Lucia Lloyd s sermon Preached: April 5, 2015 Easter Sunday, Year B Air Date: March 27, 2016 Mark 16:1-8 Unread books and the Resurrection Today s program is sponsored by St. Stephen s Episcopal Church in honor of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. A It is a book review of a book I haven t read. Interestingly, the book is about unread books. The author, Nassim Taleb, looks at Umberto Eco and comments, The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with Wow! Professor Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read? and the others a very small minority who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary. Taleb s book encourages us to explore a different relationship with what we know, and more importantly, what we do not yet know. The reviewer comments, We ve known at least since Plato s famous Allegory of the Cave that most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.. Although science is driven by thoroughly conscious ignorance and the spiritual path paved with admonitions against the illusion of thorough understanding, we cling to our knowledge our incomplete, imperfect, infinitesimal-in-absolute-terms knowledge like we cling to life itself. Taleb observes, We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. But he proposes an alternative: Let us call this an antischolar someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device
2 His book is entitled, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and he notes that his Black Swan theory centers on our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises because we underestimate the value of what we don t know and take what we do know a little too seriously. The reviewer calls the book, an illuminating inquiry into the unknowable and unpredictable outlier-events that precipitate profound change. I was talking once to a woman who said that she pictured heaven as an infinite library in which she could just enjoy reading and reading and reading as much as she wanted to for the rest of eternity. I think she s got that antischolar spirit, and the ultimate antilibrary of unread books. As we have been praying through the old Rite 1 Eucharistic service during Lent, I have found a deeper appreciation of the way it speaks of heaven not as a static possession or reward, but as a continual process of growth. In it, we pray, for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear, beseeching thee to grant them continual growth in thy love and service. When I saw today s reading from Isaiah, it reminded me of Tommy Crowther. His family chose that scripture passage for his funeral, because the image it presents of feasting at the heavenly banquet reminded them of the way Tommy loved good food and a good party, and it was so easy to picture him feasting in heaven. It reminded me of Doug Hatch, whose family chose that scripture passage to be read at his funeral for the same reason. These images of feasting (which is something we know) give us a little glimpse of the immense joy of heaven (which is something we don t know). In every aspect of life, what we do not know is far greater than what we know, and this is especially true when we consider what we do not know about heaven. I wonder what it is like for Tommy, and Doug, and the others, in the full splendor of infinite bliss, infinite discovery, infinite love, to listen to a mortal preacher like me trying to describe heaven. One of the places that we most fear the unread books, where we tend to cling to what we know and to fear what we do not yet know, is in dealing with what happens after our death. We can so easily jump to the conclusion that anything beyond the books I have already read must not exist. That the end point of the universe stops at what I know of material earthly life, and anything beyond what I already know must not exist. When the writer says we cling to our knowledge our incomplete, imperfect, infinitesimal-
3 in-absolute-terms knowledge like we cling to life itself, it occurs to me that he is not exaggerating; we cling to knowledge exactly as we cling to life itself, because earthly life is what we already know, and heavenly life is an unread book. Even when what we know is filled with pain, it is not always easy to let go of the pain we know to discover the joy we do not yet know. When someone we love dies, it is not always easy for us to let them let go of what we already know to discover the joy we do not yet know. But do we want to limit ourselves and our loved ones to never discovering anything better than what we already know? And if we could hear those who have gone before us to the continued discovering of eternal and infinite love and joy, what would they tell us? To me, one of the most important aspects of God is that there is so much more out there than the knowledge we already possess. That is one of the continuing themes of divine revelation, that what we get are only brief glimpses of what is too magnificent for any of us to fully comprehend. The resurrection is a prime example of that: that God shows us that material objects and mortal bodies are not the boundaries of all possibility, that what we know is only a tiny smidgen of the ultimate. On Easter Sunday, the lectionary gives us two options in the descriptions of the resurrection from the gospels. One of the options is the passage from the gospel of John, which is a wonderful passage, and the passage I have chosen every year up until now. It gives the preacher a lot of good material to work with, and I am grateful we have it. The other option comes from one of the other three gospels, rotating on a three year cycle, and in this year is the year we read Mark s gospel. The gospel of Mark presents Jesus as the Son of God literally from the very first verse, and throughout the gospel there are numerous places in which Jesus talks about his upcoming crucifixion and resurrection. The earliest manuscripts of the gospel of Mark, which is the earliest of the gospels, written close to 70 AD, less than 40 years after the crucifixion and resurrection, end with this passage we read today, Mark 16:1-8. It is a passage that proclaims the resurrection of Christ, and at the same time it presses us toward a sense that there is more to the resurrection than what we know, more to the resurrection than we are capable of grasping. I believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and that the risen Christ was manifest to Mary Magdalene and to the other
4 disciples in physical form. I m not trying to wiggle my way out of Christian doctrine here. What I am saying is that what we know about the resurrection is a tiny fraction of the divine mystery of spiritual reality that radiates out into the infinite and the eternal. What I love about this passage in Mark is its sense of possibility in discovering something far beyond what we have ever known, as if, in our ordinary life, a door suddenly opened into a library of unread books more mysterious and wondrous than we had ever dreamed possible. We do cling to what we know, and when we discover the unexpected we carry with us our fear of anything we do not already know. When Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome arrive at the tomb early in the morning, they discover a young man in a white robe who tells 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. 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. So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Mark invites us to see in them a reflection of our own fear of what is beyond the tiny list of things we know, beyond the narrow territory of what we expect, even when the glory of infinite possibility is shining on us, encouraging us to begin to discover that the divine has more surprises for us than we ever dreamed possible, that even death is not an ending, but a gateway into endless possibility. What we know about the resurrection is only a tiny, minuscule speck in the vast landscape of what we do not know about the resurrection. This passage may seem like an abrupt ending to Mark s gospel, but I have the sense that even that abruptness is to open our eyes to the sense that it is only the beginning of the path of discovering who God is. We read this book of Mark s gospel, and it opens to us a myriad of unread books for us to discover with amazement that there is more to God s love than we know, which God holds out to us with eager anticipation for us to discover.
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