Sermon:
April 22, 2001
All Services

Scripture:
Revelation 1:4-8

"You are the weakest link ... Goodbye!"

Sign of the times? Seductive new cultural catch phrase? I must confess that I watched this newest program of the so-called "reality" genre and was both fascinated, entertained and appalled by the program's premise. For those of you who haven't seen it, it is Jeopardy meets Survivor! We are told the show is about "teamwork." For me, it is a new definition in that the teamwork seems to revolve around who can be eliminated. I don't want to take the show seriously and want to believe it is harmless entertainment, yet its message runs so counter to my understanding of the Easter message. The good news of Easter is that the weakest link is welcome into God's loving embrace. I am fascinated that the show debuted on Easter Monday, as though we had our day of fantasy and now we are back to our winner-take-all culture. Sign of the times?

A recent book by Robert Reich, The Future of Success, has a chapter entitled "Obsolescence of Loyalty." Sign of the times? Reich, a professor at Brandeis University, writes that "students don't expect loyalty from any organization or institution and don't expect to be loyal in return." When I first read this passage, I wrote in the margin: "And what does that say about the church?" I'll leave that topic for another day.

Another sign of the times - Niketown, American Girl Place? If you have not visited Niketown in either Chicago, New York, San Francisco or wherever, it is, in the parlance of marketers, a destination store-or to put it in religious language, a pilgrimage site. On any given Sunday, more people probably visit Niketown than go to church in the Michigan Avenue area of Chicago. You will see shoppers (oops, I mean pilgrims) from Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, downstate Illinois, and even Michigan. When you enter the lobby (oops, I mean the narthex), a grand, oversize picture of the spokesperson (God, that is) of Niketown greets you. Michael Jordan! The Nike marketers are onto something. The store has a cathedral ceiling, and you follow the crowds from one specialty area to another. You are caught up in the flow as you move from niche to niche (side chapel to side chapel) where the saints and relics of Niketown are commemorated. There is a niche for every conceivable mainline sport-tennis, golf, soccer, football, basketball, baseball. Each niche has a portrait (not a statue, but then this is the 21^st century) of the saint for each sport. In each niche you have an opportunity to be separated from your money to purchase a memento/relic of your favorite star. The only things missing at this religious experience are the candles ... fire codes, don't you know.

I am fascinated by this store. I was put onto this theological exploration of marketing by the title of a paper written by a college classmate of my son on the topic, "Who is the God of Niketown?" My first visit to the store came shortly after returning from a visit to Paris and Notre Dame Cathedral. The parallels were startling. Then I realized the merchandisers were onto something. They understood the need of the human spirit for a pilgrimage site to something larger than life, something that inspires us and moves us out of our everyday existence. Sign of the times?

More recently, I visited the Music Experience in Seattle. If you are an architecture buff, it is a Frank Gehry building and worth seeing if you can't get to Bilbao, Spain. After paying your fee, the first room you are ushered into is "Cathedral Hall," a cavernous space surrounded by larger-than-life images, multi-colored photo montages and flashing neon, the post-modern equivalent of stained glass windows. After having the experience in the sanctuary, you are then ushered into the rooms which pay homage to music technology, a room of relics, rock 'n' roll guitars, and the shrines to Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Sign of the times? Time for the sign?

Speaking of signs, I invite you into Fellowship Hall where you will see on the stage the tomb from last Sunday's 7:00 sunrise worship service, designed and crafted by Carl and Pat Price. The empty tomb is the sign for all times. You will note on it a sign which says: "Tomb for Rent, only used one weekend." Sign of the times?

The Book of Revelation is often called the book of signs, which point to God's glorious victory and triumph for all the weakest links. The short passage we read this morning is very dense with theological signs of a trinitarian nature. The first is the acclamation about the "God who is, who was and who is to come." The God of all time and eternity. The all-embracing, all-encompassing God. Then we are told about the Seven Spirits, which theologians through the ages have debated as to whether they were symbolic of the Holy Spirit (because seven is a sacred number signifying completeness and totality) or symbolic of God's angels (who guard the nations and the four corners of the earth). In either case, it is about God's all-embracing presence.

In Revelation 1:5, we are told about "Jesus Christ the faithful witness, first-born of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth." In other words, Jesus is the one who stands in, above, beyond and over the world. Jesus is the sign for the time. The passage goes on to tell us who Jesus is: the one "who loves us, who freed us and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God." The latter is a radical affirmation in that the priests, whether Jewish or pagan, were the ones who were entitled to enter the holy of holies to commune with God. Priesthood was a call separate from the people. But the good news of the Easter sign is that we are now a priesthood of all believers. We all have equal access to God. There are no weakest links on God's team. God has voted us onto God's team through the Easter event.

