COMMUNITY CHURCH OF THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
P. O. BOX 222811
CARMEL CA 93922
(831) 624-8595
Rev. Paul Wrightman, Pastor
Independent and United Church of Christ
April 4, 2021
Dear Friends,
HAPPY EASTER! Even though it’s the second Easter that we haven’t been able to celebrate with an actual worship service in our sanctuary, this year feels a lot different than last. Last year we didn’t know what a long haul we were in for – now we can see that this long haul is finally grinding to an end!
Your Board of Governors is aiming for a date sometime in June to reopen our sanctuary. They hope to have all our facilities professionally cleaned and ready for renters to return by May.
The GivingTree Benefit Shop is now open from 1-4 on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. They are also taking donations. Word is that business is good!
The reality of Jesus’ resurrection at Easter is yet another major indication that Jesus IS Emmanuel – God WITH Us! Pastor Paul
WORSHIP SERVICE FOR APRIL 4, 2021
INTRODUCTION: SELECTED READINGS ON ART
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
--John Ruskin
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. –Henry Ward Beecher
The Fine Arts once divorcing themselves from truth, are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die. –Thomas Carlyle
All true Art is the expression of the soul. –Mohandas Gandhi
To draw a moral, to preach a doctrine, is like shouting at the north star. Life is a vast and awful business. The great artist sets down his vision of it and is silent.
--Ludwig Lewisohn
All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul. But it is not only the work of the whole creature, it likewise addresses the whole creature. –John Ruskin
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words. Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience. Through Art we are sometimes sent – indistinctly, briefly – revelations not to be achieved by rational thought. –Alexander Solzhenitsyn
But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition – and, therefore more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain.
--Joseph Conrad
When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it, shows there are still more pages possible. –Robert Henri
SUGGESTED MUSIC: Easter Hymn “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today”
First-Plymouth Church Lincoln Nebraska You Tube
PRAYER/POEM: e e cummings, 1894-1962
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happenings illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father,
who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
SCRIPTURE: John 20:1-18
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple [John] and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed. Then the disciples returned to their homes.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabboni’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hang on to me. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”’ Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord;’ and she told them that he had said these things to her.
SERMON: BUT THAT WAS FRIDAY – SUNDAY’S COMIN’
Rev. Paul Wrightman
(The underlining indicates what I would emphasize if delivered orally.)
My usual approach to Easter is to present an apologetic for it, to list and to explore various reasons why affirming the empty tomb and the bodily resurrection of Jesus makes the best sense both historically and theologically.
I’m constantly on the lookout for new ways of describing what happened on that first Easter Sunday nearly two thousand years ago, descriptions like the following quotation:
“Despite all legendary embellishments there remains in the oldest reports a recognizable historical core, which simply cannot be demythologized [written off as a myth]. If this shaken, anxious crowd of disciples, who were just about to throw everything away in order to flee to Galilee in utter despair, if these farmers, shepherds, and fishermen who betrayed, disowned, and then despicably denied their master, could suddenly overnight be transformed into a convinced mission group, self-confident and aware of salvation, far more effective after Easter than it had been before, no vision or hallucination is enough to explain such a revolutionary change.”
You might be saying to yourself, “There’s nothing new in that argument; I’ve heard it all before. . .” well, the newness in this expression of that old line of reasoning is that it’s made by a major theologian. . .who just happens to be Jewish! His name is Pinchas Lapide. The book, one of the 35 that he wrote, is titled: Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective.
OK, now that I’ve managed to sneak in a little apologetics, I’ll stop trying to argue for the historical reality of the empty tomb and bodily resurrection of Jesus, and just accept that the first Easter morning unfolded more or less as our Gospel accounts describe it.
Assuming, let’s say, that the story we just heard from the Gospel of John actually happened, leads me to an observation and a few questions.
Observation: If God really did raise Jesus from the grave, definitively breaking the power of death, this has to be the most significant event in all of history!
A couple of questions: How did the church lose Easter? Why is it that the crucifix and not an image of the risen Jesus is overwhelmingly the most popular symbol of Christianity?
Flat-out answer: It has not always been that way. Fleshed-out answer: Let’s respond to those questions by looking at the history of Christian art.
In their ground-breaking book Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker detail their fascinating five year investigation of early Christian art. As feminist theologians, they are determined to track down the first occurrence of the crucifixion in art, and its inherent message of bloody atonement.
They had assumed that the image of Christ on the cross happened very early in the history of Christianity. They visited the catacombs outside Rome, taking for granted the fact that they would find there numerous representations of Jesus’ death.
They found instead multiple images of God rescuing and healing people, people like Abraham and Isaac, Jonah, Daniel, Lazarus. They found no paintings of Jesus on the cross. By far the most prevalent image of Jesus was Jesus as a very-much alive Good Shepherd.
Brock and Parker summarize their time in the Roman catacombs as follows: “We could not find a dead Jesus, not even one. It was just as the angel had said to the women looking for Jesus at his tomb, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead?’ (Luke 24:5). ‘He is not here’ (Mark 16:6).”
They go on to describe their artistic adventures looking for images of crucifixion in early Christian churches all over Europe and finding. . .not one. What they did find was surprising.
For example, in the Church of St. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy, a church built in the 500’s, they came across thirteen panels, scenes from Jesus’ passion. “At panel ten,” Brock and Parker write, “we encountered Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross for Jesus to Golgotha. We expected to see the crucifixion on panel eleven. Instead, we were confronted by an angel who sat before a tomb. . .the remaining panels showed the risen Christ visiting his followers in the stories of doubting Thomas and the road to Emmaus.”
