A long time ago, nearly two thousand years now, there lived a man named Jesus, whose birth we celebrate as Christmas and whose life and ministry we remember on the occasion of his death, which was during the Jewish holiday of Passover. In fact, Jesus was Jewish, and since he came from a part of the Middle East called Nazareth, as people then didn’t have last names like we do but were named after the place where they came from, he was known as Jesus of Nazareth.

Since our religious tradition comes out of both the Jewish and Christian traditions, we will celebrate Passover in a few weeks, and Palm Sunday last week, which commemorates Jesus’ entry into the Holy City of Jerusalem almost two thousand years ago. Palm waving was a Greek symbol of honor, usually given for athletic achievement. Years after Jesus’ life had ended, the news of how he lived his life spread from modern day Israel through Turkey to Greece, where his legend picked up local descriptions like the waving of palm leaves.

Jesus was going to Jerusalem, as did all good Jews at Passover time. Passover is the time to remember the one of the two gifts through which God acts in our world is freedom. It was a divine act to free the Jews from slavery when one of the Jewish tribes was enslaved in Egypt a thousand years before Jesus lived and three thousand years before us.

But, Jesus was in Jerusalem at Passover time. Jesus had tried to live his religion as best he can, like you and I try to do. But, he was also a teacher, and a spiritual leader, and he sought to understand who God was and where he, as a man, could see God working in human life.

Jesus found God to be present in all places, in all times, through human love. Jesus declared that love was another gift through which God acts in our world. He thought and taught that it was through relationships freely formed in love that God is made real to us and we feel as free as we were created to be. There were only two relationships one needed freely to establish to lead a religious life and see the presence of God in all things and all places and in all times: Love God with all your heart, mind, and spirit, and love your neighbor as yourself. This was Jesus’ message: God is made real to us through our love for all souls. And the symbol of that ever-present spirit of love is when human beings break bread and eat together.

It is a hard thing to do, to love everyone. There are people we disagree with, that may treat us poorly or unfairly, and there are people we just don’t like. There are people whom we don’t know, and when we encounter these strangers we don’t know whether they will treat us fairly and respectfully, or whether they will try to harm us. You like someone because they are your friend, treat you nice, and because you like to be around them. You love someone when you freely give them the respect and dignity they are due because all souls are God’s children. Love freely given establishes the most holy of all relationships.

Some of the political leaders of Jesus’ time did not like the fact that crowds followed Jesus to hear his challenge to them to bring God into their lives through love. Even some of Jesus’ fellow Jews did not agree with what he said. In fact, the disagreements between Jesus and his adversaries became so intense that Jesus was arrested and condemned to death. He suffered intense cruelty from his adversaries. And Roman soldiers nailed him to a cross as they did common criminals, and Jesus was raised up and crucified.

And as he was dying on this cross Jesus did a remarkable thing, something that was such a powerful display of the message he preached and the life he sought to live, that the memory of it survived even his death. He looked down upon those who had tormented and tortured him, and he said, “Forgive them, Father (which is what he called God and encouraged others to call God), for they know not what they do.” Jesus asked the God of all to forgive those who had brought about such pain and suffering to him. The ultimate act of love yielding the ultimate form of freedom! Relationships rooted in love reveal a spirit alive always, and which conquers suffering and death.

After Jesus died he was removed from the cross and placed in a tomb. Three days later, on what we now celebrate as Easter, among his followers on the road to Emmaus there appeared a stranger. Now Jesus’ followers were almost crazy with grief at the death of their friend and teacher and fellow spiritual traveler. They were certain that death killed everything, that the death of the physical body had dominion over all. In their remorse they also felt great guilt, for when their teacher needed them to be with him as his body gave out and he died, they had denied they knew him or fled from him in fear of their own lives. In their fear they could not take that final step with the man who loved them, and whom they loved in return. So here were two of Jesus’ followers walking the path to the town of Emmaus when this stranger appeared to walk beside them. They talked as they walked, and discovered something remarkable about what their relationship with their deceased friend and teacher whom they loved, really meant:

And that is the story of Easter. Even after the death of the body there abides a unity and freedom of the spirit expressed through a love for all souls.

The sermons of Lent that have led up to this morning’s sermon have been about the ways that thinkers from the last two hundred years of history really have dismantled much of what has passed for classical religious orthodoxy. After the dismantling, there is left an intellectual and theological and religious tradition of thinking that becomes the foundation for a new understanding of faith. It has been our aim together not only to trace the disintegration of the old, but to discover the foundations of the new. And with this sermon, on the thinker who perhaps more than any other, dismantles and disintegrates old ways of thinking, the foundation of a new faith becomes real.

