Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

The Good Shephered Chapel Sermon Here

Extreme Makeover

A Sermon Preached In St. John’s Episcopal Church, Stamford, Connecticut,

On Easter Sunday, April 10, 2004

By The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding

Christian Faith is faith in the Crucified and Risen Lord. The preaching of the Apostles is without exception Resurrection preaching. In the reading that we have from the Acts of the Apostles today, St. Peter tells us what it is to be an Apostle and he tells us the message the Apostles bring, that Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the saviour king, promised by the Jewish prophets, has come. God has anointed Him not with oil like the Kings of old but with the Holy Spirit and power. In Him, as St. John tells us, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. He was rejected by His own people. He was condemned and crucified. God has raised Him from the dead and He is Lord of all, the king of everything. Early Greek-speaking Christians called Him the Pantokrator, the ruler of the cosmos. If the witness of the Apostles is true, if Christ is really Risen and Lord of all, the Resurrection is the single most important event in human history. It is, as the church has always taught, the beginning of a new history, a new creation in which there is a new way of being human in a new community formed by the New Testament, that is the New Covenant in Christ which is marked by the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit.

There are two sources of belief in the Resurrection. There are the reports of the original witnesses in the Gospels, the Book of Acts and the Letters of the Apostles, and there is the church’s experience throughout two millennia of the continuing presence and activity of the Risen Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church, in her preaching, her sacraments, her fellowship and her service to the world both in the lives of the great saints and the most ordinary Christians.

These two witnesses are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. The historical evidence alone is very compelling to anyone who will approach the texts without prejudice. The first witnesses are the women. Not the way you would write it given the status of women in the ancient world, unless it was the way it happened. The Apostles tell us through the Gospels that when the chips were down they all fled and that after the crucifixion they were all hiding because they were afraid. How unlike any other religious text I know is this honest self-portrait of a frail humanity. You instinctively trust the honesty of a reporter who reports honestly about himself. C.S. Lewis, the agnostic Oxford don and professor of English literature, who was converted to Christianity at mid-life and who went on to become one of the greatest Christian writers in the Twentieth Century, said this upon encountering the Gospels in a serious way as an adult, “I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that none of them is like this.”

The skeptical, secular historian has an insurmountable problem in explaining the origins of Christianity apart from an objective and supernatural resurrection. How to explain the conversion of this frightened and defeated band into those men of whom their opponents complain in the Book of Acts 17:6, “ these who have turned the world upside down are come hither also.”

Michael Ramsey, the late Twentieth Century Archbishop of Canterbury, said in his justly famous book on the Resurrection, “The present writer would ask sympathy for two very modest presuppositions. The one is that the biblical belief in the living God, creator, redeemer, transcendent, is true. The other is that the events must be such as account for the Gospel which the Apostles preached and by which the first Christians lived.” Skeptical presuppositions aside, the events as recorded by the original witnesses account for the origins of the faith and the church far more adequately than any of the speculations of doubters.

The reports of the original witnesses are twofold. They report that the Tomb was empty and that they saw the Risen Lord. Both of these things together are important, so important that the meaning of their union has been immortalized in the Apostles Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” The proclamation of the Apostles is that Jesus has been raised bodily and that in Him we shall likewise be raised. The point is that the resurrection faith is not about the survival of some aspect or part of us beyond death. The proclamation of the resurrection is not a proclamation of survival, that the soul or spirit survives death but a proclamation that everything relating to the humanity of Jesus, that our entire human nature, body and soul, our psychosomatic unity has been recreated in Him through His sacrifice of love. It was not some part of Him that survived but all of Him was raised from the grave, the first example of a new humanity in a new creation, destined to be the elder brother of many siblings in a new race. Because He shared our lives of sin and death, He has the power to give us the gift of sharing in His new and Risen Life which is a life in which everything pertaining to our human existence is transfigured and made new. Even now, through the power of the Holy Spirit He begins to recreate those who come to Him in faith. This is the meaning of the church’s teaching that in Holy Baptism we are regenerated, born again, made new.

This desire to be made new, to be made over is very deep in the human heart. There is a current reality TV show that plays upon this profound human longing to be a new person. The show is called, “Extreme Makeover.” It is a show about plastic surgery and people are chosen for a free extreme makeover. The plastic surgeons do their best from head to foot. The promise of the show is not only that the people will look better but that they will also feel better, have better lives in every way and especially in their relationships with other people. The promise is that those getting the extreme makeover will feel better about themselves and that other people will change their opinion of them as well. In other words, change the outside and the insides will change, there will be a complete and positive change in identity and in reality. Like so many of the shows on television just now, this is a show about salvation.

There is some truth in the premise. Someone has bad teeth and they don’t smile, fix the teeth and the smile and it does change things. There is also truth in the intuition that ultimately, if you are really going to be a new person, you must have a new body and that there is a connection between the body and our relationship with others. What the surgeons can deliver of course is only a temporary fix.

