What Will People Say?

Acts 9:36-43, 

How do you want people to remember you when you die?
What should people miss? What do you want them to say about you?

Writing your own obituary is an exercise used in writing workshops, career-counseling or life-planning, to help clarify insights about yourself, or change the direction you’re going with your life.

It’s said that Alfred Nobel was inspired to create and fund the Nobel Prize, to leave a profoundly humanitarian legacy, after seeing the headline for his own premature obituary, calling him “the merchant of death,” for his work inventing dynamite.

Writing your own obituary can have a lot of power for transformation. Or it can be simply practical. A way to save trouble for your loved ones, wrestle some closure out of your life, or tell the story you want to tell. In fact, some of you here may have done that.

I haven’t. I’ve never actually been very good at these exercises. So I asked Facebook.

And in that entirely unscientific survey, I discovered that we mostly want to be remembered for our creativity, our kindness and compassion, certain quirks and joys, and for love.

It seems to have worked that way for Tabitha, who was remembered by her friends and community for her needlework and generosity, for the beautiful clothing that she had made and given to others. They seem to have had a bit of a fashion show at her wake, wearing and displaying her creative, loving, unique gifts as they wept and told stories.

Tabitha’s later eulogists – biblical scholars and occasional preachers – have tried to fill in other details: what it meant that she is the one woman specifically named as a disciple in the Christian scriptures, why she was called “gazelle” in both Greek and Aramaic, whether she was wealthy and charitable, or poor and marginalized herself, but still intent on giving to others, details we don’t know, and won’t, because they weren’t how her friends remembered her.

These later eulogists also speculate about why Peter was summoned to her wake. We know he was relatively nearby, and had just healed a man paralyzed and bedridden for eight years. But did the mourners summon him to heal Tabitha, desperate in the loss of someone who was clearly gone beyond healing? Or did they summon him as a pastor, to comfort and console them in their grief, and plan a burial?

We don’t know. Can’t know, because they didn’t tell us, but I have another idea.

I wonder if they summoned Peter in desperation, not for healing or comfort, but for answers.

To ask: “Why are we dying???”

It was all going so well. People expect Jesus back any day, and with that confidence, many are being healed, the good news of Jesus is being shared, the faith is growing, good work is being done, the church is blooming. And Tabitha, such a faithful example...

She wasn't supposed to die before the Messiah came back! We weren't.  

How can it be that she died, when we have been promised transformative, abundant, eternal life,

instead of moldy, miserable, familiar death?

The trauma in this community isn’t only the sudden loss of a friend, of a good and generous and creative woman. It’s a blow to their faith, to the promise of abundant, everlasting, life they’ve given their hearts to. It’s doubt, even disaster, undercutting their trust and confidence and hope.

How can we be dying, when we are doing so much good, and keeping the faith?

It’s a question that’s become familiar in the church, these days, too.

Not quite the same way, of course.

In the nearly two thousand years since Tabitha’s death, Christians have had to get used to the idea that individuals die – extraordinary, marvelous, best-beloved individuals, as well as ordinary ones – that, in fact, it’s fairly likely that all of us here will die before Jesus comes back.

But people in the church – all over this country – are asking Peter and one another that same question: “Why are we dying???”

We’re doing everything right.

We care for others, we raise money and volunteers for important healing work, we change lives, we raise wonderful children in God’s care, we keep the faith, we work to grow in our faith, we see successes.

But all that isn’t keeping us from dying.  We lose people to soccer and coffee and work and indifference. We don’t raise enough money to sustain our buildings and our programs.

The diagnosis is in – it’s a terminal illness.  Not today, or necessarily soon, but in a predictable someday, the church we know will die.

In some ways, perhaps, the church as a whole should be working on that eulogy exercise,

writing our own obituary, to seek closure, perhaps, or to be inspired about what we need to change, to do differently.

