![Picture](/uploads/5/3/1/4/53145165/published/alleluia-2.jpg?1522887510)
Peter JB Carman
Emmanuel Friedens Church
Schenectady New York
Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018
Reading: Mark 16:1-8
I.
The Gospel of Mark has more than one version of its ending. There are a few that are well known. I admit I like the one with the snake handling bit, but the more likely authentic version is the one we read today.
It’s a story that ends abruptly, with women at the tomb finding the stone already thrown aside, and a mysterious person sitting there in the place of Jesus, a singular anonymous messenger from God alone, no wings mentioned. The messenger is telling them not to be afraid, telling them to go talk to the other disciples, let them know the tomb was empty, tell them Jesus has gone ahead of them to Galilee.
Now, this handful of women, throughout the Gospel, these are the ones who have stuck by Jesus when nobody had the courage too. When others—let’s just say it, when the MEN-- were numbed, distracted or driven by their own terror, this little group of women has been steadfast. When their friend’s body had to be placed hastily in a borrowed tomb, these are the ones with the courage to come back and do right by their friend.
But now they face an empty tomb. Now they are afraid. They say nothing to anyone. Not yet. And that is where the story ends. Sure, we can fill in the blanks from other versions. But no other gospel gives us that sharp sense of the impact of the experience of finding your beloved teacher missing from the tomb!
This is the oldest and shortest of the gospels in the New Testament! If this were the only gospel we had ever seen—or heard—it would drive us to say: SAY WHAT? Now what? It might lead us to start over again at the beginning of the story, to see what this means…. And eventually it might even cause us to say—Is this where we come in?
II.
Easter at Emmanuel Friedens came early for me this year. It arrived at 10:22 on Saturday morning as our friends and neighbors streamed into the fellowship hall for the world’s greatest Easter Brunch. There was something different in the air. It wasn’t just the encouraging glimpse of spring weather. Nor was it the delicious piece of ham that Nancy’s brother Jim slipped me toward the end of the event. But as people came in there was something different.
Maybe no one else felt it—or did you? As I watched the Methodist youth clowning around and serving tables diligently, sharing quantities of home baked pies; as I watched John in the kitchen nonchalantly deal with what Faye Bailey referred to as the “crisis du jour”: an industrial dishwasher dutifully blowing off steam onto the floor… I felt it—a presence….
As I shook hands with some of our guests and friends—there was something different going on. I was glimpsing the invisible, walking with someone next to me that I couldn’t see. I sensed joy trying to leak out all over the place, streaming out even more than the boiling water from the kitchen. There were hints of resurrection in the air. There was vulnerability and love in the air. The risen Christ was close by us yesterday morning.
And then, as I was helping a young woman and her child and their heavy-laden stroller onto the elevator, I learned about her Saturday morning—is she here today? “We don’t have wolves in Schenectady, do we?” she asked. “We were walking over through Vale Cemetery this morning—maybe it was a fox.” I looked at her, and asked “How big was it? Was it like this—was the tail almost as long as the body? Was it reddish?” She said, “Well it wasn’t reddish. And it wasn’t a dog. But it wasn’t that small. Here let me show you.” She grabbed her phone and played a short video clip she had taken that morning on the walk over through the woods.
There was a beautiful big grey wolf-like thing, it must have been a coyote, loping through the woods, in the heart of Schenectady. “It was much closer at first” she said looking concerned, “a little too close, but it saw us, it went around us.” Her child was so excited he could barely stand it, as she spoke. He was firing off words—not one of which I could understand. “I don’t think we are going back the same way,” his mother said. “We will go around.” As she spoke I sensed the mixture of awe and excitement, and fear on behalf of her baby, respect for the miracle, and fresh understanding of mortality, in a whole new way, there in a cemetery, crossing paths with a fine skinny specimen of a coyote. And as I looked at them go across the parking lot I found myself thinking. And as it stayed with me through the day, I wondered to myself. “That was a coyote in the Vale Cemetery. Wasn’t it? How would I respond? And how about if instead it were an empty tomb I found there, there in Vale Cemetery, the empty tomb of the savior of humanity?”
III.
For two thousand years faithful people have struggled with the empty tomb of Jesus the Galilean rabbi. Some have turned it into an allegory, a metaphor, a fable. Others have insisted on the literal physical resurrection of Jesus. And many, many have been quietly and politely dubious about the whole thing. And yet still, the empty tomb remains a shocking question mark and exclamation point. It is the birthplace of both doubt and faith: fear at first, and then deep deep joyful courage. The empty tomb turns everything upside down.
After the shock, after the shakiness, the story goes on. We know those women spoke to someone, or we wouldn’t know the story ourselves. And we know in our own lives: resurrection is a lifelong journey. It starts with a bump, or a big bang—and then we spend the rest of our lives sorting it out. And thank God for the empty tomb, for we live in a world that could really, really use some transforming, some upside downing inside outing tomb emptying resurrection.
Once we live with this reality a bit, we start to see that all the things we took for granted, all our assumptions about how the bad guys always win, all the cynicism and realism we had about the decisions we make, the interests we serve—all of it is…empty. All the secret chambers of despair in our hearts are unsealed and vacated. Empty tombs. Say what? Now what? Where can we even start? It’s like being newborn infants in the same old bodies.
It may take a special form of madness, living into this resurrection thing: Wendell Berry puts it like this in his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”. I love this poem for its resurrection in the woods, and well, even if it doesn’t have coyote, at least there’s a fox. Listen up.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man [or woman]
has not encountered he [or she] has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
And he concludes:
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.*
*Two excerpts from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973.