There is only one physician who can deliver on the promise of extreme makeover. He works not from the outside in but from the inside out. He works with sacrificial love and He transfuses us with His life and with His recreated humanity and we really become different in every dimension of our lives. We really do have a different relationship with God, with each other, forgiven and forgiving. We have a different relationship to our own faults and failings. We know we are not alone but have access to a power greater than ourselves, the Holy Spirit that the Risen Lord breathes into His people. We have new friends and we find fellowship and a new solidarity with others in praising and serving God. We have a new relationship to God’s good creation which we believe also will mysteriously in Christ be raised. We have a new relationship with the suffering world as the place from which the Crucified and Risen one calls to us to serve Him in His distressing disguise. He changes everything about us and there is no aspect of our humanity, including our bodies, that is not touched by His recreating work until He has made over into His image which includes giving us a body like His.

The Resurrection of Christ is something that is all ready but not yet. He is Risen and He is raising us and His Resurrection in us is something that is all ready and not yet. The Resurrection is something which we know about from the witness of the scripture and something which we experience as we immerse ourselves in the life of the church. Even this thing of the recreating work of the resurrection on our bodies is something which can be seen to be all ready and not yet.

Recently there was a celebration in Rome for the beatification of Mother Teresa. It is one of the steps in the Roman Church on the way to sainthood. At the end of the impressive ceremony there was unveiled a portrait of a very old, very frail, very wrinkled, very used up little woman. It was the portrait of a very beautiful face, a face changed, made over from the inside out. It was a portrait of something invisible breaking through to the visible. So St. Paul says in the 15^th chapter of the First Letter To The Corinthians, “this mortal must put on immortality” and “it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” Here St. Paul says we get a down payment of the life of the world to come. In the face of the saint perhaps we catch a glimpse of the beauty of the body that the grave cannot hold.

It is one of the great privileges that I have as a parish priest to see people change as they grow in the life of faith and they don’t just change their thinking, they change their being and their look and I tell you I can see people become more beautiful in the Lord. It is often an extreme makeover and not a temporary one but a token of even more radical and complete changes to come.

I trust the original witnesses and I trust the reported experience of the church through the ages. I trust my own Christian experience. I believe in the Resurrection of the body.

As you come to make your Easter communion, bring this deep desire of the human heart for an extreme makeover, this longing to be made new, to be beautiful, inside and out. Ask God for the grace to open your heart and life so that you might receive the new human life the Risen Lord brings us at the price of the cross and in the power of the Spirit, that life which begins now and which the grave cannot hold, that life which makes it possible for us to say with confidence, “ I believe in the Resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.” Amen.

This is a repost of a piece I originally wrote for a God Play newsletter.

The Passion Of Jesus Christ
And The Passion Of Parenthood

The sacrifice of Christ is pondered in endless books and hymns and works of art. It is a “big story” generating much wonder and wondering. There is at least one part of it that I think I understand. I believe that at the heart of the sacrifice of Jesus is the suffering of rejected love, which the saviour meets with an unswerving passion.

Many years ago I watched a documentary on television about the famous school for emotionally disturbed children run by the now discredited psychiatrist, Bruno Bettleheim. What is not in dispute is that some very sick children went to his school and got better with the help of the young and dedicated therapeutic teachers employed there. The documentary found some of these children now successful as adults and interviewed them and the teachers about their past. I was struck by one story. The man, now a successful broker on Wall Street, recalled how he had been sent to the school because he had as a seven year old tried to kill his mother and sister with a knife. The film cut to a middle-aged woman remembering being a young teacher who read to the children each night before they were to go to bed. One night as she was reading she felt the air stir by her face and looked up in time to see a knife whiz by her at eye level and stick into the wall next to her. She looked across the room and saw a seven year old boy, the boy she knew had been admitted for trying to kill his mother and sister with a knife standing poised by an open window, ready to jump out. “What did you do?” The interviewer asked. “I didn’t know what to do, so I picked him up and held him. I held him while I finished reading to the group. I held him so tightly it made my arms hurt. I held him while I put the rest of the children to bed and I continued to hold him until we both fell asleep. I continued to hold him for most of the next several days except when it was absolutely impossible for either of us.”

The scene shifts to the stockbroker. “What where you going to do?” I was going to jump out of the window and kill myself.” “What was the effect of being held?” “I can’t remember what I thought but I know it was then that things began to change for me. There is a direct line from that night to my life now, even if I can’t explain it.”

