The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
April 6, 2008

3 Easter – B
Acts 4:5-12
1 John 1:1--2:2
Luke 24: 13-36, (36b-48)

What do you see when you look at life as a whole? Do you see, as the little old lady said, just one damned thing after another? Or do you see more than that?

If you were asked to summarize in just one or two sentences the meaning, not only of your own personal experience of life from birth until now, but also of the whole of human existence, could you do it?

It’s a helpful spiritual exercise, a kind of final exam for life. Some people have done it, and all of us must, if, before we die, life is to be more than just one damned thing after another.

Gardner Taylor did it. Taylor was pastor of one of the large black Baptist churches in Brooklyn for over forty years. (Can you imagine being pastor of the same bunch of sinners for forty years?) Anyway, Taylor was once asked if he could summarize the whole of the Bible in a sentence or two. And Taylor said, “Yes, I can: ‘God is out to get back what belongs to him.’” That’s what the Bible, and life, boil down to for Taylor.

And then there is the well-known story of Karl Barth, the German theologian who was one of the giants of Protestant theology during the first half of the twentieth century. Barth spent decades writing complicated theological responses to the great questions of the Bible and life, all of it in long, complex German sentences that fill volumes on the shelves of libraries. And it is said that late in his life, when Barth was lecturing at one of the leading American seminaries, he was asked what he saw when he looked at the work of his life as a whole.

The way I heard the story, Barth had finished his lecture for the evening, when a bright-eyed, eager, young seminarian asked him, in all innocence, “Professor Barth, could you summarize what your theology means in a sentence or two?”

Barth thought for a moment, letting the smoke from his pipe drifted slow up to the ceiling – this was back in the first half of the last century, long before smoking became a mortal sin – and then he asked the seminarian, “You’re asking me if I can summarize, in a sentence or two, what all these books of mine mean, books it took me a lifetime to write?”

And the seminarian said, yes, that’s what he was asking. And Barth, it is said, leaned back in his chair, puffed some more on his pipe, and then in heavily accented English, he said, ”Yes, I can: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’”

The Easter appearances of Jesus are the evangelists’ summaries of the meaning of the Bible and of life. The Easter appearances of Jesus are their way of saying, as Martin Luther King, Jr., later put it, that “the moral arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,” their way of saying that in the end, in Jesus, the righteousness of God prevails and God does get back what belongs to him.

Easter, they say, is a matter of seeing and meaning. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all tell us that on Easter Day, and during the forty days that followed, the disciples saw Jesus. They saw and talked with and ate with the same Jesus whom they had watched die on Friday. And then they spent the rest of their lives trying to come to grips with what it meant.

Luke says that late on Easter Day, two disciples met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, but they didn’t recognize him. Not for a while at least, not until they got to their house and sat down to eat. And then they recognized him ”in the breaking of the bread.” “Their eyes were opened,” Luke says, ”and they recognized him,” but by then “he had vanished from their sight.” But in that seeing, in that recognition, they understood the meaning of the burning in their hearts they had experienced when he had explained the Scriptures to them on the road.

So these two disciples rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the Eleven what had happened. And they were all talking about it, says Luke, when Jesus himself “stood among them.” And he spoke to them, ”and they were startled and terrified, thinking they were seeing a ghost.”

But Jesus invites them to touch him, to see for themselves that he is real. And then he asks for something to eat. And they give him a piece of fish, ”which he took and ate before their eyes.” And then Jesus talked with them for a while and “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” and to the meaning of life and death and resurrection and the grace of God. And then he went away, and he was no longer there. And all this took place, says Luke, two days after the disciples had seen that Jesus was very dead on Friday.

Clearly, Luke and the other evangelists are telling us that this is what life up ahead of us is all about, that Jesus’ Resurrection is not just about “the immortality of the soul” or some other vague notion like “the enduring human spirit.” They are saying that they witnessed the reality of Jesus as a physical reality, even after he had died – a physical reality that took a different form and appearance, to be sure, for the disciples did not recognize Jesus at first. He seems just somehow to be there, and then not to be there. But it was a physical reality nonetheless. He was there in body, not just in spirit. He walked, and he talked, and he ate the fish, says Luke.

