Texts on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006
Isaiah 25: 6-9; Mark 16: 1-8
Mark probably ended his gospel like that. “Terror and amazement had them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” No stories of the appearances of the risen Lord, no conversations, no miracles, no ascending on high. Just an angel’s assurance to the women that the grave is not where Jesus is, for he has gone before you to Galilee, and you will see him, just as he had said. And they fled, afraid, and said nothing to anyone.
Church people added other endings to Mark’s story. Perhaps they found this too stark, or not useful for Sunday school. You can read the added verses, 9-20 on your own. For now, feel the effect of the story as its author meant to end it. You have the angel’s word and the women’s wordlessness. Which won out? The Word, obviously. When? When an experience of the Word–these angel promises–moved from the ear to the heart, saying, Something wonderful has happened. On some day after the death of hope, after the empty tomb and the ripple in the air from the Spirit (which we call angels’ words) something wonderful had happened to affirm for them that death has lost its power and only Love lives. Not the idea of love. Not the Hallmark card of love, or your grandmother’s sweet way in love, or your best friend’s. But God who is Love lives: Godself risen to Love in the flesh, now in their flesh who felt pierced by Love’s rising to them, in them, and themselves raised from their own death, and fear of death, to live with Love.
But this–what I am saying–is a lot of words, a lot more than angels trouble with. That is why Mark ended his story abruptly: to stop talking too much about resurrection. To catch you and me, as if in a mirror, in the act of our being afraid, in the act of our saying nothing to anyone. For we are afraid, and we hardly ever say anything to anyone about what God has done, except grace at meals. The way Mark tells it, however, we can see ourselves at the tomb, speechless and afraid. But when we acknowledge that we have heard the angel’s promise–you will see him–we can then begin to see that if we are still speechless and afraid, something wonderful must yet still happen: a new experience of Love risen in the flesh. For isn’t it plain that if such a wonderful thing had not come to the women, they would never have spoken and we would never have heard, or hoped?
So, when does Resurrection come to you, appearing in the flesh? Today? Timely? In the will of the calendar, rather than by the grace of God? Not likely. The Lord comes to those who wait. This is the constant chorus of the scriptures. You heard it again today in the song of the prophet Isaiah:
It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited. Let us rejoice in his salvation.
The essential thing in becoming human–which is just another word for salvation–is to learn the practice of actively waiting for the rising Lord in everything you can care about. The primary characteristic of actively waiting for the Lord is no judgment; not knowing the answer; not knowing what is supposed to happen, but being present to what is. Let us let God be at least as free as a novelist in writing your life; surely God is not so narrow and stuck in his stories that Resurrection must come for you primarily as relaxation of your doubt that Jesus’ dead body really walked again. I think God doesn’t waste time knocking down the doors we have barred; there are other ways in. On the other hand, if you are settled in mind that Jesus did rise bodily, do not suppose that you have thereby jumped the fence into the pasture of salvation, and that all waiting for the Lord is for you over. If your expectations about Easter Resurrection are too firmly packed in the can of the gospel story, then you may know too much, whether in dismay or in confidence. If you think you know what was supposed to happen, you are not able to actively wait for your risen God. May you be blessed this day with acceptance of not-knowing how you will meet your God, and with hope that this story was told to put you in it, actively waiting for his appearing.
Something like this came to us in the prison on Good Friday, where the Cephas organization holds a weekly conversation. I want to tell you about D, whom I met at Attica half a year ago. D is–or was–a gangster. To judge from the deference other prisoners gave him, I think he was notorious on the streets of New York City. He is, as they say, charismatic–a leader. He dominated our discussions the way some politicians or leaders of huge churches do. But D’s message to his disciples was that the violence he had done, including many killings, was all necessary, for his victims had threatened him one way or another. He had only satisfaction in his mind for the work of his life. As for the loves of his life, he had only satisfaction for the dozen children he had sown in the world through as many mothers. He rolled his personality like a thunderstorm across the room, speckled with so much laughter and confidence. Men whom we have known for years, men who are thoughtful and committed to the possibility of rising from their grave, would not speak while he held forth. With an official’s bark over the P.A. system, the ninety minutes would end abruptly, and but for the observations from us volunteers–which D would intercept like a star forward, and dribble toward his goal–not one word was heard for transformation.
We volunteers were concerned. Might one man’s charisma actually shut down the process of development in others, or at least the contribution which this weekly conversation might make? Trust the process; wait, we said. He kept coming back. Was it really enough for him, to dominate this little band, and go nowhere, while we volunteers proposed rockier, narrower, higher paths? D was often volunteering that he did not believe in God. One day he learned what I do. I won’t forget his mantra from that day, interjected throughout the hour: You’re a minister?, and: Why are you looking at me? But now that he had an authority in the room, he said he wanted a definition of religion, and of what it means to be spiritual.
