Sermon of the Week
Fear and Great Joy
An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on April 12, 2020.
Easter Sunday. #pcusa
Keywords: Yes, Earthquake, Do Not Be Afraid, e. e. cummings, Resurrection.
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Acts 10:34-43
and Matthew 28:1-10
Edward Estlin Cummings served
as an ambulance driver in World War One.
He had enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps,
it was a joint operation of the British and American Red Crosses.
It’s a long story, but after a logistical snafu,
some loitering around in Paris until that got all cleared up
and then some anti-war sentiments that he offered,
as an enlisted guy in the middle of the war,
Cummings was suspected of treason,
and was sent to a French prison camp for more than three months.
Shortly after he was released, in early 1918,
toward the end of that war
and right when the Spanish Flu pandemic
was raging across every continent and nation-state on the planet,
this was one of the poems that he wrote:[1]
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
Those years in the 1910s, more than a hundred years ago now,
when the world ached at trench warfare
and makeshift hospitals for isolation patients
those years were so dark and fearful.
I don’t really know much about e. e. cummings
as he is better known, the author of that poem,
beyond his avoidance of capital letters
and that he was wildly eccentric, like a lot of the modernist artists of his era
but I have been deeply moved
by these words
which are reflective of a captive’s gratitude
for the simple blessings of green trees and blue skies,
a yes to life itself
a yes that comes with release from the fear of death,
and an anticipated peace.
The poem addresses several themes
that might be on our minds and our spirits today
fear, anxiety, doubt, and, in the end, cummings dismisses them.
That day that he writes of—how could anyone doubt this life,
this love, this “yes”
this You
that is the God who has lifted us from “no”,
raised from death?
Simply amazing.
///
The heart of Easter
isn’t the Easter brunch with friends or loved ones.
It isn’t a Trumpet voluntary in a packed church
festooned with Lilies and speckled with bonnets
and kids fidgeting with their once-a-year ties…
though I love all of these things, and will miss them this year.
The heart of Easter is God’s decisive yes.
The amazing, audacious, in-credible—
in the sense of how-is-it-believable,
God’s monumental YES to life
in the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I’ve heard a lot of people tell me this week
how different everything is this Easter
and man is that true,
says the pastor preaching from his home,
to a virtual congregation.
But the heart of Easter is the same that it has always been,
the same since that morning,
on the first day of the week
when Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary,
went to see the tomb.
Today’s reading of the Easter gospel,
the one in Matthew,
has a few details not found anywhere else in the Bible.[2]
For our purposes, not all of those unique details are central to the point for today.
Only here is there any mention of Roman Guards
assigned graveyard duty during the Passover.
They’re unique to Matthew’s story.
They were probably there at the tomb to prevent
anyone from taking the corpse.
It also gives Matthew’s story some added heft
because it provides witnesses to this whole affair.
Only here, in Matthew,
do Mary and Mary get that close to Jesus,
the very first to See, Touch, and Worship
the risen Christ.
Jesus met them, and said, ‘Greetings!’ says Matthew,
And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him
Only here do the women want to touch Jesus,
and he allows it;
they want to worship,
and he allows them to do so…
how poignant that moment,
where the women believed,
and become the vehicle for the belief of all the others, for all of us.
And, then there is the one thing special about this telling of the story
that has been on my mind
this Easter, this Easter in the age of Coronavirus.
Only here, in the Gospel of Matthew, is there that earthquake.
Did you notice: the earthquake happens,
not as the means of opening the tomb,
but as a result of the angel of the Lord
breaking in on the scene,
rolling back the stone
the stone that seemed, once, to have separated Jesus
utterly and completely from the life the he had lived,
until Matthew shares with us the tremor,
with the angel now sitting down on the stone,
an obvious sign of divine triumph.
We in Kansas City, hungry for baseball,
might call this a divine version
of the ultimate Salvy splash.
There’s something about that angel, too, that we notice:
This particular angelic figure
is alluded to elsewhere in scripture,
in Daniel and in the book of Revelation,
dressed in garments whiter than snow
with an appearance of lightning,
a way for Matthew to assert that
God is irrupting into the world
in an altogether new and decisive way.
Well, ok. So what?
What is all this about?
Matthew’s main point, I think,
is to demonstrate for us
that there is no natural way
of speaking about the resurrection.
This is not about human capacities or possibilities.
This is utterly and completely about God
and God’s capacity and determination,
the breadth and the depth and the height of the lengths God will go
to say Yes to life, to living,
Yes to you, the people of God.
If goodness and mercy are to withstand
the onslaught of suffering and worry and heartbreak
it is not just because good people keep trying hard…
Good people do try hard,
and I see you, good people,
and what you do makes such an important difference. Keep it up.
But, in the end, God acts,
even at that boundary of life that we call death,
and does something altogether new,
through earthquake and divine messenger
and lo: the tomb is empty.
He is not here.
He has been raised.
Do not be afraid.
Angels and earthquakes are
the inevitable elements of the resurrection story
because they are the only way
Matthew can make it CLEAR to us
that we are confronted with God’s possibilities,
and not the doubts we have about our own.[3]
///
While it is true that none of the stories about Jesus’ resurrection
are quite the same in the four gospels,
it is also true that there are little threads
that tie the different gospels together,
and those threads sometimes
reveal so much for us.
