O God be in my mouth as I speak
for you and fill this place with your great grace that we may leave this place
less of what we use to be and more of what we ought to be, through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen
“But Mary stood weeping outside
the tomb, and as she wept, she stooped to look into the tomb; and she saw two
angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and
one at the feet. They said to her, Woman why are you weeping?”
Christian life is shaped by the
stories we tell each other. This might
sound a bit heretical since most people think Christian life is about a set of
rules that must be kept.
You have heard the list before:
honor your parents, don’t kill anyone, no stealing, and you can forget about
coveting your neighbor’s oxen.
Yet, if you a new to St.
Martin’s this morning, I want you to reconsider the idea that Christian life is
all about keeping commandments.
Instead I want you to reflect on
the notion that Christian life is about the way that we let stories shape the
lives that we live.
Rules I believe come much later
as a response to the stories we hear at the great festivals of Christmas and
Easter.
A good friend of mine put it
this way. He wrote, that abstracted from a way of life, particular rules for
Christian living may lack intelligibility and will almost surely lack the power
to persuade or the beauty to attract.
In other words, unless we are
willing to understand the key stories that inform Christian life, no one sitting
here will be persuaded or attracted to anything that I say about the difference
that the Risen Lord can make in your life.
So how do we attempt to
understand the Easter story that we hear in the gospel this morning?
At first glance, the Easter story
involves things our mothers told us that polite people do not talk about over
dinner.
There are politics: Jesus the
Jew was put to death by a Roman governor.
There is also lots of religious
talk about God bringing someone back to life.
The Easter story gives us the
dark side of human experience: One of Jesus’ closest friends becomes
disillusioned with his leadership; he betrays him to the religious and
political authorities. And as a result Jesus’ life ends in a bloody and
shocking death on a cross.
The mystery of the Easter story
requires us to confront the harsher realities of human life: evil, human pain
and suffering.
And when we find ourselves in
the middle of this kind of pain, this kind of spiritual desolation, it is hard
for any of us to see God.
This is why I believe Mary has
trouble seeing that it was Jesus standing at the tomb in this morning’s lesson.
Her pain and experience of the crucifixion was still too raw.
Of course even Jesus on the
cross, had to acknowledge that as he did God’s will, he could not shake the
feeling that he had been abandoned.
“My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?”
One of my favorite writers, C.
S. Lewis, knew about this type of abandonment when he experienced the death of
his beloved wife, Joy. Maybe you have seen their story in the movie
Shadowlands?
Lewis writes, “No one ever told
me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is being
afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning.
I keep swallowing.
“At other times, it feels like
being mildly drunk or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between
the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.
“Or perhaps, hard to want to
take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want others to be about me. I dread
the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and
not to me.
“Meanwhile where is God? This is
one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you
have no sense of needing…you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to him
when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find?
“A door slammed in your face and
a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence…Why is
he so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help
in time of trouble?
“Of course, it’s easy to say
that God seems absent at our greatest need because he is absent—non-existent…
“Talk to me about the truth of
religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll
listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolation of
religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
To understand how the story of
Easter works in our lives, we must acknowledge the reality of human
helplessness, the frustrations of our weakness—the very things that we spend
most of our lives denying or avoiding.
Most of us go to graveyards to
bury our hopes and dreams. We rarely expect like Peter and Mary to find that
our dreams have miraculously come to life.
Coming to terms with what the
Easter story really means, means coming to terms with death. The death of our
hopes, the death of our dreams, the death of our friendships or marriages or
other family relationships, the physical death of those we love, and finally
the deterioration and death of our mortal bodies.
Of course, once you appreciate
the more difficult components of the Easter story, the sense of despair that
people like C. S. Lewis capture then you are faced with the miraculous part of
Easter, the Resurrection. The part that seems so unbelievable.
Did Jesus really walk out of his
tomb or did the disciples came along as Matthew’s gospel suggests and snatch
the body?
Although this is the sort of
debate you see on the cover of different newsmagazines. For example, Newsweek
just had a front page story called “How Jesus became Christ” as if it was
part of some five year plan.
However this kind of
well-intentioned debate doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter.
What Christians need to remember
is that the Resurrection is not a doctrine whose value is determined by our
intellectual assent. It is not about keeping all the rules.
Instead, it is an event, a
story, that can transform your life and mine.
When Easter is only about
intellectual belief or keeping commandments, it denies the pain and suffering
we share as God’s people. It denies us our place in the story.
Easter is not for people who are
trying to get right with God because they are scared of going to hell.
Easter is for people like the apostles, like Mary, like C. S. Lewis, like you and me who have already been there.
As one of my favorite writers,
Anne Lamott, once wrote, “When you give up all hope, you’re probably only
giving up the hope of getting your own outcome to happen…” A synonym for
surrender is yield--which agriculturally speaking, means to step aside
and let something grow.
That is true Easter living. Not
assenting to some theological doctrine but living with the firm conviction that
comes from knowing that the longer we try and control our lives the more likely
our lives are going to fall apart.
It is only when we reach the end
of our ropes, when we stop obsessing about our finances, our security, our
relationship, our sins, when we step aside and give it all to God, that is
precisely the moment that something miraculous and amazing begins to happen.
That is the moment when we roll
away the stone and begin to live an Easter life. That is when we see that the
rules of Christian living do indeed have the power and the beauty to persuade
us to pick up the cross and follow our Lord.
The good news is that the Easter
story, more than anything frees us to lose our lives in order to gain it.
This happens when we let the
story reshape our lives in ways that are unforeseen and have yet to be
discovered.
The German poet Novalis put it
this way, “Our life is no dream, but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.”
It is this life, this dream and
this story that is waiting for you outside your tomb today.
Alleluia Christ is Risen!
(With special thanks to the Rev.
Gary Jones.)