Facing our Fears

"Being Grateful For What We Do Not Yet Know..."

Mark 16:1-8
April 12, 2009 (Easter Sunday)

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and
Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first
day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying
to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?”
When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been
rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe,
sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be
alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been
raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples
and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he
told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had
seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

For some reason, the need for gratitude, or a spirit of thanksgiving, has been on my
mind lately, which has also struck me as somewhat odd, because for some of us, and
so many in this country and in this world, there seems less to be grateful for than even
a year ago. The financial crisis, the employment figures, the possible demise of our
own state’s biggest employers, GM and Chrysler, and maybe even Ford—all of these
realities have been sobering for many of us, especially in a state that was probably in a
recession way before the rest of the country. And yet, it is gratitude that has haunted
me, and hounded me the last few months, perhaps because all of those things I just
mentioned have reminded me—and many of us, as well, I suspect—that all of it, all the
security we thought we had, all of it can vanish in an instance. Just ask the victims of
Bernie Madoff, the man who ran the 50 billion dollar ponzi scheme that has wiped out
so many, including so many wonderful charities. I am grateful for what little I have,
though it is more than I perhaps deserve, and certainly more than 98% of the rest of
the world, who still so often struggle just to feed themselves. To be able to be grateful
in the midst of scary times, difficult times, that is something we ought to be cultivating in
our lives, in these difficult times, but in all times in our lives, and so this Sunday, and
the next three Sundays, I want us to look at our Scriptures through the eyes of
gratitude, through what Alan Jones and John O’Neil call the four “Seasons of Grace,”
four pivotal times in which we learn what it means to live lives of gratitude, based on the
four seasons of the year—spring, summer, fall, and winter.

And so on this Sunday, we arrive at Easter, which is appropriate, because it also
begins to mark the return of spring, of flowers blooming again, and the dank cold
beginning to recede away—as Christ is risen, so rises the rest of the world, from the
cold slumber of winter that has chilled so many of us to the bones. It’s about time that
Easter arrived, that resurrection came, because it is has been a rough winter, hasn’t
it? And there is so much to be obviously grateful for—the world awakens, the Christ is
risen, the world seems new again…and yet, even here, we are challenged, especially
by our text, because what we are asked to be grateful for, this resurrection of Jesus, is
shrouded in an interesting and troubling ambiguity that we do not find in the other three
Gospels. The question that is going to be asked is whether or not it is possible to be
grateful for a resurrection that ends the way our text does, full of mystery, and a little bit
of terror, even in the midst of the hope we find in what has just happened?

For me, the text kind of reminds me of that television show Intervention on the A&E
cable network, where new beginnings are wonderful and yet full of terror as well. The
premise of the show is to ask addicts of all sorts—people addicted to food, shopping,
drugs, sex, whatever—to allow a documentary crew to follow them around and record
their struggle with their particular addiction. But unknown to them the producers of the
show have been working behind the scenes with the family and friends on putting
together an intervention to get the addict into some sort of rehab program. The
intervention takes places near the end of the show—the therapist and family confronts
the addict with the reality of their addiction and they tell the addict the consequences of
what will happen if they do not seek help, which usually means the family withdrawing
some sort of contact or financial support from their friend or family member, and then
comes an offer of help at an out-of-state treatment center. The drama comes out of
that moment, that intervention, when the addict must decide to either to accept or reject
the offer of treatment—and though I do get the kind of sick game-show quality of the
show, especially near the end, it is still truly compelling television. Most of the time,
though not always, the person struggling with the addiction accepts the offer of help,
and they are subsequently whisked away to the airport within hours of their willingness
to seek help, in order to fly to their new home, a treatment center of some sort, for the
next 30-90 days.

To me, the highlight of the show comes at the very, very end, when the screen
blackens and the producers tell the viewers about the short-term fate of the subject of
that evening’s show.   Sometimes the news is good and they report they were
discharged from their treatment program after their completion of it and they have been
sober since the end of the filming of that episode. Other times, you find out that they
dropped out of their treatment center before the prescribed end of the treatment plan,
and they are either still using their drug of choice or they’re still trying to beat the
addiction, though they are doing it by themselves, without help of professionals. As I
mentioned earlier, it’s fascinating television, and for me, the fascination really comes
with the ending—did it end well? Did they get through their treatment program? How
are they doing now? It’s probably the reason I like mystery who-dun-its, like the ones
Agatha Christie used to write: the whole point of the story is to get to the conclusion, to
find out who did the crime, and how they committed the murder in that old English
countryside manor. The television show Intervention has that same pull for me—tell me
how it ends, how does the story conclude? And like most people, I like a good neat
ending—I want the addict in treatment, I want the nice couple in the reality show The
Amazing Race to get the million dollars, and I want the nasty character in Agatha
Christie’s book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to be the murder. I want the endings to
be neat and the end to be tied up well—I want success, no messy endings, no
ambiguity, a clear answer to the question being asked, so to speak. I hate it when
Intervention ends on an ambiguous note—the addict has left the treatment program,
they’re still struggling with the addiction…and yet, of course, the truth of the matter is
that even the success stories are not finished with…the story goes on for the addict,
they still must struggle, beyond the neat-hour long box the program has used to tell
their story of struggle, and hopefully, triumph.

