First United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Michigan
Scriptures: Matthew 28:1-10
April 4, 1999
Once upon a time, preachers survived on the food that parishioners left on their porches. Chickens….eggs….sacks of string beans….portions of pigs….all backing the claim of the Pastoral Relations Committee which promised, at the time of hiring: “Even when we can’t pay you, Reverend, we will always feed you.” And, in their own way, they always did. Thankfully, that day is done. Today’s preachers are paid in checks rather than chickens. Although I did come home from church on a recent Sunday to find a key lime pie in my front door….hand carried from Sanibel Island by Jane Pettibone, because….well….she knew I’d like it.
But I did get an offer of free food recently. From a restaurant. A fairly well-known restaurant. Which sent me this wonderful invitation, complete with my name (as if we were long lost friends): “Dear Father Ritter,” the letter began. “We would like to have you join us for dinner. And feel free to bring a guest.” So I called and made a reservation for two….“Father Ritter and wife.” And I asked Kris if she could try to look pregnant.
It reminds me of the day, early in my ministerial career, when I was pondering the purchase of a clerical collar. It used to be that few Protestants wore one. Now, more than 50 percent of Protestant clergy wear one. Many of my colleagues wouldn’t be caught dead without a clerical collar in the hospital. They say it earns them respect and cuts red tape. I can’t say. I’ve never worn one. I don’t even own one. I was never highly motivated to get one. But, early in our marriage, Kris clinched it when she said: “I can’t imagine sleeping with someone who wears a collar.” I said I wasn’t planning to wear it to bed.
Twenty years and two churches ago, I had an associate named John Ferris. John had come to us, fresh out of seminary. Meaning that he was young. With a young wife. And a young child. With another on the way. No problem. Baby was in place. Birthing room was in place. Blue Cross was in place. The only problem being that the Blue Cross computer was convinced that John Ferris was a retired minister. No number of calls and letters could convince them otherwise. Finally I said to Deb: “Go ahead and have the baby”….as if she was waiting for my permission. I couldn’t wait to see what the Blue Cross people would do when a maternity claim surfaced on a retiree’s billing record.
Well, Jeremy Ferris is now of voting age. His daddy is still 20 years from retirement. And “Father Ritter and wife” are still capable of a few surprises….with or without collar. But the stories remain. Because all of us delight in those moments when ordinary expectations are turned upside down, and elements of surprise unsettle the routines of our existence. And although my segue be sloppy, could there possibly be a day of greater surprise than this, when an ordinary entombment is peeled back to reveal a most amazing discovery….the discovery of emptiness.
There was nobody there. There was no body there. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” That was the question raised by the young man at the tomb (who may or may not have looked like an angel, depending upon which narrative you read). There is an answer to that question. But the women were either too afraid or too surprised to give it. They should have said: “We didn’t come looking for the living. We came looking for the dead.” Which would have been correct. And logical. Most of us seek the dead among the dead. At least I do. I don’t go to graveyards expecting surprises.
But what surprise. What irony. And so characteristic of God, wouldn’t you say? Where Jesus is concerned, predictability has never been God’s way. The story of Jesus is one big surprise after another….beginning with a womb strangely filled and concluding with a tomb strangely empty. The dramatic events of the Gospel will simply not fit into comfortable categories of explanation. Neither will they lend themselves to easy verification. There is so much about the Resurrection that bewilders. Paul admits as much when he writes: “Behold, I hand you a mystery. We shall not all sleep. But we shall all be changed.” We have talked about this before, you and I.
But this morning I want to do something different. This morning, I want to suggest something that may be revolutionary to your way of thinking. For I want to suggest that the issue of resurrection is not the only mystery on faith’s table, but rather the last of four great mysteries. The beloved Frenchman, Henri Bergson, has laid them out for us….four unexplainable gaps in human knowledge. Allow me to list them for you.
· The first mystery: How did we get from nothing to something?
It is the riddle of creation.
· The second mystery: How did we get from matter to life?
It is the riddle of existence.
· The third mystery: How did we get from life to mind?
It is the riddle of consciousness.
· The fourth mystery: How do we get from death to life?
It is the riddle of resurrection.
Let’s back up a moment and take them one at a time. Return with me to the riddle of creation. How did we get from nothing to something? Was there ever a time of nothingness….before something was….before anything was? If so, was God there then? Is it conceivable that there was ever a time when God was not? Did God create out of nothing? From scratch? Or is God part and parcel of the creative process itself?
