A Journey of the Heart

A Sermon by Donel McClellan
First Congregational United Church of Christ
Bellingham, Washington

There is something poignantly moving and subtly hilarious about this story of women coming to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body that first Easter morning. Someone with a sense of humor like mine referred to these women at the tomb as the original Spice Girls.

Humor often depends upon surprise and the reversal of expectation. What could be more surprising than to find that a dead friend is not dead. And isn’t there something charmingly humorous about Mary Magdalen mistaking Jesus for a gardener?

Our Orthodox Christian friends have a tradition of telling funny stories on Easter as a way of underlining the amazement and wonder of the day. So, for a moment, let’s become Orthodox.

Did you hear about the poor rabbit that was killed by a car? The driver pulls over feeling terrible. Another car stops quickly and a woman, grabs a spray can from the trunk. She rushes over to the dead rabbit and douses it with the spray. Miraculously, the bunny comes to life, jumps up, waves its paw at the two people, and hops down the road. After about ten yards, the rabbit stops, turns around, and waves again. Then it hops down the road another ten yards, turns and waves. This goes on until the rabbit is out of sight.

The driver is astonished and asks the woman what was in the spray can. The woman gives him the can. He reads the label, “Hair Spray—restores life to dead hair. Adds permanent wave.”

Or, did you hear about the thoughtful woman who sent a floral spray to a friend whose business was celebrating a grand opening in new location? When she arrived at the celebration she was shocked to find that her floral piece bore the inscription “Rest in Peace!”

She immediately called the florist on her cell phone to give him a piece of her mind. The florist was embarrassed and apologetic and promised to make it right but he couldn’t interrupt the woman’s litany of frustration. Finally the florist blurted out, “Ma’am, Look at it this way, somewhere today a man was buried under a wreath that said “Good luck in your new location.”

And I know you remember Jesus’ friend Joseph of Arimathea. He was a respected pharisee in the leadership of the Jewish political community. Joseph took a great risk by asking for Jesus’ body after the crucifixion and it was his new and expensive tomb in which Jesus was buried.

You probably don’t know about the friend who cornered him a few days later and said, “Joseph, that was such beautiful, costly, hand-hewn tomb. Why on earth did you give it to someone else to be buried in?”

Joseph just smiled. “Why not?” he said. “He only needed it for the weekend.”

And the image of a tomb brings us back to Easter and the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room. We all look around it as if it doesn’t exist. The name of this elephant is death. As you probably noticed, all the humorous stories I used this morning are stories making light of death.

Death is the reason that Mary and those with her were shocked and amazed, struck speechless, by what they saw in the graveyard. And what did they see? Where they expected something—a body—they found nothing. At first they saw an rock rolled away. Later they saw the empty tomb and angels who asked a curious question, “Why are you weeping?

Finally Mary saw Jesus whom she only recognized when her name was spoken. The women’s first response to finding nothing where they expected to anoint a body, was to make a logical assumption. Someone must have stolen the body. Only when Mary saw Jesus did she understand. Death itself was trumped and life was promised to all. “Go to the sisters and brothers and tell them,” said Jesus.

Easter is about death. Fleming Rutledge, a thoughtful Episcopal priest and author, says she "looks forward to Easter day more keenly each year as she gets older, because . . . there isn’t anything we can do about death. It is so damned inexorable, and I do mean damned. . . . We feel its presence as a hostile, invading power" ^{^[1]}

Mary and her friends felt the presence of death. Peter and the other disciple were nearly overwhelmed by Jesus death. Any of us who have lost parents, sisters and brothers, spouses and children know about the power of death.

And what in human life is more certain than death and more uncertain than the hour? Death is not merciful to poverty. It is no respecter of riches. It spares no one for the sake of his noble birth, [her] behavior, his age, it waits at the door for the old and ambushes the young. ^{^[2]}

It seems to me, that if we don’t come to Easter with some sense of the power of death over our lives, then the Easter message may be lost to us. Easter speaks to a world in which death is a present power. A world where young and inexperienced drivers lose control and teen lives are ended before they have really begun; a world where parents in our community beat children to death; a world in which violence is justified because people are part of another religion, or a different expression of the same religion; a world at war; a world in which violence has become the effective political tool of terrorists; a world in which death caries the name famine, cholera AIDS.

