From the Pastor's Pen, November, 2005:

March 2008 From the Pastor's Pen

“Coming to Easter Empty…”

That sounds like a strange title at best, or at worst a cynical or hopeless one. We tend to associate “empty” with negative things—if your tank is empty, you stress about getting to the gas station before it runs out. If your stomach is empty, you look to fill it fast, if not necessarily with good things. If your life feels empty, you look for things to fill it up—entertainment or work or comfort of one kind or another. But I wonder if we might look at “empty” in a more positive light.

As I write this, we’re smack in the middle of Lent. For those who have undertaken some form of Lenten discipline (prayer, Bible study, almsgiving, fasting, “giving something up,” adding a new practice), Lent may seem long and arduous. You may wish you hadn’t done that, or you may be breezing along fine. The journey may seem like it’s too hard to bear (I remember the year I gave up Diet Coke for Lent—ouch!) But there is a point to it all: to clear away anything that keeps you away from a relationship with God. Even if you’ve only chosen a small thing, the discipline of it is what gets us out of self, and refocused on God.

That’s “emptying” in a positive sense. Taking away what doesn’t belong, so that there is room for what does. I retold a story from the great preacher Barbara Brown Taylor a Sunday or two ago; about the woman who was searching for the meaning of life. After journeying everywhere, she climbed a mountain where she was told a wise man lived. He invited her in for tea, and while the water boiled and the tea steeped, she poured out her questions before the wise old man. Then he poured her tea, and kept pouring and pouring until the steaming tea went all over her hands and the floor. When she yelled at him to stop (“can’t you see the cup is full?!”), he told her that just so, she was so full already that she had no room for the answers he might give her.

We have to be empty.

We have to have some room, even if we have to make that room by self-discipline, for God to enter in.

In a verse from the Christ hymn in Philippians, that Christ “emptied himself,” (Philippians 2:7) meaning that he willingly let go of his claims to “God-ness” in order to embrace full humanity and experience human suffering and death. Charles Wesley, in his powerful hymn “And Can it Be that I Should Gain,” takes off on that verse, and writes:

“He left his Father’s throne above (so free, so infinite his grace!)
emptied himself of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race.
‘Tis mercy all, immense and free, for O my God, it found out me!”

“Emptied himself of all but love.” That’s the difference we might look at when we consider what “fullness” or “emptiness” means. What would it look like for us if we emptied ourselves of all but love, so far as we’re able with our limited human capacity. How might we approach Easter differently if we came empty?

Easter comes, for those of us in the Northern hemisphere of the earth, as the days are lengthening toward spring, and the earth is reborn. The holiday got tangled up with pagan rituals of spring long ago, and we still look to those signs of “rebirth” as symbols of resurrection. The problem is, while spring is completely natural (and we hope coming soon!), Resurrection isn’t. There is nothing natural about death turning into life. That’s the truth of Easter, “the unnatural truth,” as Barbara Brown Taylor titles her wonderful Easter sermon. In order to embrace the mystery of Easter, which we can’t explain or rationalize or prove logically or scientifically, we have to empty ourselves. We have to set aside notions of logic in order to “get” Resurrection.

We need to come to Easter empty.

Because, dear friends, God will fill us. The risen Christ will come and fill our hearts with love, with grace, with every imaginable good gift. The promise of Easter is not about bunnies or eggs or flowers or new dresses or even chocolate! The promise of Easter is that in Jesus the Christ, death doesn’t win. God does! Love does! Because the tomb was empty, our hearts are full. Because Jesus lives, that makes all the difference in our lives and in the world.

This Easter, may we come empty enough to be filled with joy.

On the Journey with you,

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