On God’s Holy Mountain

Easter Sunday

Isaiah 65:17-25

Christ is risen!

There’s earthshaking, rock rolling good news to celebrate on Easter Sunday: he is risen! Risen indeed.

Earthshaking, rock-rolling good news, indeed.

God is about to create new heavens and a new earth! Earthshaking good news – especially when you consider the shape of the present earth: riven by racism; harrowed by homophobia; diminished by malice; rent asunder by warfare.

It seems all but impossible to see that new earth from where we stand – even on Easter Sunday. “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together” – I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be the wolf at that dinner party.

But there’s this promise: “they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.”

So, on Easter Sunday morning, I must ask: where is this holy mountain?

Isaiah’s vision of a new Jerusalem is so evocative: “no more shall there be an infant that lives but a few days … one who dies at a hundred will be considered a youth … they shall not plant and another eat … they shall not labor in vain … they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.”

Reading the news, I’ve been wondering of late: where is this holy mountain? One in four children in the richest country on earth living in poverty? More than 40 million of our citizens without health care insurance? The inconvenient truth of climate change? Iraq? Terror? Where is this holy mountain?

Looking out the windows of my study, I can see no mountains at all – holy or otherwise. Just the neighbor’s house across the street. Where is this holy mountain? On the drive home down in south Arlington, I can see no mountains. Just more houses full of families struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to make it through another day. Where is this holy mountain? If I go into the District, I see no mountains. Just houses full of more families with similar struggles, and buildings full of more workers trying to make it through more weeks, and monuments to wars and warriors staring out across a nation that still believes in the myth of redemptive violence. Where is this holy mountain?

Sure, I grew up in East Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smokey’s, and I could look out our dining room window and see mountains. But I don’t recall seeing mountains that struck me as particularly holy as a child. Perhaps, in my youth, I was not attuned to holiness. Still, years later, at a stage of more intentional attention to the holy, I did a lot of ministry in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, but the mountains there were more full of holes left behind by coal mining operations than they were full of any particular holiness.

Where is this holy mountain?

Perhaps it’s not in any particular place, but rather in human relationships. But when I look there, I feel no closer. I think of friends whose relationships are broken by mistrust or trust abused and I wonder, where is this holy mountain? I think of families devastated by losses and paralyzed by their grief and wonder, where is this holy mountain? I consider those lives I know that are broken by addictions, and I wonder, where is this holy mountain? Or the friends whose work is so stressful and so unrewarding; the young people struggling to find their way in a world that seems so unwelcoming; the sexual brokenness that is a particular mark of our times – and I wonder: where is this holy mountain?

Can we see if from here?

Well, therein lies another problem. What can we see from here, from the quiet confines of this sanctuary where we gather from time to time when if feels like we need to or ought to? Once a week at best; a couple of times a year for many.

Sure, this is a beautiful space, but what has it to do with all of the brokenness of the world? And, of course, the peacefulness within this space is pleasant, but what does it amount to measured against the violence out there? Yes, the windows are particularly beautiful, but you can’t see through them. They are somewhat like the Easter story itself: remarkable, but rather opaque.

What can we see, from here?

Consider the Easter story itself: what do Mary of Magdala, Joanna and Mary the mother of Jesus see?

Well, nothing, really. Empty space. The presence of an overwhelming absence. The absolute heart of the Easter story is this utter emptiness.

There, where we would expect, perhaps, everything, we find nothing. No thing at all.

Paul understood this well, and captures the essence of this emptiness in his letter to the Philippians, to whom he wrote:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being born in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”

The mind of Christ then: humility, obedience and self-emptying. To look at one’s self in the mirror and see nothing of self but see, at the same time, in the same reflection, the glory of God, the spark of divinity.

For what brought death on the cross of Good Friday? The obedience of Jesus, to be sure. But also, just as clearly, the utter pridefulness and self-centeredness of humanity; our desire for certainty and the security we believe we will find in such certainty built from the work of our own hands out of solid building materials that we can see, and we can mold, and we can shape, and we can control. Not nothing but something. Not the risk of no thingness, but the security of solidity. Not self-emptying but self-absorption. Not a spark of divinity, but a heart of darkness.

So who cares what we can see from here looking through these windows or looking through the opacity of the Easter story? Who needs that anyway?

Let’s just get out of here and on to Sunday brunch and then back to work tomorrow in the real world. Who needs this mysterious resurrection myth anyway?

Let’s just get out of here and live with the concreteness of life that can be measured out in terms that we understand: accounting for what we have in the way of successes, no tears – or just a few – over failures; measuring out our days by what we have gained and lost and stored away in square feet and hard currency, in rank and station, bought and sold, lost and won and tallied up for all to see – but most especially for ourselves that we might measure whether or not we’ve made the grade.

But when we get “out of here” and back to the real world, the world we return to is precisely that place of utter brokenness that we cannot fix on our own. We cannot see God’s holy mountain out there. We cannot even imagine it.

And what can we see from here?

