Transcript

I appreciate the worship committee inviting me to speak, even though Easter is over. When I was in seminary, I was invited by my home church to speak after Christmas. I'm home again. Easter is over, I suppose, but Easter is such a terrible thing to waste. The church where we worshipped before moving to Atlanta, there was a tradition of 15 years of having 500 lilies at the altar on Easter Sunday. I don't know, 500, but there were 500. Beautifully arranged, sometimes just a bank of lilies, sometimes in the shape of a cross, sometimes almost carelessly strewn like an artist crossed with canvas. Beautiful, very beautiful. They were memorial lilies, people gave $5 each, and therefore the insert of the worship bulletin on Easter had 500 names remembered by the giving of a lily. 500 lilies, $5 each. They were beautiful. In the 16th year of that tradition, it came apart. One of the elderly members of our church, a woman, went up after the morning service and said, I'm going to the hospital to visit a friend. Can I take one of the lilies to the room? I know I can't tell which one it is I gave, but just any one of them, they're all alike. And without really getting an answer to her question, she went up to the cross of lilies, 500 lilies, to get one, and she turned to those who still remained in the sanctuary in a shocked voice and said, they're plastic. Well, there was a lot of concern. Not at first, just over there being plastic, but we gave $5 for lilies. If they're plastic, they may be the same ones that were used last year. And they gave $5 last year, and committees met, and huddles were formed, official and unofficial. And the whole tradition collapsed. Someone came up with the figure, over 15 years, that's $37,500 for the same lilies. The minister gathered those concerned together, seeing a great deal of disaffection, and tried to defend the practice of having plastic lilies that were stored in a cool place and covered in dark, and they had indeed lasted for years. And they were beautiful. His defense, as I recall, was along two lines. The practical defense, in response to what has happened to the money, he said, we have used it in a contingency fund. We have been able to help transients and to meet emergencies that have not been budgeted, and let me assure you the money has gone to good uses, and there was whispered and reluctant acceptance by some rejection by others. His other line of defense for the action of the committee, the church, the minister, whoever, was theological. He said, after all, and he said this with enthusiasm, after all, the plastic lilies are more appropriate to Easter because they always bloom. They never die. And then he said, after all, we don't want to waste Easter. He's right about that. Easter's an awful thing to waste, and it can be wasted, though. It's been a concern of mine, I've said to some of you in private, maybe even in a class, that I have been concerned about the loss of the meaning of Easter because of its increasing detachment from Good Friday. When with the increase of the lilies at the altar, there seems to be a decline in the relationship of Easter to Good Friday. Without Good Friday, Easter never happened. It never happened. Without Good Friday, you cannot have Easter because you can't have resurrection if nobody's dead. Now Jesus was dead. He was dead. He wasn't sleeping. He was dead. All the texts say that. Acts 5, what is the proclamation of the early church? This Jesus whom you hanged on a tree, God raised from the dead. From John 20, and Jesus, the resurrected Jesus, the Easter Jesus, came to them and said, first what? See the scar? See the nail print? The alternate reading of Revelation 1 for this particular service declares, by his blood, declares he is the first born from among the corpses. He was dead. You don't believe these witnesses, you ask the soldiers. They'll tell you, you're talking about the one in the middle? Yeah, he was dead. You ask his disciples, well, we weren't really close, we'd gotten off to a rather safe distance, but we could tell when he died. You asked the women who prepared the body and they said, yes, yes, yes, he was dead. You ask Mary, Mary, she says yes, yes, I know what you're going to ask, yes, he's dead. You can't have a resurrection if nobody's dead. See the nail print? See the scar? The point is, it's not Christmas anymore. Somebody go tell the shepherd it was a mistake, going back. And on your way, if any of you are going north, would you stop at Ramah and tell Rachel that all that crying she was doing that we thought was out of place? She was right. In reflection, all of our carols seem kind of silly, really. It's not Christmas anymore, it's not even a epiphany anymore. You tell the wise men, they're nice gifts, but thanks anyway. And tell Herod, he wins again. In fact, it was rather naive of us to think we could actually change anything. It's not even Palm Sunday anymore. Tell Pilate, Rome is saved again. As always, tell Caiaphas, he was right, it's expedient that one die for the people. He's right, political expediency wins out again over the dreams of the disfranchised and poor. So what, it's over. And you feel the dull ache of a lost campaign. Have you ever been involved in a lost campaign? The people went to the pole and it was Barabbas by a landslide. Barabbas, all in favor of Barabbas? Well, we don't even have to count. It's Barabbas. Somebody needs to go down to the lobby now and speak to our supporters and workers. I know they're downhearted. But somebody needs to go to the mic. Yes, I've sent a telegram to our opponent. Apparently you are the people's choice, Barabbas. The campaign's over. I want to thank all of you who've worked. It's been expensive, it's been hard. We haven't lost everything. I don't want you to be so despondent. We've