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April 16, 2006 (Easter) [The one at the tomb] said to them, "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." (Mark 16: 6-7) Life is probably round. You heard me; life is probably round. Now don't go thinkin' this is something I just made up. And no, it's not a variation on the old cliché, "What goes around comes around." Life is probably round. I remembered these words as I prayed earlier this holy week. They took me by surprise and took me back twenty years. All the way back to a different lifetime, my university career. Quite often on a lunch break I would wander over to the Conley Art Building just to see what was going on over there. You never could tell. Someone might be pouring bronze for a sculpture; someone else might be putting butcher paper in the restroom stalls to encourage artful graffiti. One day--maybe I was cutting through the courtyard to make a meeting, maybe I was just ambling through just to amble through--but one day I paused at a bulletin board and saw an announcement for a senior exhibit. Life is probably round, the invitation read in crisp letters on thick white vellum. Beneath was a richly-hued circle, brimming with delicate images from the created world. It was nestled inside another circle, one that was a thick band of gold leaf. Taken in full, it was an image that seemed both sacred and safe. Life is probably round. Well of course it is, I said to myself! Just look at the earth and its daily walk around the sun. Remember the seasons and their turning. Consider the bellies of our mothers. No, I thought quickly, the artist means more than this. Although what, exactly, I wasn't quite sure. Unable to step away, an idea occurred to me. Looking one way and then another, I reached up, took down, and carried home that invitation. And I've held onto it for twenty years. Off and on for that many years, I've gotten it out to contemplate--this big-little work of art with its multi-layered and rather mysterious message. * * * * * * * * * * When it comes to Easter and uniformity in gospel storytelling, there simply is no such animal. Put our five Easter stories side by side - each gospel has one and so does Paul in First Corinthians - and you'll discover something: each one is detailed in ways the others aren't. In Matthew's account, for instance, as the women make their way to the tomb an earthquake occurs. But you'll find Luke is quake-less and includes elements not found in the others. Put one version of the Easter story next to another and you will find they look more like cousins than twins. Now, I mention all this not to stir our doubts about the veracity, the truthfulness, of the Easter-emptied tomb that lies at the center of our faith. Truth stretches beyond fact and the verifiable to embrace something far greater, something we moderns have a difficult time grasping. It bothers my believing not at all to have five variations on the resurrection. In fact, these variations enrich my believing. Why? Because rather than a point-by-point "everyone's got the exact same Easter morning account," what these differences suggest is that the surprise at the tomb, the unexpected reality of Christ's resurrection was so awesome, so unanticipated, so beyond the scope of the human mind that no one knew quite how to describe what they found. Then, then, add to that the fact that neither Paul nor any of the gospel writers were eye-witnesses to that glorious morning and you've got the makings of dissimilarity in reporting. Remember that for a whole generation after his resurrection, the story of what happened following Jesus' death was one that was spread by word of mouth. In our age of instantaneous reporting, this delay in written storytelling (20 years in Paul's case, 60 to 70 in John's), is confounding. But now back to Mark's particular telling of the resurrection story. Well acquainted with John's version, but less so with Mark's, as I read something distinctive in our account today leapt out at me: when the three women get to the tomb with their spices to prepare Jesus' body for burial, not only has Jesus been raised from the dead, he has left the resurrection scene entirely. By the time our faithful three get to the cemetery, the tomb is emptied out and the Risen Christ has gone home to Galilee. Life is probably round. Newly raised from the dead, Jesus seeks the place he was born and raised. The place his ministry sprang up is where his ministry again takes him. Jesus' new life begins precisely where his old life began--back at home in Galilee. Back where he knows by heart the contours of the land and each hidden spring gushing its cool, sweet water. Jesus goes home; back to the place he knows so well that he can walk blindfolded and still get where he needs to go. Back where he knows not only the voices but the stories of nearly everyone at the marketplace on a Tuesday morning. By the time the women show up in the early morning hours to tend to the body of their dear Jesus, burial spices and hearts in hand, he is not there. Their Jesus is alive again and he has gone home to Galilee. Life is probably round. Gone home. Gone home. Don't we say that when someone dear passes? Don't we say of those we have loved and lost to death that they have gone home? Not to the homes of their childhood, of course, but to the home from which every soul comes--the very heart of God? Isn't goin' home a huge part of our Easter joy? Don't we rejoice together that the ones we love and lose are not lost to God? That their journeys have not dead-ended into sheer nothingness? But that their journeys have circled back to return them to their heavenly home, just as ours will one day? "I'm sorry for your loss," we say to one another when death descends. And while there is sadness, there is also hope-filled confidence. Privileged with an Easter faith, we know that the one loved in life is anything but lost. The one we have loved has gone home. Life is probably round. If you're a Christian, life isn't probably round. It is round. It is! Our journey begins and ends in God. Nothing, not even the darkest of dark happenings, not even the ultimate dark happening--death, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Because Christ lives in that love, we too shall live there with him for all eternity. And yet, and yet, I want more for us to hold fast to and rejoice over than the knowledge that because of and through and indeed with Christ, we will each find ourselves at home at last. As marvelous as this is, and it is marvelous, I want us to find in Jesus' journey from life to death to life again something more than assurance for what awaits us after death. I want Easter to come alive for us in the living of our lives here and now. I want each of you not just to know--but to feel--that there is no circumstance so difficult, no betrayal so great, no diagnosis so unexpected that you will be left lifeless in the tomb, left in endless death even as your heart still beats and your days inch on. Life is full of deaths of every kind. The ending of a marriage. The closing of a factory and thus a career. Life has its deaths. The loss of a friendship or an opportunity or, even perhaps, a limb. It can even be a death when the children at last leave the nest or when you arrive at the shore of a much-anticipated retirement. Each ending, even a longed-after one, can carry the sting of death. And yet we are not left in death. Not us. Not God's Easter people. Even as the Lenten season begins with the humbling Ash Wednesday reminder--heard in words and marked on the forehead, "From dust you have come and from dust you shall return," death is not our final destination. Easter's unequivocal claim, Easter's trumpeted message is this: life is round. It does not end with the endings our eyes see. It does not cease when something runs its course or when there is a breach so permanent that no amount of effort can reassemble it. God did and does and always will bring life out of death. God did and does and will complete life's circle. But remember--and this is important because otherwise we set God up to disappoint us: God does not resuscitate. God resurrects. God goes further than we would. We would simply bring back what we had before. But when God brought Jesus back to life, God reached for more. In the dark of the tomb, God did more than blow holy air into Jesus' lungs so that he could rise up and continue on doing exactly what he had been doing before he was crucified. No, in the tomb God recreated Jesus. In the tomb God breathed into Jesus life that was at once the same and also more than Jesus had known on the front side of death. And as with Jesus, so with those who encountered him. Upon his resurrection, upon experiencing him alive again, they were not the same either. They, too, were more than they had been when they were with him before. This is what makes the roundness of God's life-giving ways so marvelous. If all we got was exactly what we had, where would be the wonder in that? The gift in that? The really real life in that? Even as we rejoice this Easter morn, even as we celebrate that for us death had ended, let us remember that Easter is not the end of our journey. It is, instead, the place where we begin, yet again. Life is more than probably round. It is--we can see at Easter--perfectly, perfectly round. And like the circle on that art show invitation twenty years ago, like the life of Jesus--the one who died for us--life is more than round. Life is held in a perfect golden circle--the great, unending circle of God's love for us which keeps calling us forth to be even more of what we have always been. Deep in your soul, you know Easter's truth: yes, you are goin' home. So be bold--go, go and really live now! In God, truly you have nothing to lose. And only new life to gain. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen
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