All personal reality is tangible, physical, the Scriptures tell us. It has been that way since the Creation. Human beings, persons, are animated bodies. Persons are spirit-filled flesh, not incarcerated souls. Body and soul are one thing, and cannot be separated. Persons are always spirit and body. Body alone is merely dust; spirit alone is only the wind.

“Try something,” said Louis Lotz. “Try laughing without your body. Try crying, loving, praying, eating corn on the cob, or hugging your kids without using your body. Show up at church some Sunday without your body, and see what kind of reception you get.”

So what are we to make of all this? What does it all mean? What are we to make of the Gospel reports that after the Resurrection Jesus appeared to his disciples, and sometimes they recognized him and sometimes they didn’t, and they talked for a while, and he invited them to touch him and see for themselves that he was real, and he ate some fish, and then he was gone?

One of the things we are to make of it is this – that what is real is greater than our ordinary experiences alone would lead us to believe. Reality is more than what we get in the habit of seeing and hearing and touching in our day-to-day lives and world. In fact, what we see and hear and touch day in and day out sometimes blinds us to realities we are not in the habit of seeing and hearing and touching, because the things that are obvious get our attention and draw us away from the things that are there, but not obvious. Reality is not just common sense. As Einstein observed, common sense is merely the set of prejudices all of us have acquired by the age of eighteen.

On Friday the disciples saw Jesus die. And they were all used to death. Death happened all the time. It was obvious, common sense. And then there was their grief. It, too, was real, obvious and close and strong and tangible. And their attention was so focused on these realities that when, on Sunday, Jesus first appeared to them they didn’t immediately perceive the reality of the life who was standing among them, because they were not attending to that. They were attending to the death that was obvious. And then, when they did see him, they were “startled and frightened,” thinking they were seeing something that wasn’t really substantial.

We know it is true – don’t we? – that real things are present to us even when we aren’t recognizing them. There is a physical reality in this room right this moment that is as real to each of us as eating a piece of fish, but it’s not obvious simply because we’re not attending to it. If, however, we had a radio here and were to turn on the switch and turn up the volume, the physical reality of radio waves would get our immediate attention. They are moving through this room right this moment, and throughout the universe all the time. They are real, and they are physical. But we have to capture them at the right frequency before they will get our attention.

What other realities are out there in the world, spiritual realities that are palpable and powerful and meaningful, but that we are simply unaware of because we haven’t attended to them at the right frequency?

Loren Eiseley (in The Immense Journey?) wrote about seeing a frog that was sitting just out of the water on the edge of a pond, eyeing his ordinary natural world, the shoreline, when suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, the frog caught a glimpse of something flying toward him from the forest. It startled him, and he plopped back into his pond with a splash.

We are like that, says Eiseley. We human beings sit on the edge of our pond, on the edge of our ordinary world, with our huge telescopes and our space probes scanning the wilderness of space, and one of these days one of our probes will catch sight of something that will lead us to plop back into our pond with a splash! Or, if we are truly more than frogs, perhaps we’ll see something that could draw us to move toward it in awe and amazement.

One of the things the evangelists are telling us, as the Scriptures say on virtually every page, is that the reality of the divine, God, is palpable, and that God intrudes into our lives in surprising, even startling ways. Just as we’ve settled down to life in all its ordinariness, God gets our attention, as he got the disciples’ attention on the evening of Easter Day, and when he does we are startled and terrified by realities that are there, but that we haven’t been paying attention to, realities that we just haven’t noticed before.

Just so, Aidan Kavanaugh says, the Easter appearances of Jesus reveal that “there was a gradual dawning in [the disciples’] brains that something is afoot in the world quite outside the bounds of what they had been led to expect was possible, [a] growing realization that the normalcy of life lived within the conventions of one’s own world is but the face of death itself.” (Made, Not Born, 1976, p. 3)

Suddenly to see a reality that has been there all along but that we have not seen before can either cause us to plop back into our ponds with a splash, or, if we are more than frogs, can draw us toward larger life with awe and amazement.

This is why I think the story of Oskar Schindler provides such a strong witness to the power of Easter, an image of life packed with greater meaning than our 24/7 “business as usual” lives can account for.

