Just three months ago, we gazed in awe at God come to earth some 2000 years ago in the form of a babe in a manger. The Incarnation isn’t a stretch for Christians. We’ve believed that for a very long time. Not quite 2000 years, but getting there.
A bit more of a stretch was considering the possibility that incarnation happens on a daily basis. That God has been in the business of coming to earth for a very long time, and comes again, every time people of God rise up and go out to do God’s work in the world.
Today, we consider a similar thing: Resurrection did indeed happen some 2000 years ago, in a burial garden near a place of death in the ancient Middle East. Again, believing that is not much of a stretch for Christians. We are pretty comfortable with understanding our faith in historical terms.
The challenge is to know our faith as a living thing. It is to get over the notion that Christianity is about a promise of future glory… based on events that happened centuries ago. It is to see that the Kingdom of God permeates “now” and that we along with Christ our brother are it. The challenge is to live our faith, rather than to merely believe in it.
Like incarnation, resurrection happens on a daily basis. God has also been in the business of breathing new life into mere mortals throughout human history. Indeed, it would be fair to say that human history is a history of God breathing life into mortal flesh, from Adam forward.
Look at the disciples in the Gospel accounts of the hours after Jesus died on the cross! They aren’t physically dead, but they just about as well be. The eleven and others huddle together behind locked doors. Some have scattered, heading home to Emmaus and, no doubt, other communities surrounding Jerusalem to try to disappear into the woodwork.
They are a classic example of troops in full retreat after the death of their leader. Clearly, they had understood little of what Jesus had told them. It was over.
The women go to the tomb to do the last thing they can do for their Master: Prepare his body for eternal death. When they come back with the story of the empty tomb, the reaction of the disciples is disbelief. They thought it “an idle tale.”
Then comes this comical Keystone Cops routine of men running to the tomb. First they run together. Then one surges ahead, but loses heart at the last moment and stops at the entrance. He who lags behind rushes in with last-minute bravado.
But, John says, the empty tomb is not enough. At least one of the disciples “saw and believed,” John says, but “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” I imagine them shaking their heads as they walk away.
What an odd contradiction. They saw but did not understand. They believed but headed back to the safety and security and comfort of home.
It is only later on, when Jesus appears in their midst and breathes on them, that they are resurrected.
And, as we are fond of saying, the rest is history! That little band of folks—eleven and a handful of others, we know not exactly how many—goes out and changes the world. Forever.
Resurrected people do amazing things.
Nora Gallagher is a journalist who has also written several books about her own spiritual journey. One of them is called Practicing Resurrection. It is an account of how the loss of a beloved brother throws her life into a tailspin, and of her return from walking straight down a wrong vocational path, dragging a failing marriage.
Gallagher’s struggle back requires her to re-examine everything: her call, her work, her marriage. It leads her finally to an exploration of nothing less than life after death. She concludes that “experiences of resurrection" really aren't about "believing six impossible things before breakfast.” Rather, she proposes, “Maybe resurrection, like everything else, needs to be practiced.”
We have all been there, in some way or another. Human existence is a process of marching resolutely into dead ends and struggling to find a way back out again.
We don’t have to be “control freaks” to long for some control, some ability to maintain our balance as we face big challenges and small ones of daily life. But we have so very little. Fr. Richard Rohr defines human suffering precisely in these terms. “When are humans suffering?” he asks. “When they have no control.”
It often seems to me that it is precisely when we think we finally have it together, that we are finally on top of our game, that life hands us the most deadly, life-destroying blows. And we suffer.
Someone we love dies or becomes seriously ill. A spouse or lover leaves us. A best friend betrays us. We are downsized by our employer. Our company fails. An economic downturn takes most of our nest egg. Our politics turns nasty. Our children and grandchildren are sent half way around the world to fight a war that we are just not sure is worthy of the sacrifice of young, beautiful lives.
Evil abounds. We aren’t in control, and much of the time it looks like God isn’t either.
But God chose to become human, to suffer and die on a cross in order to rise again in power over death. How do we understand that? As a one-time event? An economic transaction in which Jesus paid a “price” to God.. or was it to the devil? ..so that we can live happily ever after.. some day in some glorious future?
That kind of thinking certainly creeps into our religion through the words of hymns, sermons, meditation guides, and so forth. But it is wrong-headed. It makes this glorious gift of life in the midst of this glorious creation something to merely “get through” for whatever period of time.
We cannot control all of our circumstances or other people. We can choose how we respond. And we can choose, not merely to believe and huddle together in the safety and security of church, but to live our faith in the world.
Fr. Richard says to follow Christ, we must practice dying. The thing that must die is our own beloved ego, because it is human ego that leads us to destroy others in myriad ways, in order to preserve our own illusions, pretenses and sense of control.
And if we practice dying, if we let go of our prideful clinging to being right, being in control, being safe and secure… If we can empty ourselves of all the false selves the world presses upon us, then we can hear God speak our name, as Mary did in the garden.
Like Mary in the garden, and like Mary the mother of the babe in the manger, we will be filled with new life. We will rise up from the ashes of our hurts and losses and failures. We will run to tell the world, “I have seen the Lord!” We will practice resurrection.
AMEN.
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