Sometimes, you need an earthquake.

I kept this story that I read last January in The New York Times. It appeared in the newspaper just a couple of weeks after the tsunami. Remember the tsunami? What a great disaster it was? Does anyone remember what causes a tsunami?

>>>Like a great earthquake under the ocean

I think that's very interesting. Remember, it said in our Gospel lesson this morning:

After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay..."

And we Christians, when we want to find a way to talk about the possibility of that new life, and a way of saying that it is our job, and our hope, and our joy, to try to live that new life, we tell this story:

... the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, 'He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.' This is my message for you." So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, "Greetings!" And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me."

Now... that story from the Bible has been told and re-told in lots of different ways. Symbols have developed for that story.

>>>ASK: Who can tell me what a "symbol" is? It's something representing something else. What symbols for Jesus being alive do we see in our sanctuary? POSSIBLE ANSWERS: Cross - empty - Jesus' body isn't on it, because he is risen Flowers - sign of life - more about them in a moment Anything on the needlepoint banners, or anywhere else? Here's a symbol for Easter that we all know. What's this?

>>>Hold up plastic egg; purple side facing the congregation. Does anyone know why the egg is a symbol for Easter?

A chick breaks out of the egg - turn the egg around, take off the clear top, and remove chick. It's a new life, breaking out - it's like a little earthquake - the hard shell breaks, and this new living thing comes out of it! Another way of telling the Christian story - the story of resurrection - new life appearing, emerging from where it was held like a prisoner. Speaking of prisoner... this new life can be talked about in different ways. Let me tell you another story.

Broadway Presbyterian Church - Broadway Community, a mission in which members of First Congregational Church has been involved. Church of college and seminary professors, as well as former street people, homeless people.

Easter Vigil is another way of telling the story, by the way. There are churches where they have a service on the night before Easter; they talk in a procession into a dark church, and light a candle; the light coming into the darkness is another way of symbolizing new life.

At this Easter Vigil, we read the Bible stories about Jesus' arrest, and his death, and the feeling at that time that all hope had died.

Then we sat there in the candle light, and each person present was invited to say something that s/he hoped for. A teacher said she hoped to motivate children to want whole, healthy lives even more than they wanted good grades. A 12-year-old child, crying, said she hoped she could get through her parents divorcing.

A Broadway Community member, recovering addict - talked about how powerful it was to hear the Bible verses about Jesus' mother, and her sisters and friends, at the cross where Jesus died - woman's own son had been convicted of a killing, and was, that very weekend, beginning to serve a life sentence, and the woman was devastated. Her hope was in hearing about Jesus' mother, who had to be with her son as he died. "Someone knows what I'm feeling," she said. And she didn't feel so alone, so hurt, so hopeless.

Simply being able to say "I'm not so hopeless," is a way of telling the story of new life. Being able to say, "I'm not all alone in this. Other people know how I feel. Other people care about me." That's some new life that we're talking about. Sometimes it's the thin line between life and death, between total despair and getting through the next day.

>>> Another way of telling the story -- show flower pot - ask where came from

In the hall, outside Melanie's office.

Who knows how these plants got there?

They were planted during worship on Ash Wednesday - the beginning of Lent, which is the season where we're preparing for Easter - preparing for new life.

Show bulb, glass bowl with dirt - don't look too impressive. Plant the bulb in the dirt.

But beautiful, living green plants grow - a symbol of new life - out of the dirt! Can you see how this is a symbol of new life?

Now in Peter's time and place, this was not the way people thought. It was almost impossible for good religious people in Peter's community to imagine that he would go to people that were different, foreigners, and actually say that God is not the God of one people, but of all people. To say that was something like an earthquake! God was supposed to care more about some people than about others, so what was Peter doing, shaking up the way people thought!

Sometimes people don't think that way in our time and place either, do we? Do we ever find ourselves leaving some people out? Do we ever find ourselves believing that our religion, or our way of life, is somehow superior?

