I love the writer, Anne
Lamott. I love her impious truth-telling. I love the way that she begins her
book Traveling Mercies, a humorous
and honest account of one woman’s journey to faith. She writes:
"My coming to faith didn’t start with a leap but rather
a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another…I can see
how flimsy and indirect a path they made. Yet each step brought me closer to
the verdant pad of faith on which I somehow stay afloat today."
This is good news, at least to
me. I pray that this day gives you something to go on as you seek those
“verdant pads of faith” on which to stay afloat, always with God’s help, in
these challenging times.
Whether we get there by leaps
and bounds or a series of staggers, the Church’s faith is shaped by multiple
sources, including Holy Scripture. It is written for our learning but never
immediately accessible; it needs to be read and marked and learned and inwardly
digested to become meaningful. So we get four gospels, not one, which means we
get four, not one, accounts of this day. And they don’t say it the exactly the same
way. They speak their truths more like a choir singing harmony than in unison.
This faith that we share is
also shaped by two thousand years of tradition. We get layers of all this in in
today’s liturgy, in the prayers we have been praying and the beautiful music
the choir offers to the glory of God. Taken together this offers a rich texture
of meaning to this day and in a real sense, as we bring our own experiences of
the risen Christ with us to this place, the sermon is almost redundant. (It
doesn’t mean I’m not going to give it a try, however!)
Even if you are new to the
Christian faith you almost certainly know this story already, although we have
learned it at a slant. Some of us from 1928
Prayerbook Episcopalians and others from warm-hearted Methodist preachers
and still others from the nuns in a Roman Catholic grammar school. Yet even if
you’ve been at this for decades, you still have questions and doubts. At least
I hope you do, because those questions and doubts are a part of it all. More on
that next week when we reflect on good old Thomas.
We are tempted to truncate
“the tradition” into what we remember from the church of our youth, when we
were kids and then limit our adult faith to that. It’s the very opposite about
what Anne Lamott speaks of. I had a parishioner in Holden whose favorite Easter
hymn was “The Strife is O’er.” I didn’t pick the hymns in Holden, the music
director did, but I confess that is not one of my own favorites. While we’d
sing it over the fifty days of Easter, in fifteen years it never made the cut
for Easter morning. Every year she’d meet me at the door to tell me it wasn’t
quite Easter for her.
The task for every generation of the faithful is to
tell the old, old story of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection. But we have to do that from our own new perspective,
from our own slant. Context matters. And
so what I want to say is that our work right now, not just mine in these next
fifteen minutes or so, but yours as hearers
and hopefully then as doers of
the Word is to recognize that it is Easter 2018 in Worcester and we are not the
same as we were fifty years ago or even a decade ago or even a year ago. As
people, as All Saints, as the United States of America, as a planet, we are here
and it is now.
Whether you’ve been coming
here on Easter morning for generations or this is your first time through these
doors; whether you sing these hymns with full-throated faith or you come here
wondering what on earth you’ve gotten into today, we are in this together and
on this day it is not our work to try to explain it all. It’s our work to let
faith seek a little better understanding. It’s to try to attend to the Word
that has been given to us for this day and, with God’s help, to find some
meaning in it. We can only be where we are, right now and then pray that in
some way, small or large, the meaning of this day might take hold in our lives
and bring us a sense of purpose and courage and hope to get us a little further
down the road.
So…did you notice where
today’s gospel reading stopped: with the word afraid. The women said
nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. Allow that to sink in for just
a moment. The very first witnesses to the resurrection, these women preachers,
are told to go and tell. They are told that Jesus has gone ahead of them, back
to Galilee. But their fear paralyzes them and they said nothing because they
were afraid. On this first day in April 2018, this is what we get. No foolin’.
Mark’s Gospel is the oldest
of the four, written roughly four decades after the events he reports to us. He
does not claim to be an eyewitness; he’s a second-generation disciple. He and
the community he’s a part of have had forty years to think about this. Mark’s
is also the shortest of the four gospels and definitely the most urgent; he’s
the guy that is always using the word “immediately.” It is most likely addressed
to first-century Christians in Rome, which means that we are no longer on the
fringes of imperial power but right in the midst of it.
