"Being Easter"
Sermon Preached By Bruce Sanguin
April 12th, 2009
Mark 16: 1-8
The women arrive at the tomb where the body of Jesus was laid. They are ready to engage in what poet Emily Dickenson called the “solemnest industry enacted upon earth” – the “sweeping up after death.” And there is a sense in which that’s what we’re all doing here this morning. There are other reasons of course – to hear the Easter music, for the sake of family tradition, perhaps to please the parents (it’s not so much to ask!). All good enough reasons to be sure. But whether it’s top of mind, or not, Easter is a day to come to terms with death, in all its various guises.
Before the gospel is fairy tale, it is tragedy. You can’t get to Easter, except through Good Friday. A good man, God’s prophet and a lover of the downtrodden, has been executed. Bad things happen to good people. Evil is a dimension of the human condition – and we’ve all tasted it in one form or another. We’re here, at least in part, because we hope against hope that tragedy and meaninglessness is not the defining characteristic of life, because if it is, how do we find the courage to carry on? We come with the mother of James, and Salome to tend as best we can to our deep fears. Life is not fair. Jesus has been crucified – and the crucifixion stands for every indignity and everything in this world that has brought us face to face with hopelessness. To say the least, it challenges a superficial commitment to cheerful optimism. We’re here this morning to do our own “sweeping up after death”.
Some of you know that I’ve been doing a series of Lenten sermons based on Oscar nominated films, or Oscar worthy films that were overlooked. Gran Torino falls into the latter category. Walt Kowalski, a retired Ford worker, knew about death. He’s the protagonist in the Gran Torino, played by Clint Eastwood. His life is drenched in death. He fought in the Korean War and it lingers in his soul in the form of post-traumatic stress syndrome. He knows what it means to kill or be killed. His wife has just died and he is in grief. In Walt’s life, death has shaped a bitter, emotionally crippled, and racist 78 year-old man.
The opening scenes take place at his wife’s funeral. Walt sits there bristling against the simplistic platitudes of a young priest, whom he judges as not having ever tasted death. Walt even dislikes his own children whom he regards as self-involved yuppies. His only loves are his Labrador dog, Daisy, and his car, a Gran Torino, which he has lovingly restored. His “sweeping up after death” involves compulsive attention to his lawn, his home, and his beloved car. It’s nothing that will help him to move on with his life, but then again, Walt had already decided that the “sting of death” was the ultimate reality. His wife’s death was just the final nail in the coffin. Death reigned victorious in Walt’s life.
Ironically, he lives next door to a Hmong family, who he dislikes intensely, in part because they don’t take care of their lawn. The other part is his racism. He doesn’t understand that these are the Vietnamese who fought with Americans, not against them. When death once again makes an appearance in his life, disguised as a local gang of punks, Walt is reluctantly drawn back into life. The gang is forcefully recruiting Walt’s young neighbour, Thao Van. He sees them beating Thao up on his front lawn – and you don’t mess with Walt Kowalski’s front lawn! In becoming Thao’s protector and mentor Walt discovers a higher purpose and an opportunity for redemption. In one of the best endings I’ve seen in a long time, Walt finds a way to save both himself and his young friend. I won’t give away the ending, but there is powerful religious symbolism involved. The film could have been called, The Redemption of Dirty Harry!
Both Gran Torino and the Gospel story have surprise endings. You come to the end, expecting death, death, and more death – Magnum 44’s blasting away in a familiar theme of vengeance, meted out by righteous violence. Instead, like the women who came to the tomb on Easter morning, we are surprised by life. The women arrive at the tomb with their embalming spices in hand, ready to anoint a corpse and concede the triumph of death over life. But a young man greets them, announcing that Jesus has been raised and that they are to go to Galilee and await instructions.
Mark’s account of the resurrection story has two endings – the original, which we heard this morning – and a second ending that was a later addition by an editor. In the first ending, nobody actually sees the risen Jesus. Did you notice that? In the second ending that was written later, there are witnesses. It seems as though the original version is more comfortable with mystery of resurrection – not “the” resurrection, but resurrection as a metaphor of new life.
Resurrection is not physical resuscitation of a corpse and I agree with those who claim that if a video-recorder had been inside the tomb, no images of Jesus getting up and tearing off his grave clothes would appear. Mark’s gospel ends with a mysterious young man, dressed in a white robe, telling the women that they are looking for Jesus in the wrong place. “He has been raised”, he tells them. But they will need to take his word for it, because in this original ending there are no eyewitnesses.
My faith – my fundamental orientation to life and how I make meaning of it – does not hinge on a belief in “the” physical resurrection of Jesus. But resurrection as a metaphor is central. Resurrection points to a sacred, loving Presence at loose in this universe bringing life out of death, redeeming evil, and at work ceaselessly to raise up all of creation to its full glory and stature. This resurrection power was at work in Jesus of Nazareth, in his life and in his death. This Easter Presence is alive in each one of you here this morning. Of this, I am deeply convicted. “Nothing”, declares St. Paul, “can separate us from the love of God, which was in Christ Jesus”.
Mere intellectual assent to a belief in “the” resurrection is not nearly as important as mining one’s own life and one’s own experience for evidence of this Easter Presence. I see this indomitable presence in the 1000 people who went running in Pacific Spirit Park in order to take back the park after Wendy Ladner-Beaudry’s senseless murder. They are choosing to embody Wendy’s commitment to life that was so profound. If we must believe in a physical resurrection of Jesus, I’d go with St. Paul’s mystical understanding that we have become the “body of Christ”. The Spirit of Christ is embodied in us. As long as we live with love in our hearts, as long as we work for justice, as long as we live with a higher purpose, Christ is alive and well. We are called to be the resurrected presence of Christ in the world.
This is why I appreciate Mark’s original ending to his gospel story. It ends with the women in a state of terror and amazement, saying “nothing to anyone…for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). This fear is more like awe than the fear we have of an enemy or a fear that shuts us off from life. It’s awesome to imagine that the worst thing that can happen to us in life is never the last thing. It’s awesome to have just become comfortable with the very postmodern, nihilistic, conclusion that life is a sad and senseless affair, and then discover that at the heart of life there is a Loving Presence who swallows up the chaos of it all and fashions a cosmos. We’re part of a story after all, a story that is going somewhere; it’s a narrative that includes evil and senseless suffering as but a single chapter, and not the climax. Like those first women at the tomb, just when we’re ready to come to terms with death, we are startled back into life.
Mark says, in effect, you write the end to the story. This morning is about more than just believing in the resurrection. It’s about writing yourself into the Easter story. It’s about how you are going to live the resurrected life of Christ. How is the risen Christ alive in you? You be Easter! You be Walt Kowalski to Thao. Refuse to give up on life. Find and enact a higher purpose. God will lift you up out of the kingdom of death and place you in the kin-dom of life. That’s the Easter promise.
The young man tells the women that if they are looking for Jesus among the dead, they are looking in the wrong place. The Spirit of the Christ has “gone ahead” of them to Galilee. Think of Galilee as the unformed future – as your unformed future; as the unformed future of this planet; as the future that needs you. The risen Christ has gone ahead to this Galilee and calls us to join him. He is the call that comes to us in the form of sacred imagination. What might our lives be like if we were to love like Walt Kowalski, who found himself by losing himself in the love of a neighbour? What might life on our planet be like if we embodied the heart of Jesus for the left-behinds? What might this congregation be like, if we heard the call of the risen Christ from a future that needs us to call it forth. That’s our Galilee. That’s where we’ll meet up with the Risen Christ. Alleluia! Christ is risen!