There is a kind of holding that changes things. It is the holding power of love even when love is rejected, even when love is met with hostility. The cross of Jesus Christ is a mystery of unfathomable richness. It is at least this. It is the price of the persevering love of God, of God’s holding of the human race that changes everything. God holds us even though we are God’s enemies and even though we resist God’s love and push the saviour out of our lives and onto the cross. Even so God does not let go and in Christ God hangs onto us even though it costs the saviour the cross. Let us allow ourselves to be grasped by this Passion that we may hold out this love to the children given into our care. Amen.

Leander Harding+

I Thirst

A Meditation on the Third Word from the Cross

Given During the Three Hours Preaching, April 9, 1993

In St. John’s Episcopal Church, Stamford, Connecticut

By The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding

 

“I thirst,” is the shortest of the words that Jesus speaks from the cross. In Greek it is just one word, dipso. We know that part of the agony of the wounds that Jesus suffered in his scourging and upon the cross is thirst. When the body loses a great deal of blood, a tremendous all consuming thirst is produced. In every war the terrible cries of those abandoned on the field of battle is, “water, water.” At this point in his passion, Jesus flesh, like all human flesh, would be desperate with a burning thirst. Crucifixion was designed to be slow torture for criminals. The victim, though horribly traumatized by being nailed to the cross, actually died from slow loss of blood and slow strangulation. It is want of water and a want of air that does the killing. Now here on the cross in the mystery of the incarnation God gets inside human suffering. All of us are afraid of death in one way or another. In our day there is a special fear of slow death, especially the kind of slow death that it is only possible to die in a modern hospital. Here God in Jesus tastes of that suffering. Now there is truly no place where we might have to go where He has not gone before.

 

There are other kinds of slow death and some of the exaggerated fear of what might happen in a hospital might be a kind of cipher for types of slow death with which we are more familiar. There are other thirsts caused by a different kind of bleeding. The soul, the identity, the center of energy, the very most inmost self of a person can die slowly for want of life-giving water and life-giving breath. In both Hebrew and Greek the word for air, wind, breath and spirit are the same word. You can imagine what it might be like to be spiritually and emotionally dried up. You can imagine what it might be like to live a life day after day that is bleeding you to dry. You can imagine what it is to have a life in which each passing day leaves you with less vitality than the day before. You can imagine what it is to have a burning, all-consuming thirst, to say from the depth of your soul, “I thirst.” You can imagine what it is to have a kind of life which causes you to say in agony, “I am suffocating, I can’t breathe.” Each of us had had times like that in our lives. You may be having a time like that right now. There is a way in which humanity as a whole, the human race, bleeds from wounds like Rwanda and Iraq, from city slums and country shacks and from an empty life, of empty production and empty consumption, and says, “I thirst, I can’t breathe, I am dying.” We should have no problem joining with Jesus on the cross as he gives voice to a humanity that croaks from thirst and gasps for breath.

 

It is to satisfy our thirst, to breathe new life into us that Jesus has come. He wants to take from us the old life, the thirsty life, the life without breath and wind and give us a new life. He said to the Samaritan woman by the well, “I will give you water which will be in you a fountain gushing up to eternal life.” When he appears to his disciples at the resurrection he will breathe on them who are spiritless, who are winded. God thirsts to give us drink. To give us who are suffocating breath, the saviour breathes his last on the cross.

 

When someone is dying of thirst he or she cannot help but drink if the opportunity presents itself. When someone is strangling, suffocating, he or she cannot help but breathe if the chance comes. With spiritual bleeding and spiritual suffocation, it is different. The spiritually dying person can refuse to drink and bathe in God’s Spirit, refuse to inhale God’s life-giving breath. This obstinate panic that refuses God’s answer to our prayer when we cry, “I thirst,” is what pushes Jesus to the cross. This is what nails him there. There in the agony of Jesus, God makes his appeal to us. There God says, “I thirst also. I am crucified also. I am like you. I know your pain and your struggle. I know also a deeper struggle, a deeper passion. I know the passion of having your dying lover reject your life-giving gift. Here on the cross beloved, I follow you into death and when you are bled white and have breathed your last, I am there with the shed blood of Jesus to give you drink, I am there with the Spirit to give you breath.”

 

On the cross God is showing us our own suffering, showing us that God knows from the inside our suffering. On the cross God is showing us our thirst and our refusal to drink. On the cross the Father is showing us what it costs God to endure our rejection of his love, our refusal to drink and to draw breath. On the cross God meets our suffering with the suffering of Jesus in such a way that with Jesus we cry out and by Jesus our thirst is met and we have our spirits revived. In your baptism you were promised that God’s life would come into you when you were bleeding and thirsty. You were promised that God’s breath would be in you when you were out of wind. In your baptism you were asked to die with Jesus, so that you could live with him. You were asked to cry out with him, “I thirst,” so that he could give you drink. Where the thirst of the human heart and the thirst of God to give life come together, Jesus prayer from the cross, his work upon the cross is finished. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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