Parts of our world are all we need to know of hell. It is to these parts that Easter speaks a word. The word seems almost superficial if it is not spoken in the shadow of death. The word is love.

In the face of death, the women at the tomb and the earliest apostles claimed the unbelievable truth that God had conquered death and would never abandon any one of us. The Easter proclamation, as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it "is that when the bottom has fallen out from under you, when you have crashed through all your safety nets . . . the good news is that you cannot fall farther than God can catch you" ^{^[3]}

I have no logic which is adequate to convince anyone of the truth of Easter. If I were to argue the hard evidence for the resurrection in a court of law I would expect to lose. That is because Easter is neither a logical proposition nor an historic event. Easter is an experience, not of the past but of the present.

If you want evidence of resurrection look around you today. This church is full as are all the others in town, across America, and throughout the world. The evidence of Resurrection is not in the careful study of biblical texts, or innovative advances in archeology, or the complex arguments of theology. The evidence of resurrection is in the product of those who believe. The evidence of the resurrection rests within each one of you who worships with us this glad morning. It is not a conclusion of the mind but a journey of the heart.

Richard Lischer, professor at Duke Divinity School, wrote a book about his life as a freshly ordained Lutheran pastor in a little southern Illinois town. A memorable tale was that of Buster Toland’s funeral.

Buster was a mechanic at the local garage. His wife, Beulah, drank too much and was high on drugs most of the time. They argued loudly and profanely and bitterly and in the middle of a huge shouting match when he came home from lunch—and there was no lunch—Buster dropped dead. “Dead before he hit the floor,” Beulah said, at least a hundred times to anyone who would listen. Now, Buster was a rascal, and his death made the whole community feel apprehensive and worried about his utterly dysfunctional family.

Pastor Lischer helped Beulah through the local funeral plans and negotiations with the funeral director, which were exceptionally difficult. Beulah kept insisting on the most expensive casket and arrangements because she “owed it to Buster,” she said. The idealistic young minister managed to alienate the funeral director in the process.

Finally the day for the funeral arrived, complete with the open casket in the narthex of the church. The service was a disaster. Beulah wailed at the top of her lungs through the service and the pastor’s attempt at a sermon. He concluded quickly by reminding the congregation that Buster had been a good Marine and father and now the church would assume greater responsibility for his family.

And then the congregation moved to the little cemetery on the hill behind the church. The casket was lowered into the grave. Pastor Lischer said the words of committal and it was over.

Then the military phase of the service began. Four uniformed veterans from the local VFW formed an honor guard and fired their rifles on command three times over the heads of the congregation.

There was even a bugler for the occasion, twelve-year-old Moriah Seamanns, standing halfway up the hill in a pink jumper with a thin white sweater draped over her shoulders. Her new coronet caught the sunlight and she was about to give the performance of her life. Her mother stood beside her to hold her music and to steady her child, like a doe and a fawn in the silence of the spring afternoon.

Then Moriah began to play. She did not play “Taps.” She played four stanzas of “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” arcing each note across the ravine toward the mourners on the hill. It was, Lischer says, “as if her music were a time-delayed message coming to us from a saner and more beautiful world.”

Standing in the lumpy mud of the cemetery, Lischer remarked he “could see Easter” ^{^[4]}

This morning, standing in the lumpy mud of history, might we see Easter too. May it come to us in a hymn or phrase of scripture, in the faces of those around us or the touch of a familiar hand. May Easter come to us in the glorious world that bathes us in it’s painful beauty, or in that tiny flame of hope rekindled in the darkness of our hearts as they recover from a painful loss.

[1]. Fleming Rutledge, Help My Unbelief, pp. 196-199.

[2]. Bernard of Clairvaux Selected Works, translated and foreword by G.R. Evans, (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 79.

[3]. Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels, p. 133.

[4]. Richard Lischer, Open Secrets: A Journey through a Country Church, pp. 180-196). Shared by John Buchanan