come to love and care for each other. And I hope sometime in the future we can get together and kind of remember. Well, we don't want to remember tonight, but we can remember the good times we had along the way. And I know some of you are already talking 84, but let's just hold that. I'd like for the band. If they would, if the band would just play all anxiety and... Well, I hate to ask this of you, but just one more request. Will you help us sort of clean up the place? We've got to be out of here. If we're not out of here by eight o'clock in the morning, we've got to pay another month's rent on this building. And we've got a lot of buttons left and bumper stickers and all. If you want some souvenirs, you'll laugh about this someday, I'm sure, if you want to get those. And while the band is playing all angst on, would you take down the banners and streamers? Because I'd like for us to leave this place as though we were never here. Losing? It's just like... It's like dying. Did you ever lose? Just lose. They lost. I heard that great minister, Dahlberg, Edwin Dahlberg, reminisced in his retirement one evening about his seminary days at Colgate Rochester and his extraordinary teacher, Walter Rauschenbush. Walter Rauschenbush, Professor of Theology, lover of human life. He said one morning we had dragged ourselves to class. We sort of hoping Professor Rauschenbush wouldn't show up. In fact, we didn't think he would because he'd been very much involved in a bond issue in the city of Rochester. Bond issue to get the money to build the plumbing and running water and sanitation system out to certain parts of the city where the people still had outdoor toilets, no running water, poor sanitation, disease on the children playing in the mud. And he had worked and worked and worked the bond issue. He came to class. He started his lecture 19th century somewhere. He had his lecture notes. He had the morning newspaper. He got into his lecture. Professor, Mr. Dahlberg said he got into the lecture three or four minutes and stopped and put his head over on the desk and cried and spread the newspaper in front of the students, bond issue defeated. It's just like dying. It's the same dull ache that you have when there's a death in the family. I don't know if you've had a death in the family. It's the most confusing, most meaningless time there is. Everything is in slow motion, even though you want it to be over. And there are people around talking to you you don't even know, and bringing in all that food, hungry all your life and now that you can't eat all this food. Make a list, Rachel, of who brought the food. We'll have to return the dishes and I'll have to send thanking. Let them come and get the dishes. We didn't ask for the food. Now, Rachel, that's no attitude. You make a list and I'll have to send thanking. Don't send thanking. You know, it's by those that already say thank you and just send them on. There's no need. Now, now that's no way. These are our friends. These are our friends. When are the relatives going to leave? We don't have time. We don't have room. We can't talk. The kids are hungry. Well, give them some more of that jello and all like that. They're underfoot. What are we going to do? Mama, can the kids go? Would it be sacrilegious if the kids went to a movie? Well, maybe they shouldn't go. Well, they've got to do something. They don't know what all this is about. Can they go to a movie? Well, if it's Walt Disney or something like that, but don't let them see anything oppressive. Are you going to clean out Jesus' room, Mama? Oh, not now. Well, when you clean out the room, James wants his carpenter's apron and his hammer. Okay, but maybe next week. The landscape, the proper landscape, the only landscape in which you set the empty tomb of Easter, is defeat and death. Over half of the people of the world live all their lives from whimpering infant to whistling old people. All their lives every day is Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. That's it. Easter's such a terrible thing to waste, but it's wasted if it isn't the dead Jesus that's raised. There is no nourishment in a sermon that said he was never dead. He was never really dead. I went to the tomb and I could see under the cloth in which they wrapped him. I could still see a little heartbeat. I believe in the immortality of the soul. Fully. Tell it to Mary. Bunch of pagan whistling in the dark. He's dead. Don't give me a sermon on the crocus and the return of the robin. I don't get any nourishment from your trying to tell me, but it was a moral victory. There is no nourishment in your telling me, but we have the living memory. I cannot survive on the fiendite of that kind of watery nothing. There's not a calorie in it, not at all. The minister is wrong. Plastic lilies do not bloom always. Plastic lilies never bloom, because in order to bloom, something has to be able to die. If it can't die, it can't bloom. Then does this mean now that Jesus has bloomed in the resurrection, there'll be no more dying? No more pain, no more disappointment, no more lost campaigns? No, no, no, no. He didn't come out and say to his disciples in the upper room, look, no scars. No scars, no nail prints. No. No. He said, see the scars. The Easter Jesus is scarred. Paul said it beautifully, painfully, I have implicated always before you, Jesus crucified. The tense is perfect. He was killed and still remains crucified. Then what good is it to give us your poetic stuff that that which dies can bloom? What I want to know is, will that which bloom die again? Yes. And it will bloom again. If it dies, it blooms. If it blooms, it dies. But if it dies, it blooms. And how do I know this? Because Jesus came and said, see the scar? Peace. And he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit.