REASON TO REJOICE

Mark 16:1-8

As the preacher rose to the pulpit, Rose Jacobs sat that Easter morning in the hard wooden pew looking at her lap, smoothing a wrinkle in her flower print cotton dress. She felt cold in her light green T-shirt. She realized she hadn't ironed her clothes. She wore the minimum to get by and be socially acceptable, among the pink and pastel, the crisply ironed cotton and expensive linen. She didn't feel much like being in church, but it was, after all, Easter. Dave's mother insisted.

"It's such a pretty church. It'll cheer you up," she had said, as she looked into her compact mirror, pursing her lips to spread her lipstick and sculpting her gray hairdo with her other hand. As they were leaving their colonial house on Cold Soil Road, Rose thought about how their house looked too big now, for just the two of them.

The choir finished singing. She picked a piece of lint off the shoulder of Dave's dark suit as the liturgist read the scripture lesson. In that same moment, she caught a whiff of his cologne. Polo. She could see the blue bottle on the dresser. She joked with him that he'd had that bottle since college; he never wore cologne. She realized the last time she smelled that scent was at Parker's funeral. Rose felt her stomach tighten and she felt a tear form, as the liturgist read the story she'd heard again and again as a kid in church: about the women, the empty tomb, the angel. "He is not here. He is risen."
Right.

Rose had tried to muster a little enthusiasm when they were doing the opening sentences of the worship service, just to look appropriate. "He is risen! He is risen indeed!" But to her, the words could have been Swahili, or dog barking. They were meaningless to her. Blah, blah, blah, Resurrection. She looked around and saw people trying to make their countenances fit the fact that the calendar says: Easter. Time to look like we're rejoicing. In that moment, she actually found comfort in her unbelief, the superiority of an intellect able to penetrate the illusion of fantasy, and her sure guide out of grief. She looked around and felt a tragic sort of pity for those who really believe that a poor Jewish peasant actually did rise from the dead.

"Blah, Blah, Blah resurrection," she thought as her mind flashed to a Sesame Street episode she'd seen once with Parker, their TV watching time after school, when Bert and Ernie were singing the Blah Blah Blah song. "Blah blah blah blah...Easter," she thought, with a slight smile, even as a tear rolled down her face.
What reason to rejoice? Just because it's Easter? He died. Just like her Parker, he's not coming back.

* * *

I have to admit that Easter sort of brings out the contrarian in me; there's a little cynic who likes to romp through my brain when I find I have to face yet another Easter sermon; it's always the hardest sermon of the year--and there's the big crowd; everyone wants a home-run. And I guess Rose, this fictional character who might be in worship with us today, with those same thoughts and feelings, is a kind of archetype for that. It's the part of me that asks: why rejoice today? We come expecting good news. It's on the marquee. He is risen! It's a foregone conclusion that, whether we were there on Good Friday or not, Jesus will be resurrected. Whether our inner landscape reflects it or not, we will rejoice.

Why rejoice? What evidence do we have? What reason?

I like this version of the resurrection story from Mark. What we read this morning was the original ending of Mark; the rest was tacked on later by an editor who spells out what happened. But the original gospel ends with an empty tomb, the only witnesses some women--unreliable witnesses in the Greco-Roman mind. And they leave in fear. An ending that leaves quite a lot to the imagination. And, at that point, not much of a basis for rejoicing.

An empty tomb, with plenty of evidence of an absent Christ, if we simply read the headlines. 70 Iraqis dead outside a mosque in Baghdad in one day from a car bomb. Over 200,000 people killed by the Janjaweed in Southern Sudan, while the world looks on twiddling its thumbs.
What reason to rejoice? And what difference will it make?

As I thought about this sermon, somehow that phrase from the Apostle's Creed came into my head: "He descended into hell." Do you remember? (It's often got that asterisk that says "optional". But we should never skip that part, as far as I'm concerned.) In the mythological journey of Christ, the church affirms that Jesus descended into hell. That's where he's been this past day, between Friday and today. We often forget this. There's something somehow important about that journey. We forget that God emerged not just from the tomb, but from hell.

