“Do Not Be Alarmed”

Rev. Alice Hildebrand
First Congregational Church of Deer Isle, UCC
Sunset Congregational Church, UCC
Mark 16:1-8

Easter morning.  The celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus. A wonderful story of hope and love, of life where no life could possibly ever have been expected.  But — the Resurrection of Jesus, we say with our rational, reasonable minds, is impossible.  A leftover from a bygone era, when people thought about things differently than we think about them.  People believed in miracles.  But we know that there is no such thing.

What if I were to tell you that there is “no such thing” as “time”? (On Easter morning?  Why is she talking about time?)  Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega – the beginning and the end of time.  What do we mean when we say that?  No matter what you think about time now, for you, for me, for everyone, there was once no such thing as time — when we were babies.  Until we learned to “tell time,” we each lived in a timeless world.  We had needs, they were met by caregivers who orbited around us, like planets around suns.  We were the center of the universe!  Then, “time passed”– even though we didn’t know it –  and we became aware of time.  We became aware of time, and we became aware of our separation from our caregivers, and never again would we feel like the center of the universe.  Yet God is always with us, wanting us to know constantly that we ARE indeed that important, that we are loved that much.

I remember trying to help my son wait for me to be finished with a task so that we could do something together by telling him that I would be done in “one Mr. Rogers.”  If you ever watched that beloved children’s show on PBS, you know that it was half an hour long.  Sometimes I would say “two Mr. Rogers”  — an hour.  I was helping my son structure his experience of the world by giving him a unit of measurement – and he probably learned quickly that if it was “one Mr. Rogers” until we could go outside and play, that “Mr. Rogers” went very slowly, whereas if it was “one Mr. Rogers” until he was going to have to stop playing and take a nap, that “one Mr. Rogers” went all too fast.  Which is quicker, a half hour coffee break with a good friend, or a half hour in the dentist’s chair? Life HAPPENS, and we measure it with units that we call time, and it is very helpful that we do so, but – there is really no such thing!  There is no “time” for the baby, the cat, the pine tree, the rock – even though all of those will age and change.  Time is our servant, because it helps us to understand our world;  but too often time becomes our master, and we are always stressed, and busy, and in a hurry because, “Time is running out.”  Then we need to stop and remind ourselves that there is no such thing as time.

What if I were to tell you that there is no such thing as “up” or “down?” (On Easter morning?  Why is she talking about “up” and “down”?)  We live on a more or less round-ish object, Planet Earth, and we walk around on a flat surface with the ground below us and the sky above us.  And those people in Australia do the same thing, except that they are upside down and don’t know it, right?  We depend on our sense of direction as much as we depend on our sense of time.  We know that gravity holds us to earth and we know that we can travel back and forth on Earth’s surface, and up and down mountains and valleys, into caves and under water, into the sky, and we perpetually orient ourselves to the horizon.  When we think about going to the Moon or Mars, we think about a spaceship carrying us “up.”  But in actuality, there is no UP — the only true direction which scientists can observe in the universe is “outward” – everything in the universe is gradually moving farther and farther away from everything else, ever since the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago.  In actuality, we are standing on a more or less round-ish object which is spinning wildly, and careening through space.  “Up” and “down,” and for that matter, “back” and “forth,” are like time – they help us understand our world, but they really don’t exist.

OK – now that I’ve got you completely disoriented, let’s talk about Easter.  For what could be more disorienting than that?  A dead man gone from a sealed tomb?  Mysterious word that a beloved friend and teacher has been raised from death?  And in death has gone back home, where you will see him again? It’s hard for us to scrape off the encrustations of the centuries, in which Easter is the joyous highpoint of the Christian year, and get back to that early dawn scene, when there wasn’t yet a religion called Christianity, let alone a holy day/holiday called “Easter”, let alone family traditions of rabbits and eggs; jelly beans, marshmallow chickens, and huge ham dinners.  What there was on that morning so long ago when the women came to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body was the shock of death, and loss, and emptiness.  They came in grief and love, to perform a ritual of mourning. To do what must be done on that first terrible day after the most terrible day of all, the day of death.  And Mark tells us that when they saw the empty tomb, and heard that Jesus had been raised, they fled in terror and amazement, and said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

As the women had approached the tomb, they had said to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us?”  And then they saw that the stone was already rolled away.  They saw that Jesus’ body was gone, and they were told by the angelic figure sitting there that Jesus had been raised.  And at that instant, the universe changed forever.  The universe in which death is final, in which God is distant, in which there are no miracles — that universe is swept away. No wonder the women are afraid, no wonder they feel “terror and amazement.”  So ought we to feel, when you get right down to it.  These women, like us, have assumptions about how the world is put together, how it works.  In the weeks to come they will begin to rearrange those assumptions.  But at that moment in the tomb, they know only that their assumptions have been blown into smithereens.

When the women see that Jesus is gone, the universe changes forever — or does it?  Is it rather that the universe is truly revealed?  Not revealed for the first and only time, of course –what we see throughout the Bible is God trying to get human beings’ attention in order to let them — and us — know that the surface of things, the physical, logical world that we live our day to day lives in, is not the whole story.  Time and space are not in charge, God is.  And God breaks through time and space over and over again, to love us.  Salvation didn’t happen once, long ago, so that all we can do is remember it.  Salvation happens every minute of every day – salvation from the misery of separation from God.  Every minute of every day God is holding us, guiding us,  nourishing us, loving us, in orbit around us – each one of us — as though we each were the center of the universe.  As indeed we are, each and every one of us.  Caught in the daily reality of our lives, we don’t remember that.  And we despair.   But God is not “up” in heaven, and “hell” is not down below; God is here amongst us, and too much of the time, hell is right here on earth.

We read in the Gospels that Jesus performed many miracles during his lifetime – and nowadays, probably more folks are skeptical and puzzled, or even turned off and irritated, by those stories than are dazzled and pleased.  How could those things have happened –  giving sight to people born blind; feeding 5,000 on a bit of bread and a few fish; walking on water?  Superstitious nonsense!  Who could believe things like that … but — don’t get distracted by your oh-so-wonderful rational mind!  What do those stories mean?  Ask your heart, not your brain.

The Gospel writers are at pains to tell us that the miracles are meant to be understood as “signs” pointing to God; indications of God’s will for the world.  Wholeness; connection; content; peace. Jesus never just does parlor tricks – he doesn’t levitate a chair, or pop a coin out from behind anyone’s ear.  He doesn’t “perform miracles.” He feeds, and heals, and invites outcasts into warmth and love; he walks on the sea to comfort, to reassure – “Take heart,” he says.  “It is I; do not be afraid.”  In John’s Gospel, he turns water to wine, to show God’s glory, God’s love and generosity.  He always addresses human need — homelessness, hunger, hurt, ostracism.  And he tells the disciples, and us, too, that to continue to perform those miracles of love and comfort, to always address the very real needs of the folks around us, is our job after he is no longer around in the flesh.  We are the ones who can end hell on earth, right here, right now, in our time.

Easter morning.  The celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus. A wonderful story of hope and love, of life where no life could possibly ever have been expected.  But — the Resurrection of Jesus, we say with our rational, reasonable minds, is impossible.  And we tell our reasonable, rational minds – “Shhhh….listen…. take heart.  Jesus has gathered up time in his hands and holds the universe tenderly.  Love is undefeated.  God is everywhere, alive!”  Amen.