The other morning I lay in bed, pondering the resurrection of my body from it, and listening to the radio. The radio announcer reported that to save money during the recession, the Commonwealth has decided to turn off the decorative blue lights on the Zakim bridge, to the tune of 5,000 clams per month. I was crushed. I grew up in Boston, and waited 14 years for those lights to go on. They started the Big Dig when I went off to college, and finished it when my second child was born. Every time I drive over the Zakim bridge, I delight in those lights. They make me feel like I can fly.
But it’s hard times, and I guess we all have to be frugal, and avoid showy displays of conspicuous consumption. To that end, the Easter story I told you earlier this morning was from Mark’s gospel, the economical gospel. He tells in a mere 8 verses what it takes Luke 12 to say, Matthew 16 verses and the noisy and bombastic John a full 18 verses to communicate the resurrection of Jesus. Mark was the first gospel written down, and therefore the least embellished. Of course, he had to skimp somewhere. So Jesus doesn’t actually make an appearance in Mark’s gospel. The stone in front of the tomb gets better lines than Jesus, in Mark’s gospel. The women come to the tomb, early in the morning, with their spices, wondering who will roll the stone away. They arrive to find the stone, which was very large, already rolled back. A young man, probably an angel, reports that Jesus is risen, but there’s no actual resurrection appearance. It’s a cliffhanger. The story ends here, with the women fleeing the tomb, trembling and bewildered. Mark tells us they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Well. They must have told SOMEone. Everyone knows women can’t keep secrets. Thank God. Otherwise we would all be at brunch right now. Which fills the belly, but not the soul.
Jesus is conspicuously absent from our own sanctuary—Protestants focus on the resurrection, not the crucifixion, so our crosses are always empty, to remind us. This being Easter, our church deserves fresh togs just as we do, and I want you to notice our new cross, and the candle stands around it. The candle stands were made by an artist and friend of the church, AJ Liberto. He made them out of scrap wood leftover from the demolition of the stage in our parish hall, a part of our history. He built the verticals and painted them with gold leaf, and then he made stairs. He left some rough, sanded some fine, some finer, and set them in order. The lower down the stairs you go, the rougher the tread gets. The higher, the smoother. You could say it’s a stairway to heaven, or to hell, depending on your perspective. AJ also made the cross, with a lot of help from my father George, who is a self-taught carpenter and general contractor. The cross represents all of our stuff, our baggage, our pain, transformed, redeemed, into order and beauty, mystically, by the work of crucifixion and resurrection.
The Christian journey is primarily about redemption, and about following the trail Jesus blazed through the world, through hell and into heaven itself. This is hard work. I can comfort myself, from time to time, that Jesus and I have at least this in common: assuming he took up the family business, as most first-century Jewish men did, we both grew up with carpenter fathers. It is a unique burden to bear. What growing up with a carpenter father means, is that your house gets fixed after everybody else’s. For four years growing up with my own father, I climbed a 14-foot ladder to get to my bedroom; he built the stairs just in time for us to move.
The stairs to our cellar, on the other hand, worked perfectly fine, but the lights to the cellar didn’t. To get to our cellar you had to go down the creaky stairs, round the bend and into the deepest darkest recesses, grope for the light bulb overhead, and turn it in its socket to illuminate the room. For a child or teen with any degree of imagination, it was an exercise in terror.
Once the light was on, you could go about your business, but before you went back up you’d have to unscrew the bulb again, gingerly, with your hand wrapped in your sleeve. And when the light was out, it was darker than ever before, because one moment you’re staring into the sun of a lightbulb, and the next, utter darkness. You’d have to wait there for a beat, two, three, in the void—until your eyes adjusted, until you could see the thin light curving round the corner from upstairs, and begin to make your way toward it.
The dark is such a primal fear. Anything can happen in the dark of a cellar. You could step on something squishy. Hands could grab you from behind. Creepy things with many legs could skitter over your toes. Every step you go down, the darkness envelops you more—it’s just in front of you, then it’s leaking around your sides, then finally it clasps hands behind you and claims you, forever.
But sometimes, we have work to do, and the work takes us down those cellar stairs: work like moving things around, or throwing things away. Sometimes, we don’t go willingly—we’re pushed, two strong hands from behind, and go tumbling all the way down. You know what I mean. You’ve had to go down into the darkness, into the thing that feels like it could be the death of you. You have survived your parents’ arguments, their divorcing. You have lost your jobs and wondered what you were going to do; quit your jobs and wondered who you were without them. You have lost your mothers and fathers and spouses; you have lost your babies, and wondered when the sadness would go away. You have survived cancer and car crashes, you have gone straight from chemotherapy sessions to day care to pick up the kids. You have moved schools, moved house, moved mountains. You have had your heart broken. And maybe you already realize how these things that happened to you were instrumental in your coming alive, really alive. You already know you have been resurrected like Jesus, and you have nothing to fear from death. But maybe you don’t this, yet, or maybe you need to be reminded, to practice that courage.
