Sermon: Easter Sunday

[ previous | index | next ]

Easter Sunday – Going On

By Charles Rush

March 31, 2002

ere was a wonderful article in last week's paper about the world famous Cellist Mitslav Rostopovich, now 75, who for 16 years was the conductor of the National Symphony in Washington. He has been on a world-wide tour that included, among other stops, an emotional return to his native Moscow.

When Slava, as his friends call him, was in the middle of his career, he was good friends with the composer Prokofiev who was lured back to the Soviet Union by the Communist authorities only to be isolated as an artist. Rostopovich worked with him to put food on the table during some of his more difficult years. Likewise in the early 70's, the writer Solzhenitsyn, also shunned by the authorities, was living in a potting shed on the outskirts of Moscow. Rostopovich reached out to him. He and his wife invited Solzhenitsyn to move into their apartment in a move that was very daring and dangerous as he was now shadowed by the K.G.B.. The plight of his friends weighed so heavily on him that he decided to write a public letter for the need for artistic freedom in the Soviet Union. His wife and he talked about it for days. She understood very clearly that he would likely be arrested, serve time in the Gulag, and her fate would be pretty much the same as his.

He pleaded with her and even suggested that they divorce before he published the letter in the hope that the Communists would spare her some of the retribution he would receive. Still unsure, he wrote two letters and took them both to the post box at the airport before he left on tour, stood there for quite some time, mailed one. When it was published he was expelled from the Soviet Union, proclaimed an enemy of the state, exiled for the rest of his life.

He had resigned himself to never going home again. Ten years went by. Fifteen years went by. One night in 1989, he stood, like the rest of the world, in Paris watching television, crying at the sight of the Berlin wall coming down, a sight he never thought he would live to see. A friend helped him fly to Berlin in the morning and the next night, he set up his Cello in the midst of the rubble of the Berlin Wall and he played Bach as sledge hammers pounded in the background, making new music of out of old demons.[1]

That story is a parable of the great hope that we gather to celebrate today. The triumph of hope over despair and defeat, the triumph of God's goodness over human weakness and the collective character of evil.

Whatever else you may say about the Bible, it is very realistic about human character and the Good Friday world we live in. The Wall Street Journal had an editorial in Wednesday's paper on the situation in Israel and Palestine on the eve of the Arab summit in Beruit. It was articulate, insightful, explaining the power realities at work, the irreconcilable ideologies on both sides, and it concluded that the time is not right for peace, not without a great deal more bloodshed that wears both sides down. The article had a deadening air of Good Friday resignation to it, even if so many people agree with the conclusion. Nothing will change, just an endless cycle of violence and arbitrary power.

I suspect that the women that went to the tomb on that Sunday morning, 2000 years ago, secretly harbored a life stifling resignation. The hoped-for Messiah didn't overthrow the hated Romans. Pilate was still in power, Roman soldiers were guarding the tomb. Nothing was going to change.

And goodness seems so frail, like a candle in the wind. I remember as a child the day that President Kennedy was shot. They sent us all home from school. Adults were crying. It was very sad, not least because goodness was murdered. Later, we would learn a great deal more about President Kennedy that made him as human as anyone, but at the time, we didn't know it, and it seemed to our nation like goodness died. And a few years later, when Dr. King was assassinated, the whole country just stood still- really unable and unwilling to voice what everyone was thinking, “Why is it that the Good die young? What is it about us?” That is a Good Friday question. With Jesus, we had goodness in our midst and we killed it. What is it about us that we do that? It was very difficult to live through. So much hope for goodness, dashed. The women that came to the tomb that day were part of a crowd that had those same hopes for goodness only to see them die on a cross.

It is hard to live through that. We had a family friend whose brother had a rare form of cancer at a relatively young age. The sickness progressed rapidly, and the prognosis was soon dire or dead. A cancer specialist approached the family and suggested an experimental treatment that had been tried with some limited success but not enough studies for definitive. He told them of one young woman that had gotten better with this experimental treatment, a story they latched onto. The treatment was tried but it didn't work and the young man died. The brother of the young man that died was furious afterwards at the doctor that suggested the experimental treatment that didn't work, in an understandable, irrational way. He had gotten his hopes up that his brother would pull through this. And he was mad, mad at death, at God, at the fact that no one could stop this because… the reality was that he loved his brother deeply and he had been thinking about a lot of times, when he was in the hospital towards the end. He thought back over all the times the two of them snuck out of the house at night to go visit Susie Linderbrook… and the time they went joy riding in their Mother's car when they were 13 and 12… and sitting up til dawn the night before he got married… and… he just wanted to hold onto him because that is what brothers do… and he couldn't. He just couldn't. It is just horrible.

I was looking at that picture the other day of the sight at the World Trade Towers showing the placement of all the bodies recovered at the sight, just dots on a page. I was trying to give those dots some humanity… and there were just so many dots, so much sadness, that you can't do it really. I was reminded of a line from the Communist era in the 40's. “The death of one person is a tragedy. The death of a million people is a statistic.” So much sadness that even the wonderful obituaries in the Times… someone remarked that it is hard to read more than a couple a day.

When you read the touching comments of the family members that spoke to the press at the six-month anniversary. So many of them said something like, “I'm just trying to get out of bed every morning and get myself going… that is a victory in itself.” Or, “during the day, it is okay, but sometimes at night I come home and just cry.” So many of us have been carrying around such sadness. More than a few of us have been living what those women were living that Sunday morning… just going through the motions, trying to take care of what needs taking care of, just going through the routine, fulfilling the rituals, not really feeling, but just moving. Their precious son, the hoped for Messiah gone… And it is not surprising that we have women attending to these details in their grief. As one woman said to me, “We brought them into this world, we will see them out.”

