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CONTENTS
--Housing --People Christian Education --PYC
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Preached by O. Benjamin Sparks, Pastor Second Presbyterian Church Richmond, Virginia, April 16, 2006
EASTER COURAGE
Isaiah 25:6 – 9; Mark 16:1 – 8 (15:40 ff.)
The story I just read is a story of failure, a triumph of fear over courage and resolve. Matthew, Luke, and John, all recount the doubt and fear that Jesus’ resurrection and subsequent appearances strike within the company of disciples. Even as they recall for us a seaside breakfast, a reunion in the garden, an appearance in the upper room, and instruction from the risen Christ to proclaim the good news to the nations – the gospel writers do not shy away from telling us that the disciples had to be convinced that the resurrection really happened. We who live in the shadow of 60 Minutes, and the religion beat of Time magazine and Newsweek, as well as in the shadow of the cross; we think we’ve just recently discovered these problems of fact and faith. Get real! They were there from the beginning. Only Mark shows us failure. Earlier in Mark’s story, when Judas’ kiss betrays Jesus and the soldiers arrest him, all the disciples forsake him and flee. One follower tussles with the soldiers, breaks free, and leaving his cloak behind, runs away naked. Peter shows up again briefly in the High Priest’s courtyard warming himself by a fire, while Jesus is being questioned inside the house. Peter is exposed as the fearful disciple he is. In Mark, that’s the last time we see any of Jesus’ followers. Now as the story following Jesus’ death unfolds, the faithful women are set to show their mettle – which they do in other renditions. Not in Mark. At the announcement of Christ’s resurrection, terror and amazement seize the women, and they flee from the tomb, and say nothing to anyone, for they are afraid. The women come close in Mark to genuine greatness; then they fall further away than the disciples. Apparently, when we’re up against the work of the living God – it’s the good news as well as the bad news that sends us packing. What in the world does this mean? It means that Mark was writing for and to a community that did not need explanation as much as courage, a community that remained querulous and tentative about the cost of discipleship, a community that paid so much attention on the glory of the risen Christ, they had forgotten that he was also, despised and gory – one from whom people hid their faces – not esteemed, but smitten by God and afflicted, wounded for our transgressions, with the power of healing in his sufferings. Mark speaks to us who are apt to make Easter rather than Good Friday the focus of our devotion and delight. Then we build our lives – not on the power and promise of God – but upon what’s in it for us. The victory of the risen Christ does not teach us humility; we learn it from the self-emptying love of the Crucified – who told his disciples over and over that they were going up to Jerusalem where he would be subjected to humiliation, defeat, and death at the hands – not of the bad people but of the good people. And then he would rise on the third day. He also told them, “Take up your cross and follow me. Those of you who would save your lives will lose them.” And here, with the evidence and testimony before their eyes, that the One who took up his cross for as long as he could (in the end, Simon of Cyrene had to be pressed into service for the last few miles up Calvary); the one who gave up his life was raised from death – and vindicated by God. Hearing the testimony of that evidence, seeing the empty tomb, where God’s chosen One did not suffer corruption, the women ran away. They did not need understanding, but courage. What else does this mean? Mark is not only recounting human failure and loss of nerve. He is declaring that God has not been defeated by the worst we human beings can accomplish, or by the worst that can happen to us, or by the worst we do to each other, or by our fear. God vindicated His Messiah’s way of being in the world; this way of life; this bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things. This is the way of life and peace. Therefore, the truth of Easter is not dependent upon me, upon my faithfulness, upon the faithfulness of the women. Obviously the story got told; obviously – if not by Mark, then by the other gospel writers, the story got out. It was not kept secret. Mark does not intend us to think no one ever found out. Quite the contrary! Go back to Galilee. God is faithful. Take your fears and your sufferings, your amazement and your terror, and return to Galilee – where he will meet you. This mysterious event on the first day of the week, when the women were going to anoint a corpse – not to embalm, but to pay homage to their dead leader – this unrepeatable, unique event in all creation, in the history of the world, is the guarantee that God not only gives us life, but gives us new life; that God not only causes the birth of every child born of woman, but also is the author of resurrection – the guarantor that what God promises is fulfilled. This story is not about me, or about us, or about the fearful disciples and women – who cannot hit the mark or live up even to their own expectations of themselves. This story is about God, who invites us thorough the messenger in the empty tomb back to Galilee, where we saw the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. News of Jesus’ resurrection is not the end of a story. It is the beginning. It’s not a story about how everything has already come out all right, that if we only accept it and understand it, everything will always come out all right for us. It won’t. It doesn’t. Instead this story invites us to believe that because of God, everything came out all right for Jesus. As Jesus’ disciples we are invited into the story where we were all along – and that in spite of our fear, our denials, our failings, our losses, God will vindicate us. You want to see Jesus, asks Mark? He is not here. He is not in the tomb; death could not