Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
Easter Sunday - 9AM Service - April 12, 2009
Mark 16: 1-8
Whew, we made it! I made it! After all the build up and preparation of Lent, the planning and anticipation for all the services of Holy Week, we, by we I mean me, have at last made it to Easter Sunday. In just a few more hours I'll be done. All the work and worry behind me. I'll go home, put my feet up, pour myself a refreshing beverage, and I and all of us will be able to put Easter away for another year. Once again we have managed to roll that stone away from the tomb and now it's over. It's time to get on with something else, all those things I have been saying I will do "after Easter", this is the week to start. We are almost done with Easter....right?
A minister shares this story: "My cousin Barrett preached his first sermon, not only before the members of his new church, but also in front of his mother-in-law, my Aunt Mary. Aunt Mary was a woman of 'few words' as we sometimes say. Rather blunt, she could be. So after the sermon and worship were over, during Sunday dinner, Barrett asked Aunt Mary what she thought of the sermon. She replied, 'Well, I thought you had a good sermon. In fact, I thought you had a number of good sermons, in fact, I thought that you missed about three good stopping places in your sermon!'"
Ending a sermon... certainly one of the toughest challenges for a preacher. I wonder how many times you have sat here on a Sunday morning thinking, "Well what do you know, he's finally wrapping it up - only to have me go on for another five - or was it fifty - more minutes! There's always one more story to tell. Always one more dynamite point you can make. It's hard for a preacher to know when to end a sermon. The preacher wants to tie things together, sum things up, put a bow around it, present as a nice, neat and complete package to the congregation. But yet, on the other hand, you don't want such a good ending that the congregation can say, "Well, thank goodness that's over. We're done with God and worship and church for another week and now we can move on to thinking about something else." No, we preachers want that sermon to continue to bear fruit in the lives of our listeners, to keep growing and resonating in your hearts and minds. We never want it to be completely done, put away or forgotten. So yes, a sermon is hard to end, and I suppose that is why sometimes they just seem to go on forever. "Somebody stop him!"
But, you know this isn't only a problem for contemporary preachers. Consider the writers of the Four Gospels. They get to the end of the story, to what should be the happiest of happy endings - "Jesus lives! Jesus is Lord!" - but they don't seem to know how to wrap it up, how to put an ending on it. In John, the disciples go back to work, back to fishing almost as if nothing had happened. Well, those last three years certainly were interesting weren't they, we had better get back to the old routine. And then they meet the risen Lord. In Matthew the risen Christ commands the disciples to "go and make disciples of all nations." "Get out of here," he seems to say, "You have better things to do than stand around and look at me." Luke has so much trouble finding an ending that he writes an entire second volume - the Book of Acts - in which he tells the story of the coming of the Spirit of the Living Christ and how that experience empowers the early church.
Then there is Mark and his notorious non-ending. As you heard this morning, he never actually says that any of the disciples saw the risen Jesus. An angel at the tomb tells the three women that Jesus will meet the disciples back in Galilee and they should go spread the word. But, says Mark, they left and didn't tell anybody! Why? Because they were afraid. Not exactly an uplifting, inspiring, even hopeful ending to the Easter story. I mean, is this any way to run a resurrection? Even I could have written a better ending than that. Why so much trouble finding an ending to Easter? Could it be because there is no ending?
A pastor shares this story: "In August, Mary and John celebrated the birth of their first child. They had resigned themselves to never having children, but then, late into their marriage, they discovered that they were going to have a baby. The news spread like wildfire through the congregation. Mary was pregnant! She and John would be parents! In August she delivered a beautiful baby boy, but even then it was plain that his legs were tiny, almost withered, out of proportion to his body. Eventually the doctor delivered the sad news that this child would never walk."
Continues the pastor, "We in the church continued to celebrate the wonder of this baby, but, of course, it was easy for us to celebrate because we didn't have day-to-day care of him. Nor did we know what it was like to look into that crib, day after day, and to see into the future with a child who had been crippled from birth, a child who would never run or walk or live the life other children might live. Those cares began to show on Mary and John too. When people inquired about Johnny, or when the congregation made a fuss over him when they brought him to church, there was a tint of sadness in their eyes, a premonition of the life ahead for them and their new baby. Around the church, people spoke in muffled tones of the 'sadness of it all.'
