Knowing Christ and the Power of His Resurrection

Knowing Christ and the Power of His Resurrection The Dover Church
March 21, 2010 –Fifth Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Isaiah 43:16-21, Philippians 3:4b-14

For most of my life, I had absolutely no idea what Paul was talking about in this morning’s lesson. Why would he list all the things he had going for him and then say that now they were loss and rubbish compared to knowing Christ and the power of his Resurrection? That made absolutely no sense to me, because I was thinking of it as an idea to be understood. When it became something happening in my life whose power I could feel, then everything changed. In order to tell the story, I have to go back to 1978 when I was fifteen.
My boyhood was very charmed and privileged until 1978, which was when life gave me my first real shaking. First, my father left. Then, my grandmother died. And finally, I had to put my dog to sleep.
One day, my family was completely normal, healthy and wealthy and wise, doing the things that other families in our affluent, well educated, high achieving neighborhood did. And then, the next day there was a moving truck in front of the house. No warning. No explanation. My parents were quite proper, so there had been no obvious fighting. My father wasn't very good with words or emotions. We had had no experience talking about unpleasantness or feelings, so all of us were completely unprepared for this.
When someone leaves a family, they create a vacuum which sucks stuff in to fill the void. My father's void was filled with fear and insecurity about the future, anger, hurt, a sense of abandonment and huge trust issues. The love we had for one another was gradually swallowed up by all the stuff which was vacuumed in. We couldn't seem to move forward together, so we went our separate ways. We grew up, kept in touch, and moved on, but as a family we never really made it out of 1978.
Then there was my beloved grandmother. In the summer of 1977, she was beating me at basketball, shooting underhand as they did on the 1918 South Boston HS girl's basketball team. Healthy as a horse. And then over the winter she went to pieces and died in February. We buried her, my mother and aunt and uncle, two cousins, my three sisters and I. It was cold on that hillside in Plymouth. We sang “Morning Has Broken,” played our instruments, read some poems, said a prayer, and went home. No one said much or even cried that much as far as I can remember. I think no one wanted to be the first one to fall apart, for fear of what that would do to the rest of us.
And finally, my dog. She came down with a disease that would cost $1,200 to treat, with no guarantee of success. That was big money in 1978. Money I didn't have. Money my family didn't have anymore either with my father gone. So I had to walk her to the local ASPCA and sign the papers to have her put to sleep. Those 2 miles to the ASPCA were the two longest miles we ever walked together. Going home alone was terrible. I don't remember much except that I cried and tried to hide the tears so people driving by wouldn't see me.
I didn't know it at the time because I was not raised to talk about these sorts of things or even give them much thought, but from that time on I had an enormous void in my soul which I tried to fill up with achievement and success. I was basically a broken person, a spiritual cripple if you will, except I didn’t know it because I had never known what living shalom as an adult was like.
How was I broken? Well you heard what did it, but what did being broken look like? On the outside, not much different. In fact, you probably couldn’t see it at all. I couldn’t, and it was my life. A child of high functioning parents who raised me to always do my best, I became a high functioning broken person. Or, put another way, I became a human doing rather than I human being. I was what I did: the funny guy, the honor's student, the rower, the college graduate, the foreign exchange student, the PhD from Berkeley, the Fulbright scholar, the academic. For all the world to see, I was hardly what anyone would call broken. I couldn't see it myself for that matter, but the reality that something was wrong kept trying to get my attention.
And what was wrong? As I have already said, I didn't know it myself at the time because I didn’t know any better, but I had a small, well guarded, closed-off heart. My relationships were largely superficial, except for a few blessed friends. I never really believed it when someone told me that they loved me. There had to be an angle, some reason. It wasn’t me they loved, it was something about me or something I did to earn their praise which they loved. Also, I was embarrassed and didn't want to have to explain what had happened to my family. Nor did I want anyone to feel sorry for me. I had my pride.
