Easter Sunday Sermon – Jim Lawrence
April 4th, 2010Tombstone or Cornerstone?
Easter Sunday — April 4, 2010
Hillside Community Church
Rev. Dr. James Lawrence
Psalm 118:8-24, 29; John 20:1-9 (text follows sermon)
Imagine that a great cathedral is about to go under construction. The foundation must be laid first, and the contractor is inspecting a load of newly-arrived quarried stone. Some stones he approves, and others he rejects. Later in the day the architect arrives on the scene and casually surveys the pile of discarded stones. One stone nearly leaps out of the pile at him. Examining it closely, he whistles under his breath: it will make the perfect cornerstone. Calling the contractor over, he asks, “Why did you pass over this stone? To which the builder replies, “Because it doesn’t go with these others very well.” Emphatically, the architect declares: “Then the others must be chiseled to fit with this one.” So, the stone which the builder refused is polished, inscribed, and set in the place of honor, becoming the cornerstone.
This is the kind of scene imagined by the psalmist to describe the activity of God in his life. We don’t know who wrote the 118th psalm, or what the circumstances of their life were, but the psalm indicates that the author felt he had been tossed aside by others, like builders rejecting a stone. He turned to God and learned it is better to trust in the One who made heaven and earth than in people and princes. God came to his rescue, gave new meaning to his life, and exultantly in his new-found inspiration, the psalmist declares with words echoing down the ages in over a million worship services: “This is a day the Lord has made: let us rejoice and be glad in it!”
Peter referred to this very psalm in the Book of Acts, saying “Jesus is the stone which was rejected by the builders, but which has now become the cornerstone.”
And yet another stone looms in the story of the Christian scriptures, of course: the tombstone. Not a stone of construction, like a cornerstone, but a stone of destruction, a stone the soldiers used to seal Jesus’ tomb, a stone of death and annihilation.
Two great stones: one symbolizing life and the other death. One upholding a magnificent structure, and the other darkening a grave. In the highest possible sense, the two stones stand for two diametrically opposed ways of relating to life: one is ego transcendence and an embracing of the community of life; the other is ego absorption and a reduction into a personal prison of serving oneself first and foremost. One supports the experience of transformation, and the other seals and encloses upon itself.
Much of the time in our work as a church we strive to understand the spiritual way of living, especially with regard to how to love the neighbor, what it means to unite with the Divine within ourselves and in our living. That is, we are constantly trying to polish the cornerstone, at least in our outermost focus as a church. But this morning I want to focus on one particular teaching that is at the heart of Easter, one which arises from this contemplation of the two great stones—namely, that one crucial understanding of how the cornerstone blasts away the tombstone is that in God we never die.
What we believe about the destiny of our lives is not unimportant. Do you need to believe in an afterlife to live a good life? No, you don’t. It is not only possible to live ethically, honorably, and even courageously with the belief that it is all over when the heart stops pumping, but there are many who do. Does believing in the afterlife automatically render one more authentically spiritual? No, it does not. There are many who claim to believe in an afterlife whose living raises great questions about their ethics and values, at least from a Swedenborgian spirituality point of view.
So does that mean that it doesn’t matter what the truth is and that it isn’t worth attention or focus in our spiritual life discourse? The answer to that is a resounding no. The truth of the big picture can make an enormous difference in the way people set about their living, and over time can be a crucial part of a spiritual growth lifestyle that is far more satisfying, not to mention correct, than believing that physical life here is the sum and substance of meaning and purpose.
Some might recall that back in the early 90s there was a popular pithy saying found on bumper stickers, mugs, magnets and t-shirts that read, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” A rejoinder was made by some New-Age types—and I know a Swedenborgian was in on the ground-floor—so that one could buy bumper stickers and t-shirts that said, “Life’s a miracle, and then you live forever.” You can still see some of these faded t-shirts at our annual convention sometimes.
Swedenborg lived in the age of reason and the heady times of the rise of Enlightenment science with its emphasis on viewing reality as consisting in what can be observed by the physical senses and subjected to mathematical analysis. Swedenborg himself, of course, was in the front-rank of European physical scientists of his generation. But in his religious and spiritual work, it became abundantly clear to him that people overall were in great ignorance about the nature of the long journey, about higher reality, and he also believed that having better far-sightedness would immensely help many people with the way they are walking toward their destiny now.
So in 1758 he published his book Heaven and its Wonders, and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen. Of his eighteen or so theosophical works, H & H became his best-seller by far. The Harvard religious historian specializing in 19th century America, Leigh Eric Schmidt, says that archival records show that by the 1820s Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell rivaled in sales the most popular novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott. Swedenborg presented an entirely new idea about the soul’s survival of physical death than had been believed in the dominant Christian denominations of that day: ideas of purgatory, ideas of a shadowy realm called sheol, ideas of lying dormant in unconscious death until the Second Coming. Swedenborg labored to explain that the soul awakens immediately into an alert and very real spiritual existence upon cessation of physical functioning. And life is in many ways similar to what we’ve known here: only more intense, more real, if you will. But the continuities are striking, and in fact this is the belief framework that caught on to a large degree. The longtime chairperson of the fine arts department at New York University, H.W. Janson, who was not a Swedenborgian, produced a critical study of cemetery art in the 19th century, and he concluded that Swedenborg’s popular presentation of what life after death is like became the most common spiritual belief of those who believed in an afterlife. I use his published essay with its copious illustrations of graves, every time I teach my “Swedenborg in History” class, which I’m teaching this semester. The tell-tale evidence is that in the three decades after the immense popularity of Heaven and Hell, the way graves, tombstones, and mausoleums were ornamented showed the departed as very much still themselves, instead of being decorated by little cherubs and the like.
