Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scriptures: I Corinthians 15:12-19; John 20:30-31
A pair of questions as we begin.
Who is the Gospel about?
Jesus.
Who is the Gospel for?
You….me….and Fred.
Let me introduce Fred….a man whose character was as drab as his life. Fred shuffled paper in a low level government job, retiring after 40 years on the payroll. He lived alone in a one-bedroom rental apartment, yet showed little signs of regretting his solitary existence. He argued for no great causes, capitulated readily in an argument, and was deemed by most who knew him to be an agreeable fellow. In fact, that was the word that came quickest to anyone’s mind in describing
Fred….“agreeable.”
As far as anyone remembered, Fred never said a bad word about anybody. But, then, nobody ever said a bad word about him. Or a good word, for that matter. Or any word. He paid his bills on time, drove a modest car and bought a government bond whenever he accumulated a little extra.
If people loved him….or even enjoyed his company….they did not declare themselves by showing up at his funeral. His casket was carried by two men who dropped by from his office and four men recruited by the funeral director. In the eulogy, nobody recalled a mongrel mutt or a Persian cat that he stroked by night, or even a canary whose songs brought sunshine to a cold winter’s morning. In cleaning out his apartment, no one found $20,000 wrapped in brown paper and stuffed beneath his mattress. Neither was there a bundle of letters from someone once loved and lost in an earlier era.
If Fred was a member of the Silent Majority, the Moral Majority, or even the Great Society, he carried no membership card in his wallet. He never, once, sat with Bob Uecker in the front row….nor did he ever exclaim that he ought to. A few old lottery tickets and a couple of football betting cards testified to the fact that he took an occasional ride on the wheel of fortune. But never a wild ride. And seldom a winning one. Had he lived long enough, he would likely have taken up residence in a boarding house in Central Florida….preferably one near the public shuffleboard courts and within walking distance of an Old Country Buffet.
Death, when it came, tiptoed quietly into his life, meaning that he suffered neither long nor heroically. One night he simply closed his eyes and, the next morning, neglected to open them.
When the great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that “every human soul contains more meaning and value than the whole of history with its empires, wars and revolutions,” I wonder what Berdyaev would have made of Fred. When one thinks of the millions of years of biological and social development that went into his making, Fred did little to justify the effort, and gave no signs of recognizing it. The forward progress of humankind lost ground with Fred….or, at best, stood still.
Which did not keep Fred from becoming an ecological problem. I mean, there is only so much space on this planet for people to inhabit….only so much air for people to breathe….only so much water for people to drink….only so much food for people to eat….and only so much fuel to propel people from here to there while keeping them warm in the winter. And Fred used his share. Which means that Fred’s share couldn’t be allocated to anyone else. And which is why the Freds of the world need to depart the world in order that other Freds (and Fredericas) can be born….whether the replacements turn out to be galley slaves or brain surgeons.
Martin Luther King once said (perhaps with Fred in mind): “If there is no cause for which a man is prepared to put his life on the line….no truth that he struggles a lifetime to understand….no love that makes him reach beyond his selfish inclination to give….then the mere stopping of his heart is but a belated announcement of a death that has long since taken place.” Which pretty much describes Fred’s tragedy….not that he died, but that he so little lived.
So what, if anything, does Easter do for Fred? Stated another way: “If resurrection from the tomb is nothing more than an endless extension of that which already is, who is to say that Fred would want it, or that any of us would want it for him?” On the way to an answer, let’s look at a few classic misunderstandings of the Easter message and consider how they might pertain to old Fred.
Let’s begin with the misguided notion that Easter means we are immortal. Which is dead wrong. Easter does not mean we are immortal. Easter does not mean that Jesus was immortal. And it certainly does not mean that Fred was immortal. The problem is in the terminology. The word “immortal” means “not subject to mortality”….not subject to death. The Greek gods were alleged to be immortal (living for hundreds of years, with death having no power over them).
We are not immortal. We die.
Jesus was not immortal. Jesus died.
Fred was not immortal. Fred died.