Luckily I was a rower, so my friends were not the kinds of guys who wanted to talk about that sort of thing. We talked about rowing and girls. Later, my friends in academia were much the same. We talked about books, ideas, and ourselves. I realize now that I had gravitated toward the perfect world for high achieving broken people. I knew what I did and I knew a lot about a lot of things, but I didn't have the foggiest notion who I really was.
As you might imagine, I also had a fair amount of anger. Justice was big for me. I always wanted people to do the right thing and I got really mad really quickly when they didn’t, which was a lot of the time because people don't do the right thing a lot of the time. I was judging people by my own standards, which were very high, and I was judging them as I was judging myself, as human doings rather than human beings.
And finally, I unconsciously superimposed my family history on every situation in my life. Male authority threatened me and got me angry. Women who were fearful or anxious hooked me into their emotions. I went around living each new situation as if it was my family of origin, trying to squeeze the world into my ideas of how it was and how it ought to be. But every new situation, every new person that I met was just that, new, not a replay. I was so stuck in my family story that it was like I was acting in a play in which I was the only one with a different script. Have you ever had that experience? It can get pretty frustrating.
All of this might sound gloomy and sad, but I have come to realize that a lot of people live variations of my life. At the time, I thought I had a pretty good life from 1978 to 1999: I achieved a lot, had a lot of adventures, and had some friends. I was pretty normal in my high achieving little world. In truth, I had no idea what was going on or why my life was unfolding the way it was. If I could have actually seen my brokenness, I wouldn't have had the first idea of how to go about putting myself together again. And I have to say that the churches I attended never went near this sort of thing, so I never even had a hint of the problem, let alone a solution. I guess everyone else in those churches was OK.
I went to seminary to get close to God, but my frame of reference was still largely in terms of career change. I was going to take all the skills and strategies that had helped me succeed in academia and use them to succeed in ministry. There was one big problem with this however…namely God. In my desire to know and love God in Jesus Christ, God gave me a lot more than I bargained for. God opened up that box of pain and asked me if I wanted God to transform the mess inside into new life, if I wanted to let go of it and be free. I had to come face to face with my suffering, which was just about the last thing I wanted to do. By the grace of God, however, I found the courage to dive in and it hurt. But then something great started to happen. The pain and suffering began to be transformed into new life, closed doors became open windows, impossibilities became possible, a lot of stuff which used to get me all worked up became unimportant, and old death became seeds of new life. I began to actually know Christ and the power of his Resurrection. You see, you have to die to be resurrected and I was just realizing how dead I had been. The scars and nail holes were still there, but I was no longer stuck in the tomb of 1978, or 1978 to 2000. I was like Lazarus emerging from the tomb, smelly with grave clothes on, but free. The enormous stone I had been dragging around, the stone which had sealed me off from life, was rolled away. And that changed my life.
I have been living that new life ever since. Every day I get up and by the grace of God start trying to live the Good News of Jesus Christ again. Every day I get up and try to take each new day as it comes, for what it is, a new day. Nothing is bad. It’s all either good, something that’s about to become good which I cannot see yet, something that I might be just the one to turn into the good, or something I need to bring to your attention so you can help turn it into the good. I still enjoy the human doing thing, but I am really loving the human being thing, just kicking back with Jesus and feeling the love, which is what drives the whole human doing thing now for me. It's not always easy. I'm still broken, but at least I know it now. And knowing, I thank God for the cracks, because it's through those cracks that Jesus comes to me. I don’t have to pretend or deny it anymore.
And what’s more, I now have the experience and courage to help those of you who long for new life to face your suffering, knowing that the power of Christ’s Resurrection will explode into your life if you let it, just like it did with mine. And where before I just saw stupidity, senseless misery and hopeless suffering all around me in the world, now I know that all the brokenness I see are just openings through which God will pour the power of the Resurrection into our world and I am here in this world to testify to this power and help give birth to this new life. That’s all I want now, to know Christ and the power of his Resurrection, to become like Jesus in his suffering so that I too might be brought from death into life. I’m not there yet, not by a long shot, but I press on to make it my own, longing to take hold of Jesus as he has grabbed hold of me, putting aside that which lies behind me and straining forward to what lies ahead.