{"id":487,"date":"2012-04-08T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2012-04-08T16:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=487"},"modified":"2019-12-03T12:38:44","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T17:38:44","slug":"the-resurrection-from-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2012\/04\/08\/the-resurrection-from-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"The Resurrection from the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service.<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the sermon only.<\/a><\/p>\n

Mark 16: 1-8<\/a><\/p>\n

Preface<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Lord is Risen!\u00a0 He is Risen Indeed.<\/p>\n

Let us ask ourselves how we shall live with these mysterious tidings.<\/p>\n

St Mark famously concludes with either an open or a lost ending, either an intentionally ambiguous ending or a lost fragment from the end of a codex.\u00a0 Either way, we face the Gospel challenge:\u00a0 how shall we live with these wondrous tidings?\u00a0 Either way, we pick up where Mark leaves off\u2026<\/p>\n

Scientists:\u00a0 Do they kindle in us a sense of enchantment?\u00a0 Historians:\u00a0 Will they firm up in us the freedom to escape?\u00a0 Philosophers: Could they require of us a respect for eternity?<\/p>\n

Is there awaiting us a resurrection from the dead which brings real learning and virtue and piety?<\/p>\n

Enchantment<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thirty years ago today, at 6am, our parsonage phone rang, an odd sound in the Easter dawn.\u00a0 I was already somewhat awake.\u00a0 The sermon I had hoped to finish the night before lay in jumbled bits on the dining room table.\u00a0 I was counting on finishing the job early in the morning.\u00a0 But the morning had thoughts of its own.\u00a0 This is why we do not advise students to leave the sermon to the last minute.<\/p>\n

Over the phone line I could hear a light sobbing.\u00a0 In our North Country village, it was not common or considered good form to use a formal greeting, such as, \u2018Hello, this is Marion\u2019.\u00a0 It was assumed that one would know from the sound of the voice who was calling.\u00a0 If you did not, you were clearly \u2018from away\u2019, and would be sensed to be an outsider until such time as you did recognize, without formal introduction, the voice and so the personhood of the caller.\u00a0 This expectation carries to this day, so that, when our dear friends from south of Montreal call and say \u2018How are you?\u2019 we are to know who it is who asks.\u00a0\u00a0 In the main, we do.<\/p>\n

This Easter sunrise sobbing did have no familiar hold to it, so, in the first of several failures that day I had to ask who was calling.\u00a0 From under the muffled sadness, a name arose.\u00a0 I will use the name Marion.\u00a0 Marion was calling because she and her husband, a nearby farmer and a dear friend, were at odds.\u00a0 6am is not early, by the way, when milking starts at 4am.\u00a0 The distance from the farm kitchen to the barn, a visible path by sight connecting sink to milking parlor, is not great, in this case thirty feet.\u00a0 But when there is acrimony that 30 feet, given the daily closeness and interdependence of a bustling farm, might as well be the circumference of the earth.<\/p>\n

With this young couple and family we had shared many utterly joyous meals, and some of the finest food ever consumed.\u00a0 In the autumn, just before dessert, we and our two little children left the dinner table with the farmer and family to help a calf into the world.\u00a0 Then back to the ice cream and mince pie.\u00a0 Here we had found real friends, in a winter world at 40 degrees below Fahrenheit zero.\u00a0 In this home our children had stayed while we spent time in the city, and here they would return many years later to learn to work in the barn in haying season.\u00a0\u00a0 I can taste the roast, smell the coffee, feel the warmth, hear the cattle lowing, and see the path from barn to kitchen, right now, as if it were last week.<\/p>\n

But there was a breach, a break, something gone wrong, and badly enough to ask a friend for help.\u00a0 When we went north, the District Superintendent said, \u2018They may pound on you a little to see if you are for real\u201d.\u00a0 They did.\u00a0 But once they did, and once they trusted, they trusted in full.\u00a0 A place and a time when a relationship of trust could the bear the weight of an expression of need.<\/p>\n

