Sermon for Easter 2012

Scriptures for today are Here (using gospel reading Mark 16:1-8)

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? The song we sing on Good Friday recognizes that we were there as Jesus died. Because the life-and-death story that happened that astounding week in Jerusalem is the central story of our lives, all of us were there with Jesus. But something new happens on Easter morning, something unprecedented, something so far beyond the boundaries of what we know and expect, that the very questions we ask are transformed.

Were we there when God raised him from the tomb? asks the song’s last verse. And we have to answer, no, we weren’t there – because no one was there – no one but the angels, and God, saw the Resurrection at the moment it happened, no human being saw Jesus throw off that shroud that was covering him and stand up. We only see what happened later, the next morning. Mark shows us the women slipping through dark and empty streets – Mary Magdalene, the other Mary and Salome – hearts bursting with grief, eyes red and swollen from weeping, going to the tomb to anoint the body. We see them arriving at the tomb, wondering how to roll back the stone from the tomb so they can slip inside and give honor to death. And they find that God has done something absolutely inexplicable, that the stone that was blocking their way is already gone, and that Jesus is alive and free and on the loose.

And you and I, all these centuries later, know the proper response to resurrection, don’t we? We know that in the face of resurrection, the only thing to do is shout Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!]

But somehow, the women, that Easter dawn, didn’t know to shout Alleluia. They didn’t know what to say at all. The angel tells them what has happened, tells them Jesus will meet them in Galilee, instructs them to go back to Peter and the other disciples and tell the good news. But they don’t – they are struck mute – they are silent – and more than silent – they are terrified.

The passage we read today is probably the original ending of Mark’s gospel, scholars believe. But it has a very sudden ending, an ending that leaves us dangling, this sentence that we translate as “And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In Greek, it’s even stranger – the literal translation is something like “They didn’t say nothing to nobody” – a triple negative to emphasize just how silent they were. And then the last part of the sentence even ends with a dangling preposition, the word “for”: “they said nothing to anyone, they were afraid for…” As the preacher Thomas Long says, even in Greek this is an odd way to end a sentence, not to mention a book – it’s as if Mark had been dragged away from his desk in middle of a sentence. Is this any way to run a resurrection? The end just hangs there: they were afraid for … for … what?

It’s a good question, for on Easter morning what are we afraid for? Surrounded by Easter flowers, hearing glorious music, smiling with joy on this high holy day, surely we are not afraid for … for anything. But perhaps we will go home after this service, perhaps we will eat Easter dinner with our families and relax the rest of the day, perhaps tomorrow we will not be thinking of Jesus and his resurrection at all, and perhaps we will remember reasons to be afraid for … Perhaps there are troubles on our minds, a health crisis in our family, tax returns to finish, retirement accounts to obsess over, the security of our jobs to worry about; perhaps we are concerned about relationships with those we love, the conflicts in our world, the future of our children, the health of our parents, perhaps we are holding all this in and saying nothing to anyone, because we are afraid for …

And on Monday morning, perhaps it won’t occur to us that the resurrection of Jesus Christ has anything to say about those things that make us afraid for, perhaps we will think that Jesus Christ was only someone a long time ago and far away who has nothing to do with our world now, maybe we will think that the only reason to think about his resurrection will come in the long time future, when we begin to be afraid for our own death. Perhaps we are slipping through our own dark and empty streets, determined to take control of the next task ahead of us, and yet afraid for … what?

The terror and amazement of these women tells us something about ourselves. These are the brave ones. These are the ones who stayed with Jesus while all the male disciples ran away, the ones who followed him to the foot of the cross and who weren’t even willing to abandon him to the grave without caring for him first. Living with him dead, grieving his loss, mourning the end of his beautiful, hopeful, thrilling ministry – these things they understand how to do, bravely. And yet, confronted with Resurrection, their courage fails them.

And maybe we’re not so different from these silent, fearful women. Because the Resurrection shatters everything we’ve ever believed: the impermanence of life, the finality of death. Resurrection means we have to re-think our entire lives, re-orient our fears to something new. All our resignation to the evil of this world, our determination to live courageously in the face of heartbreak, our worries over the challenges of our lives, our stresses about how to roll away the stones that stand in our way – all these things are not enough to fend off death – but God is enough.

Into our human darkness comes God’s Resurrection light, and the fabric of our universe is torn in two. And we now have to learn to live in a new, amazing, terrifying world: a world in which the ultimate triumph belongs not to familiar, fearsome, inevitable death, but to thrilling, astonishing, resurrection life. We now have to adjust to living in a world where God loves us so much he will never, ever let us go. We have to learn to live as Easter people in a Good Friday world.

Fifteen years ago I had a small glimpse of what it means to live as Easter person. That year, on Maundy Thursday, I took my 5-year-old daughter Sarah to church. Maundy Thursday is the day we remember Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, his gift of bread and wine to them as a way to remember him, to bring his true, living, resurrected presence into our lives here and now, through the Eucharist. Maundy Thursday is the day also that we remember what that supper means, because in John’s gospel, Jesus demonstrates its meaning by washing feet, commanding us to wash each other’s feet as a sign that we love each other as he loved us.