Here’s the thing about darkness. It looks so much darker when you’re looking into it from the second step of the cellar, than when you’re in the middle of it, looking for the light. There are two kinds of people: those who stay on the second step, and those who go down, deep, who follow Jesus in his descent into death, into hell, and from that darkest place, look for where the light is coming in. Sometimes they are the same person, on different days.
I want to be clear here, because here’s where a preacher can get herself in a whole lot of trouble. The Church has used either/or language for too many years; either you believe in this way, or you are going to hell. I’m saying something different. I’m saying: either you believe, believe in Someone beyond yourself, your nose and what it smells, your eyes and what they see, or sooner or later you will find yourself going through hell with no way out.
For shorthand, then, I’m going to talk just for now about believers and disbelievers. You don’t always find believers in churches and temples, and you don’t always find disbelievers outside of them. It’s quite a bit messier than that. But it is true that those who seek, are much more likely to find.
Disbelievers stay on the second step to the cellar, looking down. This is where the dark looks darkest, and has the greatest power over us—before we’ve confronted whatever’s down there. We all know people like this. We won’t name them. They live as people who have no hope, as Paul put it. They are people who just can’t get off the stoop. I once sat with a dying man, whose only way of relating to me, or anyone, was to talk about the Red Sox. His wife was pining for a word of love from him before he left, a word of recognition of what their many years had meant. But he couldn’t do it. All he could do was shout at the television, challenging the umpire’s calls.
As for believers, once you know how to recognize them, they are a dime a dozen. They say things like, “I thank God I got fired—that job was killing me,” or “I tried for years to get pregnant, and I realized I needed to let go of control and let God have a say.” The most showoffy example of a Believer in my life, currently, is my friend Caroline. She was just recently diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. “But it’s the GOOD kind of stage four cancer!” she says, and begins to recount all the grace-filled moments since her diagnosis. “I’m keenly aware of the gift of each day…the day that the Lord has made,” she says. “And now that I’m starting chemo, I get to learn about makeup and hair, something I missed out on when I was a teenager!” Like many people before her, Caroline is finding out how cancer is teaching her about the things in her life that need to die, and the things that are coming alive.
People, my friend Caroline is not looking on the bright side. That is not what she is doing. She is not making the best of a bad situation. What she is doing is going to Galilee after the risen Jesus. She really believes that because Jesus Christ has already tread the path before her, has endured everything she will and more, that: made like him, like him she’ll rise. This is the open secret of Christianity, and those who learn it have nothing left to fear. All they see is resurrection.
I know you. I know what you have gone through, are going through. I know that much of the time, you would rather keep things as they are, if you have any say in the matter. The devil you know is better than the angel you don’t. I know there are days when you want to sit on the second step with those who disbelieve, and look down into the darkness rather than be in the depths of it. But God can’t resurrect what’s half alive. God can only resurrect what has died.
I know there are days when you are deep into the darkness and don’t know where to look for the light, don’t know if you even believe anymore that the light will ever come, can’t remember that it was ever there to begin with. I believe, Lord, said the man, help thou my unbelief. Jesus disappeared into the darkness for three days before he rose from the dead. Sometimes we have to spend a lot longer. At first, when we’re there, we might act like disbelievers, and despair. We kick, we scream, we rage, we cry, we give up. Temporarily.
But then we might remember that God’s first words in all of holy scripture for Jews and Christians were, “Let There Be Light.” And there WAS light.
What did the world look like to Jesus, on that first day, after three days in hell?
What does it look like, when we emerge from the dark place of death? The light, impossibly bright. The world, impossibly beautiful. We’ve gone down to the cellar. We’ve done our work. We’ve rearranged our stuff, or thrown it away. We’ve found the wine, and broken it out. Nietzsche was wrong. Whatever DOES kill us, makes us stronger.
My children like to play a practical joke on me. I’ll be in the cellar sorting things, and they’ll turn off the light. All of that primal childhood fear will rise up in me, and I’ll muster my stern mother voice past the frightened child voice, and say “turn that back on!” and they’ll dissolve in giggles. And whether or not they turn the light back on, I can follow the sound of their voices into the light.
Maybe Mark didn’t finish his resurrection story because he intended for us to. The angel says to the women, “Jesus is not here, he is risen!” It suggests something that happened once, but is still happening, every day! Jesus, no longer bound by conventional time and space, can appear anywhere, to anyone, at any time! Go, said the angel, go ahead back to Galilee, you’ll see him there! Get moving!
Sometimes, you are the person at the bottom of the stairs, trying to orient yourself toward the light. When you’re there, in the darkest dark, I have something for you. Save it till then. It’s a word from an angel—this letter, sealed. It won’t mean anything to you until you are in the darkest place, fearing death. Then, open it, let it calm you, let it help you notice where the light is coming from.
But sometimes, Believers, you are the laughter at the top of the stairs, pointing the way to the light for those who are frightened. Leave that light on no matter what it costs. The angel said, “Go, go! Go ahead to Galilee, you will see him there!” Sometimes people can’t see Christ, but they can see you; you are the Christ they will see: the Risen One, the one who has come through fire, drowning, crucifixion, and now walking around alive, alive-o, and shining with the light of the world.
