Sermon Easter 2010: Human Again

Sermon Easter 2010

April 4, 2010

“Human Again”

Ebenezer Eden Mills UC

Rev. Daryl Webber

My brother, father and I used to take annual canoe trips into the Algonquian and Georgian Bay Interior.

In the mid-eighties we were novice campers paddling alongside Moose who would swim across lakes, staying up all night to protect our food pack from the raccoons that sounded like bears in the pitch black, portaging way to much gear, and packing the canoe past its tumble-home. As novices we created dangerous situations sometimes, inexpereinced we heaped unnecessarily demand upon ourselves, but in that city slicker mentality we were also aware of the beauty of a truly dark night, and the pink mist that rises off a cooling lake at dawn.

Nine times out of ten trips we would be making the trek home under rainy skies, thunderstorms and hard headwinds and rough waters. We carried a long black tarp that we would poke our heads, and arms through tuck the sheet inside the canoe at its edges and allow for a fold outside of the canoe to divert rain water out of the canoe. Regardless, an eight hour paddle and two or three mucky and slick portages would inevitably end with being soaked, dirty, bone chilled, hungry for warm meal , and elated when you climbed into the car. I remember the mantra recited after packing into the car...”It will be good to have a shower... and feel human again”

Easter Sunday is a Christian Festival whose mantra is “it is good to be human again”. The resurrection of the Christ for the first disciples was God's vindication of Jesus life – a life that had left such a profound mark on his followers  with healing, wisdom, a call to live truthfully, with integrity and honesty deeply trusting in God's presence and purpose.. God affirmed Jesus human presence by resurrecting that life, affirming the value of his humanity and the human life of the disciples. In Light of the resurrection nothing of Jesus'  life would be lost to death, and the disciples in the face of loss wouldn't be lost to  grief, anger, fear, apathy, cynicism, despair- whatever it is that follows on the heels of such devastation in the human and social psyche. Resurrection is God's affirmation of being “human again”. In those early years of Christianity the Body was sacred, the body was Temple and tent for the Spirit of God to dwell in,  in community the one Body of believers was were God's work was being revealed- and often it meant that they were lead to affirm, “”that  it was good to be human again”. And that had implications for the way they observed human life their understanding about civilization and what progress looked like from a faith perspective. The affirmation that it was goo to be human had implications on the way the people embraced and allowed the Sabbath rest to honour the goodness of what God had created in humanity apart from human effort. Resurrection life fertilized a rich devotion to living into the future without anxiety but with a profound awareness of trust in God.

My family and I went to Crawford Lake Conservation Park a couple of weeks ago to visit the Iroquois village there. We were looking in the sweat lodge together in one of the longhouses. A picture of a couple of people naked before the hotrocks, talking. My 5 year old laughed because the people didn't have any clothes on. I explained that the sweat lodge was like a church for those people, and they would come before God who created without clothes and loved them for who they were, not because they were naked or had clothes on. God just loved them because God had created them. That was processed in some corner of his brain in a way I couldn't decipher. But he was thinking about it. A few moments later, he asked if they were poor because they didn't have clothes or a house or a very big church! I replied “no, not at all. They had everything they needed, though they didn't have as much as we do.

What it means to be human- how we clothe ourselves, what kind of home we live in, how we understand our body in relation to others and before God...to draw a picture of what it looks like to be human would mean drawing many pictures and understanding that the image has often shifted when transported from culture to culture and age to age. Value of human life can be so arbitrary and defined so narrowly. It is up to the Christian body to rise with Christ and say “it is good to be human again”, and seek God out about what that means. Right now in our culture we define our humanity as how much we work, how much we have, and what group do we belong to. Culture, since at least Darwin,. has negated the life of the Spirit, the validity of the community of faith- sometimes rightfully so, but in our time many of us  who claim Christianity as our practice have felt apologetic for our place in the world. The church can be so susceptible to loosing sight of the power of the resurrection and the call to honour being made human again.

 There is no reason why we couldn't say, let's have a forty hour work week, let's train our children's hands for peacework and as a church create video games that help us do the hard work of peacemaking- harder as ever to do that than to fire weapons. Or let us find ways of taming our technological gadgets that make us puppets...or  lets' take Sabbath rest back as something sacred and holy for ourselves and for our enlightenment. Let's honour the marginalized, the sick, let's train ourselves to see earth as something more important and as holy other from ourselves...that would be radical. There is nothing from keeping us from seeing our gift of life from that angle.

To reflect and begin even in the smallest way, enacting in our lives what it means to be human again is the call of the Easter festival.

A sacred life once humiliated is restored to its sacredness. Easter rituals like this one -is one given to reflect on what is essential to being human, and what needs to be let go of or embraced in order for us to have that deep appreciation for the human community that Jesus lived and died for. It is a festival that brings us to say, “it is good to feel human again”.  . .