As a result of these past few weeks, recounting thinkers from the past 200 years, I would make these declarations about my own faith, as I attempt to be faithful to walking with you along the intellectual and theological path that our walk these past few weeks has taken us. I believe in the primacy and sacred quality of an individual’s experience, over such things as tradition, custom, the old ways of viewing things rooted in past revelations, over what others insist “ought” to be done or “ought” to be held as true. I do not put my faith in the declarations of governmental or ecclesiastical bodies over the experience of the individual because such bodies distort truth, justice, and love by the very coercion that makes them powerful and gives them authority; and their distortions create a distance from the individual’s experience and the direct relationships that form that individual, including relationships of others and God. I believe that human nature has a social quality to it, that in our natural relatedness and connection with others, and through bonds of affection freely chosen, we gain individual identity and the very freedom that outlines that individuality. I believe this social quality - the natural bonds of family, race, and ethnicity, and the freely chosen bonds of love, commitment, and loyalty - can clash in human society and culture with a tragedy that is sometimes unavoidable. But the foundation of these beliefs for me, is that I believe in the resurrection of the spirit and life everlasting. I believe the spirit outlives and outlasts and endures and redeems these tragedies. Actually not so much a resurrection of the spirit as an indestructible quality to the spirit, and not actually life everlasting as much as that the presence of the spirit in and through all of creation, especially human being, and knowing no beginning or end. I don’t believe in heaven or hell. And I don’t even know enough about either to say what they are, such that I don’t believe in them! I believe in the enduring existence of the spirit, which outlasts even death.

That is the foundation of my faith. That is what I think the story of Easter is about, best exemplified in the story of the Road to Emmaus. But, to understand the story of Easter it is necessary not simply to recount the Road to Emmaus story. We need see and experience the presence of the enduring Spirit that the story witnesses to, in the complex ironies and tragedies of our times and our everyday lives. We need to live inside of a new Kingdom at hand always in this world.

A few weeks back a curiosity appeared in the Religion section of the Saturday Grand Rapids Press, which portrayed the flavor of this year’s Lenten sermon series, focusing on how the ideas and lives of certain thinkers from history have threatened modern religion. It was echoed again in yesterday’s Religion section, so you might want to take a look when you get home. This curiosity a few weeks’ back pertained to today’s thinker, Jesus of Nazareth, and the danger his thinking poses for religion itself. There was the weekly ¾ page advertisement extolling the readers to “Visit the House of Worship of your choice,” with the encouraging invitation of: “No Jesus, No Peace; Know Jesus, Know Peace.” And right next to it was a commentary by the Reverend Daniel Plasman, a Reformed Church minister who wrote about a former parishioner of his, Rev. Norman Kansfield, then president of New Brunswick Theological Seminary and by yesterday deposed president, who will most likely have his professional and ordination credentials also withdrawn in a public trial this June for officiating at the wedding of his daughter and her same-sex partner. Observing the actions of his former congregant, Rev. Plasman, now retired in Illinois, wrote, “[In officiating at his daughter’s same-sex wedding] Rev. Kansfield did the unthinkable, the unpardonable, the most unchurchly thing imaginable… He treated them like, well, like Jesus treated so many… He embodied the love of Christ and the presence of God when his daughter and daughter-in-law said to each other, ‘I do.’ For that indiscretion… the Rev. Kansfield, like all noble heretics, will have to pay [a] price.”

So, the now former President of New Brunswick Theological Seminary and, most likely after June, a former Reformed Church minister will be so because “He embodied the love of Christ and the presence of God” in the bonds of affection between two people, a covenant free entered into in love. Jesus gave his life for this message, that the Kingdom of God is at hand, best expressed through living out two commandments which are themselves two bonds of affection. Love God and neighbor as yourself. But, two weeks ago the adjacent advertisement in the Religion section of the paper should have read, “Know Jesus, No Peace.”

People fear love as much as death, and maybe even more! I think that is because we fear death conquers love, destroys the spirit of love, and we languish in the agony of our unbelief that love really isn’t strong enough. How could it be? It is patient, kind, not self-serving, keeps not a record of wrongs, and beareth and endureth all things. It is not what we estimate power to be. Thus, we fear it’s not strong enough, and the fear is warranted. Death is permanent and real, and nothing, least of all love, seems capable of having dominion over death. So we construct grand theologies and religious doctrines of heaven and hell, right and wrongs, mysteries about God’s intricate nature and Jesus’ double nature, what must be believed and conformed to, to overcome what we fear: that the death of the body really destroys love. I even think that is what the “fear of God” is. We don’t fear God’s power, but that God as love is not powerful enough! We do not believe the spirit of what we have experienced and felt as affection remains when what we call consciousness passes away. We fear love is lost when someone dies, so we cling to the physical body as if it were the spirit.

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The Road to Emmaus story is from the Gospel of Luke, and because Paul’s traveling companion was a physician named Luke it’s customary to think of Luke as this physician. It’s the reason modern hospitals are named for Luke and not other gospel authors. The Gospel of Luke has many similarities to Matthew, includes all of the narratives that are in Mark, and is decidedly different from the Gospel of John as well as all of the other Gospels discovered by archeology in the 20^{th century but not included in the New Testament. But it is only physician Luke’s Jesus who utters the words from the cross that become a message to all religions, all cultures, and all times, appropriate since the author wanted this to be so for all living in the vast Roman empire: “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” And it is physician Luke’s Jesus who utters something different when death arrives. Mark and Matthew’s Jesus renders the cry of the lonely, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Luke’s Jesus cries out what a physician would witness at death, “My Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” Good physicians take their patient’s hands and walk the spirit across the murky divide of physical life and death, even when loved ones still living can’t and cannot conceive of the enduring power of the spirit through their veil of tears.}

William Ernest Henley's poem, "Invictus," is what I call "the doctor's poem."  So many doctors whose Memorial Services I have performed, have told me before their death, or their surviving families have told me, that Henley’s lines became a personal credo to them.  "I am the master of my fate." And I for one want my doctor to believe that.  When he is rooting around in my insides, discerning whether to clamp this vein now or later, or cut through this bit of tissue thoroughly or partly, I want him to have a haughty confidence in what he is doing.  I want him to feel it is his duty to study everything possible to understand every part of the mechanics of the human body. I want him to believe he can know all that.  I want him to think I have put my life in his hands. I want him to shout that he is master not only of his fate but of mine, too, before he puts on that mask and orders the anesthesiologist to put me under. But Henley’s following line is a sly revealing of modern hubris, and the two read together on the modern’s lack of faith: “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.” Well, not really, not totally, not always, and not today in every situation. It is our domain as human beings to define whether the soul has been steered past the markers of physical life and into the shadowy waters of death, but we do not determine what seas it has been steered into.

Medicine can assist birth so much today in comparison to the past, that we can birth babies today that a mere 30 years ago wouldn’t have survived.  We can conceive in the laboratory, inseminate artificially, and deliver and sustain viability at 3 months.  There is no such a thing as "natural birth" much these days, if by that one means "the way God made birth to happen from the beginning,” when it comes either to human or to many instances of animal birth.  Actually, there never has been that kind of "natural" human birth for millennia now.  Human beings have aided birthing, speeding it up and slowing it down when necessary. We have since recorded history, and this is not new.

The 20th century has seen a leap in human assistance to the other end of the life continuum, too.  In centuries past medicine, pharmacology, and even witchcraft and shamanism were used to prolong life.  Human beings' capacity to keep the body functioning is now almost limitless.  Western medicine is so well acquainted with the body's processes that we can keep bodies producing the necessary requirements for sustainability virtually without the brain's direction, facilitation, and control.  Our expertise in this area has increased in such a dramatic fashion over the past decades that we need a "definition" of when life begins and ceases, because our science of life has far outstripped the past determinations we used of when life begins and ends, and when human shaping of life, our co-creation, begins and ends. But notice the language. WE have a definition of when life begins and ends. WE finite, limited, conditioned, mistake-prone, never-knowing-all human beings have a definition of when life begins and ends. It has always been that way with our physical existence. Even in the world of Hollywood B-movies we are told, “The coroner pronounced him dead.”

We walk through the valley of the shadow of death, as did our ancestors and as will our progeny. We are, in one sense, masters of our fate. Human beings have always defined birth and death because both happen to us, and not to the gods. From the Greeks on Westerners knew this. But “masters of our fate” doesn’t mean we escape fate. The Almighty has His own ways, even and especially in this area of birth and death. We have never been captain of our souls. Every body withers and dies. God is known through the Spirit that endures as Love, evident and experienced pragmatically by every individual whose had a loved one die. “Absence,” wrote the poet, “is the greatest presence.” (May Sarton)

But people fear love as much as death. We fear the death of the physical body conquers love, destroys the spirit of love, and we languish in the agony of our unbelief that love isn’t really strong enough. Our society doesn’t even want to acknowledge the presence of love in the relationship of Rev. Kansfield’s daughter and her partner, so powerful is our fear of love and our unbelief that the spirit of love is strong enough. We do not believe the spirit of what we have experienced and felt as affection remains when what we call consciousness passes away. We fear love is lost when someone dies, so we cleave unto the physical body as if it were the spirit and what lasts. And we declare what reason knows isn’t true. That the body is still alive when consciousness has passed away. And we punish those who in their belief conform not to the products of fear or the unbelief in the power of the spirit of love.

