April 12, 2009
The Sunday of the Resurrection (Year B)
Easter Day
Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11;
Mark 16:1-8
(7:45 and 10:30 AM Services)
The Marys and Salome, in Mark’s version of the resurrection gospel that we just read, these women go to the tomb. They go having witnessed the man they loved and supported and believed in, willingly accept death on the cross, not putting up much of a fight, actually. They watched him die a tortuous death.
And so, as soon as it was sunrise and the Sabbath officially over, they went to finish preparing his body for permanent burial. They went to the place where he had been temporarily laid.
It is not difficult to imagine what they were feeling, is it? Despair, sadness, probably “if onlys” ran through their minds and conversation. They might have felt anger, even at Jesus for not fighting harder, at the men, his supposed friends, who did not defend him, angry at themselves for not doing more to protect and provide for him. In fact all that they felt probably ran a whole array of emotions. And we could probably describe any number of them. But I would guess that not one of us, nor one of the women, would have described themselves as hopeful. Indeed, I would guess that hope was not in their range of possibilities at all. They were without hope of ever seeing their beloved Jesus again. They were without hope for the political renewal of the Hebrew people against the Roman occupiers. They probably were without hope for their own lives. What meaning did they now have? What were they to do with their lives now?
No. Hope was not what they were feeling at all.
That is because hope is what we hold deep in our beings when all is lost. Hope is what we trust when circumstances might dictate that there is no hope. And nothing had ever happened in the history of their lives, or time with Jesus, or the history of their people, or the world, that would have even given them the merest glimpse that hope could actually be the most honest and true emotion, the purest truth of their day. But they didn’t know that then.
They went to the tomb, encountered the “man” dressed in white, perhaps an angel – perhaps. I have not encountered an angel, but those who have say this description of a man in white would fit. The women encountered the man and still even after the man – or angel – in white told them that Jesus was not there but was going ahead of them to Galilee, and that they were to tell Peter and the others to meet him there, even then, hope is not what they felt or knew.
Instead they knew terror and amazement, and ultimately fear. Fear is what causes us not to tell that which seems impossible to others, not express that which might be unpopular or put us in some sort of questionable light. Fear is what owns us in such times of clamming up. Fear! Fear gripped them when hope is what should have owned them. For more than at Christmas, more than at any other point in history hope was born that morning, hope that defines the followers and hope, my friends, that gives us a reason to continue to be and to continue to hope some two thousand years later.
And let me be clear, as Darrell Jodock says in the Christian Century, “HOPE is not optimism – for optimism is based on the indications that things that are going well will continue on that same trajectory, will continue and bring positive results.”
Hope on the other hand does not arise from a perceived pattern of success. Hope can come in the worst of all glooms, and can even occur in the midst of complete pessimism. Hope can only come from something outside the situation. It is a dim light in the complete darkness. Hope is based not on what I can do to fix things but on what another is doing, another, beyond my control or your control.
And so that morning hope was not in their vocabulary or world view, and optimism probably wasn’t either, for there was nothing in the trajectory of the circumstance of the past few days that would have led them to think of hope at all.
And yet hope is what they knew within a few short hours!
How hopeful are you? When you hear of the resurrection, do you believe it? Does it confirm your deepest hope and define your life because you know that you are not in control? Does the resurrection speak to you telling you that something, someone, God, is in control of all things and that with God all will be well? I think that is one of the most powerful truths of Easter. God is in control. And because God is, we can hope even when nothing in the world would seem to allow us the slightest bit of it, nothing as it did for the women that morning.
I am sixty-two years old, nearly sixty-three. And when I was sixteen, I was incurably optimistic. I believed that by the time I was sixty-two, nearly sixty-three, the world would be free of cancer, war, poverty injustices of racism, and that people of all nations, genders, sexual orientation, and ages would live respecting the dignity of each and rejoicing in the diversity of creation. I believed that my generation would solve all the country’s problems and by extension the world’s.
I also did not believe in God, and was furious that churches were insinuating themselves into the causes that I felt so compelled to spend my time and energy working for, not out of a faith stance, but because I expected more of my generation. I truly believed in the inherent goodness of human beings to do the moral and just thing for a better and more just world. I was very active in antiwar movements – the
But I was young then and didn’t know much.
Now today, there is no cure for cancer. Indeed I have had it myself and am in remission – one is never really cured. And my generation has brought about the worst wars of all, unjust to my way of thinking. And nations still fight against nation; human beings still create terrible weapons and threaten each other with them; poverty is far from solved even though as we say each time we leave this place, “We know we humans have the means to end extreme poverty.” Racism is just as rampant, though not as blatant perhaps; sexism just as cruel, and far more subtle and debilitating; and the middle class is shrinking instead of growing: the extreme between rich and poor is an ever widening gulf. Gay and lesbian and bisexual people still have to go through all sorts of mechanisms to live peaceably, in a sacred blessed institution like marriage with the love of their life – if they live in a state that allows it at all. Today the world is no better off than it was. Indeed an argument could be made that it is worse. And if optimism, that optimism I was so sure of at sixteen, were all that we had to get us through the next year, let alone the next month or day, then I would say there was nothing left for us. But optimism is not want defines us!
Because Jesus was alive that morning, resurrected, not resuscitated or revived, but resurrected into a new being, we know there is another way toward all those sixteen year old things I was so sure of and now as a mature woman of deep faith can proclaim as possible, but not by our own doing, by God’s. Jesus did not finish the story that Easter morning when he was resurrected; he began it. And we are still at the beginning. We are not finished; God is not finished. And because God is the one who is in control, there is hope. We have hope. The world has hope.
Easter is not the end of the story my friends, not this day, not that first Easter Day, rather it is the foundation, the beginning and the hope out of which all else flows. As powerful as Christmas is when we celebrate the birth of a living God, God who became one of us, for me Easter is far more powerful for Easter tells us that it is not a human being that is in control, God is; and, that, my friends, gives reason to our hope for all things, even in the darkest of times. God is alive always, and we are invited into that hopeful reality this day and every day.
May that hope surround you today, and may it be a glimmering light for all your days henceforth. For we are above all else Easter people grounded in hope, love, and forgiveness, and that is the promise of Christ resurrected by God to a broken and pain-filled world. Hope!
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd