Is living out our faith as Christian disciples simply about involvement or is it ultimately about real commitment?

Last Sunday the congregation I serve celebrated Earth Day.  I concluded my sermon with a quote from a former member of our congregation, Emory Smith.  Emory and his wife Annette were responsible for developing Hilltop Arboretum, that wonderful sanctuary for native southern plants located on Highland Road south of LSU.   In his small book, Hilltop: My Story, Emory writes:

Although church membership has meant a great deal to me, I can get a greater uplift of spirit when I see the sun gild the tops of the oak tress with a crown of glory or watch a band of laughing children playing under those trees.  I know that it is a privilege to help my neighbor find calmness of mind and uplift of spirit by contributing to an environment that speaks of peace and joy.  So we have worked and planned to enhance the beauty of our bit of nature.  To me, planning this woodland has been more than a landscape job.  It has been an attempt to put into tangible form my philosophy of life. 

The faith that I have found cannot be expressed by any of the greeds recited in the churches.  I cannot join in any of them without great reservations.  A faith is better expressed by the life we share with other people than by formal words. 

If I were to try to write the creed by which I live, it would be something like this:

I believe int he natural world about me and its fitness as a home for the human family.  It is my responsibility to do all I canto preserve this world of nature, to prevent its destruction or defilement.

I believe int he people among whom I life.  All of them have faults, but so do I.  It is in the people about us that we find our strength and the joy of life’s fulfillment.

I believe in myself, that I can meet life’s problems with courage and strength and calmness.

I believe in the world of nature in all that it means: the trees and the flowers about me, the smallest division of the molecule and the most distant stars of the universe.  As long as I live, I wish to face that world with insistent curiosity, but also with reverence and wonder.  I wish to be a good custodian.  May the small part of nature under my control be the better because of the way I have used it. 

May Emory’s creed be our own.  The world will be a better place because of it!

It had been seven days since Ena Zizi had seen the light of day.  January 12, 2010 had started out as just another day in the life of the citizens of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.  But then the ground beneath their feat began its violent upheaval and the historic buildings around them began to crumble. In an instant, the landscape of the city was forever changed.  Zizi was one of many who found themselves buried beneath multiple stories of rubble and debris.  In the immediate hours after the quake, the 70 year old woman yelled for help, but no help came.  For a while, she shared the company of a priest trapped nearby, but after two days, he grew silent.   Alone, afraid, her leg broken, her hip dislocated, her body rapidly dehydrating, she had little hope of survival and spent what she believed to be her last hours talking to God. 

Miraculously, on day seven, search dogs brought rescuers close by.  When Zizi heard them, she began to sing.  And she continued singing until they found her.  As they pulled her wounded and weak body out of the rubble and carefully passed her down the three stories of debris to the ground, she began to sing again.  Her words were inarticulate.  She hadn’t had anything to drink for seven days, but she was singing.  It didn’t matter that they could not make out the words, her joy was infectious.  Tears began to flow down the cheeks of the rescuers.  Nearby teams from heard her singing and stopped their work.  Spontaneous applause broke out.  A life had been saved.  But, more important than that, in a small corner of this tortured and broken city, if only for a moment, death and despair had been defeated.  Hope and joy were resurrected from the rubble.

We all know that the landscape of our lives can be changed in an instant.  We know how quickly things can crumble all around us.  We know what it’s like to fail, to feel all alone, to have no one to talk to, to feel broken and dislocated, hungering for something more, longing for just a drop of water to quench our thirsty souls. The world is filled with death and despair.  Tragedy strikes even the most established among us.  We all get tired, we all feel troubled, we all have burdens we must bear.  But far too often we let our anthropology get in the way of our theology.  We let Good Friday have the last word…There will be suffering, sorrow, and sadness next week as there was last week.  It’s always Good Friday somewhere. We know that story all too well.

But we also know another story.  We know the story of women who went to the tomb on that first Easter morning fearing that the story had ended, but learning that it was only beginning.  They came knowing that the movement was over, they discovered it was alive and well.  They woke up that morning with nothing to say, the left the tomb that day with a song to sing.  They discovered that the gift of Easter is hope – hope which gives us confidence…which nothing can shake.  That word is the final word for us!

Have you ever considered that maybe we are created for joy, hard wired for singing, capable of a devotedly defiant faith that can bring us forth from the tombs of our lives, give us the strength and courage to wake up and kiss the morning of a new day, no matter what that day might bring, and inspire us to second line our way through the sorrows and suffering of our lives knowing that, in the words of Robert Lowery,

(Our lives ) flow on in endless song;

Above earth’s lamentation

We  hear the sweet though far off hymn

That hails a new creation:

Through all the tumult and the strife  

We hear the music ringing;

It finds an echo in our souls—

How can we keep from singing?

Can you hear it?  In Port-au-Prince they are singing today.  They are singing in defiance of the reality that surrounds them.  They are singing because they know a different story.  They are singing because they have discovered that though weeping may linger for the night, joy comes in the morning.  Sunday has come.  The tomb is empty.  And it is time for us to come forth from the tombs of our lives.  Death, doubt and despair will not have the last word.  Our mourning has been turned into dancing, our tears into laughter, our sadness into song…Christ the Lord is risen today.  Alleluia!