We’re wrestling with that a bit at Calvary.  We’re imagining what, perhaps, might be different in our future, when the money doesn’t meet our basic needs. We have no cause for despair, and much cause for rejoicing, but we’re still wrestling with a puzzling diagnosis. And some are already asking, like Tabitha’s friends, “Why are we dying,

when there’s so much life in us,

so much life in God??”

Peter doesn’t answer their questions. He doesn’t soothe their fears, invite their trust in God, lead the community toward acceptance, and closure. He shuts them all out of the room, prays, and says, simply, “Get up.”

“Tabitha, get up.”

And she does.

Peter gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive. This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.

What matters about resurrection is never the person herself. It’s the impact on the rest of us after the story is over.

When Tabitha died, what mattered was Tabitha herself. Her artistic gifts, her generosity, her friendship, her presence, and the pain of that loss.

But when Tabitha is resurrected, it’s God who matters, not her.

It’s God who people talk about.

“Amazing!” they say. “Thanks be to God!” But what else did they say about what God had done – to one another, to friends and strangers, that made it so compelling, that so many believed?

When we die, people will talk about us: Our gifts, our quirks, our good and our bad,

and we get some choice in what people will say; how we want to be remembered.

But if we’re resurrected, people will talk about God.

And that’s what matters most.

Matters more than death, matters more than what we leave behind, matters more than the creative, generous, holy, faithful work we do or lives we live.

Tabitha’s story insists that what matters is not what people will say about us, but what people will say about God.

And that’s an exercise I’ve never heard or seen: not in life-coaching, writing workshops, senior yearbooks, or on Facebook. 

Not one I’ve ever tried, have you?

What will people say about God when you’re resurrected?
What will people say,

about what God has done?

Do we have a choice in that?
Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

But it’s an even better question to shape and direct our lives – as a church, as individuals – than how we want to be remembered at our funerals. That’s the question that should draw us forward, that demands our whole imagination, and opens unlimited possibilities if we take it seriously.

When the world sees you –– when people see us –– in the light of resurrection, what will people say about God?

Ask that one.

Keep asking.

It will matter. 

UnLearn

Luke 24:1-12

Did you know what to expect when you came to church this morning?

Do you know what to say when someone exclaims, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

And how many of you came expecting the lilies, the fanfare, joy and happiness and good news?

Well, I’m sorry, but I have a little bad news for all of you who have found what you expected at church this morning, all of you who know the response to “Christ is risen!”

I’m sorry, but you’ve missed Easter.

Missed it, if you’ve been comfortable and happy this morning,

instead of plagued with confusion, uncertainty, and gut-deep doubt.

Mary and Joanna and Mary and the others had no hope of happiness that long ago dawn in Jerusalem.  They were putting themselves at risk to do their duty by the dead, to anoint the body of their friend, and say goodbye. They came that morning expecting struggle, dimness, and the scents of rock and decay, and are met, instead, by emptiness,

a trickle of fresh air in an open and abandoned grave,

and then,

suddenly,

terrifying, exalted men,

standing beside them where there’d been no one a moment ago,

who say to them,

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

Only the “dead” part makes sense to them at first, even when the dazzling men explain, “He is not here; but has risen.” They have to coax the women into coherent memory: Remember in Galilee? Remember how he told you this would happen? That he’d be betrayed, and killed, and rise again? Remember?

And they do remember, finally, that Jesus did say something like that.

And they go away in their disbelief – suspended in the tension between doubt and wonder – to tell their friends, Jesus’ friends, who quite frankly think the women are nuts.

Because it’s one thing to remember what he said, and another thing entirely to understand it, to change everything you know about death and life, to know resurrection.

Reading the Easter story this week, I kept being reminded of a scene from an old movie.

A young man, part of a small and hard-pressed Alliance confronting an oppressive Empire, goes off to a wilderness seeking training to make him a great warrior.  
He finds himself stuck in a mucky swamp, where nothing is as he expected, not the training, not his own heart, and certainly not the Jedi master.

And when the spaceship that brought him here, his only hope for rejoining his friends, suddenly sinks into the swampy waters, he is ready to give up.

