Easter 4 Sermon at St. Anne's Reston - The Good Shepherd Sunday

St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, Reston, VA
Easter 4(B) (RCL), May 3, 2009
Leslie Ferguson, Seminarian
Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Recently, I commented to some friends that I felt like my life was spinning out of control. This shouldn’t be surprising considering I’m just over 2 weeks from the end of the school year and have all the requisite stuff to do for my classes. One of my friends said that she had a mantra that might help: I should repeat “I’m in control, I’m in control” over and over until I felt like I was in control. Oddly, that didn’t help because the more I tried to get control of the situation the more maddening it became. I can only get a handle on a few things these days and I would hope those have to do with my faith and our church - things that are essential to me.

Then there’s today’s lectionary. Does it seem odd to you that there are no stories of the Resurrection in today’s readings? We are in the 4th week of Easter and we don’t have a direct reference to the Resurrection or a Resurrection story. Granted we see references to the resurrected Christ but here, just 21 days after Easter, we’ve moved past Resurrection stories into stories of action. That seems odd to me that a church that sees the Resurrection as the transformational event in its history would move so quickly away from that story.

You may be wondering why I’m struggling to find the Resurrection in our readings today and I hope you may wonder how these stories of action help us understand Christ’s redeeming action at Easter. In answer to the first question: I think, like many people, I want to hang on to the Resurrection as a sort of stable place to live and bask in Christ’s presence but I’m convicted to move when I try to stay fixed in a place with God. For my answer to the second question you’ll have to stay tuned for the next 5 or 6 minutes.

Recently, I’ve been asked to explain what the Resurrection means to me. I’ve also been asked why the Resurrection is important to us as Christians. I can’t argue with them because these are valid questions for someone who is in the process of becoming ordained in a Christian Church. Quite frankly, these questions aren’t trivial, and how we answer them is important to who we are as a church and how we witness the message of the gospel to our community.

The Resurrection is the defining event for us as Christians. I’ll grant that the world began in the Creation but our faith began at the Resurrection. Christ’s Resurrection is the creative event for Christianity. But the Resurrection isn’t that simple, even if we want to make it simple. We can’t distill a “once in an eternity” event into something as simple as “the defining moment in the faith.” The Resurrection is the event that signals a radical change or a radical shift in the perspective of our life. The Resurrection is the singular event that changes the way the world operates forever. It is in this moment that all the rules about life and death change.

But that’s not all that happened in the Resurrection. Christ rising from the dead makes our life new and vigorous. We are recreated by the power of the risen Christ. And as we experience the risen Christ we begin to see the need to live our lives differently, to make a difference in the world around us; this is where our readings come into play.

I believe that’s why there are all the references to laying down our life for others, because the example of Christ dying on the cross is one of his surrendering his human self for all of humanity. But that thought is troubling to me as I strive to be more like Christ in my daily life. Does my faith in the Resurrection and profession of a changed life mean that I have to die on the cross for someone or at least be willing to die for someone or for society? That may be where I am call to act in laying down my life and I hope I could go there but I also hope that the demands aren’t that extreme.

Dying for someone may be better understood as dying to your self. With that in mind let’s look at a few questions to challenge ourselves with. Is dying to my self complete surrender of who I am for someone else? What does dying to self really mean to us in the 21st century? Why is dying to our self a big deal for us to remember now, not just in the Easter season but in May 2009, in the midst of an economic recession and a swine flu pandemic?

First, is dying to self complete surrender of who I am for someone else? If we use Jesus’ example we may be tempted to say yes to that question. But there is something that doesn’t ring true in that response, Jesus never lost who he really was in his laying down his life and his Resurrection. He never stopped being the Incarnate Word of God, the only thing he stopped being was tied to his earthly body. Because Christ didn’t lose his essential nature I don’t think we should give up our essential nature for someone else. My experience, especially at St. Anne’s, is that I’m more successful in my ministry when I let my true self come through, when I invite people into my world and my experience of Christ at work in my life.

Second, what does dying to self in the 21st century really mean? Since we aren’t called to surrender our essential nature for the other, what might we be called to do for the other? We all have things that keep us from moving to the future with Christ; family relationships, personality traits, and insecurities. We are called to surrender the imperfect things in our life, those things that bind us to our former self, so that we can live into our relationship with the Resurrected Christ as a member of his body. And these actions are essential to help change the life of the other in our lives - that is how we mirror Christ’s surrender; that is a changed life. That is the fruit of the Resurrection.

Third, why is dying to our self a big deal today? We are bombarded with competing influences in our life and a society that will try to separate us from our life as a member of the body of Christ. Any number of us could identify things in our life that separate us from living into the full love of God. Let me name a few: self-dependence in light of overwhelming circumstances; turning inward in response to the external pressures of the financial crisis; closing our doors to others as we fear an outbreak of swine flu in our midst; reducing our interaction with our community because of fear about the future of our church; failing to move forward into those places that we are called by God, individually and communally. All these are examples of not losing our self for God.

Wow, that’s a bleak picture isn’t it? But I call us back to the present and the joys that we have in our midst. We ARE living in the light of the Resurrection. We are living a life that has been made anew by the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross and his being raised by the Father. We are a community that is willing to put itself on the line and be a witness to the Resurrection. We live our lives for the others in our ministries to the poor and underprivileged in our community - at the Embry Rucker homeless shelter, at the Jean Schmidt Free Clinic; and the list goes on. We live a life that is sacramental giving of time, talent, and treasure to help the church be a beacon to its community and spread the light of Christ so that others can enjoy a new life in Christ.

Now there is a challenge in our success: how do we move forward from here while living into the promise of the Resurrection? How do we realize the Resurrection in our lives laid down for others? We look for those moments where we experience a resurrection event in our lives as we faithfully follow the calling of Christ our Shepherd. As we begin to recognize the actions of Christ in our lives we need to share those revelations with others whom we love and who come into our lives. We need to intentionally set aside the things that keep us looking backwards to our old lives and look forward to the fullness of Christ living and acting in our community. We need to help others in our midst share in the Resurrection joy.

Moving from the Resurrection to our full and complete lives is what it is about in this the 4th Sunday of Easter. This is why we are called to lay down our lives for our friends and look to the Good Shepherd to lead us along the way. This is why we are placed into a loving and living community at St. Anne’s.

THAT is why we say:

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!