At that Maundy Thursday service 15 years ago, we washed each other’s feet, so everyone had their own feet washed and everyone washed someone else’s feet. I sat down to have my feet washed and then realized that the person who was in line to wash my feet was my own 5-year-old daughter, Sarah.

And as she sweetly took my feet, one at a time, carefully poured water over them, tenderly rubbed them dry with a towel, I found myself unaccountably weeping – because I was remembering the countless times I had done these same things for her: tenderly caring for her infant body, washing, feeding, nurturing my child. And here, she had somehow learned to do these things for me.

And I realized that this is the natural order of things. First we are loved and cared for ourselves; then we learn to love and care for others. The love that we are given becomes the love we have to give away. Which surely is a very deep meaning of the cross and the resurrection – Jesus dies in an outpouring of love for us, so we can turn and pour out that same love for others. And as long as that love lives in us, we have nothing to be afraid for …

Why does Mark’s gospel and Mark’s Easter story end with a dangling preposition that leaves us dangling, this odd non-ending? I think it’s because the story hasn’t ended – the story continues with us. The women are silent because we are the ones who are given the story to tell. We are the ones who are given the love of Christ to share with others.

Go and tell the disciples that he is risen, and will meet you in Galilee, the angel says. Who are the disciples? We are.

Mark’s story doesn’t end because the story didn’t end with Mark. The story continues all through human history, the story continues with us. And that means that it’s to us that the angel is speaking.

Go into all the places of your lives, the angel tells us, all the Galilees we came here from, all the places where we make our everyday life, all the places we are afraid for… and we will find Jesus there ahead of us, waiting for us, waiting to lead us into new life and new hope. Go into the places of worry and fear, says the angel, and we will find him there. Go into the places of silence and amazement, and we will find him there. Go into the places God is leading us, places we never would have thought of on our own, places of surprise and discovery, and we will find him there. There, with us, to help us tell the story of his love.

Because, to all of us who are afraid for …, Mark’s gospel has good news today. The tomb is empty, the place of death can’t contain the living Lord. Resurrection has changed the rules of the game, and the world has been remade. We weren’t there when God raised him, but he is here with us now. The Resurrected One is truly present in our midst, teaching us to love and serve each other.

And although the women are silent, we know what to say: Alleluia! Christ is Risen! [The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!]

Sermon for Palm Sunday 2012

Scriptures for today are Here

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Rabbi Micah Caplan said when he was at Nativity a couple of weeks ago that there is a tradition that we were all present in the central story of the Jewish people, the story of Moses receiving the law on Sinai. If that’s true, then, in a very real sense, the story we read today, of Jesus’ last tumultuous week in Jerusalem, is our central story – and we were all there, somewhere.

We recognize this fact liturgically by taking the roles of the people in the story, shouting “Hosanna” and also shouting “Crucify him”– it’s our story, we’re there. It’s the story of the human race – our hunger for power, the instinct of powerful people to scapegoat the weak in order to maintain their power, the self-interest that leads to human judges condemning the Son of God to death. We are all present as the Word of God falls silent, an event which puts the entire human race on trial.

But, though we are proved guilty of death of Jesus, there is hope for us. We call it Atonement, a word that means “at-one-ment.” In Jesus, God became at-one with human beings so that in Jesus, we might become at-one with God. In his death, we see the final act of the pageant that began at Christmas. In his cry of forsakenness, Jesus shows how completely he has entered into our separation from God – in death, he completes God’s offering of life to us. And because it is his offering to us, we are all present with him on Golgotha. We were there when they crucified our Lord.

So, where are you in this story, in your life, today? Maybe some of us are in the crowds that gather around Jesus as he walks toward Jerusalem, in a carefully stage-managed procession he arranged. There was nothing unusual about people entering Jerusalem for Passover. The reason he got attention was because he took some very specific and calculated steps – marching toward Jerusalem, healing and teaching and gathering crowds in towns, who all understood that this would be no ordinary Passover, because Jesus is walking in the footsteps of David, the first “Messiah.” You can imagine the people in each town Jesus walks through on the way to Jerusalem, getting intrigued and excited by the possibility that here, finally, was a new Messiah who would step into David’s shoes, throw off the Roman oppressors and establish a new Jewish kingdom. And at every town, dozens or hundreds more people would join his entourage, until it’s a huge crowd, marching to Jerusalem for the Passover, the feast of freedom.

Imagine the anticipation that is building as they approach the holy city – imagine what they are picturing – Rome will be overthrown, injustice and the oppression of the ordinary people of Israel will be stopped, a new day will dawn.

But if that is what they are hoping for, they will be disappointed. The last line of the opening gospel tells us what Jesus did when he arrived. The people are expecting an armed takeover of the holy city – and all he does is he goes to the temple and looks around, then leaves quietly, to come back just as quietly the next day.

