Life Among the Living

Life Among the Living

Rev. Lee begins this week by acknowledging that we are all “in need of a resurrection.” She sympathizes with the women in the Easter story of the resurrection who were visiting his grave that Sunday. She reminds us that when Jesus is resurrected, he isn’t recognized by his friends and family – he’s unfamiliar. A messenger reminds the women that we can not look for the living among the dead. We can’t find new life in what is past. We conclude with a story from a pastor about a memorial service, where the symbolism of sunflowers plays a large role, as does a very active toddler.

Life Among the Living


START OF TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:02] Speaker1
Good morning, everyone. Happy Easter. And boy, I’ve got to tell you, the second pandemic, Easter, is a tough one to preach. Let’s
just say the Easter mood does not come easily to me this year. It’s hard won, which is a shame, because I desperately want it to
come easily to me more than ever, I think I need a resurrection this year and maybe you feel the same way. I have noticed within
myself more and more these past few weeks and months a really deep well of longing. A longing for the ones that I miss, a longing
for clarity and certainty that I used to be able to take for granted, for the ability to plan something with confidence for the future, for a
world without so much violence, for a world without so much destruction and selfishness and pain and hate, where we actually treat
each other as the beloved kin that we are. Yeah, I have a pretty deep well of longing for all of those things, and I am more in touch
with that. Well, then I maybe have ever been. It had me as I prepared to preach an Easter message, deciding it was time to go back
straight to the source. This week. I spent some time reading through the stories in the four gospels of the Christian New Testament,
the stories of Easter. And what caught my attention? In all of those different versions of that story was the one moment early on
Easter morning before the news.
[00:02:14] Speaker1
Before the resurrection was known. The women in Jesus’s life get up early on Easter morning to go to the tomb and put yourself in
their shoes for a moment, picture what that must have been like that morning. The previous Friday, their dearest friend had been
murdered two days before their dearest friend had been killed by the authorities in public brutally. They were deep in grief, picture it
right, you are sitting there angry, bereft, and you these women, you have spent all day Saturday with nothing to do but sit in that rage
and that sadness while everything was closed for the Sabbath, you are still in shock. This was your beloved friend. A friend who
taught you so much, who was a leader in your community, you had such hopes for the future that you were building, you devoted
yourself to this work that all of you were going to do together, this healing, miraculous stuff. And then out of nowhere, one day, he
was picked up by the authorities and killed, brutally murdered for all to see. The grief that you would be feeling in that moment, I’m
sure, would be so deep. So then you plan to do the one thing you can do finally after Saturday is over, you set your alarm, you plan
to wake up as early as possible on Sunday morning because at least you can do something.
[00:04:20] Speaker1
Then what needs to be done in this horrible circumstance? A memorial, a memory, a preparation in one final act of love of your
friend’s body for burial. In the gospel stories, the women arrive as early as they can at the tomb at sunrise, and I picture them just
putting one foot in front of the other. I picture them with red, puffy eyes, dehydrated from all the crying broke down. I’ve heard from so
many of you that that is how it feels right now sometimes that you’re just putting one foot in front of the other. After we have lived a
year of pandemic, after we have lived more than one year of horrific gun violence, of racist hate crimes, of murders at the hands of
the authorities in our own day. Some of us are just putting one foot in front of the other and trying to do what we can do. We might be
able to relate more than we think. And so these women arrive at the tomb and suddenly. An angel appears to them. And turns
everything upside down again, saying, why do you seek the living among the dead? Why why do you seek the living among the
dead? What must have been like for that to sink in? Right, what are you saying? What are you saying? Our friend is dead. Why do
you seek the living among the dead? And the angel’s share the news that Jesus has risen.
[00:06:23] Speaker1
Gosh, it must have felt dangerous to hope in that moment. When so many other things had been taken away, the women in the
gospel stories it says struggled with it, each gospel here actually has a very different version of what happens next, which is so
interesting. Some gospel stories said that the women were terrified, they were afraid, and they told no one other gospel stories said
that they told everyone immediately, but no one believed them. How afraid everyone must have been to get their hopes up. But it
was true. None of Jesus’s friends, none of the people he loved in that moment had any reason to expect anything that morning
except for more death and more of the same. They had no concept that there could be another way out, another way to win this fight
against the evil powers in their world. No concept that there could be another way to live and to find life after so much pain and
struggle and hardship. But here it was. I was right in front of them. They all had to open their hearts and their minds to it because it is
made clear to us as readers and the gospel stories that they’re resurrected. Friend did not look the way they expected him to when
two of his followers, Jesus, his followers meet him resurrected on the road to a mass. When Jesus is seen standing on the shore by
the fishermen.
[00:08:15] Speaker1
When Mary herself greets him in the garden outside the tomb, none of them recognize him. None of them recognize him at first,
apparently their newly resurrected friend, he is still love and joy and God incarnate just as much as he had always been. But he
shows up unfamiliar in a new form, a new form that’s not even described. Maybe that’s part of the challenge for all of us of seeking
out resurrection, because we think it will be recognizable. We think it will be a recreation of what had been a return to the way that
things were before the loss, before the death. But if we are to believe the story that we tell this weekend, every year, resurrection is
not as simple as that. Resurrection is not a time machine. We do not see Jesus back in the manger reliving all of the greatest hits of
his ministry. Right. Instead, we are told that we cannot look for the living among the dead. We cannot find new life in what is past.
