There’s a blog I
like to follow that perhaps you’ve heard of. It’s called Humans of New York, and the idea behind it is very simple. The
photographer (Brandon Stanton) just takes pictures of people on the street, and
then, using their own words, tells a little bit about them. It might be just an
autobiographical sentence or two, or it may be an entire paragraph about a
recent experience they’ve had.
The entry I’m thinking
of today featured a young man holding his forehead with the spread fingers of
his right hand. This is what he said:
My
friend convinced me to go to church last weekend for the first time in five
years. At the end of the service, the pastor told everyone to line up at the
altar for a one-on-one prayer. I was the fifth in line. Everyone else got short
prayers. Just a few seconds and they were done. But the pastor looked at me
with a weird face. He announced that he had a vision of me getting locked up.
Then he had the whole church form a circle, and he put his hand on my face like
this, and he started shaking my head for fifteen minutes. He said he was trying
to cancel my destiny. My friend was laughing and filming the whole thing. I’ve
got to admit though—it’s got me nervous. I’m going back this week to see if I
can get some more details.[1]
This gave me an
idea. Since Easter is a day when we have many people visiting the church, why not
call everybody up at the end for personal prayer. I can’t think of anything
more likely to get people to come back than a little intrigue about their destiny.
But then, wouldn’t
you know it, I came down with the worst cold I’ve had in years. So I have a bit
of bad news: I think it’s best that I keep my hands to myself, so I won’t be
grabbing anybody’s head at the end of today’s service.
But when I think
about it, maybe this is why I keep coming to church, too: Sometimes I want to
grab hold of the world and shake it in order to change its destiny. Remember
those Magic 8 Balls? You’d ask a question, shake it a little bit, and it would
provide you with an answer, such as: It
is decidedly so, or Outlook not so
good, or Concentrate and ask again.
When I think about it, I wonder if the Magic 8 Ball might not be based on
scripture:
Once again, in a little while, I will
shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake
all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will
fill this house with splendor, says the Lord of Hosts.[2]
Obviously this is
a trite comparison. But there’s still something to it. To explain why, let’s
start with something we’ve all heard of, but necessarily connect with our
religion, and that’s karma. Karma is the notion of cause and effect—the idea
that if your intentions are good and your actions are just, your future is
better. This is entirely biblical, but the Bible also takes into account the
idea that we are not alone in the world, we are part of a larger whole. As
perfect as my intentions and my actions may be, I can still be robbed of
happiness by somebody else’s actions. So karma’s not all it’s cracked up to be,
because we can only exert control over a small piece of it. The only way to
avoid other people’s involvement in our karma would be to separate ourselves
entirely from the rest of the world.
And we’ve seen
this: some individuals become hermits; or some small communities of faith
isolate themselves from the rest of the world choosing not to be impacted by
bad karma over which they have no control.
This was clearly
not the way of Christ, nor was it the way of the earliest Christian church.
Karma was as real then as it is now, but as great an influence as it exerts
over our lives, God is greater. On our own, we can never free ourselves from
the vicious cycle of bad karma, but on Easter, God shook the heavens, the earth,
the sea, and the dry land to overcome cause and effect and deliver us into the
land of grace.
A week like this
one reminds us that the world needs shaking up, doesn’t it? Refugees by the
million, terrorist attacks, famine. I would love to take the world and shake it
for fifteen minutes to cancel what appears to be a grim destiny.
But I don’t need
to, because that’s what Easter is about. God shakes the heavens and the earth
and overturns our pact with death. And this victory of God can… maybe even
should… transform the way we look at the world around us. Take terrorism, for
example: When something like this happens, we react out of fear: Whom do we
round up? Which minority do we keep under surveillance? Where do we send our
bombs? Where do we need to build walls?
The sad thing is that
people calling themselves Christian advocate reactions like this with what seem
to be the loudest voices. As I’ve said
before: there may be very compelling political reasons to react out of
fear. But as for Christians, we need to hear Paul’s statement at the beginning
of this morning’s New
Testament reading: If
for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be
pitied.[3]
Paul never said
Christians wouldn’t feel the effects of terror or that bad things would never
happen to God’s people. What he did say, however, was that the resurrection of
Christ was the start of a new community—a community that can stand up to the
worst that can happen, because God’s answer is always going to be the last
word. There’s more to life than meets the eye, and we who celebrate new life on
Easter need to lead the world in asking deeper questions, and in finding a more
constructive response than fear. The goodness of Christ would never call us to
a religion that undoes us here in this life and yet gives us no hope for the
world to come.[4]
Remember that
rather frightening little passage I read from Haggai a few minutes ago? There’s
where we find one of our best assurances that the shaking of the world is no
threat to us, because immediately before those shaking words, God says his: My Spirit abides among you; do not fear.[5]
Politicians can
bring down upon us all the fear they can manage. It’s their right to do so,
after all. But we who hope in Christ know that our hope is not only in what we
can see and touch and hear, but that there’s something beyond the reality that
surrounds us now. God has shaken the heavens and the earth to give us new hope
and new life. Do we really want to wallow in the fear of death? Paul reminds us
that if we do, we are to be pitied. But Haggai reminds us not to fear: God’s
Spirit abides among us.
—©2016 Sam L. Greening, Jr.