With the sermon lying in tatters, I went down the road two miles, and past the kitchen and into the barn.\u00a0\u00a0 The appearance of the minister on Easter morning, in the barn, is a recognition or sign that something is ajar.\u00a0 John eyed me with that realization, and we had I think a good talk.\u00a0 It seemed like a moment of reflection and honest hashing out of some not very uncommon marital difference, at least for the moment, worked out.\u00a0\u00a0 Into the sunlight I went, with a wave toward the kitchen window.\u00a0 On the radio I could hear in the barn Louis Armstrong, his unique voice, and a simple tune, its unique melody, saying in full what I felt that Easter:\u00a0 I think to myself, what a wonderful world<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Our assignment included two churches, the one with the farm family and others and our parsonage just mentioned, and the one ten miles away, \u2018the out appointment\u2019.\u00a0 You know where you stand in the scheme of things when you are the \u2018out appointment\u2019.\u00a0 I hustled back to pick up the sermon scraps, get dressed, and pile us into the car.\u00a0 I had the great good fortune to have married a certified and excellent organist and choir director, who, two little one in tow, ran the music in both churches.\u00a0 That was the good news.\u00a0 The other news was that her dad, with a PhD on Paul Tillich from Iliff, was an excellent preacher, all his life.\u00a0 She new from music, and she also knew from sermons.\u00a0 Driving from the \u2018out appointment\u2019 back home, she said, \u2018Was that an Easter sermon?\u2019\u00a0 The rest of the ride I remember as remarkably quiet.<\/p>\n

Now the second Easter service in the bigger church was starting, and I needed somebody to come and talk to me about my marriage.\u00a0 No one did.\u00a0 I looked in vain across the congregation, hoping to see the young farm couple, but they were not there.\u00a0 I began to collect my sorry self and sorrier sermon, as we sang \u2018In the Garden\u2019.\u00a0 I offered the prayer and began the questionable homily.\u00a0 Then they came in, and sat, as you have to when you come late on Easter, right down front.\u00a0 Somewhere in the course of the non Easter, Easter sermon, I noticed something.\u00a0 His hand just slid over a bit, and sat on top of hers, his left hand on her right, and a holding clasp.<\/p>\n

All the hymns of Easter, all the lilies of resurrection Sunday, all the bonnets and suits and parading joys of the end of Lent in all the rest of these thirty years, all the anthems and all the celebrations cannot eclipse the enchantment of a healing, a reconciliation, a hand clasp, in small country church, a long time ago.\u00a0 A wonderful world, a world of enchantment.\u00a0 Over dinner, Jan said, well the second went a little better.<\/em><\/p>\n

M Robinson wrote a bit ago, of her experience in church as a child, \u00a0Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded, for all that opaque as figures of angels painted on gold. (DOA, 228)<\/em><\/p>\n

Escape<\/strong><\/p>\n

Up from the dead can also refer to escape from prison.\u00a0 In fact, in the long history of Christian faith, inspired by the Word of faith, a sense of liberation, of freedom, of freeing, of escape has been paramount.\u00a0\u00a0 Easter morning brings an escape hatch, a map to freedom, a key for the jail cell.<\/p>\n

It can happen to individuals, all of us sharing as we do some experience of entrapment. \u2018In Adam\u2019s Fall, we sinned all\u2019.<\/p>\n

Now with some advantage of reflection, and a few years on which to reflect, I can see by memory, by the mind\u2019s eye, women and men and communities for whom Easter has meant escape.\u00a0 I wonder if it will be so for you this Easter morning?<\/p>\n

Here is a woman whose husband was working but drinking, drinking too much.\u00a0 Spring came and she confronted him.\u00a0 He looked for help in the church, and found escape from addiction.\u00a0 You will find AA groups quite near here, Monday to Friday.<\/p>\n

