Resurrection of Our Lord/Easter Day

April 12, 2009

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark. (Mark 16:1‑8)

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought spices, so that they might go and anoint [Jesus’ body]. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he 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.” 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 of the Lord.

Easter is all about the new life God gives. New life comes in the most unexpected ways, at the most unexpected times, and in the most unexpected places, but new life comes.

I had an experience of new life coming to me this last week. It was an ordinary day, and it was an ordinary doctor’s visit. It’s come that time in my life, turning 47, when it seems that I have to hold the books out just a little bit farther to read them. It’s harder for me to adjust from looking at something close to something far away, or something far away to something close. My eyes just aren’t working quite the way they have in the past. Either you all are getting fuzzier, or it is time for me to let go my fantasy of having 20/20 vision for the rest of my life. So I made an appointment with an eye doctor for my sight. But what I received at that visit was insight.

I’m going to call him Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob began to examine my eyes, and we began to talk, as you do in the doctor’s office. Of course, the conversation came around to what is it that I do for a living. And I told him that I was a Lutheran pastor. He said, “Oh. Where is that? I said, “Immanuel Lutheran Church over here on Snelling Avenue, right by Macalester College.” And he said, “Well, do you know the chaplain at Macalester College, Lucy?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “Well, I went on a trip recently through our church with Lucy to Thailand.” He identified himself as being a member of one of the neighboring churches. Upon which I said, “Happy Maundy Thursday,” for it was this last Thursday when this occurred. And he said, “Well, the same to you, too.” So the conversation turned to matters of faith just a bit.

As he looked deeply through my open pupil into the back of my eye, he exclaimed, “What a miracle! What a miracle!” He said, “Your eyes are normal. The normal ordinary eye is, to me, just an incredible miracle.” I agreed. He said, “You know, the more that I learn about science the more faith I have. The more I learn the more that I realize I don’t understand. How mysterious and miraculous the world around us is; just the ordinary things.”

He said, “I have friends who are scientists as well, doctors, and they ask me, ‘How is it that you can believe in eternal life?’ You know what I say to them? I say, ‘Well, you’re already on your third life.’ And they say, ‘What?’” He said, “Yeah. I tell them, ‘You started out as a sperm and an egg, and life seemed pretty good at that time. But you had no idea what new thing was going to occur when you got together. An entire new universe occurred. And that seemed really good for a time—nice and warm and cozy and comfortable—until that one day you get pushed out into the world. And here you are, in your third existence. So why can’t you imagine there is another pushing out into an existence we can no more imagine now than you as a fetus could imagine this outside world?”

At which point I said, “This reminds me of a conversation that I had with my daughter a few years back, when she was four, and we were looking in the backyard at the place where our cat had been buried. My wife Andrea asked Charlie, “Where do you think Harvey went?” And Charlie, without skipping a beat, said, “Harvey went into the world.” Into the world! Not into the ground, not into the earth, not into heaven, but into the world. What is the world? Or, better, what is not the world? The world is more than the planet, more than what we can see or name or perceive. The world is all of it, everything. Without realizing it quite ( or maybe she did) Charlie spoke of a new relationship to the totality of existence, unbounded as we are today by space and time.

Each new existence is a death and a rebirth. The sperm and egg must die to their old, separate existence to become a growing embryo and fetus. The fetus must die to the womb and umbilical cord in order to become a person in the outer world. And, one must die to this temporal, bodily experience to be “pushed out” into eternal life.

So the conversation went on. He said, “Well, enough about what I don’t really know about. Let’s get back to what I do know about.” He told me about my eyes. He said they were fine and I just need reading glasses. Then it came to the bill, and he said, “Now, does your insurance cover all of this visit or just part of it?” I said I didn’t know. He said, “Well, I’m going to write on this bill, ‘Insurance Only,’ because the only payment I want from you is your prayers.” I said, “I’m glad to offer you my prayers. But is there anything in particular?” He said, “Yes, yes, there is. You see, this is the seventh anniversary of my daughter’s death. She was killed in a car accident, 30 miles an hour, two blocks from home, no seat belt.”