And these women are going through the motions, they are preparing to see Jesus out… when… when… something happened to those women that day. We don't really know what it was. The gospel of Mark says that they saw an angel and then it goes on to describe this in some very canned language of the day used about Angels. It is the way you describe something undescribable. You can't paint a picture, so you can only use poetic images and tell people what it means.

In the midst of despair, they had an experience of the presence of God. What would that be like? In the face of death, they were overwhelmed by the living power of God. Surrounded by tragic absurdity, they laid out with the assurance of a transcendent meaning. Whatever it was that happened, it was a reality they had not prepared for and could not have anticipated. And it turned their world completely around.

They realized that death can not stop God. The early Christians pretty quickly started to say, “They meant it for evil, but God used it for Good.” People can conspire to kill God's goodness, they can put it on trial, they can find people to execute it, but God's goodness will not be stopped.

They came to realize, that we are all being pulled inexorably- whether we want to be used or not- into a conspiracy of love that God is weaving for the world. They came to realize that the ultimate meaning of our world- in the midst of celebration and quite in spite of tragic evil- the ultimate meaning is good because God will not be stopped.

They came to see that we are all like sparks of a fire that flicker for only a short time, reflecting the glow of the Spirit in us, some more than others, to be sure. But even given our compromised human nature, even given the outright evil that we manifest from time to time, God is pulling us all into God's goodness. And if you zoom out on the world, the pull of God's grace was like falling into the Mississippi river when I was a kid in the spring. You can swim hard up stream if you want- you can swim sideways-, but you are headed rapidly in one direction- towards New Orleans.

They came to realize that God intends, on our great spiritual odyssey through the universe, to clarify our souls, both on this side and beyond. Like a bumper sticker I saw on the car of a guy, probably 80 years old, that said, “Please bear with me. I'm a work in progress.” After seeing his poor driving, the person I was with said, “And there is a lot of work left to do.”

Early Christians came to realize that each and every one of us has eternal significance in God and that opened up a new dimension for them.

It gave them tremendous courage. When they interiorized the idea that death was not the end and that God would meet them on the other side, they were no longer afraid of dying in the same way their Roman neighbors were. Some of them, though persecuted and threatened with torture and death, were able to hold fast to their convictions and speak truth in the midst of persecution, because they knew that goodness and God will ultimately triumph. It gave them a radical freedom to become moral, knowing that their actions counted because they mattered to God.

When loved ones died around them, they were sad, to be sure but they had a different quality of consolation than their Roman neighbors because they believed that they would one day be reunited.

All around the early Christians, Greeks and Romans had pagan religious festivals in the spring that celebrated the great cycle of rebirth, the crops that died in the fall, lay dormant all winter, and are reborn in the spring. The ancient people celebrated the mystery that life starts over, the wonder the flowers mysteriously bloom on their own, that the livestock get pregnant, that crops come back. But that was about it for our personal significance. They had a view that somehow we are merged back into the great cycle of death and rebirth. Christians had a different hope, that each and every one of us is eternally significant to God and that God is maturing us both on this side and beyond.

So frequently, they had a prayer service on Easter in a graveyard in prospect that even death would be one day redeemed and that all of us have a future together in God. In their mind, the world was not just an endless cycle, it also had a telos, a goal that it was moving toward. And God was not simply the force that started the world moving, not just the force that keeps the world evolving, God was the future that is pulling us towards completion. That is our hope in God. The Angel says to the women, “Go tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of you and he will meet them in Galilee.” Out there, on up ahead.

Christians still endure tragedy and have to slog through seasons of grief and sorrow. Real hope is not pollyana. But, we came to understand, as St. Paul said in Romans, that all things can work together for the good, ultimately speaking… even death, even tragedy. All things can become the occasion for growth. It is one of the great insights of the life of faith- because it is a given that we will suffer loss, endure grief- the secret is that even that can become the occasion for good.

We believe, in the words of St. Paul, that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ… neither death, nor tragedy in life, nor angels, nor collective/systematic evil, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rm. 8:37-39). As St. Paul said, “If God is for us, who can stand against us?”

That is because the heart of the Universe is evolving, in higher forms of spiritual consciousness, towards love. The love of God is pulling us all. It is the telos, the goal towards which we are headed. That is our hope… in God's love for the world, our future.

In the play, “Waiting for Godot”, Samuel Beckett has two characters that sit on a park bench waiting for God to show up, discussing various ways that you would know that God was present, what difference it would make, how will God handle the fact of the great suffering that exists in the world that He has made for us, and other questions you can imagine intellectuals discussing in the cafes of Paris in and around World War 2. As the play winds down, they decide that God is not going to show up and defend Himself, like He did with Job. Beckett ends the play on an existentialist note, but I would suggest, that perhaps unwittingly, he also ends it on a note of profound biblical faith.

The two characters realize that God is not going to become manifest, much like we realize that there is not going to be any unambiguous resolution to the world in which we live. There is not going to be any bolt from without. They are left, like our women are left, with an empty tomb, a host of questions, a good deal of confusion, and quite a lot to ponder over. The two of them are sitting on the park bench. One of them turns to the other and says, ‘What shall we do? Where shall we go now?' And the other one says, “On”. And so shall we. “Go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee.”

[1] From the article by Warren Hoge, “Survivor and Humanist, Celebrating con Brio”, The New York Times, Saturday, March 23, 2002, p. A4.