Here is middle aged fellow who had his heart set on a certain job, which he did not get, not even close.\u00a0\u00a0 Holy Week, with its recognition of change and failure and loss, connected to him.\u00a0 He came to church on Easter and heard something.\u00a0 He was liberated, freed from a false hope.\u00a0 He set his sights on other jobs, and found one.<\/p>\n

Here is woman who has done something for which she is ashamed, unhappy, guilt ridden.\u00a0 Whether she should have felt any of that is another issue.\u00a0 She did.\u00a0 A stone moved away from a grave, and an empty tomb presided over by angels in white, these images said something to her, down deep.\u00a0 She went home feeling better, and cut herself some slack.<\/p>\n

Here is a young person who is pretty sure he has disappointed his parents.\u00a0 College can instill a lengthened adolescence. In the lilies, trumpets, hymns and words of Easter something jars loose for him.\u00a0 So what?\u00a0 I will honor my parents, but with the long life that gives me, I will live my life, not my version of what I think they think my life should be.<\/p>\n

But you have to lift the escape hatch.\u00a0 My friend had an office mate who hated his lunch.\u00a0 Every day when noon came he opened his bag and said, \u2018Oh, this again. Awful.\u00a0 What a terrible lunch.\u2019\u00a0 My friend sympathized and then asked one noonday:\u00a0 \u2018Who makes your lunch?\u2019\u00a0 And the reply:\u00a0 \u2018Oh, I make my own lunch\u2019.<\/p>\n

Christ unhelled Hell, and said Margaret Fuller:\u00a0 \u2018each should fulfill her own peculiar secret on her own\u2019.\u00a0 My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed thee!<\/em><\/p>\n

It can also happen to groups.<\/p>\n

18 to 23 year olds, according to C. Smith of Notre Dame, lack any capacity for moral discernment, are steadily drunk or drugged, practice amoral sexuality, are severely materialistic and greedy, and with only 4% excepted are entirely apathetic about the hurts and lives of others.\u00a0 To all these issues, argues he, with a shoulder shrug, emerging young adults respond, \u2018Whatever\u2019.\u00a0 But you know, a problem identified is a problem soon solved.\u00a0 There is an escape route away from the kind of narcissism, the kind of selfishness that easily entraps many of any age.\u00a0 That route lies through a daily response, a daily set of responses.\u00a0\u00a0 Practice in ethical discussion:\u00a0 intentional moderation, temperance in use of spirits, a spiritual use of spirits if you will: a recollection that the body is the temple of the Lord:\u00a0 some experience in the joy of giving:\u00a0 daily practice at listening, connecting with the needs of others.\u00a0 Of course I think this is what happens, in the main, on every Sunday morning. \u00a0Easter opens the prison house door.\u00a0 We can learn not always to \u2018reply all\u2019.<\/p>\n

As M Robinson recently put it: Science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethic or a morality (DOA, 71)\u2026The banishment of the word \u2018liberal\u2019 was simultaneous with the collapse of liberalism itself. (DOA, 260).<\/em><\/p>\n

We are getting a taste for preemption in our country, you might notice.\u00a0 Yet nagging at our conscience, at our memory and judgment both, is a sense that attacking others who have not attacked you cannot be lastingly good, nor good judgment.\u00a0 We can change.\u00a0 You do not have to be a pacifist to insist that your country, your government not throw the first punch.\u00a0 We can learn together to save our resources, bank our cash, and look for a more peaceful future.\u00a0 Love is for the wise.<\/em><\/p>\n

We can strive for a better life, world, and society.\u00a0 Adrienne Rich looked for the creation of a society without domination.\u00a0 We can too.\u00a0 Marx said \u2018History moves with iron necessity toward inevitable results.\u2019\u00a0 But you don\u2019t believe that, nor do I.\u00a0 There is at least as much historical evidence for freedom as there is for necessity.\u00a0 We may need move away from sensation and closer to reflection, to sit quietly with Pascal in his solitary room, and think about the wagers we are making\u2026\u00a0 We can park our car and care for our planet.<\/p>\n