Emmanuel Friedens Church
Schenectady New York
Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018
Reading: Mark 16:1-8
I.
The Gospel of Mark has more than one version of its ending. There are a few that are well known. I admit I like the one with the snake handling bit, but the more likely authentic version is the one we read today.
It’s a story that ends abruptly, with women at the tomb finding the stone already thrown aside, and a mysterious person sitting there in the place of Jesus, a singular anonymous messenger from God alone, no wings mentioned. The messenger is telling them not to be afraid, telling them to go talk to the other disciples, let them know the tomb was empty, tell them Jesus has gone ahead of them to Galilee.
Now, this handful of women, throughout the Gospel, these are the ones who have stuck by Jesus when nobody had the courage too. When others—let’s just say it, when the MEN-- were numbed, distracted or driven by their own terror, this little group of women has been steadfast. When their friend’s body had to be placed hastily in a borrowed tomb, these are the ones with the courage to come back and do right by their friend.
But now they face an empty tomb. Now they are afraid. They say nothing to anyone. Not yet. And that is where the story ends. Sure, we can fill in the blanks from other versions. But no other gospel gives us that sharp sense of the impact of the experience of finding your beloved teacher missing from the tomb!
This is the oldest and shortest of the gospels in the New Testament! If this were the only gospel we had ever seen—or heard—it would drive us to say: SAY WHAT? Now what? It might lead us to start over again at the beginning of the story, to see what this means…. And eventually it might even cause us to say—Is this where we come in?
II.
Easter at Emmanuel Friedens came early for me this year. It arrived at 10:22 on Saturday morning as our friends and neighbors streamed into the fellowship hall for the world’s greatest Easter Brunch. There was something different in the air. It wasn’t just the encouraging glimpse of spring weather. Nor was it the delicious piece of ham that Nancy’s brother Jim slipped me toward the end of the event. But as people came in there was something different.
Maybe no one else felt it—or did you? As I watched the Methodist youth clowning around and serving tables diligently, sharing quantities of home baked pies; as I watched John in the kitchen nonchalantly deal with what Faye Bailey referred to as the “crisis du jour”: an industrial dishwasher dutifully blowing off steam onto the floor… I felt it—a presence….
As I shook hands with some of our guests and friends—there was something different going on. I was glimpsing the invisible, walking with someone next to me that I couldn’t see. I sensed joy trying to leak out all over the place, streaming out even more than the boiling water from the kitchen. There were hints of resurrection in the air. There was vulnerability and love in the air. The risen Christ was close by us yesterday morning.
And then, as I was helping a young woman and her child and their heavy-laden stroller onto the elevator, I learned about her Saturday morning—is she here today? “We don’t have wolves in Schenectady, do we?” she asked. “We were walking over through Vale Cemetery this morning—maybe it was a fox.” I looked at her, and asked “How big was it? Was it like this—was the tail almost as long as the body? Was it reddish?” She said, “Well it wasn’t reddish. And it wasn’t a dog. But it wasn’t that small. Here let me show you.” She grabbed her phone and played a short video clip she had taken that morning on the walk over through the woods.
There was a beautiful big grey wolf-like thing, it must have been a coyote, loping through the woods, in the heart of Schenectady. “It was much closer at first” she said looking concerned, “a little too close, but it saw us, it went around us.” Her child was so excited he could barely stand it, as she spoke. He was firing off words—not one of which I could understand. “I don’t think we are going back the same way,” his mother said. “We will go around.” As she spoke I sensed the mixture of awe and excitement, and fear on behalf of her baby, respect for the miracle, and fresh understanding of mortality, in a whole new way, there in a cemetery, crossing paths with a fine skinny specimen of a coyote. And as I looked at them go across the parking lot I found myself thinking. And as it stayed with me through the day, I wondered to myself. “That was a coyote in the Vale Cemetery. Wasn’t it? How would I respond? And how about if instead it were an empty tomb I found there, there in Vale Cemetery, the empty tomb of the savior of humanity?”
III.
For two thousand years faithful people have struggled with the empty tomb of Jesus the Galilean rabbi. Some have turned it into an allegory, a metaphor, a fable. Others have insisted on the literal physical resurrection of Jesus. And many, many have been quietly and politely dubious about the whole thing. And yet still, the empty tomb remains a shocking question mark and exclamation point. It is the birthplace of both doubt and faith: fear at first, and then deep deep joyful courage. The empty tomb turns everything upside down.
After the shock, after the shakiness, the story goes on. We know those women spoke to someone, or we wouldn’t know the story ourselves. And we know in our own lives: resurrection is a lifelong journey. It starts with a bump, or a big bang—and then we spend the rest of our lives sorting it out. And thank God for the empty tomb, for we live in a world that could really, really use some transforming, some upside downing inside outing tomb emptying resurrection.
Once we live with this reality a bit, we start to see that all the things we took for granted, all our assumptions about how the bad guys always win, all the cynicism and realism we had about the decisions we make, the interests we serve—all of it is…empty. All the secret chambers of despair in our hearts are unsealed and vacated. Empty tombs. Say what? Now what? Where can we even start? It’s like being newborn infants in the same old bodies.
It may take a special form of madness, living into this resurrection thing: Wendell Berry puts it like this in his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”. I love this poem for its resurrection in the woods, and well, even if it doesn’t have coyote, at least there’s a fox. Listen up.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man [or woman]
has not encountered he [or she] has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
And he concludes:
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.*
*Two excerpts from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973.