THE ANSWER TO PUTTING OFF LIFE

MATTHEW 28:1-10

MARCH 23, 2008 – EASTER

THOMAS H. YORTY, WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

      One of our greatest poets, Wallace Stevens gave us this wonderful piece written at the end of his life, titled, “Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself.” It goes like this: 

      At the earliest ending of winter,

      In March, a scrawny cry from outside

      Seemed like a sound in his mind. 

      He knew that he heard it,

      A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,

      In the early March wind. 

      The sun was rising at six,

      No longer a battered panache above snow…

      It would have been outside. 

      It was not from the vast ventriloquism

      Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…

      The sun was coming from outside. 

      That scrawny cry—it was

      A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

      It was part of the colossal sun. 

      Surrounded by its choral rings,

      Still far away. It was like

      A new knowledge of reality.1 

      I like that poem because it describes not only a day like this one, here in March ‘at the earliest ending of winter’; at this earliest of Easters in our lifetime;

      but I like it because it describes what we are celebrating today in the Christian church around the world ‘not ideas about the thing but the thing itself— Resurrection—a new knowledge of reality.’ 

      Lord knows we have lived with the old knowledge of reality long enough. Death and destruction. Weekly counts for five long years of soldiers lost in the fighting. A steady stream of returning service men and women, many of them still struggling with the horror of war as they return to their loved ones in small towns and big cities.

War is a metaphor for our times, for this old reality, this old news.

      Before it records the Easter event, the Bible says the battle will ebb and flow between good and evil; then one glorious day, at the end of history, God will step in and declare victory for the forces of good. 

      But most days such victory seems beyond reach—at least in our lifetime. Someone said if you tie an elephant—that noble beast meant to roam the sub-continent—to a stake in the ground and keep it there long enough you can remove the chain one day and the elephant will stay right there in that tiny circle where it was bound.

      Maybe it is the same with you and me. We are chained to our little circumference of life and when the chains are removed we do not think to explore the world, to go in any direction very far because we are so used to our little existence.

      I don’t mean to be too hard on us but isn’t it true that just surviving in today’s busy world requires a degree of resignation; of moving forward with the routines of day to day; trying to juggle all of our responsibilities; not taking our eye off of those obligations for fear of not doing the best we can for our children, our community, securing our own future? 

      Life starts to depend on putting things into little compartments. Work, play, dates with our spouses, chauffeuring duty for the kids. It all gets to be fairly scripted. It is a formula for success if we do it right; if we stick with it and do our best and play the game.

      But if you play the game long enough you either get very good at it, or very tired of it, or it ends up beating you instead of you emerging victorious.

      Isn’t that what happened to our former Governor? You wonder if finally his ill-conceived, politically suicidal dalliance wasn’t the result of his fatigue or frustration with having to play the game too long, too hard to get where he was. I’m not letting him off the hook, he is fully responsible. But he rose and fell by the rules I am talking about. 

      Which is why a story like the one we have from Matthew is so important, so relevant. Even though he’d told them many times he would suffer, be crucified and die, and on the third day rise again, freed from the chains of death, no one had a clue what he meant.

      They were going about their lives, living in their tiny circumference of reality. Not happy with it, but wedded to a life co-existing with an occupation army, under the thumb of powerful authorities in Rome and at the temple, longing for the day it would all turn around to the favor of the righteous.

      In the meantime their job was to battle on. To be faithful soldiers. To hope for the best while they faced the worst.  

      You can imagine the utter despair when they arrived at the tomb. As far as they were concerned nothing had changed. A good man was put to death. A man who had brought light and hope into their lives—convicted by an angry mob and executed.

      I think each of the Gospels has different and in some cases conflicting accounts of the Resurrection because it so caught them all by surprise, was so unexpected, so big they couldn’t pin it down in neat sentences and tidy paragraphs.

      In fact, they do not just describe one Resurrection they keep on describing all the ways and places he showed up that day and the days immediately following. As eloquent and gifted as they were as writers they finally resorted to logic-bending poetry and imagination to describe their experience. Their words and ideas could not contain all of it all at once. You see, they are not talking about an “idea” but the “thing itself.” 

