death and life, actual experiences that had unfolded in several different congregations.

Transcription

1 MIRACLES DO HAPPEN March 31, 2013, Easter Sunday Luke 24: 1-12 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: Easter proclaims the truth that love and life, not hatred and death, have the last word. Almighty God, you transcend mortal imaginings; your truth lies on the far side of the most articulate of words; your power overpowers our modest expectations. Startle us this Easter Day. Surprise us with a word beyond any we could ever imagine. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. That towering 20 th Century American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, confessed that on Easter Sunday he made a point of attending a church where he could expect a very short sermon, if there was any sermon at all. This meant that Niebuhr, a lowchurch Protestant, ended up at some high, liturgical church every Easter. It was not that the man didn t value preaching in general. Rather, Niebuhr said that it was simply true that no preacher could ever really be up to the task on Easter. John Buchanan was the pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago for 26 years, which means that John preached 26 Easter sermons from that great pulpit. In a recent essay, Buchanan confessed this: Tempting as it is to try, it is a waste of time to attempt to explain the resurrection. Some things cannot be reduced to an explanation and are greatly diminished in the process of trying. The [Easter] task is offering an invitation to walk through the door into a new world where the ultimate reality is not the death of all things: the ultimate reality is God and love everlasting. In this sermon, I m going to invite you to walk through the door into that new world where the ultimate reality is God and love everlasting. I m going offer this invitation by telling you three true stories about real people. I have the stories from someone I trust, a friend and fellow pastor who shared these encounters with - 1 -

2 death and life, actual experiences that had unfolded in several different congregations. The first story is about Julie. She was the church s Clerk of Session, and a woman of deep faith. Julie s pastor said that she taught him a great deal about faith before she died. When Julie was first diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer, the church held an impromptu prayer meeting. 300 people came to pray their hearts out. Her name was on the list of every prayer chain. In the sermon he preached at her memorial service, Julie s minister said this: The last thing she wanted me to tell you is that the same God who welcomes her in mercy and restores her joy will also walk with you in the midst of the storm. The harder part of faith is not believing in heaven and trusting that Julie is fine; the harder part of faith is trusting that the same God who cares for Julie also cares for you, and will not abandon you in your grief. Resurrection to new life and new joy in this life will be ours as well. Her pastor then said that Julie had said to him just before she died, Tom, please tell that to my boys. The second story is about a woman named Ruth. Her minister named her a grandmother type. He said that he d never had a conversation with her that she didn t laugh about something. She giggled all the time. Ruth was one of those people who just made you feel better. Her pastor said that he admired her greatly, but admired her even more once he learned her story. Ruth had been married to an avid sailor. Her husband had taught their boys to sail, and they knew their way around the family boat by the time they were in middle school. Their son Phillip had just graduated from college, and he and some buddies took the boat and headed out to sea out into the Atlantic off Charleston, South Carolina. The storm came out of nowhere. They never did find the boys. Year later, her pastor confessing that he was at the time young and stupid asked her this question, Ruth, you are so happy now; how did you ever get over that? She just smiled and said, mothers don t get over that. But I learned something when I was in the valley of the shadow. It took me a long time, but I began to see that we all have sadness. Everyone knows the dark night; everyone - 2 -

3 knows heartbreak. I know what that is like Every day the sadness is waiting. Just waiting. I don t know if it will come with the coffee or the paper or if it will speak to me in the grocery story or attack me from the hymns in church or penetrate my dreams. But every day I pray, God, don t let the sadness win. Let me push back the sadness, not only in my life, but in the lives of everyone I meet I am happy, she told him, but it is an act of defiance One last real-life story, this one about a young man named Andrew. His pastor unfolded Andrew s story in an essay I recently read, a paper that he had written on the same day he was writing the homily for young Andrew s wedding. Andrew was the son of the chair of the pulpit nominating committee that had called this minister to his present church, so he knew the family well. He said that when he had first met Andrew nearly a decade earlier, the boy was a smooth-skinned teenager into the drama club at high school. Andrew graduated and went off to college to study chemical engineering. Then one day Andrew got a headache. To make a long and agonizing story short, he ended up having a brain tumor removed by a specialist in a far-away hospital in California. Andrew took his illness to God in prayer. He told God he expected a miracle. He felt small for the task, so he asked his friends and parents friends to pray expectantly. At his five-year check-up, just before the wedding, the doctors told Andrew that he was cancer-free. He was cured. By this time, Andrew had gone on to do graduate work at the University of North Carolina. He was doing research on how to improve the delivery of chemo drugs to brain tumors. Miracles do happen. But I m telling you these three real-life stories in order to remind you that it was not only Andrew who got a miracle. Ruth, who lost her son at sea, was herself an incarnate, living miracle a woman who lived joyfully in spite of the deepest grief you could imagine. And Julie, whose funeral my minster friend presided over, got a miracle. Julie received the gift of life eternal, a reality she trusted with all her being even as she passed on her faith to her family. The Easter mystery is, of course, just that a mystery. Listen again for the series of adjectives and verbs that populate the story of the Resurrection that Ellsworth read to us from Luke s Gospel. When the women went to the tomb and found it - 3 -

4 empty they were first perplexed. Then, a verse later, they were terrified. They bowed their faces to the ground in awe. When they ran back into the city to tell the male disciples the news, the men first thought that their words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them at least until they saw something for themselves. As I said at the beginning of this sermon, the Easter mystery cannot be tidily explained by me any more than it could be explained that first morning. It can only be proclaimed, just as it was on that first Easter. Frankly, the truth is that Easter is often best sung, just as will be done following this sermon of merest words. I leave you with this. To be proclaimed in its fullness, the Easter truth must be proclaimed in two directions into the future and into the present. First and most familiar to us, Easter is indeed the promise that in some manner beyond mortal ken, life does not end with death. Easter is the proclamation that the ultimate reality is not death after all. Easter cries out that the final word is life life eternal. Call this first word, the Easter word for the future. But there is a second direction in which the Easter proclamation goes. Call this second direction, the Easter word for right now. This is the hope for the present for this world, for our lives in the here and now. This second Easter word is the promise that because life, not death, reigns supreme, our present lives really can be lived in joy and meaning, packed full of life right now, no matter what. This second Easter word is the promise that because love actually does win, our present lives can be brilliant with love right now, no matter what. Andrew is married and doing research on curing cancer. Julie is seated at the great heavenly banquet. So is Philip who was lost at sea, and by now, his mom as well, that contagiously joyful woman who triumphed past her grief. They all of them walked through the valley of the shadow and stayed alive. They spread joy. They gave love You call it what you want; I call it miraculous. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

5 * The three stories in this sermon, as well as portions of the concluding observations in quotation marks, are gleaned from a paper prepared for the 2013 Moveable Feast by Thomas Are, Senior Minster of the Village Presbyterian Church in Prairie Village, Kansas