When I was a child, I lived close enough to the school so that I could come home for lunch. On the days when I didn’t have Franco American Spaghetti (my favorite), I had soup and a sandwich. With the soup came crackers. And, as best as I can remember the cracker box, it was blue and white and featured a pudgy looking sailor boy….holding a box of crackers. Of course, on that box of crackers (the one that he was holding), was another pudgy-looking sailor boy, holding a second box of crackers. I suppose if I’d taken a magnifying glass to that second box of crackers, I’d have seen yet a third sailor boy, holding a third box of crackers. Leading me to ponder: “Where did they end? Or did they end?” With the right kind of equipment, could I have peered into an infinite regression of sailor boys and soda cracker boxes.…so as never to be able to answer the question of which came first, boy or box?
Similarly, one cannot get behind creation to solve (or even study) issues of origin. The deeper we go, the more there is to see. And the process of looking is one that widens our wonder, even as it invokes our awe.
For the scientists don’t know either. One of the most exciting changes that has taken place during my 34 years of ministry, is that scientists are now climbing back into bed with theologians. Where once we feared that science would so reduce the world that religion would no longer have a role to play in it, just the opposite has happened. What science has done is expand the world to such a degree, that religion is fast becoming the only way to explain it.
Concerning one way of looking at the origin of the universe, listen to this by Gregg Easterbrook:
For extravagant implausibility, nothing in theology can hold a candle to what science says about the “Big Bang.” From a pinpoint of compressed potential, it sent a cosmos hurtling outward at an unimaginable speed. But the forces loosed, thereby, seemed to have been remarkably (miraculously?) balanced.
If the Big Bang had been slightly less violent, the expansion of the universe would have been less rapid, and would have (in time) collapsed back upon itself. But if the explosion had been slightly more violent, the universe might have dispersed into a soup too thin to aggregate into stars.
The odds against a universe were astronomical. The ratio of matter and energy, to the volume of space at the time of the Big Bang, must have been (get this) within one quadrillionth of one percent of ideal.
What does this mean? Well, says Easterbrook, it suggests “a buoyant view of our being….in that life was so improbable, that it must have been favored by something.” Which Thomas Aquinas called “God….the First Cause.” And echoed by none other than our own Carl Price, who has confessed that he has “no problem, whatsoever, with the idea of a Big Bang….as long as you leave room at the end of the day for the idea of a Big Banger.” The bottom line being that the universe….from beginning to now….“seems to desire life.” But the details are more elusive than ever. Unexplainable mystery number one.
And the second is like unto it. How did we get from matter to life? When did cellular life begin? How did the inert become alive? When, out of the primordial ooze and muck of the sea, did the first one-cell sponge come struggling upon the shore?
How ingenious and persistent cellular life is. It seems as if no seed is so dry that it does not contain the code of life within it. Consider, for example, the tadpole shrimp of the desert. They can hatch, grow, mature, mate, reproduce and die, all in the few hours duration of a puddle that appears on the desert floor as the result of a flash storm. And even though the sun returns, scorching the land and drying the puddle, the dried corpse of the shrimp will contain eggs that will hatch the next time a puddle appears in that very place….which may not be for decades into the future.
I am told that, during the blitz bombing that the Germans inflicted on London, British botanists had a field day. They would search the rubble of the city, finding flowers in bomb craters. Many of these blooms represented varieties that England had not seen since the great fire of 1666. And where did such blooms come from? They were brought to life by the nitrates of the burning bombs, themselves. Which is amazing. Utterly amazing. I don’t understand any of it. But it’s the movement from matter to life. Unexplainable mystery number two.
And if that isn’t enough, a third emerges. How did we get from life to mind? Where did the dawn of consciousness come from? At what point did instinct give way to reflection? Concerning the mystery of consciousness, microbiologist Lewis Thomas writes: “As a species, the thing we are biological good at is learning new things….thanks to our individually large brains….and thanks, above all, to the gift of speech that connects one brain to another.”
Just think of what our minds can do. We can remember the past, solve problems in the present, and image the future. We can write history after breakfast and fantasy after lunch. Then, at the close of day, we can think about what went on before our birth, even as we ponder what may happen after our death. Then, we can go to sleep, thinking about thinking. And, through it all, we can think about each other.
Part of what it means to be conscious is to be aware that we are not alone in the world. There are others here. Different others. Needful others. Attractive others. And out of our awareness of need, charity is born. While out of our awareness of attraction, romance is born. And somewhere in the marriage of charity and romance, love is born. Amazing, isn’t it? But does anybody here understand it? Unexplainable mystery number three.
Meaning that the fourth, “How do we get from death back to life,” is not really all that strange. It only seems strange because we stand between the third mystery and the fourth. We still have no answer to the first three. But they are safely behind us. We do not understand creation, but we take it for granted. We do not understand existence, but we take it for granted. We do not understand consciousness, but we take it for granted. Neither do we understand resurrection, but it is impossible to take it for granted. Why? Because we haven’t experienced it yet.
