The following are excerpts of a sermon given yesterday by the Rev. Dean Snyder at Foundry United Methodist Church in the District.
Dr. Herbert Cohen, who has practiced psychiatry a long time, tells me that before the discovery of the wonderful psychiatric pharmaceuticals available to doctors today, they used to treat schizophrenia by intentionally injecting patients into an insulin coma. When schizophrenic patients woke up from the insulin-induced coma, Herb says, for reasons that science still does not understand to this day, they would experience a time of normalcy and freedom from their symptoms.
Psychiatric patients, in those days, were hospitalized in wards. Their beds circled the room, a couple of feet apart from each other.
Herb says that when the patients were first injected with insulin and went into a coma, their bodies would spasm, their heads would jerk, they would groan and moan, and their arms would flail the air above them and around their beds.
Their arms and hands would bump against each other. Eventually, in a coma and unconscious all the while, they would find each other’s hands and join hands with the patients to their right and to their left.
When the patients, unconscious and in a coma, found each other’s hands and joined hands, even in a coma and unconscious … they became quiet and peaceful and at rest.
In regard to that which is eternal, we are unconscious and in a coma. The Apostle Paul puts it this way in I Corinthians 13: “For now, we see in a mirror dimly. … We know only in part, and we prophesy only in part.”
In regard to eternal things, in regard to the divine, in regard to the things of God, it is as though we are unconscious and in a coma. It is as though we were looking through an old mirror with very little reflective power left, full of waves and distortions.
Most of us will die not really knowing the real purpose of our lives. God’s history is a hidden history. God uses you and me in ways we don’t, and may never in this life, fully understand.
In regard to that which is eternal, we, in this life, are unconscious and in a coma. The beginning of truth is to know what we don’t know.
In regard to that which has eternal meaning, much of what we do in this life is merely jerks and spasms and flailing around. Much of what we say and write and think are merely inarticulate moans and groans.
Much of what we think may be our greatest accomplishments and achievements in life may really have little meaning in terms of eternity. …
Our political striving and battles, our ideologies and philosophies, our good works and missions, our art and science, I’m not saying they aren’t important, they are critically important glimpses of eternal truth and beauty, but they are only very weak glimpses.
It will all come to an end.
There is only one thing that never ends, the Apostle Paul says. And, however else you want to theologize about the Passion and the cross and Easter, this is finally the only really important thing we have to say on Easter: Love never ends. Everything else dies. Everything else ends.
In our comas, in our jerks and spasms and flailing in this brief life, we will sometimes bump against others in their comas to our right and to our left. And we might manage to join hands, hardly knowing what we are doing. This is Easter.
It is this meeting that never ends, never dies.
But if we, in our comas, can clumsily manage to join hands with those on our right and left, whenever in our comas we manage to join hands with another across the divisions of our own ignorance, we are joining hands with Christ who rises from the tomb today.
This love is immortal. This love is everlasting. This love knows all things and believes all things. This love is face to face.
It is the only thing that will never pass away. Faith will, hope will, our bodies will, but not love. If we are lovers and love is in us, if we are in Christ and Christ is in us, then we will live with Him forever and ever. Amen.
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