“We’ll never get it out now,” says Luke Skywalker

“So certain are you. Always with you it cannot be done.” says Yoda,

“Hear you nothing that I say?”

“Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different….”

“NO! No different. Only different in your mind.

You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Luke – watching the emptiness where his connection to home used to be - is caught in the same helpless dismay that confronts the women at the tomb, the confusion and doubt as they hear that Jesus is risen, see he is not here.

Then Yoda speaks the truth that changes the Easter story, as well as Luke’s:
You must unlearn.

One commentator on the Easter story remarks that when we don’t believe something, can’t believe, it’s generally because we believe something else more strongly. 

We all hold habits of belief, formed from experience, and story, and sometimes what’s easier said than done. We know – not just believe, but know – that the dead stay dead. We know - below the level of conscious belief or thought - when something is too big, beyond our limits or our strength.

But Easter confronts us with our old beliefs and gives us the chance to change.

To change beliefs like: the dead stay dead; this broken relationship can’t be healed; those people are our enemies. The chance to change beliefs in our own limits, our fundamental worthlessness. Beliefs that shape the realities of life.

The disciples hear the women’s tale, and can’t believe it.  They know too well - below the level of conscious faith or thought - that the dead stay dead. But Peter puts his doubt into action, and runs to the tomb - surprised, still, to find the place empty, inhabited only by abandoned linen.

Peter plunges into Easter before he understands, dives into the confrontation between an unexpected new truth and the truth he knows, that he’s always believed.

It doesn’t change him in an instant – he leaves the tomb still suspended in disorientation and wonder – but Easter shows him the old belief in sharp outlines, gives him a lever to make the change.

We need that lever because that kind of change isn’t easy.

In that old movie, young Luke tries and fails to raise his spaceship with the Force, and gives up. 

He can’t unlearn the habits of his heart so quickly; the belief that an entire spaceship is too big to lift is stronger than the new idea – true as it may be – that he has access to power he has not yet imagined.  As Yoda coaches him to open his heart to that, Luke insists, “You want the impossible,” and sulks away.

It seems – to him – an idle tale.

Like most of the disciples in that Easter story, Luke isn’t ready to see the shape of his old belief, to see enough for it to change.

So Yoda pushes him toward the moment Peter experiences at the tomb.

Yoda closes his eyes, and the spaceship slowly begins to rise, floats out of the water, and touches down gently on solid ground at the feet of the stunned and uncertain Luke.

“I don’t…. I don’t believe it.” he says, finally face to face with his old belief and the new reality – suspended in the tension – finally open to change, but not changed yet.

“I don’t believe it,” he declares.

“That,” says Yoda, “is why you fail.

Disbelief is necessary.  It is, in itself, the Easter moment: suspending us between the power of the old belief, and the shocking suspicion of hope and change, not real yet, but deeply true.

Disbelief is necessary to open our eyes and hearts, but to fully experience resurrection we are called to go forward from there, to actually change the beliefs that have held us; beliefs that maintain the limits we put or perceive on ourselves, on one another, even on God.

You and I are called to find new life by entering into the disbelief – into the wonder and doubt that confronts us with our old certainties and gives us a chance to transform them – and to move forward beyond that place.

By taking a chance on love and friendship, in spite of old certainties that insist that that ends in loneliness and pain.

By championing the underdog – in politics, the workplace, social change – even when we know the powerful always win.

By giving up the way we’ve always done it, in spite of the fact that we know it works, and trying something that shouldn’t work, just for the chance to learn from failure – or receive a miracle after all.

That’s how Easter happens.

Easter happens when you are faced with a task you can't do; news you can’t believe; when it’s perfectly true that you CAN’T, but the possibility that in fact you CAN is somehow standing right in front of you, right beside you.

While we celebrate with predictable, secure, exuberant delight today, we tell the story of doubt and dismay at the empty tomb, over and over every year, to nurture us for those times of doubt and dismay in our own lives. To remind us that our beliefs, our limits, are not permanent, and that the chaotic experience of shattering them is the gateway to abundant life, and that joy like this lies beyond.

