The Aftermath of Miracles

Sermon

When you’re grieving, grieving the loss of someone or something, the worst of the twenty-four hours in a day may be 4a.m.  You know what I mean – you wake up without having had a decent amount of sleep, it’s still dark out, and your mind is going in a thousand different directions, reliving memories, remembering things you wish you had done, regretting some of your choices.

I imagine those women who came to Jesus’ tomb that morning woke up much earlier than they needed, if they had even slept at all.  Three days earlier, they had stood with each other on a hill called Golgotha, enduring the trauma of watching their Jesus suffer and die.

Still, they wake up, or give up the ghost and get out of bed, in the wee small hours when the dawn was still dark, and gather up the spices they had so they could properly honor Jesus’ body for burial.  Maybe it was a reflex to do that; maybe it was acting out in religious observance, following the rites of their faith that said that bodies in a tomb are anointed with spices.  As one commentator said, “Sometimes faith means going on and tending to the necessary chores.” (Alan Culpepper)

These women arrive at the tomb, fully awake and fully exhausted, and while the sun has not yet risen, they see well enough, well enough to notice that the stone that blocked the tomb – a cave, really – has been moved.

Was it moved so Jesus could get out, or was it moved so that the women could get in?

That’s what this day is about, isn’t it – someone rolled that stone away, and Jesus is not there.  As the sun peeks over the horizon, and the women are perplexed, astounded, terrified, maybe even the tiniest bit hopeful, two figures in dazzling white tell them that all those things that Jesus told them had come true.  He did suffer; he was killed; he rose again from the dead.

I wonder what happens to human beings when deep grief runs up against awe.

Friends, here we are on Easter morning and maybe some of us are still in grief, because God knows, it has been a hard three years since we last gathered in this sanctuary to celebrate the good news of resurrection.  We have grieved the death of friends we did not get to say goodbye to.  We have grieved the loss of time together, of celebrations, of a pre-pandemic way of life that we had taken for granted.  Some still wake up in the wee small hours, wondering when it will feel safe to resume normal activities, wondering if there is another shoe that is going to drop, worrying that this isn’t over yet.

And still we go about our necessary chores.  We get groceries.  We walk the dog.  We read the paper, and drink our coffee or tea, and check to see who got today’s Wordle. But maybe, in all that mundaneness, and in the grief and trauma we have been carrying these last two years, maybe there is a peek of hope as the proverbial sun makes its way over the horizon and a new day begins.

I was thinking this week about the primordial nature of the cycle of life, death, and life.  We see it in the heavens, as day turns to night and night turns back to day.  We see it in the seasons, as summer becomes fall becomes winter becomes spring.  (Only in Portland would spring become winter again the week before Easter!) Somehow the squirrels didn’t stash away the tulip bulbs for their winter pantry, and the flowers bloomed again.

So maybe this resurrection story is one more telling of the cycle of life, death, and life, but I choose to think it’s more than that.  I choose to believe that God was up to something, that whoever rolled that stone away from the tomb did so with great and holy intentionality. We do not know how or when God raised Jesus from the dead, or who or what rolled that stone away.  We only know that the women were witnesses to the aftermath of a miracle, a miracle that God had been planning for a while, maybe since the beginning of time.

C.S. Lewis called it a deeper magic from before the dawn of time, when his Christ figure, the lion Aslan, broke the stone table in two and sprang back to life.  Lucy and Susan, the little English girls who had wandered into Narnia, did not see that miracle, but were witnesses to its aftermath.  Winter ended and spring came; the witch was defeated, and Aslan lived.

Are we witnesses to the aftermath of a miracle? I wonder.  Is it a miracle that scientists created a vaccine for Covid, or just good ol’ science?  Is it a miracle that we few hundred people have gathered in person and online for Easter Sunday worship, or is it the result of having made it through the worst of a pandemic, the drudgery of wearing masks and washing hands, the pain of social distancing? Is it a miracle that so many of our griefs are still met with hope, or is that just plucky human nature?

Or is the miracle that God is still at work among us?

