Marcia Sietstra:  Pastor

Happy, happy Easter!  This is the high holy day of the church's year, a day to celebrate the new life in Christ and new life in its many forms.  I remember loving Easter as a child, for in addition to Easter eggs, I always wore a new dress, socks and shoes on Easter.  But the crowning touch was my new hat and white gloves, usually a broad-brimmed hat with light blue ribbon over my blond curls, making me look very Pollyanna-like!  The congregation was a gorgeous sight with all the pastel colored, pretty hats and ribbons in church that day; I kind of wish that tradition had survived.  Even now, the lush colors, the flowers, the trumpet fanfare, the magnificent music all help us to rejoice on this day when spring is so much in the air, and the earth is sprouting with new life!

 So many reasons to love Easter!  The poet E.E.Cummings says it well in this poem:

             i thank You God for most this amazing

            day for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

            and a blue true dram of sky; and for everything

            which is natural which is infinite which is yes

            (i who have died am alive again today,

            and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth

            day of life and of love and wings; and of the gay

            great happening illimitably earth)

            how should tasting touching hearing seeing

            breathing any—lifted from the no

            of all nothing—human merely being

            doubt unimaginable You?

            (now the ears of my ears awake and

            now the eyes of my eyes are opened)[1]

On a day like this we can so easily believe in God!  Patricia deJong, a pastor at First Congregational in Berkeley, tells a story about and Easter Sunday memory of her childhood.  Every Easter they sang a hymn that I grew up with too—it goes like this:  Low in the grave he lay, Jesus my Savior…waiting the coming day, Jesus my Lord…Up from the grave he arose!  

She vividly recalls picturing this in her mind, and the picture she sees is of Jesus lying languidly in her grandmother’s gravy bowl, slowly getting up out of the brown gravy!  Just as the song says: Low in the gravy (g-r-a-v-y) lay Jesus my Savior, waiting the coming day, Jesus my Lord![2] 

Perhaps Jesus being resurrected out of a gravy bowl is no more difficult for a child to imagine than it is for us to imagine an actual resurrection. 

Oh, it’s easy enough to imagine the other parts of the Easter story.  The suffering on the cross part is believable, because we’ve all experienced suffering in one form or another. 

Like suffering the death of a child, a husband or a wife

The suffering of  broken trust or a lost relationship

The suffering of a parent with alzheimers

The suffering & fear of unemployment and loss

And the death part of the Easter story is easy for us to understand too.  Sure, Jesus died from hanging on a cross, a very effective form of Roman execution.  He died just like our friend or relative died of cancer, just like a marriage died after a betrayal, like feelings of security died all over the country when children brought guns into a high school in Colorado.  We see death on the nightly news and in the movies, graphic displays of all kinds of death, from the starvation of Africans to the gratuitous violence of the majority of the movies advertised in this week’s movie insert in the Argus.  We humans accept death because we know death intimately.

But the part of Easter we have trouble with is the resurrection.  On Easter we are asked to believe in a resurrection of a human body.  This is something of an obstacle for many of us.  Dead people are not resuscitated in such a way that they walk, talk and appear to their friends all over the place, which is what happens in the post-resurrection accounts in the gospels, in which Jesus appears after his death to various people. 

If you were to do a study of all the places in the New Testament where Jesus appeared after his death, you’d find that in Luke and Matthew and John and the two later endings added to Mark, there is a wide variety of forms he seems to take.  Once he seems able to vanish and to move through barriers (Lk 24:31, Jn 20:19).  Another time he is described as having flesh and bone, able to be touched and to eat food with his disciples (Lk 24).  But elsewhere, his closest friends walk and talk with him without recognizing him until much later that evening when they share bread and wine (Lk 24).  Jesus seems to have a butterfly-like freedom to appear in different forms. 

Was Jesus’ corpse reconsitituted, DNA and all?  We don’t know.  Was he a spiritual apparition, a ghostlike form, as Paul may suggest?  We don’t know.  Both possibilities are outside our normal range of experience.  Perhaps what happened was that the disciples experienced Jesus’ impact in their lives so dramatically after his death, that they came to speak in terms of his presence in their midst.  We don’t know what form Jesus took after his death.

But something happened! Something that made the women flee in terror and amazement!  Would you picture it for a moment?  The women have come at dawn, expecting to anoint the corpse with spices.  They are grief-stricken, and probably thinking none-too-clearly, for they realize on the walk from the city to the tomb that they don’t even have a plan for getting the stone away from the entrance.  Arriving at the cave, the women are startled to see the stone rolled away and a youth sitting there.  He speaks, "Do not be amazed.  You seek Jesus who was crucified.  He has been raised; he is not here.  Go, tell his disciples that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him."  They bolt in terror, and that’s the end of the book of Mark!  The first account of Jesus’ life, written decades before the other gospels, ends without a single word about what form Jesus took or what happened to the women.

