Easter sermon: E-a-s-t-e-r (Apr 21st, 2019)

E-a-s-t-e-r

Without Easter, we wouldn’t know about Jesus. If his story had ended with his crucifixion, if we only had Good Friday and not the Easter morning that followed, Jesus most likely would have been forgotten - - one Jew among many crucified by the Roman Empire.

What kind of stories are the Easter stories?

In Mark, as Mary Magdalene and two other women make their way to the tomb, they wonder, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they arrive, their question becomes irrelevant. “They saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.” 

Easter stories - - disbelief, surprise, wonder... 

“So the women went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” 

Easter stories - - both terror and amazement... 

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke change the ending of the story: women did tell the disciples. They left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell other disciples. 

Easter stories - - telling others, sharing, in fear and great joy..

These are the Easter stories we shared this morning. 

We hear in the story of Jesus’ birth that God gives and explains his name, Emmanuel. Emmanuel means “God is with us.” The final words of the risen Jesus echo his name: ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The truth of the affirmation, “Jesus lives” has resounded and grounded the experience of Christians throughout the centuries. The Risen Jesus is Emmanuel, God’s abiding presence to the end of the age. Many of us to the present day have experienced Jesus as the living Christ, a living reality that has become alive in our own lives. Indeed, in the Easter stories in the Bible and in history, people have witnessed the risen Jesus as the Holy One who continues to bear the wounds of the empire that executed him. 

The Holy Week teaches us to ask how we reconcile our experience and faith…: “What ails us?” We are invited to feel the force of this question - - What ails us? Something is not right. The Holy Week invites us to think together, pray together, act together on the discrepancy between experience and faith: What ails us? What is not right in the world, and in us? Bad things happen to good people. People still bear the wounds of the empire, oppression, greed, hatred. We grieve, we mourn. We are shocked at the situations and news. It puts us in the deep chasm of Holy Saturday, this limbo time in between Good Friday and Easter. 

Saturday, the day after Jesus was crucified, Holy Saturday was the place and time of an impasse in which the silence was heavy and the weight of fear drove the disciples to hide, to deny, and to be scattered. Holy Saturday was the time when people lost sight of God’s promise that God would justify, vindicate and raise up the thousands of righteous Jewish martyrs who, for their faith in God, had been tortured, killed and buried without a tomb, their names unwritten. 

Without Easter, the cross is simply pain, agony, and horror. Without God’s reversal at Easter, Good Friday would end up as a cynical, political message: this is the way the world is, the powers that be will always be in control, and those who think it can be otherwise are utopian dreamers. However, the good news is that Good Friday was not the end of the story; WE HAVE EASTER. Christians have experienced, witnessed, embraced and lived this powerful experience of resurrection - bodily, spiritual, and political resurrection - and have given a name to this power of God’s abiding presence to the end of the age… e-a-s-t-e-r or r-e-s-s-u-r-r-e-c-t-i-o-n. Easter is the proclamation that the horror of Good Friday and the silence and brokenness of Holy Saturday will have an end, and there is no moment that God has ceased to exist. Some Gospels have written and the others haven’t written about Holy Saturday: Holy Saturday as the day when the tears have not yet been wiped away, as the day when the terror and fear have not yet turned to amazement and great joy, as the day when the mourning and wailing songs of sorrow were only sung to the heart of the faithful in hidden places, fearing all others. On this Saturday of fear and waiting, Jesus “descended into hell” or “harrowed hell” (and hell is not the later Christian place of eternal punishment, but the Jewish Sheol or the Greek Hades, the afterlife place of nonexistence.). In this in-between time, on the surface, nothing seems to be on activity. However, God is on the move, under the ground.The work of the divine transfiguration of God’s earth has already begun on Saturday. Jesus, like Persephone in the Greek myth, is taken to the depths of the earth, ready to rise as a beautiful green shoot on a spring day as the sign of unending life and hope. Then, Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday would be a rising alongside those other righteous Jewish people who had died unjustly before him. In this vision of the communal resurrection of Jesus, Jesus never rises alone. Jesus never rises without us. The truth about the past must be told and come before/go together with the work of reconciliation. We are never trapped in the past; we rise with the future of a new reconciliation.

Easter does not force us to reconcile our experience and faith. Easter comes gradually and gently, but it also comes radically, with our own personal, spiritual and political experience of liberation. And in this experience of Easter, no part of ourselves is left behind; we resurrect as the whole self (or as the whole package of who we are), when Easter becomes the living reality for us. Holy Week safely leads us into the path of the cross, to hell, to the empty tomb, and to the early morning of our new self.

So, what are your Easter stories? What is faith? On this Easter Sunday, how do you reconcile your experience and faith, your Friday, Saturday and Easter?

