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The account of the resurrection of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is stunning in its brevity and precipitous in its ending. Three women come to the tomb, perhaps to care for the body of Jesus which they fully expect to be there. A stone weighing hundreds of pounds has inexplicably been rolled back. They enter the tomb cautiously not knowing what they will find. To their utter amazement and terror, they find a young man in white robes sitting there.They were alarmed. And the young man says, "don't be alarmed."
Then in a series of staccato statements, separated by periods and semi-colons, the young man in the white robe tells the women a most extraordinary story:
"The Jesus you are looking for,
the one who was crucified,
He has been raised;
He is not here.
Look, over there is where they laid him.
Go and tell the disciples that he's gone ahead of you to Galilee;
There you'll find him,
just as he told you."
What stunning news! What stunning world changing, world renewing, world transforming news transmitted in simple declarative sentences to a simple declarative people. And the Gospel ends with "and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."
The great and central claim of the Christian Church ends there on that disconcerting note. "They were afraid."
So difficult was this ending to Mark's Gospel that later endings were written to flesh out the story, but the earliest manuscripts of Mark's Gospel end with this abrupt statement, "And they told no one for they were afraid."
And who could blame them? These good women, like the rest of us, had grown accustomed to a world of death and dying. They found ways of negotiating through the misty darkness of Roman occupation. Their irises had narrowed so that she could see better in the dark. The Temple authorities had found ways of reaching an unholy accord with Pontius Pilate and his garrisoned troops. Crucifixions were a regular affair all over the Roman Empire. Death was, you should forgive the expression, a way of life.
And these woman, like so many others, had found ways of making their compromises. They waited until the Sabbath was over so that they could make their way unnoticed to the tomb to anoint the body of the man they cared for in life. They weren't working in coalition with any rebel forces to overthrow the Roman occupation. They just made their way to do what they needed to do to in order to keep some semblance of humanity in an patently inhuman world.
And now everything is up for grabs. Everything is new. The old agreements with death and evil are called into question. Life has invaded their quiet world, and they were afraid of the consequences. Wouldn't you be afraid?
Death has many siblings. There is, of course, physical death and this story is a comfort, and has always been a comfort, and should always be a comfort for those who have lost loved ones or who are facing the very real possibility of their own death. It is a comfort to know that death is not the final power in the great drama of life. There is more to this story than the grave.
"Death be not proud though some have called thee
Mighty and powerful. For thou art not.
For even those you think you have overcome
are not dead.""Poor death" John Dunne offers in a mocking lament.
But more than physical death, there is the deadening of the spirit that comes when we allow all the various powers of death have the last word: Injustice. Wars and rumors of war. Spiritual depression. Racism. Drug addiction. The law's delay.
We make our own fatalistic bargains in an unjust world. "You can't fight city hall," we say. "You can't just throw money at the problem," we say. "The world is just that way," we say. "You can't change it." "All of politics is dirty." "We're just along for the ride."
Thus we make our Faustian bargains along the way. And then we medicate ourselves against the consequences of the bargains we have made. And we slouch toward the empty tomb prepared to do just enough in an unjust world so that we don't lose our humanity entirely.
And there we, like the three women in this simple story, are met by a strange vision of a man with shocking news. Death, which you thought was in charge of your world, is not. Death and all its siblings have been conquered and the world and the way we look at the world is now fundamentally altered. We are forced by these extraordinary events to see the world fundamentally differently.
Coming to church each Sunday is an exercise in establishing for one hour a week a resurrected community. A community of expectation and hope that crosses barriers of race, class and generations. A community of hope that looks around us for the Galilee of our lives in which our risen Lord will appear and move us toward hope.
Now let me be the first to say that given who we are, we can't sustain that community for more than an hour in any given week and even in that hour, occasionally, there are frictions that keep us from acting like a community of resurrection. We still make bargains with the powers of death. We fail to do the things that give honor and praise to God who has defeated all the powers of Death.
That leads many observers to call us hypocrites and perhaps we are guilty as charged. But we keep coming back here, beginning each worship by asking God's forgiveness and ending in the sure and certain hope that despite who we are, our God is passionately in love with us and will call us back to do the work that Christ's resurrection requires of us.
For we do not act the way we do because we are willfully evil. We act this way because we, like the woman at the tomb, are sore afraid and we turn a deaf ear to the angel who sought to comfort us with a word of hope. We've fallen into a pattern of expecting death to have the final word. And so we safeguard the little precincts of power and wealth we have, rather than acting generously with the wealth and freedoms our God has given us.
At an African-American church in one of the poorest sections of the city of Chicago there is a church of our denomination that preaches the Gospel in word and deed. They preach it from the pulpit. They preach it in their singing. They preach the Gospel message of life in the face of the disproportionate deaths of young black males in their community. They preach in word and deed of the pure presence of God in the face of the corruption on the city streets. They preach of justice in the face of injustice, of a simple fairness in the face of a grinding poverty. They tell the story of Jesus by running medical clinics for those who cannot afford health care. They speak of the resurrected one by insisting on continuing education for those who have given up hope in ecuation.
And in this Church, they sing Alleluia, but they do it in a funny kind of way. They sing, "Alleluia, anyway." Though the powers of darkness and death are all about us, we sing Alleluia anyway. Though injustice seems to be very much the shape of our reality, we sing Alleluia anyway. Because the resurrected community is stubborn in its hope.
So with Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and Mayflower Congregational Church in Detroit, and the United Church of Christ in Japan and indeed with all churches around the globe on this Easter morning, we gather again to try again in the sure and certain hope that Death has been overcome by life and Jesus Christ has risen. Today and everyday.
In our fear and perplexity we approach this Easter morning the table of the Lord in the odd and stubborn expectation of a messianic banquet that will somehow change us from a people who think that the light at the end of the tunnel is just the headlamp of an oncoming train... to a people who fully expect God to be doing a new thing in the face of every disaster, a light in every darkness, hope in the face of every despair.
"When we celebrate Jesus' meal we aren't just whistling in the dark. Bread and wine are taken up in the Eucharist into God's future purposes, and become to us vehicles through which we can taste the fact that there is a new world, there is new hope, there is a new way to live and we are a part of it. And our brokenness and tiredness, our [disappointments] about the fish we haven't caught, and the long hours we have wasted doing our own thing instead of God's thing, [all these things] somehow fall away, and we become people of God's new world, which is a world of fresh light, fresh forgiveness, new starts, new hopes. We must learn to celebrate the fact that Christ is risen, and that--puzzled though we may still be about it--we are risen with him."(1)
Christ is risen,
He is risen indeed.