During another time in my ministry, I spent five and a half years of coordinating pastoral care for people infected and affected by HIV and AIDS in New York City. And one of the perks of my job was that I had the opportunity to meet with a number of people from around the world who are engaged in similar ministries, and often had the pleasure of introducing them to the New York City AIDS care scene. One very unique visitor to my office was a Roman Catholic sister from Japan -- unique in several ways: she was a Japanese Christian, a member of a Catholic order there, and a volunteer with Tokyo's only AIDS care buddy program. There are not a lot of AIDS volunteers in Japan; Sister Shigi was, as far as she knew, the only Christian in Tokyo, certainly the only Catholic nun, who volunteered as an AIDS care buddy. (Good Japanese Christians, perhaps not unlike many Christians in the United States, feel it's best to have as little to do with AIDS as possible.) And in that time and place in Tokyo, AIDS care buddies largely assisted poor people, whose resources and access to care was limited. And so a buddy's role was mainly to comfort the dying -- to be a friend to the friendless, so they would not die completely alone.

Sister Shigi spent a couple of hours in my office, ostensibly to learn about AIDS ministry in New York -- but actually, she ministered to me, with her powerful stories about relating to people for whom she cared in Tokyo. Her task with the Tokyo AIDS care volunteer program is not an evangelical one. She does not officially extend pastoral care, nor present herself as a religious to the people for whom she cares. She is a volunteer, who goes where she is sent. But this is a woman of remarkable Christian presence. She described a vigil she kept at the bedside of a young man who, when she was assigned to go to him, was literally only hours from death. He was completely estranged from his family. His friends had ceased visiting him. Aside from perfunctory medical care providers, he'd had no human companionship for a long time, certainly no one actually sit down and simply stay with him, listening to him talk. In the few hours that remained of his earthly life, he described to Sister Shigi the ways he felt that he and his family had hurt each other. He expressed his sense of loss -- not just of his own life and health and potential, but of his parents' care and respect. And, surprisingly, he indicated that he could understand how they felt, even as they left him abandoned. He forgave them, and asked Sister Shigi if she would do him the favor of contacting them after he died, and told her their address.

As she later narrated to me, Sister Shigi said, "I thought to myself, 'Here is a pure soul.' So I looked around, and there was water, dripping from the faucet into the sink in his bathroom. So I reached out and wet my fingers, and baptized him. Then he died."

Sister Shigi does not have her Church's authority to baptize. The dying man had not identified himself as a Christian. But he had entrusted her with the burdens of his soul. She acknowledged his full personhood in the sight of God. Sister Shigi and the man with AIDS broke through each others' barriers, and saw, in each other, in the moment of death, signs of life.

Friends, this is an Easter story. This is a story about a person who had someone to spend his last hours with him, and who appreciated him for who he really was. And it's also a story about possibility: the possibility that a family who had given their son, or brother, up as a complete loser, someone who was nothing but a source of shame, could have a memory of grace, of forgiveness. That's why it's important that we continue to tell the story of Easter with our whole lives. If we spend today just enjoying the eggs and the chicks and the bunnies and the lilies - we're not telling the story, and we have not experienced the earthquake. But if we, ourselves, as one person, one family, one congregation, find some way, every day, to forgive and to welcome... that's the way we will tell the story of Easter, and Christ will be alive. Alleluia!

(1) January 11, 2005

Deadly and Yet Necessary, Quakes Renew the Planet

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

They approach the topic gingerly, wary of sounding callous, aware that the geology they admire has just caused a staggering loss of life. Even so, scientists argue that in the very long view, the global process behind great earthquakes is quite advantageous for life on earth - especially human life.

Powerful jolts like the one that sent killer waves racing across the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26 are inevitable side effects of the constant recycling of planetary crust, which produces a lush, habitable planet. Some experts refer to the regular blows - hundreds a day - as the planet's heartbeat.

The advantages began billions of years ago, when this crustal recycling made the oceans and atmosphere and formed the continents. Today, it builds mountains, enriches soils, regulates the planet's temperature, concentrates gold and other rare metals and maintains the sea's chemical balance.

Plate tectonics (after the Greek word "tekton," or builder) describes the geology. The tragic downside is that waves of quakes and volcanic eruptions along plate boundaries can devastate human populations.

"It's hard to find something uplifting about 150,000 lives being lost," said Dr. Donald J. DePaolo, a geochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. "But the type of geological process that caused the earthquake and the tsunami is an essential characteristic of the earth. As far as we know, it doesn't occur on any other planetary body and has something very directly to do with the fact that the earth is a habitable planet."

Many biologists believe that the process may have even given birth to life itself.

The main benefits of plate tectonics accumulate slowly and globally over the ages. In contrast, its local upheavals can produce regional catastrophes, as the recent Indian Ocean quake made clear. Even so, scientists say, the Dec. 26 tsunamis may prove to be an ecological boon over the decades for coastal areas hardest hit by the giant waves.

Dr. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a geologist at Wesleyan University who grew up in Indonesia and has studied the archipelago, says historical evidence from earlier tsunamis suggests that the huge waves can distribute rich sediments from river systems across coastal plains, making the soil richer. "It brings fertile soils into the lowlands," he said. "In time, a more fertile jungle will develop." Dr. de Boer, author of recent books on earthquakes and volcanoes in human history, added that great suffering from tectonic violence was usually followed by great benefits as well. "Nature is reborn with these kinds of terrible events," he said. "There are a lot of positive aspects even when we don't see them."

Plate tectonics holds that the earth's surface is made up of a dozen or so big crustal slabs that float on a sea of melted rock. Over ages, this churning sea moves the plates as well as their superimposed continents and ocean basins, tearing them apart and rearranging them like pieces of a puzzle.

The process starts as volcanic gashes spew hot rock that spreads out across the seabed. Eventually, hundreds or thousands of miles away, the cooling slab collides with other plates and sinks beneath them, plunging back into the hot earth.

The colliding plates grind past one another about as fast as fingernails grow and over time produce mountains and swarms of earthquakes as frictional stresses build and release. Meanwhile, parts of the descending plate melt and rise to form volcanoes on land.

The recent cataclysm began in a similar manner as volcanic gashes in the western depths of the Indian Ocean belched molten rock to form the India plate. Its collision with the Burma plate created the volcanoes of Sumatra as well thousands of earthquakes, including the magnitude 9.0 killer. But despite such staggering losses of life, said Robert S. Detrick Jr., a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, "there's no question that plate tectonics rejuvenates the planet." Moreover, geologists say, it demonstrates the earth's uniqueness. In the decades after the discovery of plate tectonics, space probes among the 70 or so planets and moons that make up the solar system found that the process existed only on earth - as revealed by its unique mountain ranges. In the book "Rare Earth" (Copernicus, 2000), which explored the likelihood that advanced civilizations dot the cosmos, Dr. Peter D. Ward and Dr. Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington argued in a long chapter on plate tectonics that the slow recycling of planetary crust was uncommon in the universe yet essential for the evolution of complex life.

"It maintains not just habitability but high habitability," said Dr. Ward, a paleontologist. (Dr. Brownlee is an astronomer.) Most geologists believe that the process yielded the earth's primordial ocean and atmosphere, as volcanoes spewed vast amounts of water vapor, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases. Plants eventually added oxygen. Meanwhile, many biologists say, the earth's first organisms probably arose in the deep sea, along the volcanic gashes.

"On balance, it's possible that life on earth would not have originated without plate tectonics, or the atmosphere, or the oceans," said Dr. Frank Press, the lead author of "Understanding Earth" (Freeman, 2004) and a past president of the National Academy of Sciences.

The volcanoes of the recycling process make rich soil ideal for producing coffee, sugar, rubber, coconuts, palm oil, tobacco, pepper, tea and cocoa. Water streaming through gashes in the seabed concentrates copper, silver, gold and other metals into rich deposits that are often mined after plate tectonics nudges them onto dry land.

Experts say the world ocean passes through the rocky pores of the tectonic system once every million years or so, increasing nutrients in the biosphere and regulating a host of elements and compounds, including boron and calcium.

Dr. William H. Schlesinger, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke, says one vital cycle keeps adequate amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Though carbon dioxide is thought to cause excessive greenhouse-gas warming of the planet, an appreciable level is needed to keep the planet warm enough to support life.

"Having plate tectonics complete the cycle is absolutely essential to maintaining stable climate conditions on earth," Dr. Schlesinger said. "Otherwise, all the carbon dioxide would disappear and the planet would turn into a frozen ball."

Dr. Press, who was President Jimmy Carter's science adviser, said the challenge in the coming decades would be to keep enjoying the benefits of plate tectonics while improving our ability to curb its deadly byproducts.

"We're making progress," Dr. Press said. "We can predict volcanic explosions and erect warning systems for tsunamis. We're beginning to limit the downside effects."

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