Back from the Dead

Reading:

Today’s reading is taken from Marcus Borg’s book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.

Compassion is a particularly important word in the gospels. The stories told about Jesus speak of him as having compassion and of his being moved with compassion. The word also represents the summation of his teaching about both God and ethics. For Jesus, compassion was the central quality of God and the central moral quality of a life centered in God. These two aspects of compassion are combined most clearly and compactly in a single verse…

‘Be compassionate as God is compassionate.’
This crystallization of Jesus’ message speaks of a way of life grounded in an imitatio dei -- an imitation of God. Image of God and ethos -- what God is like and how we are to live -- are brought together. Moreover, for Jesus compassion was not simply an individual virtue, but a sociopolitical paradigm expressing his alternative vision of human life in community, a vision of life embodied in the movement that came into existence around him.

In the Hebrew Bible, which Christians typically call the Old Testament and which was sacred Scripture for Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries, the word compassion has rich semantic associations. In Hebrew (as well as in Aramaic), the word usually translated as “compassion” is the plural of a noun that in its singular form means “womb.” In the Hebrew Bible, compassion is both a feeling and a way of being that flows out of that feeling…

In terms of feeling, compassion means “to feel with.” … Compassion thus means feeling the feelings of somebody else in a visceral way, at a level somewhere below the level of the head…

Sermon:

I can still remember the excitement of Easter mornings when I was a child. Everyone dressed up in bright colors. Our little church was crowded, and all those people in the sanctuary gave it a sense of being a special day. We sang hymns that rang out with hallelujahs. I remember once we had a real trumpet player at church, and another time when my mother dragged us out of bed in the dark for a sunrise service. (I wasn’t so excited about that.)

As a child I heard the story of Jesus coming back from the dead and I accepted it as true because all the grownups I knew accepted it as true.

Only children, I think, can hear and accept the Easter legend today the way so many people have received it in the course of history. Imagine yourself as a peasant living in a small European village a thousand years ago. You would have been illiterate. Only a very few people could read and the few books that existed were hand copied. No one you knew owned a book; you probably had never seen a book up close. In such a time we would have had little reason to doubt what we were told by priests who were educated and who handed down the accepted truth.

Today we simply know too much to hear the Easter story without some doubt creeping in. We know too much about how and when the stories were constructed long after the death of Jesus. We know that Easter got all mixed up with other religious traditions celebrating the rebirth of life at springtime. Even if we believe that the Easter stories (for there is more than one story in the scriptures) are literally true, we cannot believe in the same way they did a thousand years ago. Today those who believe in the physical resurrection must do so as an act of defiance, as an act of will in the face of all the people who doubt it and all the human knowledge that has cast so much doubt.

And yet I still love Easter. I no longer believe that Jesus died and then literally came back to life as a flesh and blood person. I love Easter because for me it is much more than a celebration of spring, as wonderful and thrilling as every spring is. For me Easter now is as much about Jesus as it ever was.

I love Easter because I love the fundamental message Jesus taught and lived. Easter is a powerful reminder that this message came back from the dead. In fact, the core message of Jesus never died. It cannot die. The simple, powerful message of Jesus will live as long human beings walk the earth.

Jesus’ central message, as we heard in this morning’s reading, is about compassion. Jesus’ message is that religion is first and foremost about feeling a profound loving connection to other people. The religion of Jesus is not about following rules. The religion of Jesus is about letting compassion rule us, just as the good Samaritan Todd spoke about let compassion rule his actions instead of letting religious rules prevent him from helping another person.

The religion of Jesus is not about accepting what somebody else tells you is what you ought to believe. When I was a boy and believed what I was told in church I was not following the religion of Jesus, I was learning the religion about Jesus. There’s a big difference. The religion of Jesus isn’t about believing anything. In all the stories about Jesus he shows no concern for whether people have correct or incorrect beliefs. Religion is not an idea. Religion is not about having the right answer to a question. Religion begins with feeling, with an experience. The religion of Jesus is about what we feel in our hearts and in our guts.
In order to experience this feeling of compassion we need to get out of our heads and out of our selves. We feel compassion when we let down our defenses, when we are open to others. We can feel compassion when we hear their concerns, feel their joy, when we are moved to tears or moved to sharing laughter. Newborn babies in a nursery are distressed when they hear another baby cry. That’s compassion. A mother feels distressed when she hears the cry of her child. That’s compassion. We experience compassion when we listen deeply to another person’s story. We experience compassion when we are moved by the sight of another person’s suffering. We experience compassion when we share a friend’s delight so closely that we both laugh out loud.

If we allow ourselves to feel, to really experience with others, it transforms our lives. This is what I think Jesus meant when he talked about it being like being born again. If you and I open ourselves and let ourselves really feel connection to others, it changes our lives. When we open ourselves to compassion we feel that others care about us. None of us is alone. Our connections make us strong and give us hope. Our connections make us part of something larger than ourselves.

When we feel with others and experience that marvelous feeling, it brings us back to life. There are so many things that separate us, that make us numb, that breed indifference, coldness, hatred, violence and death. Compassion saves us from these things. Compassion brings us back from the dead.

When we let compassion rule, our lives move naturally and inevitably toward joining with others to make life better for everyone. When compassion rules we become available to family and friends. We want to be an active part of the life of our congregation. It isn’t about doing our duty. Our involvement flows from a deep sense of connection and common purpose. Ultimately, our experience of compassion leads us to work to help build a world of peace and justice. If we feel our connections with others, the exploitation of others, the injustice suffered by others, touches us. Compassion begins as something interpersonal; compassion’s full expression is social and political.

Easter, for me, is not about something supernatural. Easter is not about trying to believe the unbelievable.
Easter is about Jesus’ message of the transforming power of compassion and about how this message would not die. It will never die. The message of Jesus transcends religious traditions. It is a fundamentally human message about the power of feeling connected.

Our religious task, our human task, is to allow ourselves to feel that powerful and enduring connection to life and love. Our task is to let that feeling of compassion, that feeling with, to bind us together and transform our lives.
The power of compassion brings us back to life. The power of compassion changes our lives if we will but follow our hearts.

This is the message of Jesus. This is the message that came back from the dead and brings us back from spiritual death.

May this message of compassion live in our hearts. May the experience of compassion express itself in lives of kindness, friendship, loving relationships, and lives that create understanding, peace, harmony and justice for all the people of the earth. May this be a blessed Easter.

Amen.