For example, have you ever noticed that
the account of Jesus’ birth over in Luke’s Gospel,
on the one hand
and this story of Jesus’ Resurrection in Matthew,
on the other,
provide identical words of God’s reassurance.
When you hold those two together,
a birth story, and a new life after certain death story,
it seems to wrap the entire life of Jesus,
indeed the entire gospel narrative,
between those four powerful words:
Do not be afraid.
In Luke, those are among the first words
that the angel Gabriel utters,
when Gabriel approaches Mary
with the news that she has found favor with God
and will bear a son, whom she will name Jesus (Luke 1:30).
She was amazed by that news,
and sang: my soul magnifies the Lord!
about the God she knew,
the one who fills the hungry with good things
who brings the powerful down from their thrones
who offers mercy and a future.
Do not be afraid, Mary…
Later, after Jesus has been born,
those are the first words offered to the shepherds,
in the fields,
you know, the ones keeping watch o’er their flocks by night:
Do not be afraid. (Luke 2:10).
And then, here, in our reading today,
when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary,
approach the Tomb where Jesus lay
and are there as the earth shakes
a terrestrial shudder caused by the awesomeness of what has just happened,
when there’s an angel on the now displaced stone,
that angel uttering those very same words to reassure them:
Do not be afraid.
///
When was the last time anyone said something like that to you,
Do not be afraid…
and did so with authority?
Or, to put that another way,
when was the last time someone said something like that to you
and you believed it?
I can remember, as a young kid,
those moments when a parent calmed me down
maybe in the middle of a particularly potent Iowa thunderstorm…
so it does happen, but it has been a long time.
Now, as an adult,
I don’t worry very often, if I’m honest, about thunder and lightning
but there are a lot of other things that can worry me,
and that was true before Covid-19 started going around,
and some of my friends started going to the hospital, to the icu
and we all started, quite rightly, exercising physical distancing,
this act of care for one another to keep each other safe.
As a pastor, I’ve always spent a portion of my time
in close proximity to illness and death.
In such regions, shadowed by fear and loss,
I so much want to reach for words that are reassuring.
In the end, though, I do not have words like that to offer,
at least none that are authentically my own.
I am not alone in this, of course.
Neither do the doctors and the scientists.
In the end, ultimately,
they do not have the authority to say,
“Do not be afraid”
They do not know the future,
as capable as they are
even as God has gifted them with minds and skills
to help make us all healthier. Thanks be to God.
They do not have the antidote to uncertainty.
They cannot accompany a patient down every road.
None of us can.
But even if I do not have words of my own to offer,
I can bear God’s words, God’s hope, God’s Yes:
And this is precisely what God’s heralds come to tell us
both in Biblical times, and today:
Do not be afraid.
That’s not an assurance that things won’t go wrong.
They often go wrong.
Rather, it is an assurance that, whatever may happen to us
whatever this day may hold,
God has the power to strengthen and uphold us,
that whatever we must face,
we do not face it alone,
that nothing we encounter is stronger than God’s love,
that ultimately God gets the last word,
that, in the end, and sometimes, even before the end,
God’s love wins.
That is an assurance that only God can offer with authority.
///
And that is an assurance God can offer,
because of Easter,
because of this day, the day of resurrection,
the day of God’s amazing Yes.
Mary and the other Mary,
after approaching the tomb
after feeling the earth move under their feet and the sky tumblin down
and seeing the messenger there on the displaced boulder
left that place, as Matthew says, with fear and with great joy
to go and tell the others,
to share God’s yes with the world.
Did they share it in words similar to e. e. cumming’s poem, I wonder
with hope and thanksgiving on their lips
as the new reality dawned before them?
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
Did they offer this word of hope and possibility
to broken, worried, anxious, dispirited people
people in their own sort of quarantine,
hidden from the Roman authorities,
not leaving their homes out of fear:
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
The heart of Easter hasn’t changed much, I don’t think.
I need to hear that same word from these women
and particularly so this year,
so that I too can marvel at the leaping greenly spirits of trees
the blue true dream of sky,
and know that God loves me, and can give me strength to get through days such as these.
So I can know that the hope of Easter lives. Because Christ lives.
And we will get through this, with God’s help.
Dear friends,
Christ is risen!
Christ is God’s yes in the face of fear and worry
Christ is God’s permission to love, and to trust.
Christ is God’s amazing gift that forever assures you that you matter,
that nothing can take that away.
May we celebrate that love, and claim that love,
and be empowered by that love, to be God’s people,
today, tomorrow, and forever.
May it be so.
Amen.
——
[1] Recounted by Deborah Block in “Pastoral Perspective” for Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 2, Lent Through Eastertide ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox, 2010) p 360. Poem from e. e. cummings, “I thank You God for this most amazing day” in Complete Poems: 1904-1962, ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 1992)
[2] Outlined by Barbara Brown Taylor in “Homiletical Perspective” for Matthew 28:1-10, Feasting on the Gospels: Matthew, Volume 2, Chapters 14-28 ed. Cynthia A. Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox, 2013) p 357-361.
[3] Adapted from D. Cameron Murchison, “Theological Perspective” for Matthew 28:1-10, Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 2, Lent Through Eastertide ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox, 2010) p 348.
Image Credit: Unknown artist. This painting of the women at the tomb is featured on the cover of the Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia ed. Felix Wilfred (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
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