Death had power over him. Sad to say, it had power over him long before two men from the office and four guys from the funeral home said prayers over him. And if someone had said (prior to the signing of Fred’s death certificate), “Fred, you are not going to die. You are going to live forever,” I am not sure Fred would have received that as good news. No, I am not sure he would have looked favorably upon that at all.
Or consider a second group, approaching center stage with a different philosophy to share. “Yes,” they say, “Fred will die. And he will live on in the collective memory of those who knew and loved him.” They will point to the great figures of history….Washington….Lincoln…. Churchill….Arnold Runkel. Then they will note that each of the above is “gone, but not forgotten.” The splash that each made in history’s pool is still sending ripples to the shore.
But what of Fred? Fred made no splash. Fred sent no ripples. He wrote no book, built no building, sired no child or bequeathed no fortune. So how long do you think it will take his co-workers, his landlord and the bookie who handled his football bets to forget his name and his face? Six years? Six months? Six weeks? Find that bookie and I’ll put my money on “six weeks.”
Now, through door number three enters the moralist, suggesting that Jesus shall gather the sheep and reject the goats….the “good” to heaven, the “bad” to oblivion. Maybe so. But what of Fred? Was he sheep or goat? Nobody remembered much he did that was good. But nobody remembered anything he did that was bad. His goodness consisted in avoiding badness. His chief virtue rested in that which he did not do.
Drank – not.
Smoked – not.
Fooled around with other men’s wives – not.
Murdered, stole and slandered – not.
And he certainly never prayed to idols….although whether he prayed at all is anybody’s guess. As to whether he had a pure heart, who can say? Although it would appear that he kept his nose clean. Assuming that qualifies.
But I don’t want to go further with any of these lines of thinking. Because the post-Easter question that puzzles me tonight is not “Is death survivable,” but “Are the Freds of the world transformable?” Can God make something out of Fred on either side of the grave?
To which I say: “If God can bring Jesus from the tomb, I believe that God can bring anybody from the tomb….even Fred.” By now, you are probably getting the idea that when I say “out of the tomb,” I mean something more than the grave that holds us on the last day. I also mean the graves that hold us on all the other days as well.
The resurrection of Jesus is not offered as a one-time, one-shot, magical and miraculous display of God’s power. The resurrection of Jesus is meant to show us that life need not be defeated, destroyed, demeaned or deadened in any one of us….even when we jump into self-dug holes feet first, or seal ourselves in self-hewn tombs (taking the keys with us). Why would God stop with rolling one stone away when he could roll every stone away….including stones that we, ourselves, have rolled into place, the better that we might hide from our future and our Maker.
Easter is about the eternal nature of God’s concern. And God’s concern is this….not simply that we survive, but that we become what we have it within us to become (or what God has placed within us to become). Which will not be easy. And which is why it will take God to bring it off. I am no expert on processes of birth and rebirth. Some have suggested that advances in obstetrics may eventually render childbirth painless. But rebirth will always be fraught with great pain. Bringing life into the world is one thing, over which mothers are more than capable. But changing moral and spiritual blobs into whole and loving human beings (living with the overflowing abundance that we call “life in Christ”), that’s a God job. But God will bring it off, even if it takes longer than it looks and longer than we have. That’s because God is playing on a bigger court without the constraints of a shot clock.
Yes, God will pull it off….here or there….which is what Damian Zikakis said to me in a wonderful little note, sketched in response to my last Sunday’s sermon.
How do I know? Because I have seen God do it right in front of my eyes. That’s how I know. I have seen God confound the determinists who study our social environments and predict our futures accordingly. We have psychologists and sociologists (very necessary, mind you, and very helpful, too) who study and measure us….who probe our psyches and poke around in our family trees….who assess wounds inflicted upon us, prior to the age of memory, by our mothers and our fathers, our sisters and our brothers, our preachers and our teachers. Then, pointing to our wretched housing, poor nutrition, alcoholic parents and ghetto surroundings (not to overlook the “big three’ sources of victimization….poverty, race and gender….along with mistakes that may have been made in how we were trained to go to the toilet), they say: “No way. No hope. No how.”
Yet transformation happens. Here and there, people who have no business making it, do. They survive. More than that, some of them even thrive.