contain him. He is not confined by the tomb, or by the hopes and dreams of his followers. The disciples never got that bit about suffering. Once, after he told them about his impending death – two of them began to plead with him for special privileges, and the others became indignant. He is not in the tomb. Nor is he confined by the designs of his enemies. We learn from Mark that almost from the beginning – soon after his baptism, his healing, and teaching in Galilee, that the leaders of the people plotted his death. But all their plans and schemes went down to death with him. All human attempts to get a handle on God – from the grasping of the forbidden fruit in the garden, to the building of the tower of Babel in an effort to reach up to heaven, to the works of religion and law and empire – every human attempt to make things come out right ends in failure. Nations come and go – all of them. But God is faithful to us wayward creatures, who are arrogant and fearful, who are eager to please and quick to fail, who are so bent down by death and sadness that we can only cry out for mercy. And when we meet new life? We run away. Therefore, we need courage. God does not run away from us. God embraces us. God is faithful when we are not faithful; therefore take heart; have courage. In the face of this, I confess my own failure of nerve. In the April newsletter I launched an attack on a whole body of current Christian writers who seem to delight in tweaking fundamentalists about believing in a literal resurrection. Some of them go to extremes. They claim that what really happened historically was that the Holy Spirit awakened in the disciples’ minds and hearts the truth of who Jesus was and what he taught. But these stories of appearances and an empty tomb: mere legends. They are creative, mythic ways of proclaiming the gospel, but they never actually happened. I once heard one of the most flamboyant of these interpreters say through clenched teeth: “The only fact in the Apostles Creed is “crucified under Pontius Pilate. The rest of it was made up by the church!” Well, I delivered a broadside in the April newsletter when something more subtle and indirect would have been appropriate. I inveighed against those who sit around in air-conditioned Sunday School rooms discussing such things instead of standing before the open grave of a teenager, bawling your eyes out in sorrow, choking out your Easter Hallelujahs (1) as you commit a body to the grave. I claimed that only belief in a bodily resurrection would do. Both I and my opponents have it wrong. My own belief (fervent though it may be) does not help or deter God’s grace and mercy in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Get this straight. I’m not suggesting that we not take the gospel stories seriously, or that we dismiss them as idle tales, like the men did – in Luke’s gospel – to the women who came joyously from the tomb. But I do think Mark teaches us a deeper lesson about faith. It’s not about us; it’s about God. Our confessions of faith, our orthodoxies, and our lack of orthodoxy – all of these fall away in the promise of God. Just like the fear and silence of the women. And in that way Mark does the church a favor, that none of the other writers do. He shows us that the good news of the gospel, just as he said in Chapter 1, verse 1, is not in us, in our faith, in our experience, in our faithfulness. He says that this is the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he keeps that before us until the end – and the beginning. Mark tells the stories of Jesus in ways that demonstrate the opposite: our thick-headedness, our disloyalty, our fierce competition, our failure of nerve and lack of faith. Yet we still receive comfort and a call to discipleship: “Do not be alarmed (afraid); 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.” We have the courage to begin again. Someone tells that he understood this strange ending of Mark’s gospel much better when he was writing a sermon on of Jesus’ calming of the storm. He was, at the same time, having to face a frightening medical crisis in his family. And he noticed (he says he needed to) that in Mark’s gospel, Jesus appears, not when the disciples are full of faith, but when they are full of fear. If we know the gospel of Mark, we know that in the face of the women’s fear, Jesus is just around the corner – in Galilee, where he has promised to see us. We’ve had enough fear, tragedy, and dismay weaving their unholy ways in and through this congregation and city for the last three months – to last a thousand lifetimes. What we need is courage. Easter courage; we need the courage to have faith that in spite of what seems to be the case, God will not be mocked, and God’s way will prevail in the world. We need courage to believe that in the end, death does not have the last word, but that resurrection is God’s promise for everyone who dies. Resurrection is the promise that God has not abandoned us. We need courage, to take up our cross and follow Jesus, going again to Galilee, knowing that he will meet us there. Listen to Albert Schweitzer’s compelling words: “[he will] set us to [and keep us in] the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. [He invites.] And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they will pass through in his fellowship . . . .” (2) That is precisely where Galilee was, where it is, and always will be until kingdom come, in company with the risen Christ who invited us to take up our crosses and follow him – in faith and uncertainly, in sorrow and in joy, in grief and in gladness. For Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed.
NOTES
There are three sources for several of the ideas in this sermon: Hare, Douglas R.A., Mark, Westminster Bible Commentary, WJK, Louisville, 1996, p. 222. Juel, Donald, A Master of Surprises, Mark Interpreted, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1994, p. 107-21. Journal for Preachers, Vo. XXIX, Number 3, Easter, 2006, especially the articles by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett.
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