Practicing Resurrection
John 20: 1-18
John P. Wesley
April 4, 2010
There are some things in life that really don’t require practice. There’s just something planted inside of us that seems to know what must be done. Most of us don’t spend much time after we are born learning how to eat. With few exceptions babies of most species know how to open their mouth and fill their bellies. And most babies don’t need to be taught how to breathe. They may need a little rubbing or jostling, but before they’ve lost the warmth of the womb, their lungs begin working, providing life sustaining oxygen. And it’s been my experience that most babies don’t have to be taught how to cry. When there is discomfort or things aren’t going to suit, they let out a wail and tears flow. There are a lot of things that don’t need practice.
Before my daughter was born I attended birth classes. The classes were held at one of the Catholic hospitals in Louisville. The teacher was a nun. I had something in common with her. She’d never given birth herself and neither had I. But she had attended thousands of births and she made an excellent instructor. I’ll always remember the lesson she gave about changing diapers, especially on boy babies. She took us to the nursery and she explained how the plumbing was different for boys and girls. (I’d already figured that out a few years earlier.) Then she explained how more care needed to be given when changing a little boy’s diaper. Cold hands can cause a natural response, she explained. Then she took a diaper off a little boy, and as she touched the little fellow, as on cue, a geyser shot into the air giving her a second baptism. There are some things that don’t need to be practiced. They just happen.
The ancient preacher in the book of Ecclesiastes says there is a time to be born and there is a time to die. Neither requires a lot of practice. They just happen. One is met with a great deal of joy. And one is so often met with a great deal of grief. But both take place again and again in our world, but neither requires our knowing how, our learning a new skill.
A few months ago during the Christmas season we celebrated the birth of a baby long ago in Bethlehem. John told us preparations were made before the world was created for the birth of this child. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God.” But when it came time for that baby to be born his mother Mary didn’t need a lot of coaching. She was alone in a stable in Bethlehem. Yes, her husband Joseph was there, but I doubt he was of much help. “While they were there, the time came for her to deliver the child,” that’s what Luke tells us. No practice needed. Fear, pain, mixed with a deep push and the babe entered our world and took his first breath.
And about thirty-three years later that mother in Bethlehem stood at the foot of a cross in Jerusalem filled with fear and pain as her son pushed upward to gain another breath to sustain life while hanging on a cross. Although he had anticipated this moment and spoke of it often, there had been no way to practice dying. In the fullness of time, it happened.
Many years ago I stood in a hospital room as a man asked the doctor a hard question. At the age of 49 he had been diagnosed with a form of cancer that was not treatable. Since going into the hospital several weeks before he had not gotten out. The doctors had told him the time was near. He struggled for enough breath, enough strength, to ask the doctor one question that afternoon. “How do I die?” The doctor had no answer. Death is not something you can rehearse. It happens. By nightfall he was gone.
So Mary and some of her friends made their way to the tomb where the still, lifeless body of Jesus had been laid after death had claimed him. We recognize Mary, not because we’ve seen her before, but because we have gone with her to the cemetery after our loved ones have died. We were not professional mourners. We did not need to practice our grief. Our heart was pierced with pain, our footsteps heavy with loss as we made our way to stand over the grave and wonder how it all could have happened. Even when there is a long time to prepare for someone’s death, even if death comes as a welcome release from a horrific struggle, nothing can really prepare us for the grief that follows, for the loneliness and the finality of the grave. We can’t practice our grief, it just happens. There is a time to be born and there is a time to die. We must go to the cemetery. We must weep. And then we must get on with life.