I remember a funeral I attended in a church, with the open casket up in front of the pews displaying the dead body for all to see. The preacher was howling, his head gazing up, declaring that the immobile young man was not dead but alive and enjoying heaven, when the young man’s young son, sitting in the front pew, answered the preacher’s pronouncement with a pointing of his tiny finger and the stark reality often only the very youngest will admit: “Daddy’s not alive. There’s his dead body, right there!” The young son was instantly hushed by his attending older relatives.

Jesus had talked about living inside the Kingdom of God, a new Kingdom that is at hand always and is not the product of fear and death, but of love freely given. It is present always because it is not some other realm of existence like an afterlife. This new Kingdom is present always but is not created by magic or state fiat or religious decree. This new Kingdom is not created by the ties of blood, nor is it a religion of blood whereby love emanates from the bonds of family or tribe or ethnicity, although those bonds do exist. This new Kingdom is not created by the ties of soil, nor is it a religion of land whereby love emanates from countryman to fellow countryman, or to country more than human being, although those bonds do exist as well. This new Kingdom just exists here and now. It is at hand. And the bonds of affection that form this new Kingdom are those freely given to all which, by virtue of being freely given to all, liberate human beings from the tragedies of the human condition. But to enter this new Kingdom one needs to see that the spirit of love freely given exists always, even as the physical body does not. The bonds of affection we freely create with one another reveal and multiply and expand a spirit that exists always and does not pass away.

The story is ancient but timeless. I know why Pilate did what he did. His political posturing sought to curry the favor of interest groups and make a public spectacle so as to further his own political gain.  To him there was nothing that was too great a sacrifice for the ends of his own power. Now I know why the case of Jesus’ life and death was sent back and forth between Pilate, Herod, and the Jewish leadership called the Sandhedrin, maybe even a number of times, and why in that instance two thousand years ago this was done until all of those men in power got the outcome they desired.  I know why the Sandhedrin did what they did: It made them look as if they were "religious" and “pious” and “righteous” by strictly adhering to doctrine and principle, over love and mercy.  No wonder the author of the Gospel of Matthew had Christ cry out in agony on the cross, "Why hast Thou forsaken me?"  Everybody else had, so why not God, too?!  Jesus didn't have anyone in a position to end mercifully his physical suffering who believed enough in the everlasting presence. The unbelief of others often begats lonely agony, then as now. Unbelief almost kills the Spirit and the mercy of abiding love, and the power the spirit of love has over human suffering and death.  Almost, but not quite!

For after the political posturing; after the claims of righteousness by those convinced they’re right; after the crowd loses interest in the circus of events and goes on to the next big story in Jerusalem; after commentators condemn Jesus’ closest companions and their infidelity to him through their abandonment and denial; after all the fear, the superstition, the people standing by his body and claiming he is not dead. After all of that, the words that physician Luke put in his Jesus’ mouth upon the cross, in the midst of a lonely agony, will spread like a balm across time and culture to heal all things because the words are of the Spirit of a God we cannot see but is real through faith. Live inside a new Kingdom. Forgive. Forgive them for they know not what they do. Live inside a new Kingdom. Extend mercy. Have mercy upon those who suffer, even when those who could deliver them from their suffering hesitate from their own fear and grief. Live inside a new Kingdom. Love. Love one another, and have faith that the spirit of love abides.

When Jesus forgave from the cross he pulled back the veil produced by human fear to show a new Kingdom. But so strong was the disciples fear and unbelief that it led them to flee and to believe that with the agonizing death of Jesus’ physical body the spirit of love had been crushed too. So strong was their conviction that love was really impotent in the face of death, that they would have kept Jesus’ body functioning as long as they could if given the opportunity. Those who distorted the message, “He is risen,” came to prove that, in their claim that Jesus didn’t really die, Jesus’ body didn’t really give out, Jesus’ consciousness didn’t really pass away, and Jesus’ molecules could magically reanimate. But death is real. It happens to us all. We become an empty tomb. But, the greater part, the spirit, the spirit of love, rises! Live inside this new Kingdom. Always the spirit rises! Whether we believe it does or not, the spirit rises! Whether we are captive of our fears or freed from them, the spirit rises! Whether we cling to the physical body as if it were the spirit, the spirit rises when the body is broken and consciousness has slipped away! Live inside a new Kingdom, and be free through the bonds of everlasting love. In freely chosen bonds of affection – in loving God and neighbor as self – the spirit is revealed as more powerful than suffering and stronger than death.

AMEN.