Sermon

March 27, 2005

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on Easter Day, 2005, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

In a Kansas country cemetery there’s a gravestone that reads: “Margaret Replogle Shore, 1921-1977, Thanks for stopping by. See you later.” There are not many ways to proclaim the resurrection more clearly than that.

A colleague in Georgia talks poignantly about what exactly we pin our hopes on when we proclaim the resurrection. Her mother died a few weeks after she had completed confirmation class, and like a lot of children, the faith she absorbed from her religious instruction was a very concrete one. When her mother died the little girl literally believed that her mother would rise from the dead in three days. Though she’s now a Methodist minister, she still remembers her bitterness and desolation when that did not happen.

On the surface of it, Resurrection is an absurd thing to proclaim. We know that the losses in our lives are inevitable. Those we love do actually die. The things that give us joy do come to an end. Christ’s resurrection doesn’t save us from loss and pain. It stands as a reminder that loss and pain are not the end of the story. Christ’s Resurrection points to the presence in our lives of new life, new hope, new joy always coming out of the things that have seemed dead and hopeless and endlessly sorrowful.

A peasant woman goes to experience the howling void of loss at the grave of her friend, and finds to her amazement that he is alive in a new way. A father who has lost one baby is terrified to love the next child who comes along, but finds that love is much more powerful than he ever knew and even the pain of loss cannot keep him from the delights of parenthood. After the pain of divorce, a hurting woman believes she will never trust again, but finds to her amazement that love is more powerful than that. A child dreads the death of a grandmother, hates the sight of someone she loves wasting away, but finds that the death brings peace and the restoration of her grandmother’s presence with her in a new way. Death and loss and sorrow happen, but you see Resurrection happens, too.

Which is the deepest truth of your life? Loss or Resurrection? Which one is grafted in your soul? In the book “Bird by Bird,” writer Anne Lamott describes a kind of sickness of the soul that came with the success of her first book. She found herself craving the attention and praise that success brought her and found herself getting depressed when it wasn’t there, found herself wanting peace and quiet, but not wanting the hubbub to end. She went to a young pastor to ask how to find serenity. His answer: “The world can’t give that serenity…We can only find it in our hearts.” “I hate that,” Anne Lamott answered. “I know,” he replied, “But the good news is that by the same token, the world can’t take it away.” In the end, which gives you peace? An inner certainty that the world is full of pain and loss, or the inner certainty that Resurrection happens?

For me, the most important thing that Mary Magdalene found when she visited Jesus’ grave was the truth of the Resurrection, the belief in the bottom of her soul that Jesus lives in a way that the world cannot take away. That inner truth becomes for her a conviction she has to live out in her life. As strange and as irrational as her encounter at the grave may be, she still goes out to proclaim the Resurrection.

In his children’s book, “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” Shel Silvertein includes a poem about the Pied Piper of Hamlin entitled, “The One Who Stayed.” The poem opens with all the children of Hamlin following the Piper, “dancin’, spinnin’, turnin’” in glee as they follow wherever the music leads them. But there is one boy who stays home. His father affirms his decision not to follow the piper. The father says the boy was lucky that he hadn’t been bewitched by the piper’s music. But in his heart, the boy knew that wasn’t the truth. He knew the music had stirred something in him, something life-giving. And he knew that he would regret for as long as he lived that he had stifled his longing to follow the music: “I cannot say I did not hear,” the boy laments, “That sound so haunting hollow/ I heard, I heard, I heard it clear…I was afraid to follow.”

The music of the Resurrection is like that. Faced by the sorrows and losses of this world that are all too real, it seems absurd that we might choose to follow instead the music of the Resurrection, and go off dancing, spinning and turning wherever the music leads. Absurd to leave this world with a message as naïve as “See you later.” And yet the health of our souls and the peace of our lives depends on following the music. Depends on believing that there is a hope that the world cannot take away. Depends on trusting that Resurrection happens. Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia! May that be the music of our lives. And may we follow it dancing, spinning and turning wherever that music leads. AMEN