Monday, April 1, 2013

Remembering our past: Easter-life




The History Channel’s six-week mini series on the Bible is wrapping up tonight and, in spite of the fact that it’s gotten good reviews, I won’t be watching in large part because when Jesus rises from the dead there is no way the producers of that series are going to capture the look that I imagine on the disciples’ faces. Somebody in charge of production is going to be way too pious about this and direct the actors who play the disciples to look completely dopey in an attempt to convey awe. But I know how they really looked; it’s the way somebody looks when you tell them something and they think they know where you’re going with it. “Yes, yes, tomb, Jesus, gardener, yeah, yeah… resurrection… Wait, what?” That’s what the History channel isn’t going to get—that “wait, what?” moment. How could they? The actors know the script and, let’s face it, the History channel isn’t budgeting for A-list actors to play Jesus’ disciples. Anyway, none of us can put ourselves in the place of those disciples that first Easter morning.

Time and time again, Jesus told his disciples about how he was going to die and rise from the dead, and yet they are clearly dumbfounded when it actually happens. It seems that none of them really believed in Jesus as the Son of God, because God’s son certainly could hold the resurrection card. Didn’t these guys remember Lazarus? Yet, in the face of the inexplicable, only a few women—Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and some others unnamed—hear the words of the angels and remember what Jesus had told them. Only they remember. In the Gospel of Luke, these women are in on everything; they are, in fact, disciples since Luke distinguishes between the twelve apostles and the wider cast of disciples. In fact, the way these women quickly understood what was being said to them suggests they were the disciples who were actually listening to Jesus in those days back in Galilee. (This is just another example of everything Kate tells me about men and listening)
             We have heard these stories, have learned the lessons, and so really the only question before us is whether we remember. Faith comes by hearing, but it is enacted in remembering. All of faith is simply remembering a great thing we once knew but which is called into question in our daily lives. The world out there sells us the story that there is no such thing as an empty tomb, no resurrection of the dead, and certainly no life in the world to come. The world says that is an escapist fantasy.
            Easter is a strange story for the world. That’s why the advertising industry makes it about bunnies and candy—things much easier to explain… and sell. The Easter story is so absurdly strange that we can hardly be surprised that the apostles didn’t get it; and it is a wonder that those women—apparently the best disciples of the bunch—did. Miracles are moments of absurdity and, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’d almost prefer a world where things are always as they seem. There are a surprising amount of Christians who say they do not believe in miracles. At the risk of offending some of you, I just kind of want to stare at these people and try to figure out how their minds work, because there is no Christianity without the resurrection and the resurrection is basically a miracle that dwarfs all others. I guess what people mean is that they don’t believe God still works miracles, which is basically where the apostles are at after Jesus’ death. They had seen Jesus do miraculous things in life, but death marked for them an impassible barrier. That was then; this is now. Miracles, they believed, died with Jesus.
That’s why resurrection changes absolutely everything in the world; and to be a Christian after the resurrection means that at the end of the US Hockey team’s 1980 upset of the Soviets in Lake Placid when Al Michaels screams “Do you believe in miracles?” we can say along with him, “Yes!” Yes we do. Because after three days death turned upside down and Jesus Christ rose again. That’s an absurd thing to say. Resurrection does not make sense unless the fabric of this world obscures a deeper reality, and without resurrection every other miracle is only a bit of magic.
            You are all probably familiar with the story of Peter walking on water. Jesus is our on the Sea of Galilee, walking toward their boat, and in a moment of brilliant faith—or else pure stupidity—Peter gets out of the boat and begins to walk toward him. Only after a moment does he start to sink. It’s so fitting that Peter, whose name means “rock” and who literally became like a rock and started to sink on the sea, is the one who actually listens to the women and goes to find the other rock rolled away. Well, in that story of Peter out on the water, Madeleine l’Engle points out that “as long as [Peter] didn’t remember that we human beings have forgotten how to walk on water, he was able to do it.” Here, l’Engle’s is referring to Plato who once said, “All learning is remembering. The chief job of the teacher is to help us to remember all that we have forgotten.”
            That is the purpose of Jesus’ ministry. Throughout the Gospels we learn through stories and healings bits and pieces of a reality obscured by our sin, but only on Easter does the picture make sense. Jesus’ message was so radical that is needed to be proved with the most radical of endings. Death? No, resurrection. Mortality? No, immortality. Old sinful creation? No, new creation, restored and exactly how it was created to be. Jesus’ teaching is purposed to draw us back to the Garden where we were created and called “good.” On Maundy Thursday this past week we heard those familiar words, “My body, given for you, do this in remembrance of me. My blood, shed you, do this in remembrance of me.” A part of us still remembers that time before the fall in the Garden of Eden when the miraculous and the mundane were one and the same; when we all knew how to walk on water. A part of us holds on to what is good in the world in spite of overwhelming examples of hate, cruelty and injustice; a part of us remembers the truth that is obscured by our humanity. This is why Madeleine l’Engle concludes talking about Peter on the water by saying, as she sat alongside her own pond, “Perhaps one day I will remember how to walk [on water].”
            That is the Christian life. After the resurrection each and every one of us is grasping for a past that we have forgotten but which lies just before us. Each and every one of us is gifted a promise that this world that we see out there with its biting cold and flooding rivers, its hurricanes and blizzards, its wars and assassinations, its trolls and bigots, its pain and grief, its senseless tragedies and untimely deaths, its utter hopelessness and despair—that world, that one is not our world but only a shadow that hangs over a world we remember from long ago. Our true world is borne out of a faith that is the simplest and most profound; it is a world where salvation and justice are not hopes but realities, where hope and peace are realized, where life and death are not in conflict but intertwined. That is the world beyond; the world whose door is the empty tomb; and it is a world that bursts into our own when Christ rises from the dead.
            All learning is remembering. That’s why we come together today, even as we are called in ways completely strange and foreign to one another; even as some of us find time only on Easter for the church—that matters zilch, zero, not at all. None of us can adequately explain the mystery of faith; none of us can make a statement befitting the reasons we believe what we do—all faith statements eventually ring hollow in our own ears—but each of us remembers something of a world that we yearn for with all our hearts. Today is the celebration of that world; that reality, drenched in the resurrection, Christ died, oh yes, he died… three days dead… stinky, rotten dead… but three days later, alive. Risen. Celebrate it. Remember it.

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