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A sermon preached at
Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ
Bethesda, Maryland
by the Rev. Rich Smith
Easter, April 16, 2006
Mark 16:1-8
Mark’s account of that first Easter morning reminds me of the age-old question, “If a tree falls in the forest but there is no one there, does it make any sound?” This morning I would rephrase it as: If the stone is rolled away, and the tomb is empty, and Christ is risen, but nobody says anything, is it real? Does it have an impact?
While the Easter story is told in all of the Gospels, Mark, which is the earliest, gives us the starkest account. There are very few details. It simply tells of three women going to the tomb to prepare Jesus’ body for a proper burial. They are surprised to find that the tomb is empty, except for a young man in a while robe who tells them that Jesus is risen and alive, that he will meet them back in Galilee, and that these women should hurry and tell the other disciples about it.
But they don’t. Instead they flee from the tomb, “for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Now I’d be afraid, and you probably would too, if after the death of your very best friend, you were told by a reliable source that this person had come back to life! I’d be scared out of my wits, because that’s not the way I normally expect things to happen.
But for the reader who has followed Jesus all the way through his ministry, who suffers with him through his betrayal and agony and death, this is a bit disconcerting, an anti-climax. You can’t end the story there, just leave it hanging like that! The early church felt so much that way that they added two more endings, where Jesus gets around their silence by making bodily appearances, to Mary and to the disciples. Matthew and Luke and John all have these as well. Some have theorized that maybe the original ending was lost from Mark’s manuscript, or perhaps edited out. Some can even envision the writer in prison, nearing the end of his work when the hand of the guard taps his shoulder, saying, “Come! It’s time!” But the authentic ending of Mark, in view of the preponderance of Biblical scholars, is just as we have heard it – the women receive the good news, and never breathe a word of it, because they are afraid. End of story.
I think that’s the way Mark intended to end the story, leaving it unfinished on purpose. If the story were finished, we could admire it, we could enjoy it, and then we could put it away with all the loose ends tied up, and say “they all lived happily ever after.” But not with this story! It leaves too many questions dangling unanswered. It forces us to get involved. It haunts us. And like so many of the parables that Jesus told, which are also unfinished and leave us with unanswered questions, it forces us to write our own ending. It begs us to overcome our own fear and terror and amazement and say what the women did not.
I don’t know if a tree falling in solitude makes a sound – I’ve never been there. But I do know that an empty tomb that is not reported has no impact. The resurrection is not complete until we proclaim it.
But, all too often, we too have been silent. We have been the recipients of incredible, earthshaking, awesome, totally-transforming good news, and we have said nothing because we were afraid. We have heard, we have seen, we have tasted the good news that in rasing Jesus, God validated who Jesus was and what he was about; the good news that God loves us and never lets us go, the good news that life is stronger than death, the good news that God’s love transforms us and empowers us to be all that we can be, the good news that we are part of a family and never alone and always welcome in God’s realm; the good news that calls us to justice, inclusion and love. We have heard all this, and too often we have just kept it to ourselves. You know the litany of confession: we have allowed others – that is, the Christian right – to frame the debate and to define what Christian is. We have acceded to a war that, in the words of Jim Wallis, is illegal, unwise, and immoral. We have allowed millions to go without healthcare. We have stood by while genocide takes place in Darfur and Uganda. We have watched as massive debt is piled up for our children to pay. We have pumped massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We have not even accepted or acted upon the new life that God offers each of us, to rise out of brokenness and alienation and self-centeredness. We have not allowed the resurrection to be fully realized, have said nothing to anyone because we are afraid.
And so like Martin Luther King, who said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” I have a dream that the Church will rise up and do likewise, that we will complete the resurrection by boldly proclaiming and doing the Good News!
And there are signs of hope. Not everyone is content with silence. Jim Wallis’ book, God’s Politics, has been a best seller, and is motivating many to begin to speak out and act. Rabbi Michael Lerner has written a complementary book, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, in which he says that there are “many decent Americans who get attracted to the religious right because it is the only voice that they encounter that is willing to challenge the despiritualization of daily life, to call for a life that is driven by higher purpose than money, and to provide actual experiences of supportive community for those whose daily life is suffused with alienation and spiritual loneliness.” And he proposes a progressive Spiritual covenant, which he hopes will result in a very public witness to a faith that is open and inclusive. Soon to be published is a book by the UCC’s Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right is Wrong: A Minister's Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future. Should make for interesting and inspiring summer reading! Now we just have to do as they suggest.
This morning, after a sunrise service in Phoenix, Arizona, probably about this very moment, a group of people are beginning a 2500 mile, 141 day, five million-step walk across America. Their destination is right here, Washington, D.C., where a public celebration will greet their arrival on September 3.
The organizers of this march, who include my friend Eric Elnes, Senior Pastor of the Scottsdale, Arizona UCC, are grieved that fundamentalism has become the dominant, sometimes the sole religious voice in the media. They seek to raise awareness to the fact that fundamentalists do not by themselves define American Christianity. They are embarrassed by the present alliance of political conservatives with the religious right, who seek to impose a sectarian and moralistic religious mentality upon our population. They are offended that hostility to gays and lesbians and opposition to the century long quest by women for equality and the right to define their own life choices, are now in the public mind, the defining essence of their faith. And so they have set out on what they call CrossWalkAmerica, as a vehicle through which to change that. (See www.CrossWalkAmerica.org)
They began by adopting what they call "The Phoenix Affirmations," in which they state their claim to a different Christian mentality. The declaration states: "The public face of Christianity in America today bears little connection to the historic faith of our ancestors. It represents even less our own faith as Christians, who continue to celebrate the gifts of our Creator, revealed and embodied in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Heartened by the transforming presence of Christ's Holy Spirit in our world, we find ourselves in a time and place where we will be silent no longer. We hereby mark an end to our silence by making the following affirmations: As people who are joyfully and unapologetically Christian, we pledge ourselves completely to the way of love. We work to express our love as Jesus teaches us by loving God, neighbor and self."
Loving God, they say, means that people do not treat the legitimacy of their own spiritual path as a sign that every other spiritual path is somehow illegitimate. They call for a mutuality of respect for other religions which are also paths that God has provided for humanity. Loving God also means treasuring the sacred scriptures as a source of truth but never using that conviction to close one's mind to the fact that God is Still Speaking. Loving God means caring for God's world, including our ecosystem. It means loving things sacred and secular, Christian and non-Christian, human and non-human.
Loving your neighbor means treating all people as holy, as having been made in God's image, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, ethnicity or economic class. They say loving your neighbor means standing as Jesus did at the side of the outcast and oppressed of our world and working for peace. It means preserving religious freedom as well as the Church's ability to speak prophetically to government without co-mingling Church and State. It also means facing our own shortcomings and working for what is best for all people, including those who consider us their enemies.
Loving ourselves, this document says, means basing our lives on the faith that in Christ all things are made new and all people are loved by God. Christianity therefore, cannot justify prejudice based on ignorance or fear, nor does it ever allow us to call those who oppose us 'the enemies of God.' We love ourselves when we treat both our heads and our hearts as sacred, acknowledging that science and doubt are not the enemies of faith and belief, that each is a means through which the truth of God is pursued. It also means caring for the health of our own bodies and acting on the assumption that we were made with meaning and purpose, which they define as strengthening and extending God's realm of love throughout the world.
As Bishop Spong says, “The Charter of 'CrossWalkAmerica' constitutes a stirring call to the Christians of this nation to stand up and reclaim a place for a loving, progressive, courageous understanding of what it means to be disciples of Jesus.” It lights a candle in the darkness of religious close-mindedness. It expresses the hope that the religious imperialism of our time, based on fear and cultivated by our politicians as a pathway to power, must be publicly challenged. In short, it boldly proclaims the resurrection, calling progressive Christians out of both our isolation and our fear to reclaim our place as a force for good in our world. I trust we’ll give them a hearty welcome when they arrive here on Labor Day weekend! And that in the meantime, we too will rise up and proclaim the Good News!
One person who was not afraid to speak the Good News died this past week at the age of 81. William Sloan Coffin (who once spoke from this pulpit) was a giant among progressive and prophetic Christian leaders. He once said that “clearly the trick in life is to die young as late as possible,” which he certainly accomplished. And he wrote as well, “The more we do of God’s will, the less unfinished business we leave behind when we die. If our lives exemplify personal charity and the pursuit of social justice, then death will not be the enemy, but rather the friendly angel leading us on to the One whose highest hope is to be able to say to each and every one of us, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of the Master.’” For Coffin, resurrection wasn’t just something that happened to one man in 33 A.D., nor was it only something to look forward to at our own deaths or at the end of history. Resurrection was now, as new and transforming life is offered to each one of us, we say “Yes!” and rise up and claim it.
Author Jim Carrol tells of the time in 1972 when he found himself sharing a Washington, D.C. jail cell with Coffin, after they and dozens of others had been arrested while protesting the Vietnam War. “Even now you have no idea what prompted him to do so, but at some point in that night, the man in the next cell began to sing... his resolute baritone gradually filled the air as he moved easily into the lyric of what you recognized as Handle’s Messiah... Coffin sang as if he were alone on the earth, and the old words rose through the dark as if Isaiah himself had returned to speak.... You yourself remained mute... But your silence, too, was swept into what had become prayer. As you listened to Coffin...you suddenly felt awash in an unexpected gratitude, for you realized that these words expressed your deepest faith, and that sung as they were, these words had an absolute integrity that far transcended your fearful hesitance. You did believe that your Redeemer liveth, and, more than that, you believed that your Redeemer had stood upon the earth with you, bringing you to that most unlikely place. You saw, indeed, that you belonged there, in that cell block, and that you were plenty strong enough for what lay ahead.
“That night, in a way that was unprecedented, you experienced the demanding yet consoling force of your most deeply held conviction: God exists. God exists for all. God exists for you. Yet until then, you had not known it. The sacred words of Isaiah, Job, the psalmist, Paul, and the author of Revelation, together with Handel – Alleluia, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth – were all mediated through the human eloquence of William Sloan Coffin, who, through expression rooted in his own person, made the mystery present. For a moment, you believed in God...because he did. As you felt his music vibrate the steel at your shoulder, you believed in yourself, too, because he did.”
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? If Christ is risen, and no one proclaims it, is the resurrection really complete? Is it any more than unfinished business? The Good News is, Christ is risen and alive, Christ’s spirit is let loose in the world, where the only thing that can stop it is our own fear and silence. But, take heart, take courage, for God’s love casts out fear. Take heart, take courage, for God’s love is stronger than death. Take heart, take courage, and proclaim with all your being that Christ is risen, Christ is risen, indeed!
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