Sunday, April 5, 2015 –
Easter Sunday
First Congregational United
Church of Christ – Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
Earlier this week, I was taking our two boys to preschool and
we started talking about Easter. I said something about how it was the biggest,
most important day of the church year and they wanted to know why. I reminded
them of the highlights from the story we just heard, “Remember, guys? How Jesus
died and his friends were really sad. So sad. And then something totally
surprising and unexpected happened.” “What?” “His friends tell us that they saw
him again. They looked for him in his grave, but it was empty. And then they
saw him…at first they didn’t necessarily recognize him, but later they realized
it was him. It was all very mysterious. No one really understands it.”
Our five year old carefully inquired, “But…that doesn’t
happen to REAL people, right, mama? Real people don’t come back from the dead?”
I sighed. “Well, sweetie, Jesus WAS real and that’s part of
what makes this story so confusing and special….because, you’re right. I’ve
been alive a good long while now and I’ve never known anyone who has come back
from the dead.”
I felt my eyes begin to water and I said, “You know, there
are sure a lot of people I’ve known that I wish could come back from the dead.
People I miss. People I wish I could see again.”
We talked for a few minutes about some of the people and
animals we have known and loved that we miss. And how unfair it is that some of
them are gone. We talked about doctors and the amazing medical advances in our
world and how, someday, scientists might be able to help people live longer in
the face of scary diseases. But, ultimately, that death is something we will
always have with us. And that sometimes death just makes us really mad and sad.
They say that only two things in life are certain, right?
Death and taxes. It was the same for Jesus and his friends. They lived perhaps
even more intensely and intimately with death and taxes than most of us do
these days.
Babies and young children often didn’t live to see adulthood.
Adults were frequently struck down in what could have been the prime of their
lives. We know that Jesus was surrounded by the sick, the destitute, the
cast-aways, the nobodies. Death was always at Jesus’s door and he was keenly
aware of its proximity. At times, he seemed to wear it like a cloak, wrapping
it around himself. That he would die – and that the hands of the powers and
principalities of his day – was something he knew for certain. And so he
wrapped the cloak of death tightly around himself and carried it everywhere he
went.
I have to think, this probably made Jesus a real drag to have
as a friend, right? I mean, here he is, this young and healthy guy, always
going on and on about his impending doom. Not exactly a day-brightener, you
know?
Except. Except! Jesus was also a great guy to have around. He
lived fully and he loved a good party. Remember when he turned the water into
wine at that wedding in Cana? He just couldn’t bear to see a good party come to
an end simply because the wine had run out, so he stuck another record or two
on the turntable and kept the beats flowing on into the wee hours of the night.
When I imagine Jesus, I always think of his eyes. I have to
imagine that they carried within them the depth of all humanity. I imagine that
they must have been the kind of eyes that trapped you….the kind where you
couldn’t bear to look away. And, yet, the kind of eyes that were also so
intense that you could hardly stand to maintain eye contact for more than a few
seconds.
I think about Jesus’s eyes weeping, just as my human eyes
often do. He cried, you know….when his good friend Lazarus died.
He traveled to Lazarus’s hometown of Bethany and stood
outside his tomb with Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, and although the text
just says that Jesus wept, I have to think all three of them were probably
crying together. Or maybe Mary and Martha were already all cried out because
their brother had been dead for four days already and they knew Jesus had
missed his chance to say goodbye and they knew they’d never see him again.
So when Jesus told them to roll the stone away, I imagine
that they must have laughed a bit through their tears. Or perhaps there was an
incredulous snort. “Jesus,” they might have chided, “Don’t you know that the
only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes? He’s dead, Jesus.
Dead. It’s too late.”
But Jesus didn’t know. Or he didn’t believe. Because they did
roll the stone away and we are told that Lazarus – Lazarus who had been dead
for four long days – walked out of that tomb still wrapped up tightly in his
own cloak of death, those cloths that were used to prepare his body for burial–
and Jesus, his friend, said through his tears, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
And they loosed the cloths that bound him and he lived again.