Some of you know my definition. The spiritual life begins with awareness of yourself as being at least two selfs; an “I”, and a rock that is higher than I. Spiritual life begins with awareness of the possibility that I who am lower am related to the I who am higher, who see from a greater standpoint. Spiritual life experiences the possibility that I can move beyond (Latin, transcendere) the limits of my low place; that “i” can become I, in the power of God. I told D this. He understood the concept. I told him that his desire to know what “spiritual” means suggested that he was spiritual, never mind that he did not believe in God. He dismissed this. He argued that he had no desire or need for change. He was the example of how a man should be, proud, complete, and willing and able to pay the cost of his commitments. In point of fact, his beliefs about himself virtually define what it is to be an unspiritual man. Those beliefs happen also to furnish the definition of the self-made man. Still, we wondered why he came. It seemed he must be looking for something, perhaps even already seeing something–or desiring to be seen.
D was absent from the conversation for many weeks. It regained its depth; the men dug down again; they moved each other toward responsibility, toward hope, toward freedom. A young man started coming, only 28 years old. Most of the wise men in the Cephas conversation are a good many years older than that, for it has taken a good many years longer for their spirit to cry out from the bondage of ignorance and fear. On Good Friday, D came back. Two guests had accompanied me that day; I almost whispered to them that this day’s dialogue would probably disappoint. D hung back, staring at the ceiling as the conversation moved like a diver for pearls. One of the men asked us volunteers what motivates our going into the prison. We told them of the gift of being in conversation with men who are actively waiting to rise from lower things, from fear and speechlessness, to things above, to freedom, hope, and love.
Then D spoke a long speech. He told us how he had been watching us from the beginning, even from the first time he had seen us from a holding cell as we passed down a hallway. He told us how he did not trust us at all, not our white skin, not our ignorance of their affliction, not our judgment. “But I’m changing,” he said. Here was no trembling remorse, but a clear eye. “I still can’t believe in some God above who just looks and forgives you everything at a glance, but I find myself in my cell talking as if to someone, talking about what I hope and about what I’ve done. I’m still a gangster, but there’s this second voice in me. I’ve never had a conscience, never regretted anything. But now I am having a conscience, and it’s because of these conversations with you. You come in here and you don’t judge us. And you, I still can’t believe it, you’re a minister?”
He told us that he had become an ambassador for the Cephas conversation; that the 28 year old whom we had met during his absence was one of the men he had sent, after persistently working to overcome the man’s resistance to this idea of a dialogue. The young man nodded; yes, D had sent him. “I’m not sure I believe in what you call God, but I am talking to something, and I want something different for my children. This conversation, it is good.”
The Cephas dialogue is an expression of the practice we have called “actively waiting for the Lord” to appear–how, we do not know. At the prison, we do not press the name of the risen One on the men to make him appear. But on Good Friday, he did–for all who were there! It matters not by what name or symbol anyone in that circle knew Love’s appearing. The fact is, like the women of the Easter story, D was far from the tomb, no longer afraid, and speaking–and in his speaking he had become a fisher of men. Resurrection means–not the thing that happened, of which you can make a suit of armor and steely facts from which you never move or speak, as you stand convinced in the cold corridors of the culture’s castle. Resurrection means that you know, or you are actively waiting to know, that something wonderful has happened just now. Resurrection means that you are so deep into the dialogue with what is really going on in your life–with who is really going on in your life–that, impatient of small talk and traditional religious answers forced into every cry of anguish heard in this world, you are ready to tell it like it is. Going to Galilee to see him means that you are ready yourself, you know not how, to be an instrument of God’s peace, to become fully human, judging no one, and knowing nothing of how God can appear in the flesh, yet willing that God might appear through you or to you by anyone, alongside any sinner, no matter his story, no matter her past. To wait upon the Lord is to wait actively, passionately for Love to rise between the words of the dialogue of your life.
And lest it seem that this very personal encounter have no great effects beyond your own concerns and your own peace of mind, hear, in closing, one story more about the miracle of waiting on the Lord when the world is almost at war. It happened this way for Martin Buber, the great Jewish mystic, and for a Christian clergyman in the year of 1914, just months before the great war was unleashed.
My friendship with one now dead arose in an incident that may be described, if you will, as a broken-off conversation. The date is Easter 1914. Some men from different European peoples had met in an undefined presentiment of the catastrophe [the First World War], in order to make preparations for an attempt to establish a supra-national authority. The conversations were marked by that unreserve, whose substance and fruitfulness I have scarcely ever experienced so strongly. It had such an effect on all who took part that the fictitious fell away and every word was an actuality. Then, as we discussed the composition of the larger circle from which public initiative should proceed . . . one of us, a man of passionate concentration and judicial power of love, raised the consideration that too many Jews had been nominated, so that several countries would be represented in unseemly proportion by their Jews . . . Obstinate Jew that I am, I protested against the protest. I no longer know how from that I came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him. “In a way that remains inaccessible to you”–so I directly addressed the [late] clergyman. He stood up, I too stood, we looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. “It is gone,” he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood.
The discussion of the situation between Jews and Christians had been transformed into a bond between the Christian and the Jew. In this transformation, dialogue was fulfilled. Opinions were gone, in a bodily way the factual took place.
Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, MacMillan, 1947. p. 5ff.
Resurrection comes in the gift of no longer being afraid. Love comes in fact, in the flesh, able in spite of many words to speak truth and peace in a bond truer than any agreement of minds can make. For this, God raises Love from death to life in you. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, April 2006
Recent Comments