OF SPICES AND ANGELS

Transcription

1 OF SPICES AND ANGELS A sermon preached by the Rev. Aaron Billard St. John s United Church, Moncton, NB Easter Sunday ~ April 8, 2012 Mark 16:1-8 1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?" 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." 8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid. A year ago today, my grandmother, Doris, died. Nanny died surrounded by women. They never left her side. They stayed up late one night telling stories of the past, laughing, and eating desert. And then, without warning, we lost her, as her life began to end and death took hold. After her funeral, her daughters began the difficult task of preparing her house to be sold, and (as people do) prepared for a yard sale so that things that no one else wanted could find a new home, and they could make some money in the process. Nanny

2 kept a lot of things, including the ashes of her former boyfriend, John MacDonald, who rested eternally not in some peaceful grave but instead was interred in my grandmother s bedroom at the bottom of her closet! The question was: what do you do with an urn? It almost felt illegal to have this urn; that it was supposed to be somewhere but definitely not here. It was decided to turn it over to the funeral home, and my mother put it in the living room for the time being. Later the next day, when they went to get the urn, it was gone. He is not here. The question was, Where did it go? Urns just don t get up in the middle of the night and walk off by themselves, do they? My father, who has the heart of a salesman, but the sensitivity of a hammer, walked in at that precise moment. And all at the same time, my mother, my aunt, and their friend all knew what had happened to John MacDonald: my father had, unknowingly, sold him to the highest bidder. It was a nice-looking container. Garrison Keillor tells a joke about the old Minnesotans Olie and Lena. Poor Olie is on his deathbed when he smells something wonderful coming from the kitchen. He musters the strength to pull himself out of bed and investigate. What smells so good, Lena? he asks. Don t touch that, Lena replies, It s for the funeral. When I thought of John s urn and the women together, I thought of the scripture this morning, He is not here. I ve never heard a better sermon than the one preached by the angel at the centre of Jesus dark tomb, with the grave clothes lying there, the stench of death in the air, and the stone rolled away: He was crucified! He has risen! He is not here! preaches the young man dressed in white. The Mary s and Salome are afraid. The angel tells them, Don t be afraid. That s easy to say if you re an angel; however, it s not so easy to do for a human. So often we are incapacitated by our fear. So often, ministry is about going where angels fear to tread. It becomes a mantra as a person walks down the hall in a hospital, or 2

3 walks into a home where people are in unspeakable pain: Don t be afraid. The angel s words seek a response: he gives an antidote for their fear. Go and see! For many of us, faith is a verb: Go, see, do, lift up, put down, heal, cast out, bring in, give, and receive. All this we must do at the request of the angel, in the moment of fear and doubt in order that we may believe these things that have transpired. The Mary s and Salome had come to anoint the body of their teacher and their friend. They brought spices and they came at the time when it was permitted, which was sunrise. And it got me to thinking about the ways that we anoint bodies. Before her radiation treatments began, a friend of our family had her head shaved. Because the radiation treatments, though palliative, cause minor burns to her skin, a nurse covers the affected area with cream to ease the irritation. Because she objects to narcotics, her doctor has prescribed medicinal marijuana and Extra Strength Tylenol to ease the pain in her system. Sometimes anointing happens before we die. It s about our care for, and respect of, the body so that the soul may still rest there for a time. In death, anointing is an act of mourning, but in life it is also an act of love in the face of the fear of death and dying. There is strength in it. There s gentleness in it. There is incredible faith in it. It s chemo for the soul. When I spoke with my mother last week after she met with a surgeon in Vancouver, she wanted to do a test to learn more about what she was experiencing. The surgeon explained it to her in this way. He said, If you saw a family member walking down the street, you wouldn t need a blood test to know it was them. When it comes to your diagnosis, we know what this is. On this Easter Sunday, as we proclaim the resurrection, I know who this is: Jesus Christ. Christ stands beside us on our crosses and in our tombs. I can t do any test to prove faith, I can t think of any process to walk people through to connect the dots, and yet, at specific moments in my life, I know who this is. When that moment in my heart comes when God whispers, Don t be afraid 3

4 I know whose voice that is. And that s the problem of Easter: Hearing that Jesus is the Son of God is one thing but experiencing Jesus as the Son of God is another matter. But when it comes to our faith, we know who this is. And even and especially when we know the difficult moments, we know who God is too. We emerge from crucifixion and death somehow different. Changed. Not the same. Anne Lamott writes, Grace means you re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own. Someone rolls away the stone, and we emerge into life again, when we had been dead to so much for so long. Mark s Gospel ends on a note of fear. The early church tried to fix it and they attached two different endings to it, but it ends at verse 8. Professor Craig Barnes argues that we are so tempted to fix bad endings. In a way, it s an invitation from the early church to finish this gospel ourselves with how we live. Even though we ve never seen an empty tomb, even though Jesus isn t waiting for us in Galilee, we still have to finish this Gospel. Easter is less about lilies and more about women with their dresses hiked up to their knees running with terror out of a cemetery. Easter was not a happy-ever-after ending pasted onto the otherwise frightening ending of Jesus on the cross. The way Mark tells the story it is Easter that is the frightening part...along with Joseph of Arimathea we had put Jesus into a tomb - wrapped, signed, sealed, and delivered. And when we get a good look into the tomb this morning, everything is unwrapped, unsealed, unbound. Nothing is as we expected, or as it should be. Now, we cannot even count on death. We don t know the ending anymore, and that is why Easter is frightening. And it is. Resurrection is about when we die, and it s about right now. If you need a two-word summary of the Christian faith it s this: fear not. The poet Mary Oliver asks, "What it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" The question is, will we flee or will we follow? Mary and Salome are terrified, and they flee the tomb, and they say nothing to no one because they are so afraid. Is Easter 4

5 the beginning of fear, a fear that we have seen something so incredible that our own eyes won t believe it, our ears doubt it, and our hearts can t absorb it? I love how Peter Rollins talks about resurrection: I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system. However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed. ( We don t experience Easter in our best clothes and perfect moments; instead, we experience Easter with tears running down our face, our nose running, and our eyes red from crying. The Easter message is not that God will protect you from every danger, that you and I will never encounter serious trouble, sickness, or death. The Easter word is that whatever happens to us, God will be with us, to comfort and strengthen and uphold. Rabbi Harold Kushner said, God works miracles today by enabling ordinary people to do extraordinary things. The question I want to leave you with this morning is, Do you flee or do you follow? Because when we are afraid, that s when God shows up. And that s when we no longer hear about the risen Christ but we experience him for ourselves, and that s when we finally say in our tears, through our broken heart, with dirt under our finger nails because we have just crawled through a terrible moment in life, and hearing the worst, we look up, see Christ and we say, I know who this is. And in that moment, the resurrected love of a broken Christ pours out and he says, I know who you are. 5