I am thinking of the minister who everyone agreed was unsuited to his calling. Having failed in four successive appointments, he was sent for one last try by a district superintendent who told him: “This is the last bus out.” Whereupon he pulled it together, amazing everybody by serving gloriously.
And there’s the girl who was raised in an alcoholic home….both parents. She had four older brothers and sisters who provided models for failure (which were interesting only in the fact that each of them managed to fail differently). When her life intersected with mine, she was selling Good Humor bars for seven consecutive summers on the southwest side of Detroit, earning the money to pay for a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from MSU. And just a few months ago, she received a “Humanitarian of the Year” award from one of our large mid-Michigan communities, citing her wonderful work with high school and middle school kids (especially kids living close to, or right on, life’s margins).
Here and there it happens….defying all logic. Human beings who have no business climbing off the scrap heap of life, do. We often hear people say: “If only I could light a fire under that girl….if only someone would administer a swift kick in the pants to that boy….if only someone would detonate some dynamite in that church.” Well, sometimes it happens and nobody knows why. We can trace it to no cause. We can give it no name. We can attribute it to no syndrome.
But perhaps we do know. Could it be that God is at work? The God whose peculiar way of haunting history is bursting forth from tombs….hammering and chiseling at rock….is doing it again. One of the ancient resurrection images is that of graves spitting out their dead….the earth rumbling and bodies flying everywhere. Which is primitive, I’ll grant. And which can lead to a very crude theology. But perhaps it will serve us here.
God will continue to hammer away at rock until every last stone be rolled away. Not just his stone. But ours, too. So keep your ear close to the ground, listening for subterranean thunder. What is it? It’s the jackhammer of God, at work even now. Which is why the sleep of the dead is never peaceful….or final. My father used to say (when overcome by weariness): “Bill, there’s no rest for the wicked.” Well guess what, Dad? There may not be any rest for anybody….until God’s great work is done.
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Note: Several of the ideas undergirding this sermon, including the image of “the jackhammer of God,” are drawn from British author Colin Morris and his book The Hammer of the Lord.
Additional Note: Imagine my surprise when, two days after preaching this sermon, I received a sermon preached by William Willimon in Duke University Chapel (April 9, 2000) that contained the same message. After eloquently detailing how difficult human beings find it to break old habits, forego old sins and reverse predictable patterns of self-destruction, he adds the following:
When Jesus came forth from the tomb on Easter, Jesus not only arose to new life, but so do we. New life really is possible, even for people like us who find it terribly difficult to change, to start over, to begin again, to be new.
We believe that even as Jesus is raised from the dead, so are we. God writes a new relationship, not on tablets of stone, but within our hearts. We are therefore not permitted to give up on ourselves, despair of our ability to be the sort of people we would like to be, because God has refused to despair of us, to give up on us. God keeps creating, recreating us. Thus Easter is God’s great defeat of defeat.
In just a little while we shall gather in great joy to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus, God’s great miracle in raising Jesus from the dead. I’ll tell you a miracle, different, but I think equally wonderful. I know a man who for eighteen years was enslaved to the bottle. His wife begged him, his children begged him, but he couldn’t stop. He eventually lost his marriage, his family, his job, his self-respect, just about everything. As his pastor, I tried to help him, but I finally gave up. I think I even said to myself, “He will never lick this, he is beyond help.”
That was an unfaithful, terrible thing for me to say in light of the cross of Jesus and of Easter. Nevertheless, I lost track of him over the years. A couple of weeks ago I ran into him at a meeting. We recalled the days when I was his pastor. Then he told me something wonderful.
“Pastor, you might be interested to know that I have been free, sober, for the last eight years.”
Interested! I’ll say. Free. Free for eight years.
I’ll tell you what I think happened. I think Easter happened. I think he was raised from the dead. I think the same miracle that God worked on Easter, God worked in his very heart. God started from the inside out, wrote something in the depths of his heart, which previously could only be inscribed in a list of rules in the futility of should, ought, and must.
Don’t tell me you have trouble believing in resurrection. I’ve seen it.
