Sermon: Love that Death Can't Stop

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Love that Death Can't Stop - Easter 2007

By Charles Rush

April 8, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 5.6Mb) ]

d you see that snow last night? I came home last evening, my neighbors were outside talking, and this flurry was swirling between us. They were waiting for my reaction so I said, "Merry Easter to all and to all a good night."

A blessed and happy Easter to all of you. I got a call this week about my nephews Henry and Charlie, aged 4 and 5. Apparently, on Palm Sunday they were outfitted in bow ties and seersucker sport coats, each with their palms welcoming Jesus as he rode into their Episcopal church in North Carolina. This year was special because Jesus was on a live donkey. Reportedly, my nephews were amongst a few, possibly the instigators, who decided it would be funny to whip the donkey with their palms and see what he would do.

These are the same two nephews that last year ate so many cream filled, chocolate covered eggs during the Easter egg hunt that they refused to participate in the family meal afterward, prompting my mother-in-law, Nana, to exclaim that God's miracle with Jesus was nothing compared to what He would be up against with her grandsons. May you be so blessed with chaos, the good kind.

This story begins with the poignancy and humane tenderness in the midst of death. And who cannot appreciate this even if we trust in eternal life?

I think of Leland Gunn, who met his wife 60 years ago. He passed her notes asking her if he could walk her home after school, notes she wouldn't return. And finally he got up the courage to ask her face to face. She explained that she had to go straight home after class as per her father's instructions. He had some detention duty, beating the chalk out of the erasers. She said she couldn't wait but then she said, 'there's no reason a body's got to hurry. I can stroll'.

That was all he needed to hear. Those erasers were never cleaned so quick in the history of the school, he threw his books in his satchel, ran down the road and caught up to her.

Years went by, they graduated from school, and after he returned from the war in Europe, they married, raised 5 children together, and 11 grandchildren. Leland was a relatively successful farmer.

Leland's wife became ill, gravely so, and he put her in the hospital at the county seat that was 74 miles away from the farm. He went to see her every day, sat with her all day long, drove the 74 miles home. He knew it was bad and he couldn't sleep, so he started cleaning up the house the way he knew she wanted it cleaned up… and he kept finding things to clean almost until dawn. Then he started on a list of projects that she wanted done, projects that he had never found time to get around to. Every night he would work on these until just before dawn when he would finally lay down for a couple hours just exhausted.

The day came his daughters came to see him… to talk. One of them was a nurse and they explained to Leland that their mother was not going to make it. Leland sat there in the den quiet and stoical. He had never been a big talker. They made the usual arrangements about who was doing what to keep after the farm. They tried to talk their daddy into staying at their homes and they knew he wouldn't do it. They hugged and kissed and left.

Leland sat at his kitchen table for a long time just blank. He decided that he was going to say some things to his wife and tell her how much he loved her. And he thought about what to say over and over in his mind. Leland was never good with words, so in the middle of the night he decided to write something down. That way, when she came to with the medication, he wouldn't forget. So he wrote it down. He crossed stuff out. He wrote it again. He folded his paper, put it in his pocket, and laid down.

The next day at the hospital, he sat with his wife, she was just restlessly sleeping most of the time. All morning he sat there, and in the middle of the afternoon, she opened her eyes, he pulled up next to her. She smiled at him. She was weak and groggy but she was with it. Leland stroked her face, made small talk. He looked her deep in her eyes and he wanted to begin the speech but she looked so weak that suddenly he was feeling faint. His heart was fluttering. He couldn't help himself. There were tears in his eyes but no words in his throat. He reached in his pocket for his notes but all he could see was a blur on the page.

His wife squeezed his hand. Most of their life, she had done the talking for both of them. She said, "honey, I'm going on ahead of you." He nodded his head. She said, "But you know what?" He said, "What?" She was quiet and then she said, "If it's possible… I'm gonna stroll".

Our story begins like that, with the humane poignancy that comes from saying 'goodbye' to people that we love. It is full of pathos. The women are in the middle of their 'goodbye' when something happens to them, what we don't know. We just have these stock poetic images that come from apocalyptic literature. They are symbolic, allegorical images that writers used routinely to describe a direct encounter with God, an epiphanic experience.

I like the version in Mark. It ends abruptly with the shock and wonder that the women had. They were afraid and they said nothing. Whatever it was that they experienced, they had the immediate and palpable sense that the Love Force they had known through Jesus was not stopped by death. It is not past, but still future that will meet you.

It is like those fishermen in 'The Perfect Storm' who didn't check the weather carefully and see this wall of water coming at their little boat. They have this moment, this "O My God" moment, looking at this wall of water and at each other when it is stunningly apparent how woefully they underestimated this force in front of them.

No question this divine encounter had a moral component for each person there as well. It was anxious. None of them left Jesus on terms they wanted to end on. They felt bad. Each of the disciples fell away, one by one. After a big pledge of loyalty at the Last Supper with Jesus, they each left, some just slinking away, others forcing Jesus hand with the authorities, trying to get him to assert himself.

The Temple authorities viewed Jesus as too much of a threat. They dispatched him to save the institution and themselves. The Romans were very reluctant to act but they did and they acted decisively. They tortured and killed him without prejudice.

Jesus was rejected near and far, personally and institutionally. We had goodness in our midst; we had truth in our midst and we killed it. This is what made them anxious. It was terrible chain of events that last week of Jesus' life, it was compromised, but it was over and done with. Everyone was sad. They were embarrassed, and surely almost everyone was secretly ready to get on to the next thing and get this sad chapter behind them.