What they found – or, more accurately, what they did not find at St. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna proved to be a pattern. In all early Christian portrayals of Jesus
there was an emphasis on the risen Christ, with no depictions of the crucifixion. They often discovered the risen Jesus right in the middle of Paradise – not Paradise lost, but Paradise found.
This Paradise was not the Paradise of heaven, the Paradise of a future life, but the present Paradise of the Kingdom of God on earth. We have moving scenes of disparate people gathered together in peace and harmony – with the risen Christ in their midst. We have moving paintings of people and animals drinking out of the same stream – with the risen Christ in their midst.
The overwhelming evidence of early Christian art moved Brock and Parker to begin their book with the amazing statement that “It took Jesus a thousand years to die. Images of his corpse did not appear until the tenth century.”
What happened?
What happened is that the first rendering of the crucifixion was protest art – a life-size carving of Jesus on the cross made by a German artist in the 900’s to protest the fact of Christianity having come to the Germans at the point-of-the-sword by the so-called “Holy” Roman Empire.
The artist, protesting the “be baptized or be killed” policy of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, depicted Christianity for the first time as a religion centered on death rather than life.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Anselm’s doctrine of the necessity of Jesus’ bloody atonement was authored in the next century and soon became the predominant approach to the meaning of Jesus’ death in the Christian West.
How best to portray in art the doctrine of substitutionary atonement – the belief that Jesus had to die for our sins? You guessed it – paint the crucifixion, which in the 1100’s became the most popular subject in Christian art, and has remained so ever since.
Connecting the dots, one can see a causal relationship between the church’s embrace of physical violence under the reign of Emperor Constantine, the church’s eventual adoption of violent doctrines like substitutionary atonement, and the eclipse of the early church’s emphasis on Jesus’ resurrection.
As the resurrection recedes, so does the church’s commitment to live out Jesus’ teachings in his vision of the Kingdom of God. Why bother, when all you have to do is to believe the right things about Jesus as defined by the imperial church, and look forward to inheriting Paradise after death? Whatever happened to Jesus’ prayer “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven?”
The early church understood God’s resurrection of Jesus as validating all that Jesus taught and did. But that’s not all. Being caught up in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection meant to be caught up in the reality of God’s kingdom as well.
Being caught up in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection was to allow the Spirit of God that was instrumental in raising Jesus from the death, to raise us from the dead as well.
Being caught up in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection is to say “Yes!” to the Spirit of God prompting new beginnings in us, new beginnings such as a living wage for all, the elimination of slavery and racism, the equality of women, affordable health care, creative nonviolence in conflict resolution, and giving gays the right to marry.
I’d like to bring this sermon to a close with an illustration from Tony Campolo. Tony is a radical evangelical thinker. He’s also a white guy who belongs to a black church because, for him, that’s where the action is. Tony admits that this illustration is lifted from a Good Friday sermon by his black pastor. I’ve adapted it somewhat.
“It was Friday and Mary was cryin’ her eyes out. The disciples were runnin’ in every direction, like sheep without a shepherd.
With Jesus, the disciples had felt powerful and in control: in control of their own lives, in control of and on top of the world. But with Jesus’ death, they were feeling more powerless than ever. They had reconfigured their lives around Jesus, and with Jesus gone, their lives reached a whole new level of unmanageability.
But that was Friday, and Sunday’s comin!
It was Friday. The cynics were lookin’ at the world and sayin’, ‘as things have been so they shall be. You can’t change anything in this world; you can’t change anything.
But those cynics didn’t know that it was only Friday. Sunday’s comin’!
The disciples, who had found a power greater than themselves in Jesus, and who had experienced the restoration, the fulfillment of their lives in him, became instant cynics after Jesus died on Friday.
But that was Friday – Sunday’s comin’!
Abandoned were the growth in character and the spiritual awakening that had begun in the lives of the disciples. In their place were plans to return to their old lives, with all their character defects and shortcomings.
But that was Friday – Sunday’s comin’!
So when I get stalled in my walk as a Christian, when it all looks like Friday desolation to me, I remind myself:
But that was Friday -- Sunday’s comin’!
So when we get stalled on our life’s journey, when we feel like we’re going backwards rather than forwards, when life has lost its meaning, when the Kingdom of God and our part in it seems like nothing more than idealistic pie-in-the-sky, let’s remember not only that Sunday is a comin’, let’s remember that Sunday is already here; today is Sunday!
Let’s remember that Jesus is not dead, but alive.
Let’s remember that his vision of God’s kingdom remains the highest and deepest expression of what life is all about.
Let’s remember that God’s Spirit is ready and willing to give us the power we need to become active participants in the Good News!
Amen.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
Compare and contrast an image of Jesus carrying a lamb across his shoulders, by far the most popular image of Jesus in early Christian art, with an image of Jesus being crucified, which became the most popular Christian image beginning around the year 1000, and is still the most prevalent Christian image today? Come up with descriptive words and phrases for each image.
What does this tell you about the direction that Christianity took?
How does knowing that the first sculpture of the crucified Jesus was a work of protest art change your understanding of what was going on?
What is your favorite work of art involving Jesus and why?
Which of the readings on art do you resonate with the most? Why?
CLOSING PRAYER: Nicola Slee, Contemporary
God of the open garden,
we have found you
and long to hold you fast.
But you refuse our clinging need,
eluding the love
that would bind and possess you,
sending us out
beyond the bounds of our feeble knowing.
Rapt in our joy and desire,
we cannot interpret you:
you have gone from us again,
moving into morning,
moving into light.
In your great love,
wait for us.
Where you have sent us,
go ahead of us,
be there to meet us,
risen, released in your world.
Amen.
SUGGESTED MUSIC: CROWN HIM WITH MANY CROWNS
HIMaachen You Tube
BENEDICTION
Patiently and persistently, God love.
Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.
Now and forever, God loves.
AMEN.