I read books for my children every night, and a week ago, while I was thinking about how I could explain Easter or resurrection to my own children, suddenly I remembered the story of Helen Keller and her teacher and life companion Anne Sullivan whom I read and learned about when I myself was a child. I quickly watched a short video clip from The Miracle Worker (the 2000 film version) with my children and had a discussion with them. Keller contracted an unknown illness when she was 19 months old, and the illness left her both deaf and blind. She lived, as she recalled in her autobiography, “at sea in a dense fog.” When Sullivan arrived at Keller’s house, a day Keller would forever remember as “my soul’s birthday.” Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen how to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with “d-o-l-l” for the doll that she brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for “mug”, Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. Keller’s breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of “water”. (Show the picture on the screen.) Keller recalled the moment: “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me: I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free.” 

Some might say Easter exists because the Bible says so and the Easter stories in the Bible are true because all things that are written there are factual. Some would say Easter stories are like parables, communicating the truth of God’s love in the form of stories full of symbols, metaphors and memorable narratives. As I celebrate and embrace Easter with you, with Immanuel, I would like to say that Easter is the “name” for what Christians and the faithful have experienced through centuries and millennia. Everything under heaven has its name, (in its diversity), and we have “Easter” because what this name refers to has been experienced, lived, transformed the lives of countless righteous, faithful, humbled ones, and ordinary saints like us in many different forms, actions, places: on the street, in protests, in daily service of love, in preserving nature. We have E-a-s-t-e-r because the thing that this name refers to truly exists like water, the wonderful cool something that flows in the river, flows over our self and changes us to be a new self, a transformed self, beyond the wounds of injustice and the world’s emperors.

We may be at sea in the fog, in certain stages in our lives, on certain shores of our lives. However, on our Life’s holy Saturdays, God has never left us alone. God helps us understand that each experience has its unique name, and helps us name it, and in the spiral journey of distance and intimacy, God moves her fingers on our palm, patiently writing E-a-s-t-e-r, letting us re-live and be born again with the baptism of this wonderful, wet, cool thing – God’s self as flowing water, water from the fountain that powerfully hits the palm of our open hands to awaken our minds. The consciousness of a new, transformed self emerges. 

Let us continue the hard work of the heart and vigorously move our arms to pump the new water for our lives and for the world, with Jesus being our teacher. And may we pray that faith moves us to the courage to truly believe in the mystery of Easter, (And we say it aloud: “Jesus lives!”) the most wonderful and coolest thing ever. 

Celebrating the Spring, Celebrating the Life of Joan Borton (April 1, 2019)

A Service of Worship

Celebrating the Life of Joan Borton 

April 1, 2019 

Immanuel United Church, Winnipeg 

Rev. Ha Na Park

Celebrating the Spring, Celebrating Joan

Spring is slowly but surely emerging out from under our feet, making itself felt in the air and in our anticipation. 

When I leave home last year’s grass is shy but seen in the circles that the melted snow left in my front yard. The rose stems have earned their survival after this very cold last winter and will soon begin to show the signs of hope and their pretty buds and leaves. The Red River and Assiniboine River will flow again and reflect the light of the Sun on their surfaces like shiny wrinkles. As I remember and celebrate the life of Joan, who was a beloved member of our Immanuel congregation and a dear friend to so many in her beautifully and widely quilted squares of friendship, and the one and only sister to Dave and Doreen, I thought I would dedicate today’s reflection to her, in the spirit and celebration of spring.

If we were to pick a season among the four that would be the closest to the character of children, I would say it has to be Spring. Spring helps us to discover again and again the part of us that is still like a child. Spring invites us to rejoice, to start anew, to adopt an unhurried curiosity towards the creation and recreation of the earth and the landscape around us. In the scripture reading Joan’s friends chose and Brenda shared with us today, Jesus says to his friends, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” This afternoon, I invite you to delight in the anticipation of spring. I imagine that the seeds of joy, laughter and tears Joan shared with you and left in your hearts will become a tree, and a song, for as long as we remember Joan. 