At the same time, there is also a positive dimension to their slack-jawed, "Oh My God" moment of awe. This positive dimension is that you thought it ended badly but it might not be over after all. What if death cannot stop God's goodness and love? We hadn't thought about that? What if we reject God but God doesn't accept our rejection entirely? What if God keeps coming after us in Grace, with love and goodness, even though we are hateful? This is an awakening insight that is 'too good to be true' and also deeply distressing at the same time.

It brings to mind that lament from the Psalms, "where can I run, where can I hide that You cannot find me?' What if God does not simply leave us to our own devices? What if we can't be rid of this so easily?

My confirmation class was doing a little bible study recently and we chanced upon Luke 15, the story of the Prodigal Son. We were reading about the two sons that asked their dad for their inheritance before the Dad died. I asked my confirmand's, aged 13, what they thought about the Son requesting his inheritance. Everyone thought that took a lot of chutzpah. None of them would do it… I thought you parents might be relieved to hear that.

But then, this Dad is not like you Dad's. When this Dad is actually asked for the money, he gives it to his teenage Son… If I took a poll right now, the percentage of you who would give them the money would be near zero.

The Son leaves, squanders his money on parties, women and loose living, goes broke, and then thinks about going home. The teenager comes to his senses and realizes that his Father's hired help lives better than he will. He decides to go home.

I asked my Confirmands, "what the Father should do"?

One of them said, 'he can't let him come home until he shows some respect.'

Another one suggested, "he has to work and repay the money or something."

Yet another, "he can move back to the area but not back home."

Finally, one young man said, "I wouldn't even think about going home."

I said, "why?"

He said, "You don't know my Dad?"

I thought to myself, "Actually, I do know your Dad… and I wouldn't be going home either."

Then I read out loud, "When the Son was a long way off, the Father ran down the road, threw his arms around the boy, kissed him, and said 'My Son was lost and now is found. He was dead and now is alive.'"

Every time I've done this, I get a lot of silent gazes coming back at me. Half incredulous that there could be unbounded, unmerited, loving goodness like that… And the other half are incredulous as in 'Gee, I didn't think about that', not even as a possibility. I suspect that this is pretty close to the exact same gaze that Jesus got when he first told that parable.

This, it seems to me, is the actual point of this season. Above all else, God wants for us to be reconciled and God wants to be reconciled with us. With each other, we have all kinds of limits, we have all kinds of qualifications, all kinds of conditions. Maybe not so with God!

Maybe with God, you are always God's child. Maybe no matter what you've done or where you've been, God will always welcome you home. Maybe even if you hate this one part of yourself and in the quiet of the night that is what you think about in your deepest anxious, concern, with God you still are somebody.

When one of my colleagues was at Duke Divinity school, he was a chaplain in the North Carolina prison system. He got a call one day from a father, whose son was in prison. The young man had committed a robbery in his small town in the mountains and was sentenced to several years in jail. He was embittered, angry, stubborn. The Father wanted to see the son, had written the son, called him, got no response and reached out to the Chaplain to see if he would intervene.

The Chaplain went to see the kid and the kid steadfastly refused to see his Father.

Despite the refusal, the Dad, a poor man, boarded the bus in his mountain town and made the 7 hour trip across the state in the hope of seeing him on Visitation day. The Son said 'No', so the Dad boarded the bus and went back home.

Next week, same thing. Week after week, the same thing. Every time, the Chaplain had the awkward job of delivering the news to the Father that the Son wouldn't see him. The Father would think about it for a minute, pick up his things and go find the bus home. So, finally, the Chaplain, having been trained in psychology like we all are at Duke div. school, thought he would share some of his insights with the Father about limits, healthy boundaries, helping others take responsibility which he did.

The Father was a simple man, didn't say much. So the Chaplain concluded, "Look, no one would keep doing what you are doing. Your Son is embittered and defiant and if he won't change himself, no one else can. I think you need to go back home and get on with the rest of your life and put your energy there. No one would put up with this kind of rejection, week after week, nobody would do it."

The Father stood there quietly and finally pointed upwards and said, "He has for centuries".[i] Right, we Clergy have these moments too, "Right, we hadn't thought about that." Maybe God is really quite different than we are.

Whether we are so independent and successful that we just don't know what in the world we would really want God for, whether we are just so stubborn that we would rather be alone than be in relationship with God, whether we are just filled with some self-loathing in this one area of ourselves that we can't share with ourselves, let alone God, maybe God wants to be reconciled with us more than anything else. Maybe God wants us home.

Maybe the point of our lives is not just fretting about who we wished we had become and what we ought to have done, but coming to terms with who we actually are and appreciating how we had to grow through our mistakes and limitations that was all part of the process that made us who we have become in fact.

Maybe the point of our lives is not so much being Mr. or Mrs. Perfect as it is finding redemption through our actual past and with who we are right now. Maybe this redemption is not focused so much in the 'after life' as in 'all of our life'-beginning with this cast of characters that live with us and around us right now.

Maybe our spiritual health is not about hiding parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of, or compensating for them, or overachieving in some other area as it is about finding healing so we can become integrated and authentic.

Maybe we don't have to make conditional bargains with the Almighty or invent some substitutionary act of atonement for our past failures, as simply start the process of healing with those right around us right now. Maybe that is quite simply what God wants for us.

My brothers and sisters, I tell you the truth. More than anything else, God wants to be reconciled with you. You have a place at the table. You are somebody. Find your way home. Amen.

[i] From William Willomon, and loosely quoted from Homiletics (February, 2007), p. 55.