Recently Elaine Pagels, known mostly for her scholarship with regard to Gnosticism and the New Testament, spoke about stopping for a moment in the vestibule of a church at worship, and realizing that \u201chere is a family that knows how to face death\u201d (Pagels, Beyond Belief<\/em>, 3).\u00a0\u00a0 Honest lament and faithful thanksgiving are both parts of facing the uncertain present in light of God\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

Can we recall what we affirmed last week?<\/p>\n

To the question of evil let us live our answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith. <\/em><\/p>\n

Let us meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity. \u00a0Let us remember and that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi-colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come in seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary\u2014Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around. The resurrection follows but does not replace the cross. The cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word and there is a God to whom we may pray, in the assurance of being heard: \u201cDeliver us from evil\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

Eternity<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the Chapellear Drama center at Ohio Wesleyan University, on which stage our daughter and future son in law met and fell in love, there are several photographs of plays past.\u00a0 One is from the opening of the center, in 1972, with Shakespeare, of course, The Tempest<\/em>.\u00a0 Others show our daughter and her husband, in the 1990\u2019s, with the leads in Sweeney Todd, Once Upon A Mattress, Skylight, the Adding Machine, Antigone, Galileo Galilei.\u00a0\u00a0 There are also nameplates for alumni of the theater department, going back into the history of the school, nearly to its founding in 1842, making it the oldest incorporated Methodist school in the country.\u00a0 I\u2019m just sayin\u2026<\/p>\n

It turns out that many future physicians, scholars, lawyers, and others began as thespians.\u00a0 I stood one evening under the nameplate of one such, Ralph Sockman.\u00a0 Sockman preached for decades at Christ Church on Fifth Avenue in NYC.\u00a0 I sometimes pull down one book or another of his sermons, and I sit back and I read and I smile.\u00a0 They are lastingly good, eternally so one might say.\u00a0 And, I feel a certain responsibility to support my fellow OWU alumnus, now that he is long dead and largely forgotten, outside of the small circle of devotees to a certain kind of Methodist preaching, at its zenith, nadir and apex.<\/p>\n

I tried to hold my children\u2019s attention, that evening, under the nameplate of Sockman, to some little avail.\u00a0 He tried to give people a \u2018lift for living\u2019 this life, by reference to an eternal horizon:\u00a0 help in time by way of reference to eternity.\u00a0 They are long, carefully braided sermons, polished and refined.\u00a0 He spoke though from memory, I am told, without notes, as the British say, \u2018ingenious, pithy, and without book\u2019.\u00a0 He wore a morning coat, I am told, and looped his index finger under the vest button, beside his watch chain, and in that posture he preached.\u00a0 With beauty.<\/p>\n

This winter, one of the few cold late afternoons, I fetched one of his old now out of print volumes.\u00a0 Whence the book?\u00a0 I have no idea.\u00a0 My office over the years has become a last resting place for clergy preaching gowns, old Bibles, various home communion travel kits, and, as in this case, the overflow and unneeded spillage of clergy books.\u00a0 Someone left it off.\u00a0\u00a0 We have a saying in the itinerant ministry, a way of describing somebody who has done what he could in one setting and is waiting for another appointment:\u00a0 he is packing his books<\/em>.\u00a0 Anyway, I read through some of the sermons, and then turned to the last in the collection.<\/p>\n

Sockman was preaching about eternity.\u00a0 It read like a valediction, like maybe the last sermon he gave in some setting, or the last in a year\u2019s efforts, or, maybe, the last of his life.\u00a0 It raises a good question.\u00a0\u00a0 What would you say if you knew this were your last\u2014sermon, letter, conversation, book, paper, speech?\u00a0 My fellow Battling Bishop, graduate that is of OWU, in four moments, gave his thoughts about heaven.\u00a0 You may have heard BU\u2019s magnificent rendering of Rachmaninoff\u2019s favorite work, The Bells<\/em>, also in four parts:\u00a0 sleigh bells, wedding bells, alarm bells, tolling bells.\u00a0 Sockman\u2019s last will and testament rang with those sounds.\u00a0 I give you his symphony, his four bells ringing out a lasting trust in eternity.<\/p>\n

