Love is Come Again
Mark 16:1-8
1 John 3:11,14,16-18
A
Sermon Preached by
Easter
University
Congregational United
They sit gazing at him up there. So proud of him. How can it be that in just four months he will be gone? These 18 years have gone by so fast. They sit here wondering what will they have when it is just the two of them again looking at each other across the kitchen table.
She is tacking the Time Magazine cover inside her locker – the picture of the polar bear on the melting ice pack and the headline, “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.” She is. While her friends worry about who is going to the prom she is worried about her future and the future of the world and she doesn’t want to forget what’s going on.
She stands looking at her body in the mirror. “YUCK! I HATE it!” Whose body is that anyway? I want my old body back!”
Change is at the heart of human experience and at the heart of our world today. And change is at the heart of the Easter story. It’s a story that wants us to find ourselves in it. Find in it God’s promise of hope amidst all we are losing in our lives and world today. The way to that hope, and that newness is however a journey through grief and confusion, work that most of us would rather skip.
They sit holding hands across the table, looking in each others eyes now welling with tears. This time the treatment didn’t just work. The cancer is coming closer. They are worried, scared to death honestly, and they want to be anyplace else than here in this place. The last thing they want to do is give in to those tears, the anger they have been keeping at arms length. To give in, isn’t that to admit defeat? And would they ever find their way out of that dark, slippery tunnel of despair?
We aren’t very good at this
grief stuff. We’ve learned to be strong
instead. We are so like Ennis in “
It is perfectly typical that there are no men in the Easter story. I imagine we men are mostly off “standing it” somewhere – working late, drinking too much, keeping busy. Most of us – women and men – would rather not listen to the tears and the anger and the wisdom that have to teach us in these seasons of change. But this is the work that begins Easter. You have to go to the tomb, sit there and grieve. To face what you are losing and begin to let it go so that there is some room for the newness of God to take root.
And what we find, more often
than not in such grief is confusion. The
women enter into this place of grief, and nothing is as it is supposed to
be. The stone is rolled away. Jesus’ body is not in the tomb but an angel
sits there who tells them that Jesus has gone ahead of them to
He moved out here across the country to be with his partner. But everything from home seems to have followed him here and he can’t escape the voices. There is his minister shaking his head, there his parents saying they will pray for him, there those scriptures drumming in her head. He is going to hell. He is a sinner. He doesn’t even know who God is anymore or what to believe. So he’s sitting here talking to this stranger in this strange church, longing to hear something and fearing what it might be.
If the work of grief clears the room for the newness of God to take root, the gifts of confusion, and the anxiety, anger, fear that often accompany this season of confusion, are to till, loosen up the soil so a new shoot, a new way, can break forth.
Easter invites us to open ourselves and our lives to the new in many ways. Most importantly, it invites us to a new relationship with God. If the women were to find this Risen Christ, they couldn’t go looking for the man they used to know who spoke in flesh and words. They would need to use other senses – to find this living Christ. One that speaks in more mytical, less rational way - not just out there in scripture and tradition, but also within here, in our own souls, in and through the changing seasons of our lives. A newer, fuller way of knowing. A way that is traveled less in certainty and more in trust.
We don’t see how it happened that the women met the living Christ. We only know that they did. They met the living God in a way they never had met God before. They can’t tell us how it happened. But we can see it on the faces of the women and men who have followed them on that journey through grief and confusion and met a living God who has set them free in wonder.
The grandmother sits holding her hands. “My grandson did something he is ashamed of. He told me about it and I understood. I reminded him of what I believe, that he is loved and he really is forgiven. But I worry about him too. Who is going to be there to remind him how much he is loved after I am gone?”
There is something, a force, a power, a presence, a name – call it what you will - that is life and love. We can’t force each other to get it, experience it, see it. We can only witness to its presence – when we let it rise in our faces as it rose in the face of Jesus who let go of his life into the new that is God.
You can see it in the faces of the parents who let go of the child they used to know, the relationship they used to have together, and who are getting to know this new man their child has become and each other in this new season of their lives.
You can see it in the face of that passionate young woman, meeting head on the crises of our time – not with a with furrowed brow, and anxious spirit, but with a heart broken open in love for God’s world and people that she cannot help but give away.
See it here in the girl who sees a woman looking back at her in the mirror, smiling now, “You are beautiful.”
Here in the couple who finally stopped working so hard pushing away the life they feared and started living life.
See it in the young man who takes time to listen now for a different voice, the one that speaks within, and has found a new community of faith that listens with him for the still speaking God.
See it there in the grandson who remembers his grandmother’s face and all she taught him and believes today it might really be true and is set free to risk and love again.
Today, we are invited to enter the story of change, of transformation, that is Easter, that story that is our lives. To do the work of today so we too might pass from Death to Life. So that we too may look in the mirror and see our own face set free in wonder and hope.
Now, before the story is complete in you, act as if it is. Give your hearts, your life, your compassion, your generosity away. Trust before you know. Believe before you can see.
Love is come again, like wheat that rises green. Give yourself over to Easter – the amazing new of God that is even now clearing, rising, blooming in us all. Amen.