Only in what is to come only, in fact, in an unfamiliar form, which might be scary and confusing at first. But which we will find is alive
and on fire. With love and life and God incarnated. I got my first dose of the coronavirus vaccine two weeks ago, and I know many of
you also have if you have not yet heard the good news in the state of Pennsylvania, every single person aged 16 and older will now
be eligible to receive the vaccine this month on April 19th.
[00:10:31] Speaker1
After some amusing back and forth between the nurse and I at the Philly Convention Center, when I got my vaccine, I asked her to
give me the shot in my right arm in my tattoo. Actually, some of you know that I have a lot of tattoos. This was actually the second one
I got. And it is my largest tattoo. It covers my entire right bicep. People often don’t know what to make of this tattoo, especially once
they find out what I do for a living. You can see here it is a tattoo of an old traditional church building. And it’s on fire, it’s burning. I
actually got this tattoo early in my ministry as a sign and a reminder to myself not to make the forms of religion into an idle. To be
open to the unexpected and the unfamiliar ways that the spirit shows up. At the base of this burning building, you will see in my tattoo
is also a burst of sunflowers. You might know that in nature, scientists call sunflowers phyto mediators, which is a very fancy way of
saying they clean the soil, they actually have the ability to purify the ground, lifting toxic materials like lead and heavy metals up from
the ground. After the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters, officials, this is true, officials planted vast fields of sunflowers to
absorb the radiation and prepare the damaged soil for a new life.
[00:12:27] Speaker1
It’s one of the most effective and gentle ways. To heal the ground and who would have ever thought that that’s how resurrection of
that soil might come about after something as terrifying and awful as a nuclear disaster, that the cure would be found in a simple
sunflower? In an opinion piece for The New York Times on Friday, a New Testament professor named Asao McCauley wrote an
article comparing the Easter story to the story we have lived this year. And reminding us to stay open to resurrection in unexpected
forms and not just that, but to remind us that we are all in need of resurrection. He said, as we leave these terms of quarantine, thank
God, as we leave these terms of quarantine, a return to normal would be a disaster unless, he says, we recognize we are going back
to a world that is in need of healing, a world that is in need of resurrection. I find my resurrection mood, my Easter mood. It shows up
when I start in that place. When I wonder, with an open heart. What are resurrections might look like, whether they are personal in
your life or whether you also are thinking about our collective need for healing and resurrection? What unfamiliar forms might that
take? I want to close with a story from a colleague and a friend of mine, the Reverend Molly House Gordon.
[00:14:36] Speaker1
Who told us all about a memorial that she went to officiate last year? A small graveside service in a neighboring town from where she
lives in Missouri, over the border in Kansas. The memorial service was for a beloved elder in her congregation, a woman named
Sue, and during the service, Molly said the family had decided that they wanted to do a ritual, that after each person shared a
memory of Sue, they would pick up a sunflower from a big bucket because Kansas, Molly said, and add it to the gravesite. Well, as
the family assembled that morning. Amidst the tears and the sadness of such a somber occasion. Molly noticed that Sue’s, two year
old great granddaughter, was their. And as soon as she saw the bucket of sunflowers. She squealed with joy. When the
remembrances began later in the service. Molly said my small, self-appointed coefficient began to. Sue’s, eldest son was the first to
speak. And when he had finished sharing memories of his mother, he laid a sunflower by her gravesite. And the two year old saw her
chance, she crept up slowly to the flower and snatched it and took off through the gathered family of mourners. She went first to her
grandparents and with the concentrated carelessness of a toddler, Molly says she tore petals off of that sunflower in chubby little
handfuls and presented them to grandma and grandpa.
[00:16:43] Speaker1
Molly says we were all unsure whether to be horrified or charmed when a toddler gives you something, you take it. So there they sat,
whose son and his wife clutching handfuls of sunflower petals. The service went on and the toddler went on to. Every time someone
would speak and leave a flower, she would fetch the fresh flower like it was her one job and leave the torn one behind, she traveled
through the entire crowd distributing sunflower petals into helpless open hands. And by the end of the service, there was a very sad
pile of headless sunflower heads stacked upon one another next to the open gravesite, empty and bare. And there was also a crowd
of faces. Their eyes wet with tears, bemused and sad and joyful and shining. Every single one holding open palms of sunflower
petals. Molly says loss is very real and yet. We may also be startled to find ourselves sitting in its midst with handfuls of sunflower
petals. With bright memories and love filling up our hands and spilling over the edge. To carry with us. Into the next day. My friends,
this Easter may resurrection show up for you in unexpected ways, and may we all remember not to shut down the presence of Divine
Love, even if its form is unfamiliar to us. Maybe today you feel ready to plant some sunflowers, to purify the soil around you, but I
hope you remember that if the planting is too much.
[00:19:09] Speaker1
Feel free to just receive whatever big, messy, torn up clumps of bright joy are dropped into your helpless open hands. May we be
grateful for them? And may we continue to remember that there is still so much life? Here to be lived. Among the living. Amen, and
may you live in blessing. I invite you to join me this morning in the spirit of prayer. God of the uncertain times. Presence that is with us
when we don’t know what is coming, when we are afraid maybe to hope for something good because we know so much can go
wrong, because we know so much can be lost. On this Easter morning. May we hear the angels when they ask us a question? When
they ask us where we are putting our attention in this moment. When they encourage us to look in new places. To see an unfamiliar
version as just as on fire with the holy. As the thing that we miss. As the thing that we love. God, in this world where we trust that the
most high power is love. Help us remember that that means love cannot die. And is with us in this moment as much as any other. For
the prayers that I’ve spoken out loud and for the prayers that everyone gathered with us holds on their hearts. We say Amen.