By Dr. Roger D. Johns,
Senior pastor, Saint Mark's United Methodist Church, Rockville Centre
Last year we lost one of our most dedicated members to cancer. She worked as a local real estate agent and was a no-nonsense, effective businesswoman. We knew her as a profoundly modest humanitarian who was always involved in community service of one sort or another. Her favorite charities were the Salvation Army and Rotocare, a program of medical care, counseling and compassion for the homeless and indigent, in cooperation with Mercy Hospital.
For most of its 100-year history, Rotary was a men's club. Several decades ago, the courts forced us to admit women, which was easily one of the best things that ever happened to us. This good lady was our first woman member, our first woman president, and the living incarnation of the spirit of Rotary.
Recently, at our sponsors' dinner, we inaugurated an annual humanitarian award in her honor. The first recipient was a 15-year-old young man who displays wisdom and maturity beyond his years. He is a cancer survivor, having gone step by step through the horrors of having a life-threatening disease, struggling through chemotherapy and radiation, and achieving the victory of remission. He then went on the offensive, becoming a powerful advocate and a an effective fund-raiser for the treatment and ultimate eradication of the scourge that almost took his life.
Informing the lives of both the honoree, our late Rotary member, and the recipient of the award in her honor and memory is, of course, the essence of the Christian faith. This serves for me as a powerful parable for the authentic message of Easter. Too often we forget the simplicity of the message of service and self-sacrifice in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. The overdramatization and romanticization in Hollywood treatments of the Christian message take away from its basic integrity. Focusing on the blood and gore of Jesus's death is as bad as rendering his resurrection as a quasi-magical event. Neither is a responsible representation of the Gospel.
The transfer of the message of a dedicated life of service from one person to another affirms the integrity of both. Magnified a thousand times, this is the Easter message. The miracle of Easter is God's intention to donate to humanity all the insights, teachings, and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. When it appears that all is lost in his cruel torture and death, the startling message of new life explodes around us. This does not need to be mystified or overinstitutionalized. It is the open secret of the meaning of life; God's purpose for God's creation; the spark that first brought life into the universe, as St. John's Gospel relates.
On this Easter, let us look for the message in the simplest acts of goodness, love and compassion that occur around us. It is not something "out there" that we should strive to understand. It is "inside," where deep speaks to deep, where the lives of people, even those who never met, are touched by service and dedication. To me this is where Jesus speaks most plainly and directly to us his message of love, of life, and of his triumph over death.
