Home Page > Sermon Index > March 23, 2008

“The Great Discovery”

Wilton Presbyterian Church

Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008

Let’s see, where were we? Oh, I remember. The three questions Holy Week raises.

Which parade do you pick? A procession of Caesar’s power or a procession of Christ’s peace?

Which savior do you pick? Jesus Bar-abbas who advocates violence or Jesus called the Messiah who talked and walked non-violence?

And then the last question Jesus cried out on his cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Even though I didn’t mention it last week, I’m sure you noticed. The first two questions are of us: Which parade? Which savior? The third question, however, is of God. “My God, my God, why?”

And it’s in the bowels of this third question of God that I begin this sermon. And for one simple reason: because in it’s the bowels of this third question that today’s proclamation begins. Cross and resurrection. Good Friday and Easter. They go together. They are of one piece: this human cry of despair in the face of man’s inhumanity to man and God’s mightiest of mighty acts in Christ’s resurrection.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cried with a loud voice…Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.” (Mt 27.46, 50) On Good Friday the life of this man--this man among men, this Son of Man—ended. It was over, finished, done, dead. His disciples and friends? Scattered, secluded, emptying their lives, bearing their own crosses on earth through the very same question Jesus had asked of God in heaven, “My God, my God, why?”

Well, not all of Jesus’ disciples and friends had abandoned him. “Many women,” Matthew writes, were there at his crucifixion, among them Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James and Joseph and of the sons of Zedebee. They saw Jesus’ suffering, they heard his cry; they beheld—and must have felt--his last breath.

And then…then they waited.

The men—as men tend to do—waited in their closets, each to himself, nursing inside his private grief, his fear, and perhaps a few grudges. Except Joseph of Arimathea. With Pilate’s permission, he took Jesus’ body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb.

And the women? The women—Mary Magdalene and Mary anyway—they kept their vigil together, “sitting opposite the tomb” (Mt. 27.61) waiting while Pilate’s soldiers secured the tomb with a stone. And then waiting some more, tossing and turning the question: “My God, my God, why?” over and over again with one another. Waiting after everything was done that could be done. Waiting into the silence, into the nothing, into the emptiness. Waiting into the question that had no answer, “My God, my God, why?” Waiting into Jesus’ tomb. Waiting into their own tomb.

The Nobel Prize winning Roman Catholic nun, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, disclosed in a recent book of her private journals and letters (Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light) not the serene meditations of a Catholic sister confident in her belief in God but of a human being suffering what some Christians have called “the dark night” of a terrifying period of doubt and loneliness. “In my soul,” she wrote, “I feel just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me—of God not being God—of God not existing.” From the outside, many look upon openly religious people as enjoying stress-free spiritual lives. But it is not so, brothers and sisters. Not so at all.

Sure, the saints of your life (whoever they are) have known moments of high calling, like Jesus at his baptism when the heavens opened, the dove descended, and the voice from heaven declares, “You are my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased.” And yes, they have known wilderness periods of testing like Jesus underwent in the wilderness purifying their faith through what the prophet Micah called “a refiner’s fire.” And periods of genuinely good and faithful work when they have said and done what they believed was right to say and do—not to get ahead, not to pander for praise, not for their glory but for God’s—they’ve known these, too. The notoriety—and the publicity and praise, the flattery and adulation, yes, some come to know these as well.

But do we think often of such people, such saints, as knowing betrayal, denial, and abandonment by their friends? Do we think of them as people who have despaired of God? I suspect not. And yet, good brothers and sisters, who is there among you who has not experienced the bottom drop out of your life? Who has not felt—not just socially, economically, emotionally, and physically, but spiritually--betrayed, denied, and deserted and left hanging with the question, “My God, my God, why?” Who is there among you who has not tasted in your soul the terrible and terrifying pain of utter and complete loss—loss of purpose, loss of meaning, loss of yourself, and loss of God? Saints know that. You know that.

And that, brothers and sisters, is precisely where Easter begins. In the tomb. Filled on Good Friday. …And empty on Easter Sunday.

“After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdala and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it….The guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised.” (Mt. 28.1-6)

“He is not here,” the angel said. “Come, see where he lay.” Come, see the empty tomb!

“He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him. This is my message for you.” (Mt 28.6-7)

Can you imagine what this discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb must have meant to these two women? How ambushed by the unexpected they must they felt? How stunned and staggered they must have been? How afraid of a message too good to be true? And yet how ecstatic that what would be too good to be true was true, confirmed by Jesus’ own appearance to them on their way back to tell the disciples?

But please note how insistent Matthew is that the resurrection of Jesus is not about what happened to the body of the “Jesus who was crucified.” The Marys--like us, I suspect—were looking for the body of this Jesus they remembered, as though his buried—but now absent—corpse is what Jesus and his life and now his resurrection were all about. The angel puts this quest for the body of Jesus to rest. “He is not here….He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you…there you will see him. This is my message for you.” (Mt 28.7) As if to say, the Easter message is not about restoration of the past; it is gift for the future. It is not behind you; it is ahead of you. It is not about Jesus’ tangible flesh nor some visible ghost; it is about his Spirit. And it is no longer just about him and his life; it is about you and your life.