“But, mama, that’s not a real story right? Real people don’t
come back from the dead, right?”
Honestly, friends, sometimes I’m not even sure how to answer
that question. Because, no, I’ve never seen anyone come back from the dead. But
I’m equally convinced that these stories – these stories that are at the very
core of our faith – are true in some deep and profound ways.
One of my all-time favorite preachers, Anna Carter Florence,
says one of my all-time favorite things when she tells the Easter story. She
says this, “If the dead won’t even stay dead, then what can you count on?”
I mean, that pretty much sums up the ridiculous nature of the
Easter story, right? “If the dead won’t even stay dead, then what on Earth can
we count on?”
Death and taxes, I tell ya. Death and taxes are supposed to
be for certain.
Except when they aren’t.
You know, the longer I follow this Jesus of Nazareth, the
less and less certain I am about a lot of things. I know, you might think that
seems backwards. I often think that we’ve told ourselves a grand fib when we’ve
pretended that having “faith” is about becoming more and more certain. Because
the more I live into this wild and crazy faith called Christianity, the more I
realize just how much I don’t know.
“If the dead won’t even stay dead, what can you count on?”
I am struck by how often, in John’s Gospel, at least, we are
told that Jesus’s disciples did not know what was going on that morning…early
on the first day of the week when they went to the tomb. Mary must have
approached the grave 100% certain that the heavy stone would still be in
place….except it wasn’t. And she ran to find backup, telling her friends,
“Someone has taken Jesus, and I do not know where they’ve laid him!”
When the nameless disciple bends down and looks in the tomb, we are told that
he “believes” (in what, exactly, we’re not told) but even though he “believes”
he still “does not understand” the full gravity of what is taking place.
And again, when Mary is standing there crying and the two angels ask her why
she s weeping, she responds “They’ve taken Jesus away, and I do not know
where they’ve laid him!” And then
she sees Jesus but, of course, she does not know it’s Jesus.
There’s a lot of not knowing this in passage. A lot of confusion. A lot of things that seem to be, quite literally, in-credible, un-believable.
At first glance, a story like this one….a story that upends
everything we believe to be true; a story that leaves us snickering a little or
nervously looking around to see how others react;
A story like this doesn’t seem to be good news at all. What
could be so good about having the ground pulled out from under you? What could
be so good about a story that takes all we know to be true about life and
just….crumples it up and tosses it aside?
Except, this: when things aren’t going well.
When the phone call comes from the doctor’s office with bad
news – and they are sure – SURE there’s hardly anything that can be done….
When the one that you love more than life itself is gone and
there’s no way they’re coming back…
When you’ve screwed up so very badly that you’re sure, you’re
just SURE, there’s nothing you can do to fix it and you’re feeling as unlovable
as you’ve ever felt…
When you look up from the empty bottle, the
all-you-can-eat-buffet, the computer, the gambling table, the credit card….and
you realize that your life is empty. As empty as can be and you can’t see your
way back.
When that happens, my friends, then it turns out that there
is a little jewel within the Christian faith that I like to call The Gospel of
Uncertainty. There is Good News to be found in the incredible, because it means
that maybe the experts aren’t always right, that death isn’t the end of love,
that there actually are do-overs forever and even the most unlovable of
offenders will be loved again, and that even in our moments of deepest despair
and brokenness, we are never truly empty.
The Gospel of Uncertainty means that there is always More.
That’s More with a capital “M.” More growth, more hope, more love, more light
and truth yet to break into our midst. Death does not have the final word. Love
does.
“When the dead won’t even stay dead, what CAN we count on?” I
have a feeling the answer is different for each of us. And that one of the most
sacred of our tasks as humans is to live ever more fully into the answers that
find us.
Thanks be to God for the journey, the stories, and our
companions on the Way. May we continue to live into the More with every passing
day.
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