Sockman said he had an intuition, a sense of heaven, based on integrity, in four octaves.\u00a0 He believed in the integrity of personality.\u00a0 So do I.\u00a0 He believed in the integrity of creation.\u00a0 So do I.\u00a0 He believed in the integrity of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 So do I.\u00a0 He believed in the integrity of his own intimations.\u00a0 So do I.\u00a0 You can hear him at his best in a single sentence: The larger the body of knowledge we survey, the longer the shoreline of mystery surrounding it. The larger the body of knowledge we survey, the longer the shoreline of mystery surrounding it<\/em>.\u00a0 Mystery increases with knowledge, and so, at least possibly, piety with learning, faith with understanding, spirit with mind, and love with education.\u00a0 The more we know the more we do not know.<\/p>\n

I ask you something, especially if you are drawn to faith but not yet convinced.\u00a0 Can you appreciate the difference between absence and evidence?\u00a0 Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence<\/em>.\u00a0 The thing about faith is that there is always a leap involved.<\/p>\n

When I see a newborn child I feel eternity.\u00a0 When a couple takes and gives their vows in marriage, I hear the bells of eternity.\u00a0 When I think about how much I would give to see my Dad again, I think of eternity.\u00a0 When I hear St. Paul place this life in the context of another life, I yearn for eternity.\u00a0 When I observe tragedy that has no earthly recompense, and so to have any at all would depend on heaven, I long for eternity.\u00a0 When I worship on Sunday at Marsh Chapel, I sense eternity.<\/p>\n

As m Robinson recently put it: Our civilization believed for a long time in God and the soul and sin and salvation, assuming, whatever else, that meaning had a larger frame and context than this life in this world (DOA, 84)<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you\u2019d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that\u2019s eternal about every human being.”<\/em> – Thornton Wilder, Our Town<\/p>\n

As many of you know, Dad nearly died in September of 2008.\u00a0 We had two extra years with him before he died in 2010.\u00a0 In\u00a0 November of 2008, as he recuperated, I saw him one morning learning to walk all over again, with my mother every present and loving alongside.\u00a0 It was a miraculous sight, as was the rest of his healing.\u00a0\u00a0 He told us in those days about a vision or dream he had had, in the coma.\u00a0 I share it with you to close, not as evidence of eternity, for heaven neither needs nor admits of evidence from us, but rather as evidence of a longing for eternity, and so a comfort and an encouragement.\u00a0 He said that in the hours near death he saw a kind of light, shining through what he described as a lattice work.\u00a0 \u201cBehind and around me I could hear voices\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n

Coda<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you remember what we said last week?<\/p>\n

If we believe that life has meaning and purpose<\/em><\/p>\n

If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us<\/em><\/p>\n

If we believe that divine love lasts<\/em><\/p>\n

If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure<\/em><\/p>\n

If we believe that God so loved the world to give God\u2019s only Son<\/em><\/p>\n

If we believe that Jesus is the transcript in time of God in eternity<\/em><\/p>\n

If we believe that all God\u2019s children are precious in God\u2019s sight<\/em><\/p>\n

If we believe grace and forgiveness are the heart of the universe<\/em><\/p>\n

If we believe that God has loved us personally<\/em><\/p>\n

If we believe in God<\/em><\/p>\n

Then we shall all trust God over the valley of the shadow of death<\/em><\/p>\n

Psalm 46 will carry us home:\u00a0 God is our refuge and strength\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill<\/em><\/p>\n

Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service. Click here to hear the sermon only. Mark 16: 1-8 Preface The Lord is Risen!\u00a0 He is Risen Indeed. Let us ask ourselves how we shall live with these mysterious tidings. St Mark famously concludes with either an open or a lost ending, either an intentionally ambiguous ending […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2557,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions\/2557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}