One sign of Easter that seems so prevalent in our society is spring-the sign of newness- butterflies, bunnies, chicks, new growth. As an aside, I always wonder how the Easter message is preached in the southern hemisphere, where Easter comes in autumn! Another time perhaps. What are the signs of Easter? The empty tomb, the empty cross-they point to a new freedom promised us.

A story is told about a preacher, Edmund Steimle, who was preparing a sermon on one of the lectionary texts for Holy Saturday. The text was from Lamentations 3 and reads: "God's mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning." As he pondered this passage, it did not give him hope because, at his age, the promise of newness every morning was, at best, a mixed blessing. He said he had come to that point in his life where he really wanted sameness in the morning-his newspaper, orange juice and favorite slippers. "I can do without a lot of newness, in the morning especially."

Yet, like it or not, newness is the order of the day at Easter. Perhaps this explains why this Sunday is often called Low Sunday. It's as though the Easter message of newness is too much. We really don't want to break our daily routines.

Easter provides the freedom to trust a future we don't control. Ethicists once defined sin as an "attempt to control that which should not controlled and the refusal to control that which should be controlled." An ethical spin to the Serenity Prayer, if you will.

Think about the opening stories in Luke's gospel. First we are told about Zechariah and Elizabeth's good news of a son. You can imagine how happy they must have been. The high hopes they must have had that he would grow up to be a righteous and good Torah-fearing boy who would carry on the family tradition. Who hasn't wished the same for our children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews? Yet, they got instead a wild man who ate locusts. They wanted a child and got a prophet. Or think about Mary and Joseph and their aspirations for Jesus. What did they get? A young man crucified on a cross. Probably not what they expected. The message to which all the Easter signs are pointing is that God's future is better than we could have imagined!

Remember that cottage industry of futurism, books galore by futurist think tanks devoted to divining the future? We all dream of a predictable future, one that we can control. A seminary president who attended one of those conferences 20 years ago, where erudite persons such as physicists, sociologists, and political scientists presented papers on the shape of the future, remembers having said at the time: "I am only a theologian and I have no idea what shape the future will take. The only thing I know is the future will belong to a merciful God." Years later, when rummaging through his papers, he came across the papers from this conference and reflected: "You know, I was the only one who was right!" The empty tomb is a sign of freedom.

Easter also provides freedom to grant a blessing. Instead of shouting at the world for its iniquity, its shallowness, its callousness, or wagging our heads at the sad signs of the times as I have just done, another way to look at the world is with cheerful confidence in God's divine providence. The lens of Easter is a world full of wonder and grace. Time for the signs!

The Easter signs also point to the freedom not to fear. What are we afraid of? We are afraid we won't be a survivor; we are afraid we are the weakest link; we are afraid we aren't super-stars, super-rich, super-thin, super-whatever.

Another familiar sign of Easter is the communion meal. You may be familiar with the movie drawn from Isak Dinesen's story, Babette's Feast. A group of townspeople in a remote Danish village gather for a fabulous meal prepared by Babette, a French maid/servant who works in one of the village homes. No one knows Babette was once a chef in a five-star Paris restaurant. No one knows she poured out her life's fortune on this one meal. You get the picture. Babette is a Christ figure and the meal is a symbol of the heavenly banquet. At the feast, one of the guests, General Lowenstein, is moved to speak:

Humankind, my friends, is frail and foolish. We have all been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and shortsightedness, we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we are afraid. We tremble before making our choices in life, and we tremble again for fear we have made the wrong ones. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite... See! That which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted to us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly.

Instead of following the signs of the culture-the weakest link, Survivor, Niketown-we can follow the signs of Easter. Eastertide is the time for the signs-the empty tomb, the empty cross and the banquet set for us.

It is important that we have sacred signs and objects around us to remind us of the Easter message. We don't have to let the media and Madison Avenue provide the signs. For example, in my office is "The Wallberg Cross" with its milagros, driftwood, stones and cloth fashioned into a cross, ark and sunburst to remind me that my life serves a purpose greater than the routines of daily existence. My work, your work, is meant to point the way.

Gregory Pierce, in his new book Spirituality at Work, recommends the spiritual discipline of having sacred objects around you. Not a new idea, but he does give it an interesting twist. He recommends that you move/change your sacred signs at least once a year so that they do not become invisible. He further challenges his readers to look for a sacred sign en-route from home to workplace or grocery store or wherever to remind us that God is in the world and is Lord of all.

The ultimate sign we learned this morning in Revelation is that God is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the almighty. In other words, God encompasses all that is, that was and is to be. What are the signs for the time? The empty tomb, the empty cross, the heavenly feast!

You're the weakest link ... Welcome to the feast!

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Note: I am grateful to Thomas G. Long, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, whose article "Growing Old and Wise on Easter" in the Easter 2001 edition of the Journal for Preachers provided many of the insights and illustrations regarding newness and freedom in this sermon.