While some scoff at the notion of miracles, and other politely disbelieve them, some of us relish the hope that miracles do happen.  I’m one of those, but then, I’m one of those people who believes that Jesus was really, truly, physically raised from the dead and that we will be too.

So maybe it is a miracle that God is still with us and at work among us, despite the many reasons we give God to abandon us altogether.  My goodness, my heart, we have failed so often.  Because it’s Easter I don’t want to talk about Ukraine, or the subway shooting in Brooklyn, or T Rex or Jennifer Drain or Amara Marluke, all women in Portland who have been shot and killed this year.  Because it’s Easter I don’t want to talk about climate change, or pandemics, or the wealth gap.

But there, I did, because Easter comes not when the sun has risen and it’s a beautiful, 72 degree day and we all look great and we’re all healthy and happy.  Easter comes when the dawn is still dark, and we’re depressed and anxious and mad, and it starts to hail when we’re walking the dog.  Easter comes when we just had a big fight with a friend; when we’ve procrastinated all those important things we meant to do, when we’re not sure believing in God is worth it.

We Christians are an Easter people, a people whose cross is empty, a people who are given abundant life and asked to share that abundance.  So we look for ways to bring life to others, if not literal life, then the opportunity for new beginnings and different futures.  We do that not because we are all powerful and good, but because God has done that for us, and God is doing that in us.

Just as that Easter morning was a new beginning for those who had followed Jesus faithfully and fickly, so this time coming out of Covid is an opportunity for a new beginning and a different future.  Maybe that’s best expressed in words shared earlier in the pandemic and attributed to Brene Brown, although they were actually written by Sonya Renee Taylor.

She said, “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”

We Easter people are being called to that – God calls us to respond to the new life we have been given by offering life to others, by meeting greed and inequity with generosity and justice; by meeting exhaustion and depletion with restoration; by meeting disconnection with community; by meeting hate with grace and love; by meeting lack with abundance.

God knows we have a lot of digging out to do as we come out of all the rubble of the pandemic.  God understands that work.  The women who came to the tomb at dawn of Easter morning did not change the world that afternoon.  The men didn’t even believe them.

Peter didn’t change the world by the time the sun set.  He saw the empty tomb, and went home by himself and sat there, amazed.  It took a while for the beginning of the new life to begin to take anything like a shape.

It will take us a while to move into new beginnings and different futures.  But as we do that, let’s not go back.  In a post shared on Thursday, religious history scholar Diana Butler Bass noticed something that I had missed all these years of Easter sermons and celebrations.

She wrote, “They never return to the cross. Jesus never takes them back to the site of the execution. He never gathers his followers at Calvary, never points to the blood-stained hill, and never instructs them to meets him there. He never valorizes the events of Friday. He never mentions them. Yes, wounds remain, but how he got them isn’t mentioned. Instead, almost all the post-resurrection appearances — which are joyful and celebratory and conversational — take place at the upper room table or at other tables and meals.” (https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/the-holy-thursday-revolution)

If there’s one thing we missed during the isolation of Covid, sharing a meal with others may be at the top of a lot of folks’ lists.  As the future opens up, maybe we’ll do more of that, and we won’t worry if the silver is polished or the napkins are wrinkle-free.  We’ll bring what we have, and share it, and rejoice in the friendship and fellowship, made all the more meaningful because we were without it for so long.

In a tender interview this year, the tables were turned on talk show host Stephen Colbert as his guest, Dua Lipa, asked him to talk about his faith and his comedy. His answer was lovely, but too long for today, but one line has stuck with me. He said, “So, if there’s some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it’s that no matter what happens, you are never defeated. You must understand and see this in the light of eternity and find some way to love and laugh with each other.”

Maybe that’s what the aftermath of a miracle looks like: people gathering, people who are free, and fed, and grateful.  People loving and laughing with each other. People who are relying on each other and God to walk with them into a new day.  People who say yes to life, and yes to life again, and yes to life again.

Yes. Christ is risen.  Yes.  He is risen indeed.