      And this is where I think Wallace Stevens is so insightful. Given that we are like elephants and stick to our faithful, plodding way through life;

      given that the world operates essentially like the Bible said it would operate – good versus evil in a war of attrition; and given the vast new reality of Resurrection, and possibilities of unchained life;

      given all of that, Stevens says we seldom grasp it all at once but come to it disbelievingly at first. Sometimes the new reality creeps up on us like the scrawny cry from a bird through the March wind before winter is over. Sometimes we have to convince ourselves of what we heard and saw – that it really happened. It is like coming to wakefulness from a long winter’s sleep; waking into a new realm, a new knowledge of reality. 

      I want to reach out to those of us today who may still be circling the little stake that we’ve been tied to—eyes downcast on the trodden path but hearts fixed, perhaps, on some promising sound we thought we heard, some news we desperately hope to be true.

      Nothing against the lilies or brass or timpani. Nothing against the big organ and all of its fifty-five hundred pipes piping, but sometimes Resurrection starts in smaller doses, mere glimpses of new possibility, self-awareness, opportunity.

      Nevertheless, the big music proclaims that what has been reserved for the end of history, has happened in the midst of history; is happening today.  

      Like any earth-shaking news maybe our defenses won’t let us take it all in all at once. I was talking to a man the other day who is struggling and he said to me, “If I had to grasp all of this at once it would do me in. Denial isn’t always a bad thing,” he said.

      Maybe getting rid of our denial is like peeling away the layers of an onion, until we are exposed to more and more of the new knowledge of reality.

      It’s why the constant refrain in the New Testament from Jesus’ birth to his Resurrection is, “Do not be afraid, do not be afraid, do not be afraid.”  But of course they were afraid, so afraid the guards were like dead men. Frozen stiff, lifeless while an angel sat on the rolled-away stone and told the women the good news. And they left the tomb, Matthew says with fear and great joy. Joy! You see they’d ventured outside of their circumscribed expectations, which is precisely when they beheld the Risen Christ. 

      Arthur C. Clarke the great writer of science fiction died this past week and the headline was, “The Author Who Saw Science Fiction Become Real.” Sometimes I think it is a thin line that separates the rational and irrational world.

      One of Clarke’s guiding principles was, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”2 That’s not bad spiritual advice on Easter from a scientist.

      Go ahead, he is telling us, explore this marvelous, mysterious world in all of its beauty, grandeur and pain and when you think you’ve gotten to the very end of what is possible then take a leap into the impossible. Who knows what is possible? Who knows what is real? Who knows where the limits are? Get past the old reality, we’re told today, the limiting orbit of our scaled-down expectations. 

      We’ll maybe you’re asking what would that look like, what would venturing into the impossible feel like?

      If Easter is God’s answer to Good Friday then venturing into the impossible is opening ourselves to the defeat of death—like the prophet Isaiah said, “Death is swallowed up in victory, O Death where is thy sting?”

      I want to be clear. The Bible isn’t saying that death won’t happen anymore. The Bible is saying that death isn’t the end anymore. Resurrection isn’t resuscitation. Resurrection is what happens after death has had its due and done its worst. Then for the resurrected there is no more dying. That’s what all of our memorial flowers hail today—the new life of eternity. 

      What would a world, a family, a marriage, a person where death has been swallowed up in victory look like?

      Like those excited women at the tomb running back to tell the men—who were still asleep in the old knowledge of reality. It would look like a friend of mine who decided he wasn’t going to wait until retirement or until the next promotion or until life wasn’t so busy to start being the kind of person he wanted to be now.

      How often do we “put life off” until all the conditions are right, while we reach for some illusive state of perfection or achievement? Put off spending time with our spouse, or children, or picking up that novel we’ve been longing to read, or making peace with a wounded relative, or deciding to make some impact for good in our community? 

      If the obstacle of death has been removed, and the chains of the old reality gone, if we need not be afraid of life, if we can trust that the risen Christ is by our side as he was by those women on that fresh new morning then we can start living our lives today.

      We can start venturing into what we thought was impossible, into a new world that offers more living in one minute than the old world relinquished in a year.

      The good news today is a scrawny cry of hope here at the end of winter; a chorister whose c precedes the choir of God’s glorious news of death’s defeat; a great choral anthem of freedom to discover life; a new knowledge the thing itself, Resurrection. Amen.