Hell is not a fun place to go. But if God is sovereign over all of life, God had to go and claim not only death and the cross, but also hell.

Like Rose, perhaps you've been there. Perhaps you are there, as you've come to church today. For somehow, the descent into hell is part of our journey too, even part of the journey that could lead us into the mystery of Christ's resurrection. Like the Persephone of Greek mythology, we must descend into Hades to find our soul. Like Persephone, we discover that we live our life partly in the underworld. We descend to hell, trusting that God is there.

To rejoice in this mystery perhaps requires of us to journey there too. Ourselves. Or perhaps accompanying another. For it's there that we find kindling for hope's flame; that "thing with feathers", which leads us upward.
Khalil Gibran in The Prophet speaks to this, when he writes, "Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? Is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?"

There's something of a great task we face each Easter--not something we passively await to happen, that we receive because it's just what we do on this day. We do not rejoice in a foregone conclusion. The task is to believe the voices of the women: The tomb is empty; He is not dead, but risen. Go out and find him! He awaits you in Galilee. Today we must rejoice in the impossible; to trust where we have not seen, to find him in the rocky shoals and murky depths of human life.

In Elie Wiesel's play, The Trial of God, three rabbis imprisoned at Auschwitz put God on trial, and find him guilty; and after reflecting on the outcome, they see that it's time to go to evening prayers, and they go off to recite them together. It's actually based on something that really happened to him, when he was there at Auschwitz as a boy.

The task at hand today is to live this truth: that life emerges out of death. It is to live in the understanding that everyone dies, but not everyone lives. It is a truth that allows us to deal with the pain and suffering of the world because we cannot fail to rejoice, for to fail to do so is ourselves to die.

Our task today is to believe this story, to be one of the suckers who really believes it, because if we do, it changes everything: that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. To believe, not just to say the words. It's a marvelous and arduous task. It is to trust that he goes ahead to meet us in Galilee, in Trenton, in Princeton, with no other proof than an empty tomb.

Do we have cause to rejoice?

We cannot fail to rejoice. Such failure is death.

Because if we fail to rejoice, how easy it is to ignore the crying of a lonely child. If we fail to rejoice, how easy it is to blame poverty on the poor, to believe that "welfare mothers" are the cause of our national debt, instead of the fuel required by the engines of war.

If we do not rejoice, how easy it is to ignore the oil-soaked beaches, the species being extinguished in our exhaust.

If we fail to rejoice, how easy it is to see pictures of immigrants being beaten, and to say to ourselves, "they deserved it."

If Jesus Christ is not risen from death, Romeo and Juliet keep dying, Jesus remains in the tomb, the world stays mad and tragedy lives on.

We have reason rejoice, because we know that Ebenezer Scrooge does emerge from his sleep, and finds a new life waiting for him. So is the promise for us all.

* * *

At the end of the worship service, Rose got up from her pew, not wanting to talk with anyone; just leave me alone, she thought. Leave me alone. She stared at the flags at the front of the sanctuary, and thought how odd it was that they were there in that otherwise pristine worship space. No one noticed a slight redness in her eyes; certainly not her mother in law, who was looking at other people's outfits, smoothing her velvet collar.

Then something happened that she did not expect. She caught a glimpse of Jill Miller's red hair, above the crowd. She was heading toward her. Jill was a friend, she supposed, but she hadn't talked with her since Parker's funeral. Jill had also lost a daughter, Megan, in a car accident a year and a half ago. She could tell she was heading right to her, her blue eyes fixed on her. Rose tried to turn, but somehow felt as if to do so would be an act of supreme cowardice.

Jill stepped up, uncomfortably near to her, head-on. She didn't look happy; but she had a kind of peace about her. She looked into Rose's eyes. She didn't say anything for what seemed like an eternity, just breathed in a deep breath. Finally, she said it, in a small puff of breath, like the still small voice that Elijah heard so long ago; softly. She could barely hear it.

"Christ is risen," she said, still looking into her eyes.

They wept. They didn't care if people were watching. They wept the way people do when they share a certain kind of knowing.

And Rose realized later that some small frozen lake at the bottom of her soul where she'd been living began to thaw that day.

Amen.

 

Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006

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