So it’s okay if you missed the doubt today, and came here knowing how to respond with joy to the shout that “Christ is risen!”

Because Easter will come to you again, someday, suspending you in uncertainty and disbelief, giving you the chance to see old certainties and shatter them, and outlive your limits.

Today is practice for the new and abundant life that will call you forward through the chaos of transformation.

And God will celebrate with you then, as we celebrate with God, today.

For Christ is risen,

Christ is risen indeed!
Alleluia!

In the Shadow of the Cross

Good Friday

“In the shadow of the cross may your soul find rest.”

Those words jerked my wandering mind right back into the room.

 I’d been mostly listening, as our Convention speaker talked about the work of healing and transformation at Thistle Farms, a ministry for women coming out of the sex-trafficking industry.

She had been telling us stories of women who had never known what it was to be loved, or to love themselves; women scorned, “despised and rejected” by the world.

My heart hurt, a bit, and I was angry – angry about a world where people can be treated as objects, a world where help is far from people who are dying – spiritually or literally – and so my mind wandered, until these words jerked me back.

“In the shadow of the cross, may your soul find rest.”

I didn't like that a bit, because I don’t find the cross at all restful. Do you?

Here is Jesus, mocked, beaten, tortured, and now hung to die in the most public, shameful, slow and painful way.

Here is a crowd – angry, restless, stirred up by those who play on their fear and uncertainty: demanding the death of this man, and now forced to witness the dangerous, crushing power of the Roman state as their demands are met.

And here are women, standing at the fringes; in danger, themselves, from being here; but still, always, overlooked, pushed aside, ignored as they grieve.

I don’t want that to be restful.

I want us – when we see the cross, when we remember the cross – to be stirred up and restless about that violence and fear and anger, loneliness and grief.

I want us to be restless when we hear that story, and when we see the same things in the news of our own day.

A day where it’s normal to ask presidential candidates if they’ll continue policies of torture – and a “yes” to that question can sometimes draw applause.

A world where more than sixteen thousand women and girls in this metro area are currently victims of sex trafficking: used, despised, rejected, objectified.

News that’s full of bleeding victims, shattered rubble, and the constant stirrings of fear that remind us that hate is easy, and bombs and guns go anywhere.

Life – for so many of us – where death walks with us – in memories of lost loved ones, threats to our own bodies and health, the pain of broken relationships.

“In the shadow of the cross, may your soul find rest.”

It feels wrong to me, and yet that phrase has haunted me since that speaker said it.

She was telling a story of finding just one note in her father’s handwriting, her father who had died when she was a child. Those words fell out of his prayer book: “In the shadow of the cross, may your soul find rest,” and she found comfort.

And then, at last, I saw it, too.

A thin space of shadow, cast by that cross on the top of that hill in Jerusalem, a little slice of shade in the midst of the fierce, bright, hard-edged emotions and realities of violence and death and division.

Space enough for a bird or a heart to touch down for a moment’s rest: out of the glare, cool in the heat, a small but real refuge.

That thin shadow, awkwardly shaped - the shadow of two trees stripped of their comforting branches and bound with the battered body of Love Incarnate - is a promise, then and now, 

that even in the very center of violence, grief, hate, anger, and fear,

in every center of such pain,

God makes a space of rest.

It’s a promise that when our lives come to a place of agony and destruction, God makes a slice of shelter, and rest: not by denying or diminishing the pain, but right in the middle of it, making a sliver of peace from the pain itself.

I need that promise tonight, as we stand at the foot of the cross and remember the nails, the mockery, the loneliness, and the fear of that ancient hill outside Jerusalem.

I need that promise, when the cross is planted again and again in the world you and I share today.

And God makes that promise,

two thousand years ago;

tonight.

A sliver of peace,

love that cannot be conquered by hate.

Look for that in the shadow tonight, in this space; in your life.

In the midst of agony, a benediction:

In the shadow of the cross, may your soul find rest.

Amen.