The Grammar of Resurrection
Easter Sunday
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church
April 8, 2007
Luke 24:1-12
Easter music is not like Christmas music. During Lent, the stores
do not continually pump Easter music over the loudspeakers,
nor do radio stations inundate us with 24 hours of “all
Easter, all the time.” That being the case, choosing the
hymns we sing on Easter morning is a daunting task. For a while
this week we were considering hymn #57, “The Snow Lay
on the Ground,” until we remembered it was in the Christmas
section.
Nonetheless, and the weather notwithstanding, a warm welcome
to you all, with prayers that the good news of this resurrection
day will bless you, those you love and all the world. Whether
you’ve been a member here for decades, months, are visiting
for the first time or are just passing through, something about
the power of this day has drawn you here, and we are grateful
for your presence.
Allow me to add to the invitation to those of you searching
for a church home. We do not have brass and strings every Sunday
– but we do seek to offer engaging worship supported by
inspiring music, learning and connecting opportunities for all
ages that provide crucibles for the most important questions
of faith and life, and service opportunities that seek to address
real human need and to change the world for the common good
of all God’s children. If you sense God calling you in
this particular direction, I would encourage you to listen to
that voice and to engage us in conversation and discernment.
A blessed Easter to you. Christ is risen indeed. Let us pray.
***
Eternal God, on this glad Easter morning, we gather
as your glad people. We gather with the women, with the earliest
disciples, with the church of every generation at the empty
tomb and around the story of the risen Christ. Open the story
to us yet again at this moment, in this place. Surprise us,
challenge us, comfort us, transform us, by the power of your
word and the hope of Jesus Christ, who was dead but is risen,
and who offers us new life. Amen.
***
Grammar matters. It is not the most important thing in the
world, though it seems to me that things in the world, or in
our lives, go well when we are communicating well and things
don’t go as well when we are not. Good grammar helps us
communicate good, or well, I should say, providing clear directions
to an unknown destination.
You will remember the recent phenomenon with the book Eats,
Shoots, and Leaves. Subtitled The Zero Tolerance Approach to
Punctuation, the book, written by self-described “punctuation
vigilante” Lynne Truss, reminded us, in a very humorous
and somewhat serious way, how important this stuff is, or, in
the least, how we should be paying attention a bit more than
we are.
Now I am not sure about “zero tolerance” regarding
much of anything. But good communication matters, because at
the heart of who we are, we have been given a story, an extraordinary
story, and further, God has called us, has joined our stories
to this story. As important as doctrine and church government
is – and we spend no little time on those matters around
here – they matter little unless they are in service to
the story, the heart of which we rehearse this morning.
Speaking of punctuation, my nifty little computer spell-check
doesn’t like the ancient phrase “Christ is risen!”
It insists on “Christ is raised!” Clearly one for
the grammarians to work out, but even so to this great story
as the gathering place of all of our stories we turn.
Luke’s version is spare, the actual resurrection left
unobserved. Lots of coming and going, lots of wondering and
worrying, lots of remembering and recounting. Lots of dramatis
personae, but no one really in charge or particularly sure
of themselves or even sure what is happening.
I’ve always appreciated the Frederick Buechner reminder
that “…when the writers of the four Gospels come
to the most important part of the story they have to tell, they
tell it in whispers…It was the most extraordinary thing
they believed had ever happened, and yet they tell it so quietly,”
Buechner writes, “that you have to lean close to be sure
what they are saying. They tell it as softly as a secret, as
something so precious, and holy, and fragile, and unbelievable,
and true, that to tell it any other way would be somehow to
dishonor it.” (“The Secret in the Dark,” in
Secrets in the Dark, page 252 and ff.)
The final, very understated, scene is a sentence diagrammer’s
dream – “But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping
and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then
he went home, amazed at what had happened.” That seems
to me to be what we are all called to do, we who overhear in
the decades and centuries and millennium following. Linger at
the tomb only briefly, and then go home, get on with our business,
amazed at what happened to be sure, but recognizing it as the
beginning it is, rather than the conclusion we might make it
out to be.
That is to say, the importance of Easter resides not so much
in what happened then – as important as that is both to
the first followers and to us. Rather, the importance resides
in what happened from that moment on, what continues to happen
because of what happened. Resurrection is not the epilogue.
It is the foreword to the story.
We are called to “practice resurrection,” as poet
Wendell Berry insists, not to bronze it or paste it in a scrap
book. Practice it, which seems like a verb to me, and an active
verb at that.
The grammar of resurrection may look like many things, has
and will look like many things.
The grammar of resurrection is a grammar of restoration.
In the space of the same days whereby Elizabeth Edwards and
Tony Snow announced the recurrence of their cancers, I received
three e-mails: one told of the thyroid cancer of a college roommate’s
wife; another of the breast cancer of a former co-worker, some
five years my younger; and a third of the lymphoma of a pastoral
colleague’s spouse.
Many of you in this room have shared with me your own cancer
diagnosis or that of one you love. It is part of the job. But
this seemed a little too much, even though I know that fully
one-third of us will deal with cancer at some point in our lives.
And those that don’t will deal with many other things
– heartache or heartbreak, depression or addiction, dementia
or stroke.
