WORSHIP

Selected Sermons

“Sealed or Open”

By Rev. Mary Louise McCullough

March 23, 2008
Easter Sunday

Matthew 27: 62 - 28: 10

If you’ve been reminiscing about the years we wear Easter bonnets instead of Easter mufflers … you may be happy to

know we will never have to celebrate Easter this early again.

It will be 220 years before Easter falls on March 23 again. The

last time it came around this early was 1913. Next year, we’ll

be back to a nice mid-April Easter.

Part of the problem with an early Easter is, it can make our

Easter images less convincing. When we look out on a cold

day, are we convinced that the light has come into the world? There is less sunshine to undergird our poetic responses, and we’re nowhere near that wonderful convergence we enjoy here in western Pennsylvania almost every Christmas Eve … when we read the words of the gospel of John in the darkest days of the year, light our candles and our hearts can imagine that somewhere in that opaque night, a light is being born and will

grow brighter, and brighter.

It almost seems easier this year to imagine the light still flickering, rather than coming with earthquake force and streams of radiance.

Just the other night, a group of demonstrators huddled in the

cold rain on this corner to observe that five years of war is still unacceptable. No light dawning there.

Every month, soldiers return from Iraq and have to face down depression, post traumatic stress, financial severities and other issues that rip apart the sanctuary of home they have been

longing for. No light dawning there.

Our country seems headed for a recession and some people

are losing their homes, unable to pay their bills. The pain in our city’s hurting neighborhoods is as bad as ever and getting worse. No light there.

As I considered our Matthew text against this backdrop, I thought about switching to John’s resurrection story because we have the choice, and John is the most poetic but then I realized that this year, Matthew – with all his issues – is just right for our situation. His account of this pivotal moment in time is conscious of the unresolved back-stories – they blink at us right there on the page – just like our own back-stories, the ones we bring every Sunday, and especially when we come to Easter.

Matthew shines his light on a sealed tomb. He seems to struggle a bit, trying to give his community something to grasp in a sea of doubt, something to hang onto and hope for, amidst a far reaching message that is relentless unto death.

What is resurrection in a world seemingly ruled by competing powers able to bring more death than life? Matthew’s answer is, look again at Jesus, who completed what was written by the prophets, who stood up to the powers of evil and whose voice

and presence, far from being silenced and erased, were released by God into a more powerful form than ever.

Matthew’s community never knew Jesus so they struggled with some of the same questions we have – what happened to the body? Why should I believe this story? If there is power in this story, where is that power in my life? Any historical distance is a problem with a story where you’re talking about a missing body and a divine intervention.

Here at Sixth, you have lived with those questions and from what

I am told, you have traveled out to the far end of the possibilities … some of you have tried on the Easter outfit of the one who says, there was no resurrection. … and lightning didn’t strike the building, and life went on.

And of course that has been a more acceptable, even fashionable way to go these last twenty or so years. The way of looking under the rocks in the garden rather than closing our eyes and walking blindly over them, is a more preferable way for many of us today.

Trouble is, many folks who do that end up walking right on out

of the garden. The history of the church has not been one of welcoming doubt and dissent or inquiry.

But if Christianity is to stay relevant or even alive in a postmodern world, we need to be in conversation with the rational, the scientific, we need to ask profound questions about who we are and who God is. We need to ask questions that help blind faith become authentic, grounded faith, questions that do justice to

our doubts, and to our stories, rather than simply creating a dogma of doubt. 1

I’ve had conversations with people who are hungry for something they don’t get in progressive churches – they have experienced progressive churches as happily creating their own kind of spirit-starved dogma, becoming communities so intent on affirming everything and everyone that they lose their center, they lose the active awareness that it’s not all about them and their causes.

They lose their sense of the power of God.

And the fact is, if you want to build your faith, or lack of it, on scholarly debates around resurrection, you’re still in uncertain territory. Those debates have spanned two centuries and the IQ levels on both sides are enormous. … For every argument against, there is a brilliant argument for. … The wisest scholars take us by the hand and encourage us to look at our own perceptions, the social and cultural orientations we inherit as children, because that is where we first begin to craft an understanding of life, an awareness of meaning. We can never fully escape those cultural lenses that we put on as we grow up, but we can become aware

of them, and aware of reactions against them.

I’ll never forget the day my mother, a devout liberal Southern Baptist who stood up for the Civil Rights movement and never missed a Sunday at church unless she was sick, announced

that she was having troubles with the resurrection. Now this just wasn’t something you talked about in my family.

We were at the beach one summer, having one of those vacation conversations, and she said, “Honey, I’m not sure if I believe in

the actual resurrection anymore.” It felt like a little earthquake on the beach that day. She was tired of accepting “on faith” what her faith told her to wonder about. She had been doing a lot of reading … her mind has never remained static. I’m not sure where she is on it right now but she has spent a fair amount of time, wondering.

Matthew’s audience was wondering why the world hadn’t ended yet. They were, as far as we know, a community of Gentiles and Jews around 70 A.D., struggling to understand why they should continue in this strange new religious movement when its prime eyewitnesses had preached that the world was going to end. We think we have it bad; my guess is that these folks had a lot more cognitive dissonance than we have — expecting end times that never came.

