It’s What You Love!

Acts 10:34-43

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

A

Sermon

by

The Rev. David R. Anderson

April 4, 2010

Easter Day

Saint Luke’s Parish

Darien, Connecticut

There’s a line in that reading from Acts that tripped me flat on my face. Peter is making the first Easter proclamation, and he says, “They put [Jesus] to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses.”

Why would God not allow Christ to appear to all people? Isn’t God for everyone? Doesn’t God want everyone to see the risen Christ? Yes, and in fact Christ is standing in full view of the whole world. But not everyone can see him. He appears—he becomes palpable, visible—only to a few.

Well, this offends my egalitarian conviction; this insults my sense of inclusivity. Only to a few? Yes, and herein lies the secret of life. Christ appears only to the eyes of love. If you love him you will see him; if you don’t you won’t.Notice I didn’t say. “If you believe in him…” This is what we tell little children: “If you believe in Santa Claus he’ll come.” “If you believe in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy….” And unfortunately, long after we morph into adulthood, we carry that kind of “believism” with us. The real believers somehow see God. And if you don’t, it means you don’t believe hard enough.

Look, if the risen Christ appeared only to true believers, he certainly wouldn’t have appeared to any of the disciples. None of them believed. All the men ran away, and one denied him with a curse. But when he broke from the grip of death, Jesus appeared to these unbelievers. Why? Because in spite of their weakness, their fear and their selfish timidity, they loved him. They wanted to love him. They were fascinated by his quiet power and by his promise of eternal life—the very fire of divine life here, now. He scared them half to death, and they were always taking three steps forward and two steps back, but they loved him.

If you’re sitting here this morning and you’re saying, “I don’t believe,” or “I can’t believe,” I don’t want to disappoint you, but what you believe does not really matter. Where politics or sports or fashion or art is concerned, what you believe has some limited significance. You believe the Yankees are supreme, someone else believes in red stockings. You believe Rousseau was right about the ‘noble savage’, I believe in Hobbes. You believe Brahms is best, someone else swears by Beethoven. Who’s to say who’s right? And so we argue hard for our beliefs.

But when we come to the fundamental question of human life—that is, Are you alive or are you dead?—what I “believe” is frankly pointless. When you’re standing in a pounding surf and the waves are almost too much, and the salt is in your mouth and the sun seems eighteen inches above your face, does it matter whether or not you believe in the ocean? It just is. And either you love it and wade into it, and soak it up bodily, or you don’t. You stand on the boardwalk and you watch other people get wet. . . .

This is something like the nature of spiritual life, yet most of us imagine that the key to life and death is a kind of cosmic quiz. Do you believe or not?

People often ask why God doesn’t “come out and show himself.” “Why can’t God just come out of hiding and say ‘Here I am’?” If God would do that, we say, why then we’d believe. The saints and seers of all the ages have gone hoarsetelling us that God is as close as your breath, as intimate as your heartbeat. They’re calling out to us in the surf, “Look, open your eyes. You’re standing knee deep in the divine—its waves are practically knocking you down!”

You know, we’re like the little fish who swims up to another fish and says, “Excuse me, I’m looking for the ocean.”

We’re awash in resurrection. We’re swimming in the power of life to conquer death, not only when we breathe our last, but all the little deaths we encounter every day. The risen life of Christ is ours—ours to vanquish the fear of cancer, the anxiety of financial loss, ours to vanquish the ache of loneliness, the rendings of grief, even the languors of boredom. This, brothers and sisters, is what kills us, little by little, day after day, until we are essentially soul-dead: the heart is beating but a soul-scan shows no activity. Flat line.

And here we are, all of us flat-liners, blasted by the breakers of resurrection life, and we’re muttering, “I’m not sure I believe in God….[another wave hits us]… I’m not sure if I believe in miracles like the resurrection.”

But it isn’t what we believe that unlocks the secret of life, it’s what we belove. In fact, that’s the old, old meaning of “believe.” Our English word “believe” comes from the German “belieben,” and even modern German still retains the sense of liebe, “I love.” To belieben is to belove, to hold dear, to treasure, to long for. Not, Does it all make sense to my puny gray matter?To believe is to belove.

Life is too short to waste time being dead. Dead people lie around tinkering in their heads with what they believe or don’t believe. Living people find the grace, the gift of lieben, of love.

And this is why those first disciples could see the Christ when no one else could. They were lovers. Unbelieving lovers.

Each day, an old monastic story says, the disciple would ask the same question, “How shall I find God?” And each day he would get the same mysterious answer: “Through desire.” “But I believe in God with all my heart, don’t I? Why then have I not found him?”

One day the Master happened to be bathing in the river with the disciple. He pushed the man’s head under the water and held it there while the poor fellow struggled desperately to break loose. Finally, the Master released him and he exploded out of the water, gasping for air. The Master said, “When you are given the grace to gasp for God as you gasped for air, you will have found him.”

When we gasp for resurrection life, the risen Christ suddenly appears. Then whether we “believe in Christ” seems as remote and pointless as whether we believe in the sea, whether we believe in the trees and the crocuses, the cliffs and the meadows, whether we believe in ecstasy, sadness and sorrow, in salt air, moonlight and silence. All of that simply appears, but only to the gasper, only tothe lover.

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.