"But on Easter Sunday, they came to church with the baby all bundled up in a new Easter outfit. Little Johnny was baptized that day, and when the service was over something was different. When Mary discussed it later, with tears in her eyes, she said it was as if a door opened for her on that Easter, and she saw the way. It was as if during that Easter baptism, God Almighty passed a blessing over Johnny's life and their lives. She now saw her son through the eyes of faith, saw him, not as a burden, but as a new unique, undeserved and special blessing." For them, a new beginning.
I invite you to take that as an Easter story. Easter proclaims that it ain't over until God says it's over, and that in Christ's resurrection, the story continues. Don't quit on life or on anyone else's life. God certainly hasn't. You know, it pains me to say this, but it just might be that Mark is a much more clever and astute writer than I will ever be! We have the fearful women, we have Jesus' promise to meet his disciples in Galilee and we have the invitation to join him there. Everything is left open-ended, unfinished. It's as if Mark is saying, "Look, Jesus is now loose in the world. The tomb could not hold him, not his life. He has outgrown the tomb. The music hasn't stopped, it's just going on somewhere else. The living Lord's business is among the living. So don't look for him in the tomb, a place of ending and hopelessness and death. He isn't there. He's out in the world, going ahead of you, and he's inviting you to join him there.” Says Barbara Brown Taylor, "The story is already alive, with or without us. God wants us to be a part of it - to sob on Palm Sunday, to wash each other's feet on Maundy Thursday, to fast on Good Friday, to laugh out loud on Easter Sunday. In these and a thousand other ways, we are invited to be part of Jesus Christ's risen life on earth." So much for putting my feet up and being done with Easter. It ain't over 'til God says it's over, and you get the feeling that with Easter, God has only just begun.
Now, you have heard me say this before, but the resurrection is the one and only event in Jesus' life that was entirely between him and God. There were no witnesses. No one saw it happen on that first Easter...there was no one was inside the tomb. They all arrived after the fact. In fact, most of them saw nothing because they were all still asleep in bed. But, as Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us, it really didn't matter because the empty tomb was not the point...the empty tomb was not the point.
I remember attending a summer seminar at Princeton Seminary during the last great cicada invasion of the East. We don't really have them here, but they live seventeen years in the ground. Then they pop out and make this horrendous noise for what seems like forever. There were piles of dry, brown cicada shells everywhere. Thousands of them. They looked dead, but of course they weren't. They were just shells. Each one had a neat slit down its back where the living creature inside had escaped, with new legs, new eyes, new wings. And as I said, you could hear them singing their song everywhere - until finally it drove you inside. You might say that Jesus' tomb was just the cicada shell with the neat slit down the back. Whatever life had once been inside was gone, as I said earlier, now singing somewhere else. What Jesus was now was larger than the tomb, larger than Galilee. He was out to take back a world, and the women were a part of it and Peter was a part of it and we are a part of it.
You see, to discuss endlessly the details of Easter is to miss Easter. Mark makes it clear. Easter is all about the future. Jesus is all about the future. Don't look back, look ahead. Easter is not about answering endless questions, it is about beginning new lives. The issue is not to seek proof of Easter but to be that proof. Not to talk about Jesus, but to risk our lives on what he said and on the sort of life he lived. Easter is not a proof, it's an attitude. Is your life at a dead end? Not if you believe in the God of Easter, in whom there are endless possibilities. Have your gotten you life all fouled up? You can begin again, if you believe in the God who on Easter proclaimed, "I can make all things new." For someone in the throes of divorce or touched by the heartache of death or bogged down in a life that seems to lack purpose or meaning, facing financial insecurity, or who finds himself or herself at the very perimeter of life, Easter comes as a "see-it-through" attitude which dares to assert, "Because Christ lives, I can live also."
It's an old story of the mother who takes her son to his very first swimming lesson and just before the lesson begins, she insists, "Now don't you dare go near the water until you've learned how to swim!"
Well, that's not the way swimming works, or life, and that's not how we learn about Easter. No the great question of this Easter Sunday is what it always is. Christ is alive, are you? He is risen; has your faith risen? He saw it through with his love for all of us; do you dare to love like that? Get in the water, get into life. For that is where the Easter miracle happens. Not in a tomb, but out in the world, in our encounters with one another, and in our encounters with the living Lord. Says Taylor, "In the end, that is the only evidence we have to offer those who ask us how we can possibly believe. Because we live, that is why. Because we have found, much to our surprise, that we are not alone. Because we never know where or in whom he might turn up next." Truly, today is only the beginning. We are just never done with Easter, because Easter is never done with us.