This Sunday is Easter Sunday and we invite you to join us for an intergenerational Easter Worship Service! Each Easter Sunday we celebrate the universal message that new life can spring forth even from our darkest moments. We all have “empty tombs” of loss, pain, and uncertainty. Yet, with hope and courage we emerge to find new life and meaning. Hallelujah!
Listen to a podcast of this homily.
Readings
"Rolling Away the Stone," No. 628 in Singing the Living Tradition
"Easter Morning," No. 623 in Singing the Living Tradition
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The gospel of Mark, which our reading is based on, is the most intriguing of the gospel accounts to me because of the closing lines we just read.
“So they went
out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they
said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
The gospel
writer, Mark, leaves out the most celebrated aspect of the Easter story – the
appearance of the resurrected Jesus.
No, grand
hallelujah ending here.
The story does
not have a nice, neat happy conclusion.
For this
reason, perhaps, it seems to me an exceedingly fitting version of the Easter
story for Unitarian Universalists.
We who doubt
any story with an easy resolution.
We who invite
questions without easy answers.
In the version
of the gospel account that we just engaged in, we are invited to put ourselves
in the place of the women who first go to the tomb of Jesus:
Mary
Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, a follower of Jesus.
These women
had witnessed their teacher, their dear friend brutally murdered and
humiliated. The ministry of Jesus had involved prophesying against the
political and religious establishment. He was seen as enough of a threat that
he was arrested, brought before the court, and sentenced to death by one of the
most brutal means possible – crucifixion.
The women had
just witnessed all this happen to someone they loved so dearly and then watched
as he was buried.
And, they wished
to honor him and follow proper burial procedures. So once the Sabbath had
ended, they gathered together bringing their spices and oils to anoint his
body. One final outpouring of love.
They first
worry over who will roll the stone away from the entrance to the tomb. And they
arrive to discover the stone already moved and the body of their beloved one
gone. A man dressed in a white robe is there and tells them to tell the others
what they have seen and to go to Galilee and they will find Jesus there.
Instead, as
Mark’s gospel account tells it, they fled seized by terror and amazement and
did not say a word to anyone.
No, not a neat
and tidy ending to this story.
You may be
wondering, as I sometimes have, Is this really an Easter story?
I mean,
where’s the rejoicing? Where is the miraculous resurrection?
Instead, the
story leaves us on the edge of our seats yearning for that glimmer of hope in
this dark moment of despair.
In our own
dark moments of despair, we yearn for this same glimmer of hope. We do not want
fear and terror to be the last word.
But, I would
propose that the gospel of Mark’s cliff-hanger ending is not an ending at all
but a beginning.
We know that,
historically speaking, the story did not in fact end there. It did not end with
the women, out of fear, speaking to no one. In fact, news spread of the empty
tomb and Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and of his appearance to his
disciples. And the community of people that followed and proclaimed his
teachings lived on bringing forward the message that love conquers all.
When the women
found the tomb empty, there was anguish and questioning and desolation. But,
there was also possibility and hope.
Whether we
believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus or not, the Easter story communicates
the possibility - the promise - that death does not have the last word.
We can look to
our own lives and the world around us here and now for the assurance that this
is true.
Together this
morning we participated in a powerful ritual of bringing forth life and beauty
from stark barrenness. Already the buds of flowers have begun pushing their way
up and out of the cold, wet ground. Birds have begun returning with their
morning greetings.
Just a week
ago, I was beginning to wonder whether we were destined to live in an eternal
winter. It seemed like we would never emerge from that cold and gray empty
tomb.
And, we face
many of these kinds of empty tombs, don’t we?
Mourning the
loss of a dear friend, wife, grandfather, child.
Losing your
job and wondering what comes next.
Waiting for
the day you can be reunited with family living thousands of miles away because
they can’t get the right papers to be in this country.
Like the women
at the tomb, we have faced those moments when it seemed that fear and amazement
at what is happening in our lives is all there is.
But, these
experiences of our life do not have the last word. They are just a beginning.
Kate Braestrup
is a Unitarian Universalist chaplain for the Maine Warden Service. In 1996, she
was living in a small coastal town with her husband and their four young
children. Her husband,
Drew, was a law enforcement officer and had talked about going into seminary. One morning
Drew left for work in his squad car while Kate was at home getting herself and
the children ready to head out for the day. And, Kate
heard a siren go by and stopped to wonder who the ambulance might be for. They lived in
a small enough community that she would probably know who it was for and she
stopped to stay a little prayer for them. And she says,
“And then as I was putting my shoes on right after that, I was thinking about
how much I loved Drew and how nice it was to still be in love with him after 11
years of marriage. That was actually when he died. The ambulance was for him.” She continues,
“When he died, two things happened. One was that I was in the same moment
confronted by an unbearable loss and also by the realization that there were
people and a community all around me that were there to help me bear it.” Within a year
of his death, Kate, who had been a writer, entered seminary and began
preparations to become a chaplain. “What Drew
did,” she says, “was to begin a process or to start hacking out the road that
one of us was going to travel.” [from her interview with Krista Tippett]
Life begins
again even from our moments of darkest despair.
Mary Oliver’s
poem, “I Will Try,” describes her personal encounter with grief and her
emergence from it. She writes,
I will try.
I will step
from the house to see what I see
and hear and I
will praise it...
[from the collection Red Bird]
Our rising up
and stepping forth again can be this subtle. Like an almost unrecognizable song
coming from deep within.
Rising up from
devastation.
Rising up from
grief.
Rising up from
uncertainty.
It happens
again and again and again.
Like the faith
we have in the earth’s renewal, we can believe in the miraculous resurrection
of our own spirits.
This Easter,
may we believe again that new life is possible in every moment.
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Benediction
"Gardeners of the spirit," May Sarton
May we be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit
who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth
as without light nothing flowers.
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