Download the kingdom of god - Swarthmore Presbyterian Church

Drop Everything!
Mark 16:1-8
Rev. Richard R. Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
Easter Sunday
April 8, 2012
We began our service in a spirit of confession. Let me move to my own personal admission. I couldn’t get to
writing my sermon for this morning until yesterday. That’s a little too close for comfort, but I had a hard time
getting to Easter this year. Maybe I took my own advice, as in physician, heal thyself! For I said on Palm
Sunday a week ago that we can’t just jump from one parade to another, from the triumph of Palm Sunday to
the joy of Easter morning. There’s a lot of suffering and death in between. And so it seemed for me this year.
But very richly so, for our morning services this week were remarkably helpful for the journey and our Maundy
Thursday again quite moving in its unique and penetrating poignancy. By noon on Good Friday I was
commiserating with a couple of my community clergy friends that I hadn’t even been able to get Easter into my
head or heart yet, despite – or because of – the richness of the past few days. But then I learned much of the
same from them. They still had a long way to go as well.
Most of us, I learned, are “morning” people so we were set to face an empty computer screen as late as
Saturday morning – but at least with a few hours’ buffer before panic time. Only one of us admitted to being a
night person and he said he was hoping to make a run for it on Good Friday evening. Contemplating a late
Saturday evening sermon is too wild for me to imagine. So, I guess what I’m saying is that most church-going
Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians in Swarthmore and Wallingford are getting a pretty
fresh word this morning.
But that’s as it should be, I suppose, as the sun dawns to the message of God’s new life on Easter morning and
we come with flowers from our gardens to make our barren cross beautiful to sight and scent. The way the
three women came to Jesus’ tomb on the first day of the new week after his death to honor his body and to
overwhelm the stench of death with sweet-smelling spices.
They came expecting death, of course. What else could they expect? We go through a liturgical ritual now in
Holy Week, but they lived it. They went through every phase of the last week of Jesus’ life that was called
anything but holy that first time through. It was simply devastating. The hopes of Palm Sunday morning so
quickly dashed. A conspiracy of power between the leaders of religion and politics linking arms. Such power
as that can be insurmountable in life as we know it – at least for a while. Death can seem to win until a
greater power steps in and overthrows it.
Death has always been the natural enemy of life. We know that intellectually, but we feel it with a pain
stinging and severe when it touches us close to home. I suppose that no topic, with the possible exception of
romantic love, has captivated the poetic imagination as much as the reality of death. And different poets have
faced that reality with varying emotions.
Death, be not proud, the British cleric of the seventeenth century, John Donne, proclaimed as he stared death
in the face. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so.
Echoing the thoughts of the apostle Paul in Romans 8, Donne concludes his Holy Sonnet #10 with the line: One
short sleep past, we wake eternally/And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
A couple of centuries later our own New England poet, Emily Dickinson, would imagine death as a kindly visitor
who comes to relieve us of our life’s burdens and tasks: Because I could not stop for Death – /He kindly
stopped for me – /The Carriage held but just Ourselves – /And Immortality.
And the English Romanticist, William Wordsworth, lamenting the losses that we encounter in our mortal lives,
yet held, as he called them, “Intimations of Immortality”: Though nothing can bring back the hour/Of
splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;/We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains
behind;/In the primal sympathy/Which having been must ever be;/In the soothing thoughts that spring/Out of
human suffering;/In the faith that looks through death,/In years that bring the philosophic mind.
And so through the years in the hands of those who seem adept in facing the harsh realities of life and yet give
expression to the accompanying complex thoughts of our minds and deepest longings of our hearts we have
been led to integrate the struggles and suffering of our mortal days with the eternal nature of God’s reality.
You may have seen the current issue of Time magazine with an article entitled “Rethinking Heaven.” There’s
an article like that every year around Easter as once again we encounter the mystery and the promise of the
Resurrection in the midst of our own suffering, pain, and death. The writer quotes the contemporary British
theologian N. T. Wright who says: “‘Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden
dimension of our ordinary life – God’s dimension, if you like . . . God made heaven and earth; at the last [God]
will remake both and join them together forever.’”
In the meantime, suggest Wright and others of his persuasion, we mortals are to be about the work that Jesus
began, living and working toward God’s space in our own world so beset with the realities of pain and suffering
and death. Ours is to strive with hope toward that same resurrection spirit we are told about this very
morning.
When Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went to the tomb that first day of the week
following the death of the one they had loved and followed, they expected to find the body decaying in death.
Instead they found an empty tomb. This was unprecedented in their life experience. They didn’t know what
to do with it. Even though the young man in a white robe told them to go tell Peter and the other disciples the
great good news, they could not “for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone,
for they were afraid.”
It’s such an honest story, Mark’s account of Jesus’ resurrection. How could the women feel anything but terror
and amazement as they encounter something completely out of their experience. There is nothing they have
known on which to hang something like this. Death has always been just that: death, pure and simple. And
devastating.
But as they live into the promise of the angel they come to know the risen Christ among them. For that which
they thought the powers of the world had destroyed forever, reappears in some transformed way to lead them
on.
I am not here today to say what I have never been able to say before and I’m sure will never be able to say on
some Easter hence, no matter how much sermon preparation time I have. The Resurrection remains a mystery.
And also an undeniable truth for all of us who have witnessed it not only in the stories of Galilee of old but in
places where we live today.
Over time skeptics have doubted and cynics have mocked, but people of faith – with many varying
interpretations – have yet believed and had their lives turned around through the transformation of Jesus the
Christ from death to life. Paul assured us that Jesus was the “first born” of the resurrection life God brings
and that we will follow, each in our own ways. Though death remains a very real and painful reality for every
human being who has ever lived – including the one we call God’s own beloved Son – death is yet not the final
truth if we live into the hope that Easter proclaims again and again as we turn the calendar of our liturgy and
our lives from year to year.
In our morning Communion services this past week our guest clergy leaders recounted for us the admittedly
countless examples of physical and emotional human suffering and death. But all that bad news gives way to
the good news of this morning now upon us. Although we are frail, mortal, finite human beings, unable to
overcome the reality of death, God, the one who creates life and gives life, is determined to be the creator
and giver of new life even in death. Because Jesus is raised after a humiliating and painful death, we are bold
to believe that we and those we love also shall be raised into the ineffable mystery of God’s eternal care.
Mark’s Gospel leaves us hanging. We don’t know what happens after the women leave the tomb. We’re not
even told what they do with the spices they have brought, spices that must have cost them more than they
would have been able to afford comfortably. But they did what they could in the face of death, and I like to
think that they didn’t bother taking the spices back with them, that they just dropped them in their “terror
and amazement.”
At the end – and in the beginning – we drop everything that we have prepared for the hour of death. We don’t
need those things anymore, for we have made it through the emotional and physical pain of the death that we
have experienced, and we give way to the warm embrace of the God who cares for us as distress gives way to
new life. It can be a thing of terror and amazement to yield to a God who refuses to let death have the final
word, for we can become accustomed to deadly ways. But the good news of this morning is that the God of
Easter calls us into courage and hope to discover the resurrection for ourselves by living into its reality in our
own lives.
The truth of the resurrection is that Christ crucified and buried is yet risen and alive. To which we respond
with a joyful Alleluia! And Amen.