Odd, wouldn’t you say?  Or maybe not.  I rather like Mark’s ending, for it leaves what happened next to our imagination.  And it seems to me, that imagination is what is required at Easter!  What we see and touch and hear in life we have no trouble accepting.  Just as we have no trouble accepting that there is a lot of suffering in this world and it ends in death for us all.  But Mark would have us imagine that which we cannot know through  our five senses.

He would have us imagine a world in which the God-known-in-Jesus loves us beyond our wildest imagination!  A world in which love is stronger than hate, stronger than deceit, stronger than betrayal.  He would have us believe that wherever the love-ethic of Jesus is practiced, hatred will not win out, injustice will not be the last word, and joy can sprout up where decay and death seemed to be the last word.

Last week I watched the dedication of the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial Park.  Beside a wall marked with the time of the blast beginning and ending, 9:01 and 9:03, there is a tranquil meditation pool.  Alongside the pool, are 168 sculpted chairs here and there in the park.  Each chair represents a person killed in the blast 5 years ago, a blast caused by the hatred and fear of a right-wing militia group member.  Some of the chairs are smaller than the others; they represent the children killed in the daycare section of the federal building.  The governor of Oklahoma said, at the dedication, that the survivors and the families of the victims felt they had to put up this memorial as a symbol of their resolve to resist hatred, the hatred that caused this tragedy.  They could not let hatred be the last word and they have turned a scene of horror into a peaceful place.

Mark, all through his gospel, is challenging the reader to make a decision.  He doesn’t want us to sympathize with the crucified Lord.  He want us to follow him—to finish the story and experience for ourselves that love does conquer all!  And knowing that, experiencing that, we are able to imagine anything is possible with  our God!  Easter is the day we can imagine that God will bring us together with our loved ones who have died ahead of us!  I can imagine that surely a God who gives us the capacity for such strong bonds of love will not just let it all end at the end of this life!

Isn’t it interesting that the young man at the tomb tells the women that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee where they will see him.  Perhaps Galilee represents the ordinary world, where they would experience Jesus with them in their conversations, in their sharing of the bread and wine, on the beach where he taught them.  We also glimpse Jesus in ordinary life when we come together to learn what he taught us, to pray, to worship in music. 

We experience this God-known-in-Jesus in those moments of life too big for words when we connect with God… in the clasp of a baby’s hand around our finger… in the music of Bach… in a sunset over the water’s edge… in the tender caress of a person we love beyond words.  We experience God-known-in-Jesus in the resurrected earth that blooms each spring, in the spirit that cannot be quenched even when the body is dying, in the will to go on living after a tragedy. 

We are not so far away from the women at the tomb or the disciples, for we can also testify to the miracle and the wonder of life, especially for those who have a living encounter with Christ.  It matters little to me what form Jesus took when his followers experienced his presence with them after the crucifixion.  What matters is that they experienced Christ in ways they could never have imagined before!  What matters now, is that we dare to imagine that the same thing can happen to us!

Mark leaves the resolution of the story up to us.  Will we go looking for Jesus in ordinary life?  You’ll find him in the hearts of people who refuse to give up fighting for justice, people who practice the Golden Rule, who judge not, lest they be judged, who care for the poor and the powerless, who are healed because they have been forgiven and are able to forgive others.  

In the end, the only evidence you’ll have is this Easter experience of life.  In those special moments when we experience the mystery of life, we become able to believe in what we cannot see. 

There is a story that has been around for quite some time, but I think it illustrates this well.  There was a young father who arrived home from work one evening, tired and irritable.  His 5-year-old daughter Annie handed him a gift-wrapped shoebox, which looked like she had used about 4 rolls of paper and 4 more rolls of tape to wrap.  He scolded her for wasting so much paper as he opened the box.  And then, seeing that it was empty, he scolded her again, and said, "You need to put something in a gift Annie!"

Little Annie’s voice quivered and tears came down her cheeks, as she answered, "I blew that whole box full of kisses for you daddy." 

Now that father is an old man and Annie is grown.  But he still keeps that box under his bed, and occasionally he opens it and feels a soft kiss and it brightens his day.  He believes in something he cannot see and is restored. 

I hope that on this Easter you believe in something you cannot see so you may be restored.  Amen.

-

[1] E.E. Cummings, i thank You God.

[2] Patricia deJong, A Wildly New Day, sermon preached at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, April 12, 1998.