23 March 2008

Easter Sunday

Come, See

Matthew 28:1-10

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

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 “[Jesus] is not here; for he has been raised, as he said.  Come, see…” (Matthew 28:6, New Revised Standard Version.)

 

During the past week we’ve listened to the story of Jesus passion and death, watching with our minds’ eyes as he walks up the hill of the Skull and is crucified.  In her sermon last Sunday, Pastor Jennifer spoke the question on the minds and in the hearts of disciples viewing that tragic scene both then and through the ages:  “God, were you there?”

 

As I listened to her sermon and to the lessons of Passion Sunday, my memory took me to a similar question posed by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in his recently republished book, “Night.” Among other horrors, both great and small, that he experienced in those terrible days, Wiesel especially remembers the occasion when three prisoners are hanged while the rest of the camp is forced to watch.  As nooses pull tight around three necks, someone behind Wiesel whispers, “Where is merciful God, where is He?”  Then, as the camp is ordered to march past the gallows, to look at a boy struggling to die because he didn’t weigh enough to die with a quick mercy, the same man asks again, “For God’s sake, where is God?”  And Wiesel recalls his own response:  “From within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where He is?  This is where – hanging here from this gallows…’”  (Wiesel, Night, pages 64-65.) Indeed, the death of the Jewish boy and the death of the Jewish Jesus force us to watch, and seeing the forces of evil, death, betrayal, and our own failed humanity we wonder, “Where is God?”

 

But the question haunts us, doesn’t it, in other corners of our life?  Where is God, we might ask, as we consume earth’s bounty in failed quests for satisfaction?  Where is God, we whisper to ourselves, when friends or family close to us fall prey to capricious illnesses?  Where is God, we want to know, when we confront our own impotent pride?  Where is God, we might dare to ask, when passing the milestone of five years in Iraq causes us to ponder efficacy and the morality of military action taken in our name and paid for with lives of friends and a debt being run up for us and for our heirs?  Where is God, we wonder, when we travel into corners of our world or our country that live with so much less materially, and yet exhibit such spiritual joy?  And the answer, part of it at least, is that God is there, on every gallows, at every oil spill, at every injustice, at every open grave, beside every dying soldier or civilian, near every American, every Iraqi, every Afghan, every Israeli, every Palestinian; and God is also with every African child dying of AIDS or malaria, just as God weeps beside every Sudanese villager as she is raped or tortured to death.

 

Wiesel’s Jewish faith – or maybe it’s his existentialism — shares a common expression with our Christian faith.  Both his message and the lament of Good Friday are the same: If God is present in our world at all, God is there in the both our human suffering and the loneliness born of that suffering.  God is there.  That is the gospel truth. 

 

In just this kind of a world, Jesus dies.  But then, something happens.  On the first day of the week, our lesson for today tells us, two women go to the tomb, looking for a dead Jesus.  There is nothing there for them, really, except the tears that speak of their love for a dead man. Yet they go.  These women go, in spite of their fear, in spite of their grief, confronting their loneliness.  They go because they know what the powerless know best:  that God is with the powerless.  They, more than most, sense that God was there, with Jesus as he died.  And these women know, as only the broken can know, that God does not surrender.  God was there, they know; neither they nor Jesus faced that day alone. And on this new day, this first day of a new week, a new life, they know they are not alone. 

 

The women know, because they know that our faith teaches that God is never far from them.  Our passionate God is with all those who endure passion.  We believe that, too. But there is more.  Humanity is meant for more, says God. From God’s blessing of creation to the holy commission of the prophets, to the birth of a sacred hope for a messiah, people of faith have looked beyond death for a hope a different life.  We are endowed, I believe, with a hope for a life in spite of death.  And we believe that God accompanies us into that life.  Hope is the legacy of deep faith, after all, a faith in God and not just in politics.  The message of Easter is the message of a particular hope:  the same God who is silently beside Jesus – and us, too – on Good Friday, is also and joyfully present with us on Easter morning.  Or, as another preacher once said to his church, “On the cross, the world did all it could to Jesus.  At Easter, God did all God could to the world.” (“Easter as an Earthquake,” Bishop William H. Willimon, http://www.chapel.duke.edu/)

 

The truth of this day is the core of our faith:  the very God whom we desperately long to glimpse in the suffering of our own Good Friday moments is the same God whom we meet in the joy, the beauty, and the ecstasy of life’s richest and fullest moments.  And, friends, these moments are neither bought nor earned.  They are gift.  Pure and simple, God’s moments of joy are gift.  The women on that first Easter morning, says Matthew, “left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy…”  (Matt. 28:8)  Where did the joy come from?  Their joy came from their experience of God’s presence, and the angel’s message of life.  Their joy was a gift.

 

The challenge for us, as for the women at the tomb, is to open our eyes.  Peering into the empty tomb, blinking at the angel who seemed afire with life in front of them, the women heard an instruction:  “Come, see.”  If we find it easy to ask, “Where is God?” in our suffering, we find it challenging as well to see God in our surprise, in our delight, in our joy.  “Where is God in our world?”  Come and see, says our God.  Open your eyes.

 

In Nicaragua one day I asked the group, “So, where is God for you, in these few days?” I expected some of the answers we discussed.  But I was a bit surprised when that questioned boomeranged into my own mind and heart.  I’ve thought about it since, and one moment stands out as God’s blessing of presence.  To tell you about that moment, I have to tell you about Willie.

 

Willie is eight, and his siblings are caring for him these days because their parents have gone to Spain to find work, sending their money home to their family.  So it was Willie’s cousin who brought him to the hospital for some help.  I met Willie as Dr. Jeff Siegel examined his feet on Saturday morning.  Noting that his feet are displaced almost ninety degrees, Jeff explained that Willie no longer actually walks on his feet, but on the bones of his legs.  Something needed to be done to help him walk differently for the rest of his life. So Jeff and Charles spent one morning of our visit in Leon correcting one of Willie’s feet.  The news of Willie’s successful operation was an Easter moment for our whole group. We felt God among us quite powerfully at hearing the news.

 

But my own moment was more personal. On that Saturday before his operation, I happened to walk through the hospital waiting area alone.  All of a sudden, someone behind me threw arms around my waist.  I turned, and there was Willie, his face a wide smile.  I picked him up, shared a hug, and accepted his blessing as he accepted mine. In the brief spontaneous exchange, a moment transcending differences of culture, age, and language, God was there.  Palpably, God was there in the life we shared in that brief exchange.

 

Easter is about many things – but this much I know without any hesitation:   at least one of Easter’s blessings is being awakened to beauty and blessing in every moment of our lives.  Easter is about seeing, accepting, and celebrating those moments of joy and beauty.  Easter is attending to the godly fireworks of joy in each of our lives in an endless succession.

 

Easter’s joy is glimpsing God in the present, remembering that the angel continues to invite the grieving disciple:  “Come, see.” Recently I’ve come to see this truth again in reading some things by the Irish author, poet, and former priest, John O’Donohue.  Though he died this past January, he lives in his published books.  He continues to invite readers to see the beauty of life in its intimate particularity in their own immediate surroundings.  He invites an awareness of God’s presence in every ordinary moment.  And, in a poem entitled “Bennacht,” an Irish word that means “blessing,” O’Donohue helps us move from the grey world of grief to a world filled with color, and inhabited by us and by an ever-present, ever-living God.  Listen, to one of O’Donohue’s poems and see the beauty, even when the curach, or boat, of life seems to flounder:

Bennacht

 

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

 

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colors,

indigo, red, green

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

 

When the canvas frays

in the curach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

 

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

 (John O’Donohue, Anam Cara:  A Book of Celtic Wisdom, Cliff Street Books, 1997, page v.)

 

Friends, if your question is, with so many of us, “Where is God?”  all I can say is, “Come, see.”  Come, see the invisible cloak of God’s goodness, mercy, and love around your every breathing moment.  Where is God?  Past, present, and future:  At Christ’s death, God is here; in Christ’s Easter life, God is here; and in Christ coming to us again, yes, God is here.  God is surely with us as we are with God for ever.  In this moment, all we ever have, God is here, and now, and always.

 

 

Amen.