You remember Oskar Schindler. He was an ordinary guy like the rest of us – a driven man, heavy drinker, womanizer, gambler, black market dealer, and war profiteer. To Schindler, World War II was an opportunity, an opportunity for personal gain. Wartime Germany was merely his ordinary, normal world, a world he could manipulate for his own benefit. To him, the Jews in Krakow were simply cheap labor to be exploited, and the war merely provided the market for Schindler’s goods, a way to make his fortune.

But gradually – or maybe it was suddenly one day – Schindler saw something he had not seen before. He realized that his normal, ordinary life, the life he was living within the conventions of the world, was but the face of death itself.

Schindler was well on his way to making his fortune when one day he and his mistress went for a horseback ride. And they rode to the top of the hill overlooking the city just at the time that Nazi soldiers, the people whose war he was helping to finance, were viciously slaughtering the Jews who lived there, mindlessly and mercilessly destroying both them and their ghetto.

And there, on his horse, Schindler sees a reality that he has not seen before, a palpable moral reality. In the movie, you can see it in his face. He begins to realize how murderous and irrational his world has become, how the conventions of his world had become but the face of death itself. Though his normal world did not believe it, he sees what he has not seen before – that Jews are human beings – and that he, Oskar Schindler, body, soul, and pocketbook, is the only hope his Jewish workers have of surviving.

So at great personal risk, Schindler devises a plan in response to the reality that has been there all along, but that he has just now seen. He will use his fortune to bribe those in power in order to ransom his Jewish workers. He will buy their lives and their freedom. So he makes his list, a list of the names of each of his workers, a list of the names of each human being for whom he will pay a price, so that each person on that list will be under his care and protection and will therefore be exempt from the Nazis’ order of extermination.

Even then Schindler himself does not yet fully realize the meaning of the new reality and life he has recently seen. He just sees it, and he responds to it. He pays for it. But it’s only at the end of the war, only at the moment of crisis, at the moment of judgment for himself, that he discovers the full meaning of what he has done:

The war is over. Germany has capitulated. But to the victorious Allies, Schindler himself is a marked man, simply another Nazi and war profiteer who will now have to go on the run from the Allies.

But the Jews whom Schindler ransomed have been saved, and they are grateful. So they write a letter testifying to what Schindler has done for them. “We are witnesses of these things,” they write. “We are witnesses of the fact that Oskar Schindler did deliberately, and of his own free will, spend his fortune and his sacred honor to save our lives and to spare us from the death camps of the people of his own party and nation. We are witnesses to these things.” And they all signed it, all 1,200 of them. And they gave their witness to Oskar Schindler, Nazi but their redeemer, as his passport in the foreign land of Allied power.

They also give Schindler another gift. They gave him a ring made from the gold fillings of teeth gratefully offered by one of the ransomed workers. And on the ring they inscribed, in Hebrew, these words from the Talmud: ”Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” It’s only then that Schindler sees the fullness of the meaning of the new reality he has chosen, the fullness and power of the new life he has chosen as his own, the life of grace.

He is overcome by his workers’ kindness, by their gratefulness and their forgiveness. And he looks at his car, the Mercedes he is about to use for his escape, and he breaks into uncontrollable tears. “The car,” he says. “My God, the car! I could have sold my car to buy more lives. And my gold cigarette case. And my party pin. They, too, could have been sold for the price of others.”

But his friends assure him that “whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” That’s the reality and meaning of Schindler’s life, and it’s the meaning of the Bible, the meaning of Easter.

The Resurrection is the testimony of God to this truth, God’s own testimony to the reality that whoever spends his life in love for others will be given life anew, life that not even death can take away. It is God’s testimony that even in the face of the absolute injustice of the crucifixion of Jesus, the arc of history bends towards justice, and toward grace and peace. It is testimony to the fact that God’s righteousness will prevail, and that God does get back what belongs to him. “We are witnesses to these things,” the apostles tell us.

Oskar Schindler spent all that he had to ransom those within his power to ransom, and the life he saved was his own. The normalcy of the life he had been living, within the conventions of his own world, had become “but the face of death itself.” And when he saw that, when he saw that there was an alternative reality, an alternative life, and when he responded to it, he found the fullness of the new life, a life he had never even thought about before – the gratitude and forgiveness of his friends, who had once been his enemies. And never, it is my hunch, would Schindler have traded back the new life for the old!

“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” That’s the reality of Easter, the meaning of the Bible, the meaning of life. And we, too, Jesus tells us, are to witness to these things.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.