Sermon of April 10, 2005
Presented by the Rev. Dr. Davida Foy Crabtree, Conference Minister, Connecticut Conference, United Church of Christ
Scripture lesson: Luke 24:13-35

“Astounded!”

Good morning. It is a joy to be here with you in Bolton. Before I read you the scripture text, I want to bring you greetings and thanks as well. I bring you greetings from the other 253 UCC churches. I particularly bring you greetings from Monroe Congregational Church, where I preached and worshipped with them last Sunday. They asked that I bring you their greetings. And I would ask for your permission that I may bring your greetings two weeks from now to the Willington Federated Church. This is one of the ways that I have of reminding us of the thread of Christ which weaves us together. I also want to bring you greetings from your new regional minister, the Reverend Lois Happe who just began her work on April 1, and served most recently as pastor of a church not terribly unlike yours, in Westhampton, Mass. So I am glad to bring those greetings.

I also want to say a word of thanks to you. Thanks for 21 years ago calling Chuck Ericson to be your pastor, because over these 21 years and even before that, he has served in such important ways in the wider life of our church. In particular, he and Jane were camp family Mom and Dad at Silver Lake for two summers. He has served on a number of the departments and committees of the conference, serving now to teach the Associates in Christian Education program, and thereby influencing the present and future shape of Christian Education in our churches.

This church has an inordinate influence on Christian Education throughout the conference because Julia Williamson serves also as co-chair of the Connecticut Association of United Church Educators.  So I say thank you to you for their gifts, for the gifts of Ginny Wickersham who serves as chair of the committee on church and ministry of the Tolland Assoc.; for Jane Hooper who has been so deeply involved in our wider church life; for Chrissie Davies who was on our conference board of directors before she abandoned us for college, and who was a very effective member of our board. And so I say thank you for all of your many ways of serving in the wider church. And thanks too, for your generosity through Our Church’s Wider Mission and the ways in which your support is reaching out to those who are in need, both churches and individuals, here and around the world.

Now let us listen to the Scripture appointed for this day: Luke 24:13-35.

No, the disciples didn’t know the whole story the way we know it. When Jesus died on that cross and was laid in that tomb, they didn’t know what we know.  They knew only that they had lost this gentle, wonderful man, whose life and ministry had transformed theirs.  They knew only that this person, who was so dear to them, was now gone. Gone before his time; gone in an act of violence; gone in an act of betrayal, not only by one of their own but by the religious authorities. Gone, and so perhaps maybe in some way, you can imagine what it was like for the disciples.  hey were human beings like you and me. So perhaps they were thinking somebody stole the body. Or they had completely done away with it. No, the angels said he was alive. So, they were astounded. That is a very strong word. That’s not the word for surprised, that’s not even the word for amazed. Astounded is a very strong word. There in the midst of their grief, they learned that their beloved Jesus was actually alive and they were astounded!

You and I, most of us, have had a time when we’ve lost someone who was close to us. So we can imagine their experience -- astounded in the midst of their grief.  Jesus is the one person whom God has raised from the dead – as a sign to us of God’s love and hope for humanity.

Such an astounding act is one that deserves a response from each and every one of us. The response to which we are called is this: to be so committed to this Jesus that we are willing to be transformed ourselves. There are many ways to have little experiences of the resurrection that you and I are capable of having in the midst of our daily lives. It may be when Jack gets excited when the Red Sox win the World Series. I don’t mean to compare the Red Sox winning the World Series to the resurrection…!  There is something that happens inside of us when the UCONN men and the UCONN women both win championships in the same year.  Those are such trivial examples -- pardon me, Jack.

Each of us yearns, in our own way, for one of those moments when life is suddenly deeper, richer. We can actually have that experience of the risen Christ. It may not be the same as the disciples walking down that path. Chances are, it won’t be. 

If you are always waiting for a thunderbolt to come from heaven and smack you across the forehead with a jagged scar, like Harry Potter, in some way that marks you for life, then you are probably waiting wrongly. So often, the risen Christ comes to us in quiet little, ways … when we’re in the hospital and the faithful pastor comes to call. When we are profoundly lonely, and someone speaks to us in the grocery store and we realize we’re not alone.  Those experiences are signs of God’s presence.

I want to tell you two stories, where I’ve witnessed people, or I’ve heard the story of someone, whose life was changed.