They were discovering that the daily task of living this new way was an unexpected challenge. No one had crafted a religion that would be airtight and good for 2000 years; that wasn’t their goal. They were just trying to make it for a few decades.

So Matthew focuses on this empty tomb, a tomb that is sealed. This is one of the primary differences in Matthew. A collusion of military and religious authorities tries its best to make Friday’s crucifixion the end of the story. They go to the trouble of sealing the tomb so that all will be finished, no one will say the body got up and walked away.

But an earthquake rolls away the stone. Despite everyone’s best efforts to control history, God’s purpose in all this can not be snuffed out.

And if you’ll notice, it is not the body walking away that is Matthew’s concern. It is that a tomb sealed by those who wanted to end Jesus’ ministry is suddenly wide open, and the word is out.

An earthquake rolls away the stone. Not so that Jesus can get

out — he is long gone— but so that we can see in.

We can see as we peer into that tomb that part of the story IS over. The part about the body. The washing of feet, the long walks and sleeping under the stars. That unique gift of God made flesh

in Jesus of Nazareth is complete. A new story has begun. It is about other bodies. The spotlight moves from the man Jesus to

his followers and the things they will realize and say and do. God moves into human life in a new way, diffused into many lives. These were changed people. Some of their lives were rocked as

if by an earthquake. Some changed more gradually, like that light dawning in the darkness.

So when you feel pressed to make an either/or kind of decision on resurrection, don’t buy into that particular choice: you don’t have to either believe the Easter story literally or walk away from it and simply believe in yourself. Go back and look again. Look at Jesus and what he was saying and doing. Look at the gospel writers and what they are up to. Look into that tomb which was sealed shut forever, but is now wide open for our questions and wondering.

The saving, creative work of God occurs minute by minute, every day, in spite of all kinds of efforts to shut it down. Every day, God is shaping chaos into beauty. Every day, God protects us from things that otherwise might throw us off course. We take so much for granted, you know? The saving work of God usually does not occur in cataclysmic strokes. It occurs around us, and through us, in small ways, every day. That is what we see if we gaze into that tomb instead of fleeing like the disciples who ran at the first sign of outside criticism. We flee to our explanations and our dogmatic doubt. We don’t like living in a world that makes us feel silly for even entertaining this resurrection stuff.

Kate Braestrup is a chaplain whose work takes her out for search-and-rescue missions in the forests of Maine, giving comfort to people whose loved ones have disappeared in the woods. Kate entered the seminary to become a chaplain months after her husband, Drew, a state trooper, was killed when a truck smashed into his patrol car.

She entitled her recently published memoir, Finding the Body. The publishers changed that title to, Here If You Need Me, a less fitting but more sanitized title that reflects our cultural skittishness around death, looking into tombs and such.

Admitting that her husband’s sudden and tragic end had everything to do with her own call to ministry, Kate recounts the day that the funeral director, Mr. Moss, came to meet with her after her husband’s accident. She writes, “I knew precisely what our preferences were when it came to the disposal of what Mr. Moss gently referred to as ‘the remains.’

“I am his remains,” I thought,’ Kate writes.

“I am his remains.”

Kate looked into the open tomb that day. She washed and dressed her husband’s body, and was the last to close his

coffin before it went off for cremation. Just like the two Mary’s

in Matthew’s gospel, she wanted to be near this physical reminder of the person whom she had loved, with whom she had borne four children, with whom she had laughed and cried, worked and slept. Her husband had been thinking of going to seminary, and eventually, she did.

I am his remains, she said.

In her work, she listens to cries from the depths when people

lose friends and family in awful ways. She looks at her own children and observes the way she prays for them, how every danger she stumbles upon is what she brings to prayer to ask God’s care for her loved ones.

She has stayed in the house where they all lived, even though

she has remarried, and her kids shout, “Hello Dad!” when they drive over the bridge where Drew died.

Kate understands that the gospels call us not to seal ourselves

in a religion or a dogma of doubt. That treats our spiritual lives

like a crime scene sealed off by yellow police tape. We are called to open ourselves to the messy reality of a life made sacred by a loving God. A God who is the source of miracles, every day, amidst the tragedies and the joys of human experience.

We are the remains.

The resurrection does not solve or sanitize human life; it does

not fully explain Jesus, or God or what we are to believe, or how we are to live.

The resurrection does burst through our doubts and our dogma, and push us to get back on our feet when our lives and our intellects threaten to overwhelm us.

Jesus preached and taught that God’s response to the suffering

at the heart of human life is justice drenched in love, love drenched in justice.

I don’t know about you, but I doubt if any of us would have the strength to live into that awareness without the power of resurrection that was unleashed that day among the disciples

and friends of Jesus.

The resurrection proclaims that nothing can change that. No evil on earth can alter God.

That is a resurrection to believe in!

Thanks be to God.

______________________________

1  For the idea of a dogma of doubt, I am grateful for Dale Allison’s 

    work, Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and

    Its Interpreters

Copyright 2008 Rev. Mary Louise McCullough