The temptation to end the story neatly sometimes even infects our own sacred texts.
For example, someone thousands of years ago thought that the Lord’s Prayer ended
badly, and subsequently someone added a brassier, more bold ending to Jesus’ own
prayer—For thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory forever, Amen—a line that is
not in our oldest and most reliable copies of the Bible. And even in our text today,
which is earliest telling of the story of Jesus’ life, we have the probable insertion of 11
verses at the end of Mark’s Gospel—note that I only read up to verse 8 today, though
the printed text in our Bibles goes to verse 20. Someone, probably in the early second
century, thought the ending of Mark, with the women being in a state of terror and
amazement was not quite “big” enough of an ending—someone thought we might need
some appearance stories of Jesus that we find in the later Gospels, Matthew, Luke and
John. Someone wanted to finish the story differently and more neatly—not on such a
negative note, with the women going out with mixed feelings, unsure of the future, silent
and afraid because of the empty tomb.

I mean, I get that. I want the neat endings as well. I want the reconciliation with Peter, I
want the moment with Thomas, when he declares Jesus as his Lord and God, as he
touches the wounds of this newly resurrected Christ. I like those kind of stories. I want
it all, everything perfectly neat and nice if I’m blessed enough to be resurrected. Erma
Bombeck tells a wonderful story of a grandmother that wanted it all: she "took her
grandson to the beach one day, complete with bucket, shovel and sun hat. The
grandmother dozed off and as she slept, a large wave dragged the child out to sea.
The grandmother awoke and was devastated. She fell to the ground on her knees and
prayed, 'God, if you save my grandchild, I promise I'll make it up to you. I'll join whatever
club you want me to. I'll volunteer at the hospital, give to the poor and do anything that
makes you happy.' "Suddenly, a huge wave tossed her grandson on the beach at her
feet. She noticed color in his cheeks and his eyes were bright. He was alive. As she
stood up, however, she seemed to be upset. She put her hands on her hips, looked
skyward, and said sharply, 'He had a hat, you know.'" (I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to
Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise: Children Surviving Cancer [New York: Harper and Row,
1989], 56-57)

Well, sometimes we don’t the resurrection AND the hat—we don’t’ get it all, everything
we want, when God brings us out of the grave. In the other Gospels, we do get those
powerful stories—we get the hat—but just not here, not in this Gospel of Mark, this
earliest and most visceral telling of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. The earliest
ending in Mark is not neat, it is not definitive, and we don’t get the neat and clean
reconciliations we want to witness, that we get to witness elsewhere. It’s like the
moment at the end of the reality show Intervention: the show fades into black and the
white lettering spells out the uncertain future—we don’t know if the addict makes it or
not. Like the show, we’re stuck with only a word of hope—the tomb is empty, or the
addict has sought treatment and they are trying, and we can only hope for the best.
Sometimes the prayers Jesus gives us don’t end with a bang, and sometimes the words
of Scripture end on an ambiguous note, with no neat ending, no neat conclusion with
which we can easily put down after finishing the Gospel of Mark.

Now, I want us to look at our text from Mark a little bit more closely. The text itself says
that the women came to the tomb with a question: “who will roll away the tomb? How do
we get to the body in order to embalm it with spices?” They arrive and they receive
their answer—someone has already moved the stone and there is yet another sitting in
that tomb, someone who is not the Christ. This young man, so the text goes, gives
them a message, with this most unscripted of endings: “He has been raised; he is not
here.” This wasn’t part of anyone’s script—or at least it wasn’t an ending anyone was
willing to believe when Christ foretold his death in the Gospels stories, when he was
telling his disciples the ending that he thought God was going to write with his life. And
then the text has this angel telling the women to go and tell the disciples that this now
missing one is going ahead of them to Galilee. And on these words, the women flee,
and we are told simply that they were filled with fear and amazement—and if we end
with verse 8, we don’t even know if they did what was asked of them, which is to tell
Peter and the disciples this puzzling piece of news. All we know is that the experience
silenced them and that is how the story ends, at least in our oldest, most reliable
manuscripts of the Bible. We as readers are left hanging in the Gospel of Mark,
wondering what happens next, and maybe that is why the ending seemed so
insufferable for someone in the early 2nd century—surely the story shouldn’t end like
this!

And yet, it does, and we are left not quite knowing what to be grateful for, at least
according to Mark’s Gospel, and those women, fleeing from the tomb, they too are left
hanging, not sure of what is to come next, and the thought of it scares them to death.
And yet, as ambiguous as the ending is, what does this text tell us what about it means
to grateful? Well, I think actually it tells us a lot, but for us today, I think what it tells us
is the truth about the messiness of our own resurrections, of our own untidy moments
of rebirth. Friends, resurrection is not neat, and it is a messy thing, this rising from the
dead, this starting over from nothing, this beginning life again anew, maybe with more,
maybe with less, whatever. When God resurrects Jesus and when God resurrects us
emotionally and spiritually, we don’t get the nice neat endings or the neat beginnings
we had hoped for, because real life is as messy as we are, and resurrection, real
resurrection, may send us out in “terror and amazement,” as it did those women fleeing
from the tomb thousands of years ago. To be grateful even in the midst of a
resurrection that is messy, one that is unexpected, one that we didn’t see coming from
a mile away, that is one of the things that is asked from us in this text.

Spring is a beautiful season, when the flowers come up, when life comes back from the
dead of winter, but that doesn’t mean that our gardens aren’t a mess from the winter
they have gone through, or that the new life blooming there doesn’t need our help in
cleaning up around it.   And, guess what? The ticks and fleas are back, and we’ll be
spending a lot more time on our mowers now, and it’ll require some work, this spring
time…this resurrection. To be grateful to God for the resurrection we have, the garden
we’ve been given, the one that is going to require some work on our part, that is a
challenge, isn’t it? Fleeing in terror and amazement at the thought of the resurrection I
have been given, that you have been given, that Christ has been given—that is as
about as real as it gets, at least in my book, and yet, even then, even in its messiness,
even in its lack of neatness, even then there is something to be grateful for and that is
that despite the odds, he is risen, he is risen, and we too, we too will rise.   Amen.