Easter 2024, St. Agnes Scott Murray
Happy Easter.
I don’t know about you, but Easter seems to change what it means to me every year. I guess that is good news. Except it means I can’t pull one of my old sermons out from the files. I have to write a new one every year. We change, over time, and the story too, even so familiar to us, changes too.
In my own life, I used to think that if I could just get to that one spot, every thing would stop and I would understand it all and, well, that would be it. I would become a blissful ninny. And I tell you honestly that I got to that spot a couple of years back, but I found out that there is no stationary point, no place to step back from it all. All the meaning in life is in the movement. The changes, The ebb and flow.
That’s why the Easter story keeps shifting for us. Part of us wants it to solidify, hold still, retain the same meaning and significance it may have held for us for years. Something secure. But it moves with us on our journey, much like the pillar of fire which lead the children of Israel in the desert.
This is unsettling. I think, genetically, humans aren’t made for this. I wouldn’t go so far as to say our brains and nervous system are like a computer, but their main function is to filter data and organize it into simplified bits for quick automatic reaction. Billions of billion data points “out there” funneling down and through and sifted into mere millions. What you and I often refer to “reality” is truly never known by us. We can’t take it unfiltered. And these filters, our DNA and the matrix of all our social interactions through life wired together, help us function but also never give us the whole picture. Oh, and one more troublesome point. I don’t have the same filters as you. Similar, but not the same. We each experience the world differently, uniquely. If you have ever had a conversation with another human being, you understand what I mean!
So, now, let’s turn this into a three dimensional chess board. Sitting here this morning, we just heard a story from 2000 years ago (exclamation point). We heard it in English, but it was written in Greek. About Jewish guys speaking actually speaking Aramaic. And they had a very very different understanding of how the world works than you and I have now today. What do think would be probabilities that we might not get just what it is that the gospel writer is trying to get across? Oh, yeah, another thing. We have four rather different gospel accounts. (At least, in this book. Last count, over 80 gospels on record…) Whew.
And so when we plug those variables into each one us present this morning, each with our own unique filtering system, it’s a miracle that we can even be in this building together this morning and attempt to say we are a community. The “right teaching” of dogma and orthodoxy are one way to force a sense of security and community, but besides being rather bland and yet quite often capable of violence, this forcing loses sight of the uniqueness of each human’s life experience. Each one of us experiences the drama of life differently than our neighbor.
In the movie Big, with Tom Hanks, he is a 10 year old who makes a wish to become big. And he does. He ends up getting a job in a toy company mainly because as a still 10 year old inside, he understands the market. One thing he comes up with is an electronic comic book. A kid can write his own stories with the modules, each story with different ending if desired. Each kid has the need for a story which responds uniquely to him or her. Sounds kind of real life like, don’t you think.
Now, as some of you know, I have a favorite among the gospels, mine is Mark. And we heard its ending read this morning. We have to admit, though, not a real whiz bang ending. I’m not sure any trained writer would be happy with how it wraps up, or rather fails to wrap up. Marks gospel has no strong beginning and no thunderclap finish. It feels like a long telling of a story and the teller forgets the punchline. The other later gospels fixed this, much like Tom Hanks’ electronic comic book, changing content and endings to meet the needs of their respective readers. But what is regarded as the first gospel written, we’re left hanging, waiting for the natural rhythm to play out. And it doesn’t. And we feel maybe cheated, or incomplete, or …
And in a weird way, I like that. Ever year when I read this, I get chills because I think that Mark has deliberately left a space for the reader to make their own meaning of the empty tomb. 2000 years later, with my own unique way of interacting with the world, I am privileged to be challenged by Mark to ponder this story, to ask yet once again what does this mean to me now, in this place in life where I stand? What new things do I hear in the story which propel me to shift areas in my life to be more receptive to the ever moving spirit? How do I live out this day of new birth moving forward?
Resurrection/rebirth/new life, it isn’t some religious dogma encrusted out of reach in a 2000 year old story. It is always present to us as we journey, It was always with us, always within us, even long before we awaken to it. It is present when we come to realize our uniqueness. The kingdom of heaven becomes the place where we explore our own uniqueness and the uniqueness of others. We build our community when we share with each other our own experience and view of what resurrection means to us. That is how we come to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Mark is telling us to explore. Don’t be afraid, he says, don’t be afraid of a dangling ending in this story (or even in your own story). The empty tomb does not equal empty of meaning. Mark deliberately upsets the rhythm of the story in order to get our attention. “The most important part of the story is what you will now do with this!” he seems to say. The emptiness is an invitation, a symbolic welcoming gesture to enter in and to explore, to find what treasure is waiting there, just for you.