No thing at all. No thing.

And yet … for some reason I am drawn back to the slim view out the window of my study. It’s not much – just the neighbor’s house. Just a small garden with some potted herbs; a picket fence lined with some daffodils, and purple hyacinth; a flowering tree that I cannot identify but which blossoms all pink and white and welcoming. Really, nothing at all that one can account for or portion out.

And right here, in front of us this morning: a fern. Nothing much to look at, really. Not even an Easter lily, just an ordinary, somewhat scruffy houseplant.

You might think, following this brief discursis through the garden that I might be a green thumb. You would be wrong. You won’t find a living plant in my study, and the only live plants in this building survive through the care of others.

It took a while for folks here to realize that plant care was not part of my “terms of call,” nor in my understanding of the pastor’s job description. This fern was a victim of that misunderstanding, and anyone who pays attention to such things knows that not too very long ago there was nary a green shoot coming forth from that pot. Broken nubs sticking out of hard, dry dirt. Ready for the compost heap. Dead as could be.

But here it stands, full of life – refusing to take my “no” for an answer but instead responding to the care and compassion of a higher “yes” – in this case, embodied in the attention of Evelyn Woodson.

“But that’s no big deal,” you say. “It’s just an ordinary house plant, not an empty tomb.”

And you’d be right to say that. It is ordinary; it is, in fact, an ordinary resurrection.

That’s why I brought it in here this morning: precisely because it is so ordinary.

You see, resurrection is not the exception to the way of creation – it is, indeed, the Creator’s intention for creation.

People ask me sometimes around this time of year if I believe in the resurrection. I say, “how can I not believe, when I have seen it myself so many times.”

In my own family, I saw my father’s dreams die when he was struck by serious mental illness when I was just 10 years old. And I’ve seen him rise up over the course of some 35 years to continue being a community leader, a loving father and husband, and now grandfather. How can I not believe in resurrection?

In my work life, I saw a close friend a colleague struck by breast cancer. She was the youngest breast cancer patient in Chicago when she had a radical mastectomy in her early 30s. Last year she celebrate 10 years cancer free by running a marathon. How can I not believe in resurrection?

I know a man who came close to suicide as his work and family life fell apart when he came out of the closet. The future seemed dead to him, but now he is a leader in his field and beloved member of his community and his church and his family. How can I not believe in resurrection?

We are intended to rise up! After all, that’s the simple meaning of the Greek word translated as “resurrection.” It just means to rise up; we do it every day of our lives.

But these days we are so surrounded by fearfulness – we live in a culture of fear, produced by and reproducing a politics of fear and religions based on fear – so surrounded are we by our own fearfulness that we cannot see and do not perceive the simple foundations of creation built on God’s designs for life. For life!

If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail. If all you have is fear, then you are entombed by death, and from the darkness of the tomb it is impossible to see God’s holy mountain where even the darkness shines like the new day sun.

In the past few months I have walked a few steps with several people through the valley of the shadow of death – friends here and family members elsewhere facing either the end of life or the end of life as they have known it.

Each time I have accompanied them I have entered the journey expecting a morose march to the tomb; and, to my amazement, each time I have found, instead, life and hope and faith and love beating back the darkness. Facing death – whether actual physical death or the death of relationships or dreams – in such light is not a naïve denial of death; rather beating the darkness till it bleeds daylight[1] means living each day according to the rhythms of resurrection. Rather than a long, slow, sad journey to the tomb, walking to that beat takes us closer to God’s holy mountain.

We may not have a crystal clear vision of the mountain within this space, but we do have something that you cannot find in the so-called real world: we harbor a vision, a prophetic imagination of a future otherwise – of a community of belovedness in which fear is not the air we breath, but rather we are surrounded by love and suffused in love’s light. It is no thing, for sure, but it is not nothing. For, as Jesus understood, perfect love casts out all fear. That is what the women at the tomb encountered that first Easter morning.

It’s what people the world over have encountered throughout history when they walk to graveyards and expect to find hope entombed but find, instead, new life springing up.

So this morning, here in the quiet of this sanctuary, lay down the burden of your fear. Be emptied of self and filled with love. Turn from the demands of a culture of selfishness and enter obedience to Christ’s command that we love one another as he loved. Step out from the darkness of fear and step into the bright light of God’s love and grace and mercy. The tomb of Good Friday is certainly real – as is all the brokenness I’ve named this morning. But it is not the full story and it is not the end of the story; it is not God’s intention for creation. Never forget that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And all that keeps us wrapped up in the darkness of the tombs of injustice are the bonds of our own fear.

Lay them down, and you can see the mountain from here.

And from the mountaintop, you can look over and see the other side: the promised land flowing with milk and honey and with the waters of justice and righteousness; a commonwealth of love and justice; the beloved community where they shall not hurt or destroy.

For this, Christ died; for this Christ is risen; for this we are his disciples.

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen!

---

[1] “Beating the darkness till it bleeds daylight,” is a phrase from Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.”