|
|
The Resurrection is Personal
|
|
| 3/23/2008 |
Easter Day 2008
In 1972, when I was 13 years old, my mother and I were on vacation in Santa Barbara, California—that’s the beach about two hours from Los Angeles. My parents were divorced by then, but my father came up and stayed with us weekends, which I loved.
My parents had been married in Santa Barbara, I think in 1955, in a small Presbyterian Church on State Street--a white adobe with Spanish tile in the floor. I still like to look at the photo of their wedding day. My father dressed in a perfect gray Brooks Brother suit with narrow lapels and a bow tie. He held my mother’s hand with his right hand, and in his left, a lit Kent cigarette, his elbow in a chic 45-degree bend. My mother dressed in a light blue silk Dior suit that she picked up in Paris; she was a couture buyer for a department store in LA. So elegant, they looked like Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.
“Why didn’t you wear white, Mommy?” I asked before I understood the harsh judgments of the church toward women who asked for a second chance.
My father had bad heart valves; he had contracted rheumatic fever as a child. By 1972, the Kents, several Old Fashioned’s a night, and twenty years in the advertising business were more than his leaky valves could carry. One night, I heard him get up in the middle of the night, and leave the house. He checked himself into the hospital, and the next day, as he was being prepped for surgery, he died, shortly after saying to me, “Take care of your mother.”
I tell this story because while the debates about the resurrection of Jesus the Christ, and what happened on that Easter morning thousands of years ago when two women went early to the tomb to see where they had laid the broken body of Jesus pried from the cross, will never end.
But our own stories of the resurrection about those whom we love and see no more will always live.
The resurrection is very personal. The resurrection is intimate. I suspect most of us gather early on Easter morning because we are carrying here in our hearts someone we love, we know and we remember. We dare to believe in such an extravagant story out of our extravagant capacity to love.
This is my thirty sixth Easter since my father died, the thirty sixth time I have come to a church on the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs after the Spring equinox and shared in a proclamation that has rung out for thousands of years, Alleluia: Christ is Risen Indeed, trampling down death by death. This is the thirty-sixth year of gathering with people like you, coming together to say “no” to death itself.
Later in the week my father died. I helped carry him back into the same Presbyterian Church, which my mother figured was the first time he’d been back to church since the day they were married. I took my place behind the pastor, next to my brother and sister, and we walked down the aisle as he intoned, “I am the Resurrection, and I am the Life, saith the Lord, whom so ever shall believe in me, though he die, yet shall he live.”
I am pretty sure that my father had slim faith, and if he nodded at all in the direction of the empty tomb, it was with the casual grace that men in Brooks Brothers’ suits with Kents could, across the din of the Oak Room, nod at and speak volumes to a beautiful women in a Dior suit.
Like when I carried my father down that church aisle with the words of the Resurrection rising, I know that I gather with you all this morning is to still carry my father in the faith of new and risen life. If my faith creaks, or has some dust upon it, I stand it up and dust it off not for my sake, but for his.
Faith is not about taking hold of the impossible, but rather being confident (sure?) that the impossible has taken a hold of us.
Many years back, in my last congregation, I had two members, Steve and Cheryl, full of life and hope, dreams and drive. One night, driving down a twisty dirt road out of Zion National Park, their truck slipped and went down the side, and that was all.
After the funeral, Steve’s father said to me, “I believe they are resurrected, in the arms of Jesus, and better now, and one day, I will be with them.”
Maybe it was my own grief. Maybe it was my anger at God that two beautiful people my age were gone and I had to bury them. But he could see that not only did I not have his faith, that I thought his faith was naïve. I wanted him to be broken and angry, and all he was, was sure and certain in the hope of the Resurrection.
He was right, I was wrong. His faith is that the Resurrection had a hold of daughter and son-in-law, and that Resurrection was never going to let them go.
If he were to let go of his sureness, he was letting go of them. Love demands the faith, and faith demands the telling of the story.
For the resurrection of Jesus whom we dare to call the Christ, and the outrageous claim that we too will be raised (how or where we do not know) is not a belief to be accepted or rejected, but an outrageous story to be preached and passed along so that it takes hold of us, even when we can’t take hold of what the Resurrection demands of us.
Some two thousand years ago, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went on the first day of the week, as the night was ending and the day was dawning, to see the tomb of Jesus. Then, the earth shook, and the stone heavy with death itself rolled away from the place where they had laid him. An angel, who looked like lightning (whatever that looks like) told them not to be afraid, and somehow they weren’t. The soldiers there appointed to insure death itself fainted dead away. The women ran to tell the others that Christ was risen indeed, and in the telling, experienced the Risen Christ, right before them.
It is in the telling that Christ is Risen. I tell the story for my father and your father. For your children, your brothers your sisters, your mothers and your friends. For Steve, Cheryl, Jay, Virginia, Jim, . . . .
None of us tell the story every day. When we can’t others will. When we do, tell the story, “Christ is Risen Indeed,” like lightning, and permit Christ to find us on the road as we go to tell.
|
|
|
|