As I read the notes I took from Dave and Doreen and Joan’s friends, I was reminded of the Maya Angelou quote: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Everyone told me how much Joan’s presence and her life meant for them, how they remembered the way Joan would sit and look at them. Joan looked right into their eyes with her blue eyes when she spoke to them. Joan always listened first, talked later. Fiercely loyal to her friends, Joan made each of them feel trusted and loved, knowing that Joan would always have their back. In the same spirit, Joan dedicated most of her work career to Children’s Hospital, caring for the children on isolation and Surgical Wards, Intensive Care and Post Anesthetic Care Units, Children’s Clinic and in Cardiology. Joan was a hardworking and compassionate nurse who will be long-remembered for her advocacy for patients and families. At five feet, Joan was small but mighty, morally, ethically, in advocacy, love and care. While working as a surgical nurse clinician in Cardiology, Joan was a voice for families navigating the frightening journey of their child’s heart surgery. This was a life-changing chapter in Joan’s life; she gave of herself to secure the best outcomes for the children. After retiring, Joan used her energy and her experience to spend a huge amount of time volunteering. People of all ages loved Joan in all her volunteer endeavours: CGIT, the breakfast program at Elmwood Elementary, the Pan Am and Canada Games, and at Immanuel United Church, to name just a few. Joan was deeply saddened when illness forced her to stop after 11 years of volunteering for English as a Second Language in the Winnipeg School Division. Joan was a philanthropist, preferring to support smaller charities and those that fed and sheltered the marginalized in Winnipeg. Friends told me Joan was a “Lifelong champion of the underdog and a believer in social justice.” Joan herself practiced humanity and humility, and liked to engage with those who practice the same. Joan is remembered in many loving (detailed) memories by her friends as someone who was always clear about what she liked and what she didn’t - black and white, yes or no - she definitely didn’t care for arrogance in anyone.

My own friendship with Joan started to grow when I connected with our member Karen, who lives in the same building as Joan. Karen’s on the 8^th floor, Joan’s on the 5th. As I was fairly new to the ministry of Immanuel last year, Karen helped me to get to know Joan at church after service on Sunday mornings, and also kindly offered to host a tea time with her homemade almond cake. Joan and I began conversing and sharing blessings. I smiled when Joan’s friends told me about Joan’s famous “pregnant pauses”, the silence that often emerged during one-on-one conversations. When I talked to her, when I thought I should finish, I would encounter her eyes, then the pregnant pause, then I would recollect what else I would like to say. It never felt awkward; the moments Joan shared with me made me feel her acceptance, trust and gift of love. One day after worship on a Sunday morning before Christmas, I asked her, “I am not sure how I may be helpful, but would you want me to pray for you?”, Joan said yes, and was willing to hold my hands and let me pray for her. Later she told me she was thinking of that prayer during her chemo. At her bedside at Riverview, when I asked her if I could leave with her a strawberry medicine patch, I explained the indigenous teaching that was involved in it, telling her strawberry is one of the few fruits that have the seeds on the outside; it’s an important bearer of virtues such as openness, honesty, and embracing vulnerability. Joan looked at me and said she would like to write that down so she would remember. Then she brought the medicine patch close to her nose, and smelled the mixed aromas of lavender, sage, cedar, wild tobacco, and rose. May she rise in the resurrection of the aromas of Spring herbs, strawberries and roses in this wide and beautiful garden of God’s land. 

Besides her friends, Joan loved her brother Dave, his wife Doreen, her father and her stepmother Evelyn dearly – they were also a big part of Joan’s life and her heart. Dave and Joan stayed in touch through phone calls and visits while Joan was ill. The family told me that Joan left a note in her journal in which she wrote, “I can get through this if I am with Lisa and Irene, Doreen and Dave.” Dave, may the unfathomable journey of deep grief on the death of Joan, your sister, also be a life-affirming journey towards healing and springtime in God’s grace and God’s love for you, we pray. 

Joan liked walking. She especially liked to walk in Kildonan Park. Joan enjoyed the lakes and beaches, with Grand Beach being her favourite. The last time I visited Joan at her home, when I asked, “What does this time mean for you?” she answered right away, with no pregnant pause, but black and white, yes or no, saying, “Setting goals. My goal is to gain strength. Then, in the spring, I would like to go to Ottawa, Ontario, with my friend. When I took a trip to Washington, DC I visited the Capitol building, the White House and so on, and learned about their history. I really enjoyed myself. I thought, why not visit my own country’s capital city next time?” 

Joan, spring is slow in this land which our indigenous relatives have called “The land where God sits”, yet when it comes, it comes full of signs of hope and resurrection — filling the heart of the believers with the aromas of healing herbs and medicines - lavender, sage, cedar, tobacco, rose… In this Turtle land, the small wild strawberries sprout their dark green leaves close to the ground. I remember in spring, in White Shell, wild blueberries are still hidden until the summer. Children and parents will find joy picking them and tasting them when the warm weather comes. 

Joan, may the Cosmic Christ rejoice with you. May God bless the heart of all believers who await the coming of the spring. May the friendship of the Holy Spirit accompany you in your next adventures where Heaven and earth meet, where the sky and sea blend into a horizon of new hope. May we all arise in the hope of resurrection. May God hold Joan in the palm of her hands, on her wings. Amen. 

Hymn: VU 808 On Eagle's Wings