THE INTIMATE RESURRECTION
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
Stanford Memorial Church
Easter Sunday 2009
Happy Easter to each and every one of you! "Alleluia, Christ is risen!" as we said together to begin this glorious service on the greatest day of the Christian year. We sang, "Jesus Christ is risen today... Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!" It's as if the whole world knew of his resurrection: "Hearts are strong, and voices sing, Alleluia!"[i]
But our gospel reading reminds us that the resurrection actually was very intimate -- known at first by only one person, Mary Magdalene. What a poignant story! She asks someone she presumes to be a gardener where Jesus' body is: "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." She only realizes that he is the resurrected Jesus when he speaks her own name. Then she goes to spread the word that he's alive again. But only to his disciples.[ii] In fact, in all of the stories in the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Jesus makes resurrection appearances only to Mary and his close disciples. Some of those stories portray other very intimate recognitions, like Luke's account of two disciples walking the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus with a stranger whom they don't identify as Jesus until he breaks bread with them at supper, but then he instantly vanishes from their sight.[iii] Mark describes Jesus as appearing to the eleven as they are sitting at a table,[iv] and Matthew tells of his coming to the same small group on a mountainside in the Galilee region well north of Jerusalem.[v]
I submit to you that this is still the way today that Jesus's resurrection is best known -- very intimately. Many Christians speak of their personal experience of being born again into a transformative relationship with the living Christ. But even for those of us who haven't had an event in our lives that we could identify that way, there are resurrection experiences that happen for us personally in quite specific places and times. There are many in Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, who describe life-changing encounters with their Higher Power in explicitly Christian terms like this: "I will be forever grateful to the old timers who took this then 23 year old, scared to death, little girl under their wings and loved me until I could love myself...They showed me 'the way' to a loving God, Jesus, who did not condemn, only loved...I am so blessed to have sobriety today. I love the Lord with all my heart."[vi] Likewise, Christian author Anne LaMott writes graphically of in her national bestseller "Traveling Mercies" of her "resurrection story" of being saved from addiction by sober alcoholics who loved her and brought her home from a "terrifying place of...decay."[vii]
The first minister I trained under used to speak of the privilege of spending countless hours in the homes of families when a loved one had died. He came to see again and again that it was the intimate, personal moments that redeemed lives and gave them lasting meaning for those left behind. It was not the great public moments of success -- financial or otherwise. Instead, people always seemed to speak of a specific "hug, a caress, a tender word or a hearty laugh, remembered then simply because it was given just at the right time when it was most needed" -- the "small lights" which "sparkle and lighten what is otherwise so dark a world."[viii] That is the moments of intimate resurrection. Jesus was always explaining that we can save our lives only by letting go of our petty selves, our egos, in love for others. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of the hound of hell, fear, as overcome only by love. For King love took very concrete form as nonviolence even with one's oppressors, forgiving one's enemies, and "always trying to project the 'I' into the 'Thou.' But he also spoke of trying to develop what he called a "dangerous unselfishness" as a quality of character that could keep moving us from death to life on a daily basis.[ix] This is not easy now, I know, in a time of unparalleled fear and anxiety from international terrorism and severe economic recession.
Where do we find hope? Two days ago we had an ecumenical Good Friday service here in the church. The preacher, Presbyterian minister Geoff Browning, presented an imagined first hand report of a disciple of Jesus during the week from his triumphal arrival in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to his crucifixion at the hands of the Roman Empire just a few days later. He came during the celebration of Passover, which is a commemoration of the Jews' liberation from slavery in Egypt. Jesus seemed to be coming as a liberator himself, called by many "the King of the Jews" who this time would liberate his oppressed people from the shackles of their Roman overlords. He would stand with the poor and the marginalized against the wealthy elites and against both secular and religious authorities who were in effect keeping common people enslaved. Instead, the might of empire crushed him like an insect. The imagined disciple at the end of Rev. Browning's sermon was left saying, "Now Jesus is gone and I cannot bear it. Who will speak up for us now? Our hope was crucified with him."
Rev. Joanne Sanders had the last word in the Good Friday service, though. Anticipating the Easter message, she proclaimed, "May the life of Christ rise up in us." For Christ's resurrection is realized in us if we commit ourselves to being his disciples and following in his footsteps. We, in his name, become the hope beyond the crucifixion. We become the ones to speak up against slavery and oppression, against terrorism and all-consuming greed and fear in our economic life. As was said in the Litany of the Cross here on Friday, Jesus meets us in "the darkest places of our hearts, where fear, anxiety, self-hatred, and despair threaten to extinguish the light of our love." Jesus embraces and then redeems "the darkness of the world...walk[ing] in solidarity with the despised and rejected, the untouchable, the unmentionable and the unlovable."
