Glorification

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

April 28, 2013; 5 Easter, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(John 13:31-35)  At the last supper, when Judas had gone out, Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

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His friend Judas has betrayed Jesus.  Now what is set in motion will lead to catastrophe.  Jesus will be arrested, tortured and slowly executed.  As this traumatic series of events is inaugurated, Jesus says, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified."

In John's Gospel, Jesus' passion and death is his glorification.  Looking at the beautiful crosses near our altar and in our windows, 21 centuries later, we say the same thing.  We glory in the cross of Christ.  But it would not have felt that way had we been there with Jesus.  It would have felt like tragedy, threat and disaster.  On that evening, Jesus reinterpreted tragedy, threat, disaster, pain and death, and invited us to see all of that as the context for glorification.  The catalyst that Jesus gave us is a quality of love that turns tragedy into glory.  He gives us a new commandment, that we shall love one another.

Maybe you’ve heard parts of Nelson Mandela's famous speech from his trial when he was facing a likely sentence of death.  It sends chills down my back. 

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

That speech saved him from being hanged; he was given life imprisonment.  I visited the Robin Island prison where Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years of incarceration.  Guided by one of Mandela=s fellow prisoners, I saw the single, solitary jail cells.  I went to the lime quarry where every morning the black prisoners would go to chip the white gleaming marble in the tropical sunshine.  The brightness of the sun on the white marble damaged their eyes, and Mandela like most of his fellows is partially blinded.

While imprisoned on Robin Island, Mandela organized the inmates into small groups.  As they chipped marble, they took turns teaching one another whatever they knew B political science, biology, accounting, and so forth.  Some prisoners became concerned that the white Afrikaner guards were eavesdropping on them.  Good, said Mandela.  They are learning also.  One day they will be our colleagues and they will need to know these things we are learning.  Mandela himself learned the Afrikaner language and read their poetry, history and theater.  When criticized for studying the oppressors culture he responded, AI am learning the language of my future colleagues.@ 

Nelson Mandela insisted that his people see their adversaries as their future colleagues for the rebuilding of their nation.  When apartheid finally fell and the black majority was ready to go to war and claim a total victory over the whites, Mandela unplugged the energy for violence with these words:  AI have fought all my life against white domination.  I will fight all my life against black domination.@   With Desmond Tutu he formed the ATruth and Reconciliation Commission@ to create a means for boldly facing the injustice of South Africa=s past within a context of forgiveness and reconciliation.  The story is one of the political miracles of the twentieth century. 

God has glorified them through their passion.  And the catalyst that turned their suffering into glory was their incredible, courageous love.  They accepted Jesus' command to love one another, and they accepted it in its widest context – Jesus’  command to love your enemy.  That's something I have a hard time doing.

Our nation has now absorbed another act of senseless violence.  For many, it has re-triggered other times when we’ve felt powerful emotions from violence and attack.  My feelings led me to look back at what I preached in 2001 on the Sunday after September 11, in the wake of the disaster that triggered so much of what we live with now.  I looked again at what I said then:

Anger can metabolize into a consuming fire that turns into rage, fury, bitterness, hate and obsessive feelings for revenge.  This week I have imagined incredible and violent scenarios for purging the world of these evil people, but when I’ve stopped long enough to monitor my own spirit, it is my own soul that I am consuming, my own peace that I am destroying.  It is important for the strong to protect the vulnerable from those who seek to harm.  But vengeance is a treacherous place for humans to trod.

We are compassionate people.  Do not let the wicked turn you into less than you are; turn you into something you are not.  In the aftermath of this attack, the real battleground for us is in our hearts.  We must not let them triumph inside of us by surrendering our compassion, our love, and our peace.  Beware of trying to slay the dragon, lest you become the dragon.

Jesus’ response to his own betrayal and his embrace of threat, disaster, pain and death witnesses to another way of being.  It is another kind of glory than what we sometimes think of as glory. 

Beginning in 1948, the country of Tibet was invaded by China.  In a series of events, China overran, annexed, and attempted to wipe out the entire culture of that remarkable and gentle nation.  The temporal and spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, had to flee his home and has lived in exile for over fifty years.

One of his companions, another Lama, was not so lucky.  He was captured by the Chinese and imprisoned for years.  Much of the time he endured torture, physical and mental torture.  When he was finally released after years of international pressure, he was reunited with his old friend the Dalai Lama.  The Dalai Lama asked him how it had been for him.  He said that he had been in grave danger two or three times.  Grave danger.  On two or three occasions he said, he was in danger of losing his compassion for the Chinese.

In the wake of Good Friday and Easter, we gather as a resurrection people.  We proclaim that Jesus has triumphed over all that threatens us, even death.  It is to that Spirit and energy that I turn in my anger and weakness and ask God to help us love in such a way that we can help bring resurrection to a betrayed world.  The same God that Jesus points us toward is reaching within our lives to give to us the same Spirit that Jesus had.  That=s our amazing claim.  God is with us.  God is in us.  God is in everything.  Even in the presence of injustice, abuse, betrayal, hatred, evil, suffering, pain and death.  Still, there is nothing in the universe stronger than love.  God still triumphs in the end.  And that glory is accessible to us as well.

You've seen God's power of resurrection in your life.  We all have.  Sometimes we name it; sometimes we don't.  Wherever there is a Spirit of acceptance and courage, a willingness for love and compassion, whenever we love one another, there is the Spirit of the risen Christ.  Surgeon Richard Selzer wrote about seeing this Spirit in a hospital room he visited after a surgery he had performed:

The young woman speaks.  "Doctor, will my mouth always be like this?"

"Yes," I say, "it will.  It is because the nerve was cut."

She nods, and is silent.  But the young man smiles.

"I like it," he says.  "It is kind of cute."

All at once [the doctor writes] I know who he is.  I understand, and I lower my gaze.  One is not bold in an encounter with a god.  Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.   

(from the essay, Lessons from the Art of Surgery, quoted by Bernie Siegel, Love, Medicine & Miracles, p. 190)

That's what God looks like.  That's the human face of God, the Spirit of Jesus, bringing the power of resurrection into our brokenness and suffering.  Wherever there is acceptance and courage, love and compassion -- there Christ is glorified.

Whenever you face your hour of tragedy, betrayal and death, embrace the vision that God is twisting the divine lips to bend and kiss your crooked mouth, to give us courage in times of desperation to help us to continue to love one another, to inspire trust that our love in the context of suffering and threat will be God's catalyst for glory, and our glorification as well.

[I preached this sermon first in 2007.  Recycled because of a late change in our preaching schedule this week.]

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