| Note: No sermon is quite the same when you read it. You miss the inflections, the expression that you gain in the hearing. The words below are only a close approximation of the sermon, taken from handwritten notes. Nevertheless, the words (as best as can be deciphered!) are shared with you here. The Webmeister |
Easter Day FIRST AND FOREMOST, WELCOME! This day belongs to us all! To our guests—welcome. I am keenly aware that so many of my parishioners are out of town with family members and that they this morning are in some other congregation. I hope they too are welcomed with love. So to all who are here with family or by themselves—Thank you for coming to help us celebrate Christ's Resurrection! Welcome! This day belongs to us all! But I also realize that Easter, like Christmas, is seen by our culture as an event not a process. For the women who came to Jesus' tomb, his death was the end of a long and by turns, wonderful, then terrifying, then heart breaking journey. It lasted perhaps 3 years. Three years may not seem, in retrospect, a long time, but as your life is lived, 3 years is a long time. Jesus' death was not an "event" to his disciples; it was the end of the process that had begun so long before. I can identify today with them because Easter Day for a priest is the culmination of the season of Lent begun on Ash Wednesday—every Sunday in Lent—every Wednesday night Lenten program—Palm Sunday—Holy Week—pinning on Palm crosses—reading the passion Gospel—the stripping of the altar—walking the way of the cross—the Vigil last night—a baptism of a young boy named John—all of it leads here. I remember, as if I were there, 6 years ago when they wheeled me out of the Hermann Cath Lab the day after my heart attack. My cardiologist met the gurney in the hallway and looked at me and said that we needed to have a "come to Jesus" meeting about my diet. When he left and they took me back upstairs to a room, my wife Ginny said to me, "You know, this is about a change of your way of life, not just a diet." A change of a way of life. There is a prayer in the Marriage service in which the priest prays—thanking God for sending Jesus Christ to come among us and for making "the way of the cross to be the way of life." It has always seemed such a hard phrase to use on such a celebratory day as a wedding and yet so true. How many people have you heard who have said that they are "spiritual" but not "religious". I believe them! —because I think all people are spiritual. I think all people yearn for greater wholeness and holiness. I believe all people tremble inwardly when faced with tragedy or chaos or death. And it seems odd to me to disconnect that yearning from any process, any pattern and sense of religion. It's as if you yearned for better physical health but refused to go to a doctor. How can we find a pattern to fit our yearning into? This was the same predicament so many of Jesus' followers found with the "religion" of first century Palestine. It did not move their hearts to love or to hope. What they heard and saw in Jesus, they did not think of as "religion". They thought of it as a new way of life, life in which the Lord god Almighty could be addressed as Abba—Daddy - life in which they felt that God loved them. These women we read of today in Mark's gospel account—their grief was as raw as only the death of one you truly love could make it. But on top of that, Jesus' death meant the loss of their entire way of knowing God—the new way of life Jesus has taught them. The world and its "religion" had obliterated their hope. It's like the loss of anyone you've known for many years. It's not just about the death of someone you love; it's about the death of your life as you known it. And yet the women did not discover what they expected, what their raw grief told them they would find. Who can understand grief? I hate it when people start telling you how long you're going to grieve. Joan Didion in her beautiful book, The Year of Magical Thinking, writes about her husband John's death on December 31st, 2003: "Grief when it comes is nothing we expect it to be... Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life." The dailiness of the lives of those women—their patterns were—must have been obliterated. And then they received shock on top of shock. The translation of Mark we have is that the women were alarmed when they saw the great stone rolled away from the mouth of the grave and a young man seated where Jesus' crucified body had been laid. "Alarmed"? This seems so bland and useless a way to describe the deep emotional wrench that must have been in their hearts. St. Mark uses the Greek word ekthambeo which means to be completely astounded or struck with terror. The young man tells them not to be ekthambeo but to go and tell the other disciples that Jesus has been raised. And Mark so movingly captures the feeling I can only imagine I would feel when he writes that "The women fled from the tomb filled with trembling and shock and said nothing to anyone because they were terrified." It seems that if Jesus' death was a greater grief than any they had known before, then his resurrection was harder yet. It is hard to start living again on the other side of loss. You can't imagine you have the strength to begin again, to trust your heart to hope again, to fall in love again. I will never forget my friend Kate Hillhouse felling me after all the surgery and chemo for breast cancer that on the day her doctor finally told her he didn't need to see her again for 6 months, she broke down. She told me, "My whole life has come down to surviving one day at a time and now suddenly I have to think about 6 months. I don't know how to do it." How do you find life on the other side of crucifixion? But how also do you find life on the other side of resurrection? How do we find the wondrous creative irrationality to give our hearts away again. To shed the constraints of brutal worldly logic—to remember again the words of Blaise Paschal that "the heart has reasons that Reason knows nothing of." How in short do we believe in God again. I do not know how to say this except that maybe we have to loose ourselves—our own egos—those walls that have been built brick by brick and stone by stone to keep us safe from the world around us—to keep us sane when life terrifies or astonishes us. "Safe and sane." Does there come a time in all our lives of spiritual hunger for wholeness and holiness when "safe and sane" might be a death sentence? One thing is for sure—the women who cam to the tomb and then fled in terror did not remain silent. They overcame their fear of new life. And so now it comes back to us. Can we overcome our tears and trust that there is a God we can call Abba? —that his new life is formed precisely as we find the way of the cross and to be the way of life? And can we see Christianity not as a spiritually crushing religion but as the body of Christ in this world? In the end, Jesus gave his life to his followers before it was taken by the executioners. And this new way of life has come from them through innumerable hands to us. Christ did not die a billion, billion deaths for each of us separately. He died one death for all of us. This day belongs to us all! Alleluia - Christ is Risen. Amen. The Reverend James T. Tucker April 16, 2006 *Past sermons may be found here. |
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