Today they include drug addicts, the diseased, the homeless. One of Rev. Geoff Browning's predecessors as leader of the United Campus Christian Ministry at Stanford, the Reverend Jim Burklo, was also the director of the Urban Ministry for the homeless in Palo Alto. He writes in his book Open Christianity about the manager of a retail store who immediately hired a homeless recovering drug addict with hepatitis the very same day that the Urban Ministry staff sent him to apply for the job. Rev. Burklo greatly admired the store manager for taking this kind of chance. A decade later the employee was still there. Rev. Burklo wrote, "Today, when I go into the store, I am greeted by the smiling face of this formerly homeless fellow, who is now clean, sober, and healthy. He is my friend's [the store manager's] most valuable employee. Customers come into the store specifically because of his friendly and helpful manner."[x]
"May the life of Christ rise up in us." Here's another example of intimate resurrection. A life is saved, close up and personal, because of the Christ-like love of a retail store manager manifested with a particular homeless man. May we have more such love during these economic hard times. Resurrection no doubt works in both directions too, for surely this store manager, who Rev. Burklo says is no do-gooder or social reformer, has found increasing fulfillment in his own life, especially since he has continued to hire "other people on the margins of life, patiently helped them to adjust to the demands of the job, and taken special care to accommodate their personal needs."[xi]
One more intimate resurrection story before I end. A woman named Shirley in Massachusetts, where I lived for 30 years, took emotionally disturbed children temporarily into her own through a program called "Mentor." Ten year-old Timmy had been abandoned by his mother when he was three, and lived with his abusive, alcoholic father. Authorities suspected that both his mother and father had badly mistreated him, both physically and emotionally. When he came to Shirley and her husband, he was almost completely non-verbal. They raised rabbits and put Timmy in charge of one of the pens. He made a special pet of one of the female rabbits and even began to talk to her a bit. One morning when he came to the pen he found that this particular rabbit had given birth, but she was huddled in a corner with her three tiny babies lifeless on the cage floor. "Timmy gagged in rage, and beat his fists against the sides of the cage, screaming at her -- 'Why did you leave them alone? You didn't like them. You left them to die!'
Shirley restrained Timmy and then reached into the cage, scooping up the three limp bodies. She ran into the house with Timmy in tow and wrapped the tiny bunnies in an electric blanket. An hour later Timmy stood flabbergasted at the newborn rabbits squirming and wriggling in the blanket's warmth. When Shirley was questioned about the miracle, she simply replied, "Oh, rabbits are like that." Timmy began talking more -- not just to his rabbits, but to people too, in whom he'd long ago lost trust.[xii] Tiny rabbits come back to life. A resurrection. And a 10-year old boy comes back to life too. All up close and personal. Intimate.
So, let's celebrate Easter communally today -- starting with the thousand or so here in this church now. "Jesus Christ is risen today... Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!" But let's also remember Mary Magdalene alone with the gardener in the early morning light. The experience of resurrection can be very intimate indeed.
BENEDICTION
(In words adapted from Clarke Dewey Wells[xiii]:)
O God of Easter and infrequent Spring...
Lure us to fresh schemes of life. Rouse us from tiredness, self-pity,
Whet us for use. Fire us with good passion.
Restore in us the love of living. Bind us to hope again. AMEN.
NOTES
1
[i] Charles Wesley, "Jesus Christ is Risen Today" (1760).
[ii] John 20: 11-18.
[iii] Luke 24: 13-3.
[iv] Mark 16: 14-18.
[v] Matthew 28: 16-20.
[vi] Andrea, Response in "Jesus is My Higher Power" on
[vii] Anne LaMott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), pp. 184-189.
[viii] Charles A. Gaines, Hope and Courage Along the Way (pamphlet, 1982), p. 36.
[ix] Martin Luther King, Jr., "I See the Promised Land," a sermon delivered April 3, 1968, as reproduced in James Melvin Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 279-286.
[x] Jim Burklo, Open Christianity: Home by Another Road (Los Altos, CA: Rising Star Press, 2000), p. 227.
[xi]Ibid.
[xii] Marjorie Rebmann, "Resurrection," in Carl Seaburg and Mark Harris (eds.), Celebrating Easter and Spring (Cambridge, MA: Anne Miniver Press, 2000), pp. 77-78.
[xiii] Clarke Dewey Wells, "Hope Again," in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), #624.