Why would Mark end his gospel
this way? Did the original ending somehow get clipped off accidentally? Did
Mark drop dead suddenly of a heart attack before he was done? Did the Roman authorities knock on the door
in that moment and “disappear” him before he could finish? Who knows? On this
Easter morning all we can say with any degree of certainty is that it did end
here, without even a specific sighting of the resurrected Jesus. For today we
just have an empty tomb and the testimony given to the women. In Greek the
grammar stammers along, so that you could translate it something like this:
“And going out they fled from the tomb, for fear and
trembling had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone. They were afraid,
because…”
Now if this is how a film
ended you could be sure that a sequel was already in the works. But unlike
Luke, who does write a sequel that we
know as the Acts of the Apostles, so far as we know, Mark did not. This is it. They said nothing. To no one. Because they
were afraid…
Mark leaves us with questions
and I think he does that on purpose. What
happened next? When did they find
their voices and speak? How exactly
did they overcome their fears? Whom
did they tell first when they finally overcame their fear? Because we most
definitely know that they did find their voices. We know that they did speak, for
the same reason that the first-century Church in Rome knew that they did. We
know they finally spoke because someone told someone who told someone who told someone
who told us. He isn’t there. He’s not dead! Christ is risen, and he has
gone ahead of you. Keep on keeping on, and you will find him. In Galilee.
In Worcester. In the midst of your life in places where you least expect to and
perhaps in those very places where you are most afraid.
We know they spoke because
the story doesn’t end today at the empty tomb; it begins there. Somebody told
somebody who told Mark and then Matthew and Luke and John and Paul, none of
whom claim to be eyewitnesses. Even so these words had to in some way resonate
for them as true, had to hook them and take hold in their lives, to make sense
of their lives. Fear doesn’t get the last
word. We gather here today and throughout these next fifty days to bear
witness to that reality. Being afraid is never the end of the story.
As some of you know I was in
the Holy Land a couple of months ago. It was my fourth time there and each time
I’ve spent some time wandering the streets of the old city of Jerusalem,
including walking the Via Delarosa, praying the Stations of the Cross through
those old streets winding streets. You end up at the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher, the traditional site built over the place believed to have been the
empty tomb. Two days ago I walked those same Stations of the Cross and prayed
those same prayers not in the holy city of Jerusalem but through the streets of
the holy city of Worcester, with our Bishop and with my friend, the Rev.
Meredyth Ward and with about thirty others, including some of you. We stopped
at various places along the way as we overlaid the story of Jesus final hours with
stories from this city and particularly stories of some of our most vulnerable
neighbors.
Jesus wasn’t in that tomb in
Jerusalem anymore where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher now sits because he had
gone ahead of them to Galilee – back to the Lake, back to the Mount of the
Beatitudes, back to the familiar streets of those villages to the north. The
women are told that they will find him in the midst of their lives and they
were told to deliver that message to the disciples and while they were clearly
afraid at first it’s also just as clear that they did find their voices. They did go and tell because what other choice
did they have? That’s the good news we gather to proclaim today: that Christ is alive and is no longer bound
to distant years in Palestine; Christ comes to claim the here and now and
conquer every place and time. Including this place and this time. Including
this congregation, this city, this nation, and the world. Christ has gone ahead
of us.
I think this is a brilliant
way to end a gospel and maybe the most brilliant ending of the four because the
burden of the narrative shifts in that moment from the women in the story to us
as hearers of the story. What will we
do with it? Will we flee or follow? Mark says, in effect, “you are the sequel” to this story. So how will you overcome your
fears and then whom will you tell? What difference will it make in your one
wild and precious life?
Fear is a part of our lives.
And courage is definitely not the absence of fear. Ask a veteran or a firefighter
or a cop. Ask a kid from the Margery Stoneham Douglas School in Parkland,
Florida or a friend who is battling against cancer. Courage is the ability to face our fears and then somehow still keep
on moving forward by putting one foot in front of the other. It’s about
marching for our lives in the streets of Worcester and the streets of Boston
and the streets of Washington. It’s about hoping for a better world but that’s
never passive; after thoughts and prayers we are called to become the change we
seek in this world. And to know that we don’t walk alone, because Jesus isn’t in
the tomb. He’s among the living and he has already gone ahead of us, not just
to Galilee but to the ends of the earth, including Worcester County
Massachusetts in 2018.
Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia. Pay
attention to your lives, and keep your eyes on the prize, and keep on marching
in the light of God.
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