Yet the strange assault upon the soul’s survival of physical death has continued in our so-called scientific age, but the scientific community has done shockingly little to progress in its efforts to explain the unexplained. Hard factual evidence for telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and continuation of human consciousness apart from the body does exist; sadly, its voice has been stifled by deficient psychical research. So many in our physicalist and technological religion, if you will, will badmouth what they will not actually explore or ignore as impossible—a conclusion that they themselves have not buttressed with facts.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty is the religion correspondent for NPR and has just released a new book a few months ago called Fingerprints of God: the Search for the Science of Spirituality. Though she grew up Christian Science, as an adult she had become agnostic and disconnected from any experiential basis for believing there is anything more than the obvious phenomena of the material world. Yet after having had a couple of striking spiritual experiences, she decided as a journalist to look into the science and religion conversation. She went to conferences at Oxford and at Chicago, she read research, and met with countless writers and thinkers associated with the questions, and one of the most crucial conclusions she came to is that science isn’t following its own standards when it comes to questions such as the soul’s ability to exist apart from the body. She focuses especially on near-death research. Her conclusion is that the science community in general is derelict in its unwillingness to confront evidence and is not following its own rules of engagement in the matter. She says she looked at the mountains of evidence and separated out what she regarded as qualifying as reasonably hard data that a self-respecting scientist would want to explore. That data is specifically the testimony of many hundreds at this point from all walks of life, from all classes and religious backgrounds, including atheist, who had lucid experiences when clinically at the point of death (completely blacked out) who could describe later in vivid detail what went on around them as they hovered outside their physical body. She says, forget seeing grandma and all the other kinds of testimony that can’t be investigated. Focus on the testimony that can be investigated: there were others present who can corroborate or contest the report. What she regards as hard evidence is the decent-sized mountain of reports from disembodied states that is corroborated by those who were there.
I found myself wanting to research Arthur Ford again a couple of months ago. One doesn’t hear much about Ford anymore, but he might lay claim to being the best-known and best-respected American psychic of the 20th century, and certainly was so for the decades between 1950-1980, when he was a household name. I sent an email to one of our ministers, Ernest Martin, whom I knew used to have Ford speak at his church back in the Fifties (this minister is now 87 years old) and whom I also knew took an active leadership role for many years in Ford’s organization called Spiritual Pioneers Fellowship, which held conferences and supported research and study on non-physical matters. In the course of responding to my questions, Erni sent me an email which said in part:
“Jim, you asked what impressed me most about my experiences with Arthur Ford. I was convinced of his authenticity, proven over a career of more than 50 years. I admit that, under pressure to perform, he probably did “research”, from time to time, on the backgrounds of prominent people, so that he could come up with evidence”. But over his 50 years, he met with thousands and thousands of people, and in most cases they were unknown people, and were scattered through lecture audiences. For example, Dorothy Schmucker, a woman from the General Church in Bryn Athyn, went to a public lecture given by Ford in Philadelphia, in about 1958. She had recently lost her oldest son in a destroyer explosion off Cape Cod. She was devastated and confided to me that she had been considering suicide. In a lecture before a large audience, Ford spoke of his conviction of the reality of life beyond death. He then had messages for people in the audience. He said the first one is from Buddy. “Buddy wants to assure his mother that he is alive and well, “ and then he gave more details. At the door, as people were leaving, Ford singled Mrs. Schmucker out of a large cluster and called, “You’re Buddy’s mother, aren’t you?” She called him later, and arranged for a private “sitting”. That sitting was very convincing to her.”
People say, I need proof. Has anyone ever come back and shown us? Swedenborg did everything he could to try to “come back and tell us,” so to speak. Yet, we are left in a crucial freedom to make up our minds about many things from an inner place. As with the question of whether the world of nature shows evidence of a divine mind behind it or not, the answer with life after death is the same, according to Swedenborg. If you are open to it, you will find confirmations aplenty. If you are not actually open to it, you will probably drift towards unbelief.
But the real and final question is whether having this understanding and vision is truly useful to us in making us better people. The answer is the same as with many other facets of life: knowledge in the hands of immature or even selfish-minded intentions is dangerous; knowledge in the hands of good intentions is powerful.
Seeing the great purpose of our life in God is like a foundation stone for growing strong in love, for seeking higher wisdom in effectiveness, for having forbearance with others, for shouldering the pains of evolution of life here. Roll that tombstone away from your spiritual eyes. See instead the great purpose of your life in God which Christ demonstrated, and hear God’s call to you and to me to be sculptors together with God in crafting all the stones of our spiritual house to fit with the cornerstone of eternal life.
Psalm 118: 8-24, 29
It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in man.
It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in princes.
All the nations surrounded me,
but in the name of the LORD I cut them off.
They surrounded me on every side,
but in the name of the LORD I cut them off.
They swarmed around me like bees,
but they died out as quickly as burning thorns;
in the name of the LORD I cut them off.
I was pushed back and about to fall,
but the LORD helped me.
The LORD is my strength and my song;
he has become my salvation.
Shouts of joy and victory
resound in the tents of the righteous:
“The LORD’s right hand has done mighty things!
The LORD’s right hand is lifted high;
the LORD’s right hand has done mighty things!”
I will not die but live,
and will proclaim what the LORD has done.
The LORD has chastened me severely,
but he has not given me over to death.
Open for me the gates of righteousness;
I will enter and give thanks to the LORD.
This is the gate of the LORD
through which the righteous may enter.
I will give you thanks, for you answered me;
you have become my salvation.
The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone;
the LORD has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day the LORD has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
his love endures forever.
John 20: 1-9
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)