But something happened in that cemetery in Jerusalem that shook Mary to her very soul. Something happened that erased the easy way of dealing with life and inserted the more difficult way. A new way of seeing, a new way of being in the world was revealed, a way that didn’t just happen, but a way that required faith and belief, a way that required thought and practice. The story of what happened in the cemetery gets a little jumbled. There’s a stone rolled away and a run back to where the disciples are hiding. There’s a race to the tomb that is found to be empty. There are two angels in white and there are tears of sadness and anger changed into tears of joy and relief as the reality of resurrection began to sink in and Mary realized the gardener who tends the earth God has created is really the one whom God has raised for time and for eternity. It was almost more than Mary could take in. She wants to take hold of Jesus as she had in days gone by, but Jesus says to her, “Don’t hold on to me.” And Mary finally rushes back to the other disciples as the first to witness the resurrection of Jesus. She bursts into the room declaring, “I have seen the Lord.”
The experiences of birth and death don’t take practice. They just happen. But this thing called resurrection; it takes a lot of practice. It is not a natural thing. It is not something we can prove with science; not something we can know beyond a shadow of a doubt. But as one minister said, resurrection is not something that needs to be proven; it is something that needs to be lived. Resurrection is a gift of faith, something that was reported, something that was acted on by the early church, something that has been at the center of our proclamation for two thousand years.
But it is not something that happens naturally. It is something that we must insert into some of the most difficult and challenging circumstances of life.
When we do lose our loved ones, when we grieve at the cemetery, when we are overwhelmed with sadness, we are invited to practice resurrection. “I am the resurrection and the life, those that believe in me, even though they die shall live again.” It is not natural. It is not the way we have observed things happening. But faith invites us to practice resurrection, to believe that the God who made us will not leave us in the dust, but will give us life in a body not made with hands but eternal in the heavens.
And when we face hardship and trouble, when we lose our job, or a relationship ends and we feel lost and vulnerable, we are invited to practice resurrection, to believe this present difficulty is simply preparing us for something more glorious, more spectacular than anything that has gone before. Resurrection isn’t just about bringing a dead body out of a tomb. It is about raising a new life out of the old, it is about putting one way of living and doing to death so a new way, God’s way, can rise up in us.
The title for my sermon this morning came from the last line of a poem written by Kentuckian Wendell Berry a number of years ago. The poem had a strange title, Manifesto, the Mad Farmer Liberation Front. Wendell Berry, part farmer, part conservationist, and all parts spiritual, challenges us to look at how we live our lives, how we fall into patterns that require little thought or choice. His poem starts out describing the normal way of looking at the world.
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
Berry changes the tone of his poem, calling all of us to something different than routine, something different than what the world says is ordinary.
…..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.
He brings his poem to an end with just two words, practice resurrection. What I think he is saying is that resurrection is not something you believe in so much as it is something you practice, something you do. If Jesus was raised from the tomb, it changes everything in life. It means that we don’t just live for ourselves, but we live for God. It means we turn our focus on the things Jesus believed and did because that is the life God blessed then and will bless today. Practice Resurrection.
Jim Wallis tells of being in a meeting where Bishop Tutu spoke in the days before Apartheid ended in South Africa. “Tutu stopped preaching when some intruders came in and lined the wall. They had already arrested Tutu and other church leaders just a few weeks before and kept them in jail for several days. Tutu just looked at them for what appeared a long time. After meeting their eyes with his in a steely gaze, the church leader acknowledged their power ... but reminded them that he served a higher power than their political authority. Then, in the most extraordinary challenge to political tyranny Wallis said he have ever witnessed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the representatives of South African Apartheid, “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side!” He said it with a smile on his face and an enticing warmth in his invitation, but with a clarity and a boldness that took everyone’s breath away. The congregation’s response was electric. The crowd was literally transformed by the bishop’s challenge to power. (It was a resurrection moment.) From a cowering fear of the heavily armed security forces that surrounded the cathedral and greatly outnumbered the band of worshippers, Wallis said they literally leaped to their feet, shouted the praises of God and began dancing. They danced out of the cathedral to meet the awaiting police and military forces who not knowing what else to do, backed up to provide the space for the people of faith to dance for freedom in the streets of South Africa.”
My friends, if Christ has been raised from the dead, things are different in the world, not just in how we go to the cemetery, but how we face the challenges of evil and injustice. If Christ has been raised we have to practice resurrection not just in how we look at death but how we face life.