The first one is about a little six year old girl in Uganda. I was there to experience our church’s mission at work. We went by van over roads that had been gouged out by mortar fire because this was in the late 80’s when I was still pastor in Colchester. This was toward the end of the terror of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. We were stopped every half-mile or mile or so by 14 year olds with rifles.  It was a little bit of a scary trip, a very long, hot and bumpy trip. Uganda is an absolutely beautiful East African country, and the capitol city of Kampala and its university were known as the renaissance university of all of Africa. So we travel to this village, by comparison probably not unlike the size of Bolton. And a children’s choir had been gathered from all around the region, and some of those children had walked two hours to get there to sing for us. The children sang to us in such wonderful, melodic voices in the midst of such despair.  The choir director must have asked them each to seek someone out and shake their hand. This little six year old girl came up and shook my hand, as firmly as anyone ever has. She had on a little orange dress, as threadbare as it could be, but cleaned and pressed and to this day I don’t know how her mother did it.  he shook my hand and said, “thank you”, and I said “no, thank you for your beautiful music.”  She said, “no, we’re here to thank you because the church has helped us live.”  She didn’t mean that in a metaphorical way.  Yes, this church helps us live, and my home church in Windsor helps us live. She meant literally, physically, she felt she was alive because of our work there. She had a school to which she could run when the mortar fire started. She was living because of our giving, because of our generosity. Because of our work there, her mother had a sewing machine and a way of making clothing.  It ran by treadle, but when no one in Uganda had work, there were well over 500 women who had treadle sewing machines because of your generosity and who could make clothing – pajamas, and linens for beds, and they could sell them to earn money.  In that little girl’s face, I saw the risen Christ. When she said thank you, she meant for me to carry the word back to you. Because you literally save lives, and not just in Uganda, but in Colombia right now, in places like Afghanistan, places like Indonesia after the tsunami…your long arm representing the love of God is reaching out and changing lives.

Now I want to tell you a story about a young man, a little bit older than that young girl.  I didn’t see or witness this myself, but it was told to me by the dean of the summer conference at Silver Lake. Now I know there are some of you here about this age, and I don’t mean this negatively about 13 or 14 year old, but I know that sometimes that age can be cruel. There is life beyond that age. This young man was more than on the pudgy side, and often had been the brunt of jokes and teasing. Do some of the older among us remember what it was like to be that age? How unending the teasing could sometimes be? I remember both participating in it and being the brunt of it. 

At Silver Lake we have a high ropes course. This is a series of elements of ropes and wood that is strung between the trees, some of them 15-20 feet above ground, and one of them 40 feet above ground.   One of them is called the Burma Bridge. Has anyone here done the Burma Bridge? Yes, you’re harnessed, but it doesn’t feel like it at all. The objective is to get from one tree to the other by using these ropes. Quite an experience! The point is to move us beyond the limits that we impose among ourselves. I would never dream that I could do that. I wouldn’t even think of it. But I took our conference staff out to the ropes course, and I’m a leader, so what am I going to do? 

One of the elements of the ropes course is called the Catwalk. You climb a ladder up the tree, and you stand on this beam with a harness for safety. The goal is to walk this beam, probablythe distance of the pulpit here to the back wall. When you are there, the beam seems about four inches wide, but it is probably ten inches. You make your way across  one foot at a time. Two thirds of the kids at that particular conference got across that beam. Then this young man, who was so used to being the brunt of jokes, got up there.  He knew he had to get across because the whole conference was counting on him. He simply sat down, knowing he couldn’t make that trip. He sat there and he sat there. The conferees grew more and more silent.  He knew he couldn’t do it… And he sat there. But he knew that the conference was counting on him, and he knew that about one third of the conferees were still behind him. What was he going to do?  So he scooched, and he scooched, and he scooched and he slid his way. I don’t know how he avoided splinters!  But he made his way from one tree to the other. He stood up to get ready to swing down on the harness, and the whole conference cheered.   When he got down his counselor gave him a hug, and he said, “Nobody has ever cheered for me before.”

“Nobody has ever cheered for me before.” The catwalk is a story of a life changed because on a Tuesday during a week at Silver Lake, that young man who had never been cheered for by anyone before, was cheered for, even though he didn’t do it the way everybody else did. That was the face of the risen Christ, not just in the young man but in all the conferees. Because there they were on Tuesday (they had only arrived on Sunday), and they were already a Christian community.  I dare say there are a lot of other places where he would not have been cheered for. There are a lot of other places, where there would have been teasing and cat-calling.  But there at Silver Lake, you changed not only that young man’s life, you changed the lives of all those kids because they experienced a whole different way of being God’s people. 

Through your mission giving, there in Uganda, there at SilverLake, you are changing lives. It matters. It matters profoundly that we give life to our mission through the United Church of Christ. I give thanks to God, and I give thanks to God for this church, and for your witness in this place because you give life to God’s people. In Christ’s name, amen.

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