Sermon for The Third Sunday After Easter
“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
There is a sense in which the Christian Faith is precisely the needed corrective to the dreaded fatalisms and fears of our world and day. This has been an extraordinary week of fears and worries of global proportions. “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us,” the Litany would have us pray, and rightly so, precisely in the face of all of those things!
They are before us. How do we face tribulations and hardships, “fear in a handful of dust,” as T.S. Eliot puts it? Fear in the air we breathe and in the hands we touch. How do we face the fears of flu and fire, the fears of a troubled world, it seems, where there is only fear? Well, our Scripture readings speak profoundly to these realities. These realities are not altogether new; it’s just that they are before us in a more concentrated way. We are fearful not just about the world, but more profoundly, we are afraid of ourselves and the destructive nature of our humanity. And yet, we have the hardest time being honest about this.