What Easter does, I believe, what the grammar of resurrection
does, is not provide some kind of shield from life’s difficulties,
some magical defense mechanism, but rather offers the gift that
every life experience will be lived in the warm and bright light
of the promise of love.
Elizabeth Edwards says that “God (is) a God who promised
enlightenment and salvation. And that's all. Didn't promise
us protection. I'm not praying for God to save me from cancer.
I'm not. God will enlighten me when the time comes. And if I
believe, I'll be saved. And that's all he promises me. (Newsweek,
April 9, 2007)
That is what we are promised, the resurrection of restoration.
No protection. No superstition. No magic. But love; the fullness
of love. The promise that in life and in death we belong to
God, and not to ourselves, not to our brokenness, not to our
disease, but to God, to the risen Christ, who knows us fully,
restores us fully, loves us fully.
The grammar of resurrection does not stop there. It is the
grammar of transformation as well.
There are so many organizations, institutions, that are in need
of transformation. But since we are in church, and this is a
reasonably big day for churchly things, let us focus on the
church.
Annie Dillard wrote one time, “What a pity that so hard
on the heels of Christ come the Christians.” That may
be. There may be no such thing as bad publicity, but I mostly
cringe these days when a story is written about we Presbyterians
in the papers. Conflict on top of conflict on top of conflict.
It may always have been that way. Read Acts; read Paul’s
epistles.
But there are moments, glimpses of a resurrection church. We
are living in the midst of an evolution, perhaps a revolution,
in the life of the church, in the lives of churches like ours.
We are witnessing the end of one kind of denomination and the
birth of another. We occupy a new role in culture. We speak
differently, and are spoken to differently, by new generations
seeking new experiences, and by older generations seeking renewal.
It’s about things like music and church politics and “org.”
charts, but it is about things much deeper than that, about
vision, about purpose, about meaning, about new forms of spiritual
disciplines and practices based on very old ones, about new
forms of gifts.
In a fine new book called Christianity for the Rest of
Us, Diana Butler Bass spends time studying mainline congregations,
some of which feel like this place. Rather than developing churches
that are “culturally irrelevant and hopelessly confused,”
Bass calls for churches that are “open and generous, intellectual
and emotive, beautiful and just.” Bass yearns for churches
that “exhibit Christian authenticity, express a coherent
faith, offer members ways of living with passion and purpose.
They exude a renewed sense of mission and identity… and
are creative and traditional, risk-taking and grounded, confident
and humble, open and orthodox.” (Pages 3-7)
I am not always sure what this will look like; today is not
a day for strategic planning. But I do know that the mainline
church, the Presbyterian church, this church, Third Presbyterian
Church, will only be faithful and sustainable and viable and
vital if it hitches its wagon to this story, and no other, if
it gathers around the resurrection of transformation, the abundance
of new life, and not now or not ever the small tactics of scarcity.
The grammar of resurrection does not stop there, either, not
at the personal and certainly not within the four walls of the
church. It is also the grammar of liberation.
The current movie “Amazing Grace” tells the story
of the abolition movement in late 18th century England, led
by William Wilberforce and his political and clerical colleagues.
It pits the forces of justice against the forces of inertia
and gradualism. And it makes the machinations of the British
parliamentary process seem downright riveting!
There are many liberations in the story, many resurrections.
The first happens as John Newton, slave trader, is convicted
of his sin and lays down that very profitable enterprise. We
know John Newton as the writer of the hymn “Amazing Grace,”
but he also serves as a kind of spiritual mentor to young Wilberforce.
When faced with a dilemma of calling – praise the Lord
or change the world – Wilberforce experiences a vocational
resurrection that praises God by changing the world, by pushing,
year after year, in the face of corruption and illness and chronic
defeat, a bill to end the English slave trade. He wins in one
sense by doing it at all; he wins in another when the votes
finally go his way.
The final liberation is happening still, based on seeds planted
in the 1790’s and watered by the blood, sweat and tears
of abolitionists, politicians, crusaders of all types, a minister
here and there, and especially the slaves themselves. The seeds,
cultivated slowly, sometimes shamefully slowly, have not yet
fully blossomed. But they were planted nonetheless, and they
bloom, like crocuses pushing up from the snow, subtly, gradually.
And those blooms give witness to a million other resurrections,
from all kinds of enslavements, all kinds of entombments, every
kind of injustice, because every time that justice is achieved,
or oppression is challenged, or reconciliation is realized,
that means that the story of the rolled-away stone has found
root, that the story did not linger at the empty tomb too long,
that it was taken by the disciples to wherever it was that resurrection
was most urgently needed.
We do not always know what it will look like. I do not know
what manner, precisely, of resurrection is needed in your life,
or mine. Nor is it clear, always, what type is needed in the
world, or whether we have the spiritual fortitude – like
Wilberforce, or a million other “resurrection vigilantes,”
known and unknown, or more so, “resurrection practitioners.”
Some saw the story unfold and were terrified and perplexed.
Others heard about it and were doubtful and amazed. We are parts
of all, and have parts of all in us.
I do not know what kind of resurrection is needed: the kind
that restores, that transforms, that liberates.
But I do know that this is no idle tale, that this is the story
that defines all of our stories, that draws us in and sends
us out, a grammar of resurrection leading us from death to life,
from cross to empty tomb, from wandering lost to finding a way
home. Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Amen.