But maybe that’s the key. Maybe we could live with resurrection as a mystery, if we could experience something of resurrection as a reality. Which, in a literal sense, borders on the impossible. We can’t experience rising from the dead until we die. But could it be that the key to understanding resurrection beyond the grave, is to experience what Paul called “the power of the Resurrection” on this side of the grave?
Did I ever tell you of the man who boarded the New York to Chicago bound train and explained to the porter: “Look, I’m a heavy sleeper, and I want to be sure you awaken me at 3:00 in the morning so that I can get off at Buffalo. Regardless of what I say or how much fuss I make, get me off that train. I have some very important business in Buffalo. Therefore, even if you have to remove me bodily, I want you to do it.” The next morning, the fellow awakened in Chicago, having slept all night….and, more importantly, having missed Buffalo. He found the porter and began to pour forth with a torrent of abusive language, stopping just short of attacking the porter physically. Afterward, someone asked the porter: “How could you stand there and take that kind of talk from that man?” To which the porter replied: “Oh, that was nothing. You should have heard the fellow I put off in Buffalo.”
I submit that, where the resurrection is concerned, most of us fail to arise at the right station. We assume that there will be a great deliverance in the far-off tomorrow that follows death. And then, having banked that belief against the day of our dying, we miss hundreds upon hundreds of resurrections at hand. Which is precisely our problem, John Killinger says. “We sing and talk about the resurrection on Easter, and then feel a little guilty when a voice inside questions whether it be real. All the while, we fail to realize that some of the best experiences of the resurrection occur in the midst of life, when we are off fishing or off praying….making the bed or lying in the bed….driving along a country road….reading a mind-opening book….or simply walking through a supermarket.
My father has been dead and gone, going on 32 years. And while I can’t recall him ever reflecting upon the resurrection, I do remember that, whenever we sang around the piano, he always wanted my mother to play, “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.”
Somewhere the sun in shining,
Somewhere the songbirds dwell,
Hush, then, thy sad repining,
God lives and all is well.
Then, when she’d get to the refrain, he’d tilt back his head and sing (especially if he’d had a couple):
Somewhere. Somewhere. Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.
Land of the free where we’ll dwell with thee.
Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.
Which, of course, Leonard Bernstein rewrote (during a six week hiatus at Cranbrook) into that beautiful lyric for a dying lover on the west side of Manhattan:
There’s a place for us,
A time and place for us,
Peace and quiet and open air, wait for us,
Somewhere.
Both songs are memorable. Both songs are beautiful. Both songs talk about a promised future. Which Christ offers. Make no mistake about that.
But notice, once again, what the messenger at the tomb said to the women (when they came looking for the body). He said: “Go tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them….(where?)….in Galilee.” And where was Galilee? Galilee was the place where the disciples had spent virtually all their lives. Galilee is where they had worked and sweated, laughed and loved, met and mated. Galilee was where they had spent day after day with Jesus. And now they were being told that Galilee was where they would experience Jesus again….“in the power of his resurrection.” Which means that the very first Easter hymn may have well have been: “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places.”
My friends, the grave is empty. You won’t find Jesus there. But strange as it may seem….coming from someone in a pulpit….you may not find him here, either. Where you may find him….”in the power of his resurrection”….may be in the old familiar places where you experienced him first or experienced him last….the very places where you and Jesus have lived, labored, laughed, loved and languished.
Let’s put this to bed. Reach back with me to the days of Candid Camera when Allen Funt was running around filming people reacting to events that were as strange as they were staged. I remember one scene, filmed at a perfectly ordinary table in a perfectly ordinary lunchroom. The only thing that was not perfectly ordinary was the flower that was sitting in the vase on the table. Someone would sit down and start drinking his water (Pepsi or iced tea) and, when he would set the glass down between sips, the flower would rear up from its vase, arch completely over, and start inhaling the man’s drink.
But because what was happening did not fit anybody’s conception of reality, each diner (to a person) cast a few furtive glances to make sure that nobody had seen this strange occurrence, and then moved to another table, trying to look as if nothing had happened.
It was a silly little scene in a silly little show. But it was as sad as it was silly. For a very small miracle happened when a flower bowed its wild and lovely head and commenced to drink. And the response of all who saw it was to switch tables.
In the run-of-the-mill lunchrooms of my life, flowers do not drink from Pepsi glasses. Neither do dead men vacate graves. But, my friends, in a world where God and not Allen Funt does the staging, do not discount anything. And whatever you do, do not walk away…do not run away….do not look away….do not shy away….and, especially, do not turn away from whatever miracles may be at hand.
Note: I first encountered “the four mysteries” of Henri Bergson in a course on philosophy taught by my late mentor, Arthur Munk. The material by Gregg Easterbrook can be found in his elegant book Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt. To Bill Muehl, I owe the reminder about an infinite regression of sailor boys and soda cracker boxes. And I believe it was Frederick Buechner who talked about tadpole shrimp and other amazing biological miracles.