Have you discovered the empty tomb?

Do you believe, brothers and sisters, that the very best of ourselves that this Son of Man awakened in our relationships with one another and with God and which this Son of Man lived—which on Friday we saw scourged, buffeted, stretched out on a cross…Do you believe all that beauty and gentleness, goodness and grace that was Jesus, is again alive and with us now, not as a memory that inevitably fades but as an undying presence in the life of everyone of us?

Have you discovered the angel’s voice?

Do you believe that the question of despair and grief and fear and the time of living with this question is over and that a deeper meaning and more loving purpose in our lives and in the world’s life lies open before you? Because, without ever answering the question “My God, my God, why?” life does go on. And maybe, just maybe, life going on, life moving on, life living on is the best answer we receive to the question.

Have you discovered that the strife is o’er, the battle done, and that Jesus is going ahead of you, of all of us?

Have we not lived Friday’s wars long enough? Isn’t it now time for peace?

Have we not lived Friday’s ideologies and prejudices long enough? Isn’t it now time for conversation and action toward a more perfect union?

Have we not lived Friday’s hurt and bitterness, meanness and coarseness long enough? Isn’t it time for healing and gentleness, for courtesy and decency?

Have we not lived Friday’s despair long enough? Isn’t it time for the courage of hope?

I want to close with a resurrection story. It is a story that begins in the despair of one of the most awful and terrifying natural disasters this nation has suffered—the story of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the days before, during and after Hurricane Katrina. A story that begins in the bowels of Jesus’ question on his cross, lives tragically with this question for days, and then slowly, surely begins to receive an answer.

In those first few days after Katrina, how well we remember the silence, absence and inaction of agencies and powers we all thought would be there for the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Save for the Coast Guard and Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the power of government was powerless, the help of institutions was helpless…and the poor and infirm left deserted and alone to fend for themselves, to starve for food, to thirst for water or to die from disease or neglect. “My God, my God, why?” Victims of Katrina asked this question. You and I asked it. The whole nation—indeed the whole world--asked that question. How could a country “of the people, by the people, and for the people” such as ours so abandon its own people in such a time of desperate human need?

But what I have been stunned to discover just recently—some 2 ½ years later--are the stories of some of the very first responders to the victims of Katrina “who will never be known by name.” Like the NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana) Homeboys. As Douglas Brinkley writes in The Great Deluge:

When the levees broke, and the bowl (in which the City of New Orleans sat) started filling, hundreds of residents with recreational vehicles went into high gear. The city had people conducting rescues with yachts, dinghies, ferries, canoes, rafts, sailboats, scows, skiffs, sloops, tubs, catamarans, dories, draggers, baiters, and ketches—and even a floating wagon. Who were these navigators? What was their story? They were known at Johnny White’s Bar as the NOLA Homeboys, the oddballs who refused to evacuate, who were saving New Orleanians from the ravages of Katrina. They knew fellow citizens were suffering and even dying and they weren’t going to sit on the sidelines, waiting for out-of-state help. These were their brothers and their sisters. These were the neighbors they never knew. These were the neighbors they were determined to save. They had no official insignia or training. They were bartenders and insurance sales-persons and clerks—regular folks. It never dawned on them to wait for the FEMA trucks or the Oregon National Guard.

Without worrying about mosquitoes, chemical burns, or tetanus, with no surgical masks on their faces, the NOLA Homeboys plunged forward to help the terrified. There was no hesitation, just raw human instinct to risk your life to save another person. There was a part-time dishwasher at Cannon’s Restaurant, a checkout clerk at the A & P, or a tacomaker from Juan’s Flying Burrito. Some of them were considered misfits in town…outcasts in the community… Without search and rescue training, they were fueled by a combination of courage, decency, instinct, and adrenaline. Some had never heard of FEMA, but they intuitively knew that by the time ‘those guys’ showed up, people would have drowned. ‘Law enforcement is never comfortable with common citizens coming in,’ (one officer said). “We didn’t want to be rescuing the rescuer. We had widespread violence. So we were concerned about jeopardizing their lives. In the end, thank God they did.’” (Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge, 303-304)

These NOLA Homeboys—misfits, outcasts, odd balls all--were just some of the Easter people for the victims of Katrina in New Orleans. There were many others whose names we shall never know but who, in the face of natural tragedy and human injustice beyond description, discovered within themselves and displayed for the rest of us what community really means and what the mighty power of “courage, decency, instinct, and adrenaline” can do to raise people from all but certain death.

I suspect that most of these misfits, outcasts, and odd balls were not much into church-going or organized religion. They may not even have been that much into Jesus in any conventional, traditional sense. “Christian” is probably not an adjective they would have applied to themselves. But they were—and still are, for me anyway—people who lived into the worst Friday could deliver and came to countless empty tombs at dawn to discover the angel telling them to go and do what Jesus called them to do in their time and their place.

They are—these NOLA Homeboys--the ordinary, humble, salt-of-the-earth-and-sea people through whom the Spirit of the Risen Christ in the Easter proclamation still rings throughout this nation and this world. And when the winds blow and the floodwaters rise into your homes and businesses, into your families and yourselves, God raises the very same Spirit of Christ in you, for “The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed.”

Let us pray…