The pain in his voice went straight to my heart. I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear.” Seeing that I was empathizing, he said, “We’re ok. We know we’re going to be somehow reunited again. And we have a son as well…” Then he caught himself, and he said, “Yes, it’s very, very difficult.” I promised him my prayers. I thanked him for his time and for the insight, and I left.

You know how, when you go to the doctor, they put those drops in your eye that opens your pupils wide up and so you can’t really handle the light? I stepped out from the building into the bright morning sunlight, and it just hurt, my eyes just hurt, and all I wanted to do was get out of the light. It was too much, too much for me. My eyes were blurry and my mind whirred with thoughts about the connection between pain and sight, death and life, what we see and what we don’t see…what we are made to see, and what we refuse to see. I went over to the nearest Hardy’s and I got myself a sausage biscuit and a cup of coffee. I tried to jot down a few notes, but I couldn’t see the page in front of me. I realized that he had given me a gift; that he had shared with me, out of the pain of death, his experience and insight into new life.

Our Gospel story today shares this kind of ambiguity—death and life, life and death. The Gospel writer Mark tells us that early, two days after Jesus had been crucified, these faithful women went to care for the body at the tomb. When they arrived, they found that the tomb has been opened up and that Jesus is not there. A young man, an angel we suppose, tells them that he has risen and he’s gone ahead of them. “Go tell the others.” But they are in such shock, and fear, and bewilderment that they say nothing to anyone because, it says, “They were afraid.” That’s the way Mark ends the Gospel, as if to say, “In conclusion, inconclusion.” The story is without an ending. It ends with a recent death, grieving friends, an empty tomb, a promise and fear. Unlike the other Gospels, Mark does not give us a resurrected Jesus, but only a word about it.

I want to suggest that there are two very powerful images in the story. The first is the empty grave itself. We never see Jesus alive again in the Gospel of Mark. All we have is an empty grave and a word, a promise that says, “He’s not here. He’s risen.”

Every grave is an empty grave. Every grave is an empty grave. Every grave that you have been to, every loved one that you have put in the ground is not there. When we go and we bury our beloved, we stand at the edge of the grave, and that place becomes a marker for us, a marker of our separation, the experience, the very real experience of the separation that we experience. But they are not there. They have gone into the world. They have been pushed out into another existence. Where they are, we can’t say. What it’s like, we can’t exactly say. But what we can say is that that grave is empty. She is not there; he is not there.

Secondly, at the very end of this Gospel is a picture of women who loved Jesus so, in fear and in confusion and in silence. It’s too easy for us Christians to read these stories and to minimize or forget the trauma that has just occurred two days earlier. They have witnessed what nobody should ever have to witness. They have seen what nobody should ever have to see. Their beloved friend and teacher has been betrayed, beaten, brutalized, crushed, tortured, unjustly accused, humiliated, and finally killed.

It’s too easy for us Christians, in the light of the resurrection, to minimize the death, the tragedy, and the trauma that are all around us every day. The resurrection doesn’t fix us. The resurrection doesn’t fix our world. War still rages; children still are abused and neglected; starvation still occurs; injustice still happens; rights are trampled. Even now, while we celebrate Easter here this morning, death and suffering are happening all around us, and even in your lives as well.

In the Gospel of Mark resurrection does not trump the death. It is death and resurrection. It is resurrection and death, both occurring at the same time. The new life had already occurred when the women went to the tomb, but they couldn’t yet see it. It is our limitation of sight that makes us see either death or the newness of life. Had we eyes to see, we would see that they belong to each other, and neither occurs without the other.

Dr. Bob was not trying to evangelize me, but rather to share something from his journey for his sake and for mine. On one point, however, he offered gentle advice: He said, “You know, whenever I tell this story, I always tell people to wear their safety belt.” I thought about that. I thought, how beautiful. His pain and his loss, combined with his faith in new life, have united in a simple offering to others, a simple word: “Wear your safety belt. Take care of yourself. Your life is a precious gift to be kept safe.”

The Gospel of Mark is inconclusive. It’s not death and then resurrection. It’s not death being overcome by resurrection. It’s both death and resurrection. We always experience both at the same time, even when we don’t have eyes to see them both. There is no resurrection without death, and there is no death without resurrection.

Amen.