Perhaps that’s the moment when the crowds lose heart, when some of them change from people shouting Hosanna to people hoping for crucifixion. When their dreams of takeover and power are shattered, when their leader proves to be a disappointment – that’s when they lose their faith in him.

And that’s the place some of us might find ourselves in today: disappointed in God, wanting God to change the world, relieve oppression, end poverty, stop the world’s hurt, fix our lives, wanting God to use all that divine power to set things right for us. But if God governed through power, God wouldn’t be any different from us. God is going to take a different path – not the path of power, but the path of love, the path of atonement – and love will ask us to look at the world differently. Love will ask us to give ourselves for the sake of those we love.

Today, love might disappoint us, with its lack of satisfying power. And blessed are we in our disappointment, as we share that loving path with God; because God will use his love to share power with us, and to give us power to change things in our world, with God’s help.

Or maybe, we find ourselves in the person who owns the donkey. Jesus has apparently set this up in advance, in his carefully calculated scheme to fit the people’s hopes for the Messiah. He plans to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah that the king of peace will come to Jerusalem riding on a donkey. So he has arranged a code word with the donkey’s owner – “The Lord needs it.” It’s a code word – like Holmes saying to Watson, “The game’s afoot,” it means the time is now, God’s plan is underway.

So maybe that’s where some of us find ourselves today – waiting, hoping for a sign, wondering when God will call us into service –wondering what the next thing is in our lives, trying to make important decisions. And praying that God will come to us with a call – listening for something that will tell us what that call will be.

And blessed are we in our waiting, because the waiting time is the time God uses to speak into our hearts about God’s true hopes for us. And God’s call will come for us, to tell us when it’s time to join Jesus, to give what we have to give, to join him with what we have, even if it seems small, insignificant, symbolic, like a donkey. Whatever it is you have to offer, Jesus will say that is exactly what he needs.

But perhaps some of us find ourselves in the young man who runs off naked – it’s odd little story in the garden that appears in Mark but in no other gospel, and it doesn’t seem important. Many scholars think this young man is Mark himself, who wrote this gospel. We don’t know much about Mark, but in this story he seems to be an obscure young man, perhaps not a disciple, just caught up in the excitement, curious, following the disciples to the garden to see what will happen, and escaping naked, with nothing but his life.

And he might seem like an insignificant part of the story, but without him we might not have the story – because Mark goes on to write this story, to invent the whole concept of a gospel, to bring this story home to us, 20 centuries later.

And maybe that’s where we are today – obscure, vulnerable, but with a story of how Jesus has touched our lives, has changed us, has given us a mission. And God might be building in our hearts and minds a way to share that story. And blessed are we in our story-telling, because there are so many people in our world who need to hear this story we’ve heard today – the story of love.

Perhaps that’s not where you find yourself today. Perhaps you see yourself in Peter. Peter, the blunt, the outspoken, Peter, who always makes mistakes, Peter, the brave disciple who suddenly loses his courage. Peter, who denies ever knowing Jesus, and in denying it, somehow ends up telling the truth after all – saying the heartbreaking words, “I do not know this man you are talking about” – and it turns out it’s true: Peter never knew Jesus. Peter never believed Jesus when he said he was going to die. Peter always, to the end, hoped that Jesus would be the Messiah of victory, not of defeat on the cross – and Peter misunderstands, denies, disappoints, Jesus, and Peter breaks down and weeps.

And maybe some of us find ourselves there today – in a dark place, knowing that we have denied Jesus, that we have disappointed him, that we may never have known him at all, wishing that somehow, some way, he could forgive us. And blessed are we in our denial – for in our own failure, our recognition of our own weakness, we open up space for the Messiah first to forgive us, and then to work through us in a way we never expected. Like Peter, we have the potential to become true disciples, rocks on which Jesus builds his church.

And maybe there are many of us here who see ourselves in the women at the cross. They are powerless to change what is happening to the savior they love, powerless to change much about their world, but what they have, they give – their presence, and their love. At the end, when Jesus feels forsaken even by God, he is not forsaken by these women, who suffer themselves so they can be with him and comfort him.

And maybe some of us are those women, suffering ourselves, suffering alongside others we love, walking with them through the most difficult time. And blessed are we in our suffering, for we are doing for others what Jesus has done for us – and for those who suffer, yours is the kingdom of heaven.

And I think most of us, almost every week, every time we come to worship, can find ourselves in the disciples, at supper the night before Jesus dies – stretching out our hands to receive the bread and wine, the body and blood of Jesus. We don’t understand what Jesus is giving us, perhaps – not sure what he is about or what this gift of bread and wine means, but willing to accept it because he is the one who is giving it. We are willing to take the bread of life from the one who is the bread of life, willing to let him nourish us with his love, feed us with his life, inspire us with his death, become at-one with us in our own body and blood, so that we can be at-one with him, on the cross and in the resurrection to come.

And blessed are we as we accept in our hands the love of the savior who lives, and dies, for us. Blessed are we as we become at-one with the Body of Christ. Blessed are we who come here, today, in the name of the Lord.