A pastor went to a nursing home to offer communion to the residents. This was not one of those upscale places called a retirement center. This facility was for the poor and its residents were mostly in various states of dementia. When the pastor arrived she was told by a volunteer, who was wheeling patients into the room, that since it was late afternoon, everyone's medication seemed to be wearing off. Some would sleep through the service as usual, but for the most part, her little congregation would be on the wild side today. Sure enough, all through the beginning of the service, a woman sang, "Row, row, row your boat," bouncing up and down in her wheel chair. It got so chaotic that the pastor clapped her hands to get their attention, and said, "What shall I read from the Bible today? What part would you like to hear?" Above all the movement and noise still in the room, one answer could be heard on an old woman's voice: "Tell us a resurrection story." The room changed. Those who'd been moving grew still. Sleepers opened their eyes. "Yes," said another. And from yet another: "Yes. Tell us a resurrection story."
You and I are here today for just such a story. We may have any number of reasons for wanting it. If your own death has been on your mind, you might lean in for this kind of story. Or maybe your mind turns to loved ones today, gone from you and deeply mourned. Their absence is your reason to wish for a resurrection story. Others of us didn't arrive today with that particular pain, but we are, by heaven, sick to death of world news, saddened and repulsed by all this senseless slaughter, this wholesale, tragic, stupid wasting of life. How about a resurrection story that touches on that? And of course it needn't be anyone's actual death that might make us desperate for such a story. Short of physical death, how many ways are there for something vital in us to have died? Dead relationship. Dead innocence. Dead capacities to create, to work, to think, to dream. A killed sense of meaning and purpose. A killed hope. Dead faith. How many the ways of feeling dead, and wreaking of death, and drowning in it, while the heart goes right on dumbly pumping.
Death, I think, is aggressive. Not just a conclusion passively waiting out there to be reached when it's time. Doesn't death seem more predatorial? Some poet described every grave as a mouth of the earth that opens and closes to swallow us whole. Death gives the earth a billion mouths, quick to open anywhere to swallow us. Something like it is at work within a life or a friendship, a family, a community. How quick are the teeth of secret death and relational death, eating away in the dark till we're hollowed out and going through the motions, lifeless.
Because the jaws of death are open everywhere around us and within us, and because death has taken or will take everyone we love, I will tell a resurrection story. Do you want to hear it?
The world had come to an end. The finest human being you could ever imagine was dead. Think for a moment of the finest person you ever knew – the strongest, the brightest, the greatest heart you've ever known – then multiply that life by a thousand strengths. This was Jesus. Had you known the man, you would have been in awe of him as you are of no one else. Those who were closest to him could only believe that God was in him like no other. And at little more than thirty, he was destroyed, made horribly dead by the cruelest of means. Some women who loved him watched him die wretchedly, no doubt in their minds he was dead. They saw the rigid corpse loosened from the cross and carried away and closed up in a tomb, swallowed down into the awful, ugly mouth of death.
On the third day after, they were back at the place, heavy with grief, and found to their shock that the mouth of that grave was wide open, nothing closing it, and nothing inside any more. They went in for a better look, and suddenly beside them, two men in dazzling clothes, beaming, asking, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen!"
The women told all this to the male disciples, who of course did not believe it – an idle tale, they said. But the Risen One put an end to that, showing up, conversing, breaking their bread for them, munching on broiled fish. Before long, hundreds of his followers had seen him. And their lives opened up like that tomb and flowed with fresh new passion and purpose. Folks who'd been shut up in fear broke free into fierce new courage. People closed up in guilt emerged not ashamed any more. People sealed up in sadness stepped into the light laughing, singing, embracing one another.
And they all would still die. They knew they would die and their loved ones would die and many of their dreams would die. But the grip of it was broken for them. The hold of death was undone. And one ancient pagan writer said of them, "They bear their dead away with singing as if going to a feast."
And one of these singers, the first of them really to write about resurrection, the little man named Paul, put it into words for them all. "Death?" he wrote. "Death is swallowed up." The eater of us all has been swallowed up in this victory. Death will rage against us still and come after us and hurtfully wound us. But Christ has altered it. Death's teeth have been broken, its jaws unhinged. The horrible mouth of death is impotent to hold us. Death is a tunnel that opens to light and to the love of God.
So little Paul goes walking right up to the edge of the grave. He leans over it, stares down to sees how deep it goes, how dark it is, lets the cold of it come wafting up against his face. And then, of all things, he sasses death, taunts it: Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting? Death, you dummy, you're ugly, you stink, but you're toothless and weak and doomed. Where is your victory? Then he lifts his face and laughs: Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ.
I wish I could share Paul's laughter at death every day, but I can't, and neither can you. Death has a way of answering back, "I'll show you my sting." Some of us are stung so hard by death that we're sick with it and can't quite comprehend the celebration. Death hasn't finished doing damage in this world, and we haven't come here at Easter to lie about that.
We have come for the telling of a resurrection story. We've come to recall who entered death ahead of us and made a way through and is standing on both sides of death to make us entirely alive. Today we are gazing at the starkly opened, empty tomb that is his. And we are left to wonder if all the tombs of our experience may not also be made open and empty.
Has it occurred to you to wonder why the Gospels make such a thing about the stone rolled away from his tomb? He doesn't need it rolled away. According to the stories, the risen Christ wasn't hindered in the least by closed doors. He passes through them – he needs no rolled-away stone to exit a grave. No, his tomb is open to let us come in, to have our look around, to be present to death in all its forms – and to see that we are not at all closed in here, the door stands open. This blown-open grave is a sign that no darkness we will ever enter – no sadness, no sickness, no ruined relationship, no sin, no death – can hold us. The tomb stands open, a witness to how free we shall be, how free we are even now, to walk out of darkness into the light, new creatures, unbound, resurrected.
Most of us have done time in very dark places. Many of us are in a dark place now, entombed in a personal kind of ongoing death. We have heard a resurrection story that now whispers to us: See, in this present darkness, look there is a gleam of light; it is coming from the other side, from a door blown open. It leads to perfect freedom one day, and freedom enough this day, to stare down all this death and sass it: "Where's your sting, death? Your victory grip, how good is it really?"
I tell you, we will run through it into the light, find God's other children shining there, and the beautiful Christ who has called our names. We will fall to our knees and lift our faces and laugh forever: "Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!"
