Quiet, Unrelenting Hope: Easter 2020
Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s. A time where the casual funkiness of bell bottoms and flower children became Izod polo shirts, shoulder pads, pegged jeans, big bangs and earrings that matched your dress that matched your shoes that matched your makeup.
Easter Day 1982 was a reason to fulfill my lifelong dream (and by lifelong, I mean all of my 11 years to that point) to look just like Princess Diana. I had a periwinkle blue dress with white polka dots. And for the first time — pantyhose! My ears were recently pierced. My mom had just given me my very first eyeshadow — a subtle electric blue.
We went to church that morning and I felt like I had achieved perfection.
I don’t remember the sermon or the songs or the people — but I remember my outfit.
Now that’s the Easter spirit.
As so many of us have thought for years, or at least acted as if it was true.
We get dressed in our very best. We slick the errant hair back. We adjust the tie. We squeeze children’s feet into patent leather shoes. We expect the music to be glorious, the church to be beautiful, the kids to be cute, the preaching to be inspirational.
And then we go to brunch and have the most lovely meal — food cooked to perfectiont, Easter eggs hidden in a perfectly manicured lawn, Martha Stewart level decorations on our tables.
We know that’s not reality and maybe you’ve given up all together. And I’m not saying dressing up isn’t part of the fun. I look forward to seeing you all in your future Easter finest.
But I think it’s safe to say that somewhere in this cultural narrative, we conflated perfection with resurrection. And by extension, Christianity with perfection.
In fact, many people have left their faith in resurrection all together because they can’t buy into that whole perfection thing. And rightly so.
But here’s the thing…
Resurrection is not about being perfect
or getting it all right
or having everything the way we want
or happily ever after…
Resurrection is about a love determined enough to find us in our grief and in our fear, take us by the hand and lead us into hope.
I chose two of the subtler resurrection texts for this morning because in those texts, there are no angels in white robes or big surprises or earthquakes or stones rolled away.
Instead there is a woman weeping with grief and confusion outside of a grave. And 10 men self-isolated in fear and anxiety in an upper room.
A man comes to Mary. She’s seen the empty tomb but it doesn’t make sense. She has lost her teacher and a friend and to add insult to injury, his body has been taken. She doesn’t recognize the man is Jesus until he says her name.
The poet Rilke wrote: “I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief, so this massive darkness makes me small”
Mary was lost in her grief — small in the darkness as Rilke would say. Desperate to find a reason, to find a why, to find a way out, to get relief from her pain.
Jesus asks her simple and direct questions:
“Woman, why are you weeping?
Whom are you seeking?”
And her first response is on the surface of things:
“Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
In other words — “let’s just fix this problem and make it go away.” This is our natural and first response to pain, the first sign of our grief.
And then Jesus says her name: “Mary.” Everything changes when she hears her name spoken into the cacophony of her grief. Mary sees it is Jesus.
Mary makes the next understandable move: She wants to hold on to Jesus, to make everything just like it was before.
Jesus doesn’t allow her to stay there either.
““Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Jesus invites Mary to become bigger. Her grief was the necessary path to seeing resurrection.
Her grief led her to being the one who spoke hope to the disciples and who declared that the God of Jesus belonged to them as well — Jesus’ God, their God, her God.
Francis Weller in her book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, says this: “Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty. By so doing, we may be able to feel our desire for life once again and remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred.”
Grief is essential for life, for experiencing life as sacred, for resurrection. Which makes resurrection a lot more messy than we’d like.
The second story today is also less than Easter-bonnet perfect.
What do the disciples do when they discover an empty tomb?
They do not rejoice and sing. Their first reaction is complete terror and anxiety. They self-isolate themselves in an upper room. I can only imagine that the conversation goes round and round in an endless cycle of “what if?” and “what’s next?” and “what will we do?” Which feels very familiar these days.
And Jesus shows up right there in the middle of the cycle without blame or shame and just says, “Peace be with you.”
He shows them his hands and his side as if to say, “Yes, this really happened. Yes, the wounds are real. Yes, the trauma is understandable. Yes, the injustice still unacceptably wrong.”
And the text says, “then” — “THEN!” — after Jesus showed them his wounds, “THEN the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.”
They weren’t glad about seeing a dead man rise without seeing the wounds that honored their trauma, that validated their fear, that said, “This all happened. It was real.”
I feel like I wake up every morning these days and say to myself, “This is real.”
After that admission, the disciples could receive it. They could receive the peace Jesus offered them, the scent and sending of God’s own breath, the courage to go out and forgive, just as Jesus had on the cross.
Jesus meets the disciples in their fear, anxiety and trauma and finds a way to make all of that the opening to hope.
Last summer, my friends Roz and Paul couldn’t wait for their daughter’s wedding. It was — it is — a seeming match made in heaven for their beloved daughter after some hard years. The wedding day was set up to be perfect — a well-deserved celebration of love and hope.
Before the ceremony, there was a signing of the ketubah, the marriage covenant, with just close family and friends. Roz signed the ketubah and stepped back, the heel of her carefully chosen shoes catching on the curb and sending her falling into a 2 foot ditch behind her.
At her side immediately was a doctor, a nurse, and a physicians assistant — all a part of the wedding party. They assessed her situation, got her some pain medication, made a sling out of a caterer’s apron. And just awhile later, Roz pushed away the offered wheelchair, took the arm of her son and walked down the aisle. She and Paul stood up and read True Love, a poem by David Whyte with these words:
…because finally
after all the struggle
and all the years,
you don’t want to any more,
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness,
however fluid and however
dangerous, to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
These words of love in the midst of struggle, hope in the face of pain, a resolve to be together no matter what. They were never more true than when read by Roz with her arm in a sling, determined to stand for love, in the midst of deep disappointment that a perfect day was also a day of injury and pain.
In the weeks to come, there would be surgeries, physical therapy, the discovery of A-fib and more procedures and recoveries for Roz. There was anger, questions and residual trauma. And then resolve. A seeing of the beauty through the wounds. The shining of love through mutual care.
Don’t we get protected on certain days?
Don’t we get a pass from suffering on the day of a beloved daughter’s wedding?
Don’t we get to gather on Easter Sunday?
Don’t we get to have our graduation we have worked so hard for?
Don’t those who are sacrificing so much get protected from disease?
Do people have to die alone?
Why can’t the most vulnerable have extra boosts of immunity?
Resurrection doesn’t come as a free pass.
It came when Mary’s grief was acknowledged, it came to the disciples when they looked at the wounds of Jesus, to Roz on an imperfectly perfect wedding day. Resurrection is glimpsed every day right now by our determination to protect life at the cost of our economy and personal freedom. Resurrection just keeps coming through our grief, our wounds and our fear.
Resurrection is usually not loud and brash but quiet and relentless. It asks us to grow bigger by grieving, to look in the face of the stranger and recognize Jesus, to face wounds in ourselves and others so that we can know peace, to let go of assumptions that we know just where and how God will show up.
Kate Bowler, a church historian, author and young mother, has also been living with incurable colon cancer for the last 5 years. She has been a valuable and trusted voice for many in recent weeks because she has lived the reality that not everything happens for a reason. When she was asked this week by the New York Times what she would say to someone who doesn’t pray, she said this:
For me, part of the joy of prayer is having abandoned the formula. I have no expectation that prayer works in a direct way. But I do hope that every person, religious or not, feels the permission to say, “I’m at the edge of what I know. And in the face of the sea of abyss, someone out there please show me love.” Because that’s, to me, the only thing that fills up the darkness. It’s somehow in there, the feeling that I am not for no reason. And that doesn’t mean anything better is going to happen to me, but in the meantime that I will know that we all are deeply and profoundly loved. That’s my hope for everybody.”
Resurrection is not magical thinking. Resurrection is not perfectly dressed or performed. Resurrection doesn’t even require a sanctuary or a church service. It does not give us a pass on anything. Resurrection means we are deeply and profoundly loved.
And God stops at nothing — not even death — to let us know that.
