Ice Cream Joy

Matthew 28:1-10

Can you feel the joy? Almost taste it?

That’s something I love about Easter morning – there’s a brightness and a joy to this day that lifts my heart and the corners of my lips whether I’m ready for it or not.

We’re lucky, you and I, to know that when we come to church on Easter morning we are coming to joy, because this story didn’t start out simple and predictable, or all that happy.

Nearly two thousand years ago, in the pale morning twilight, Mary Magdalene and The Other Mary went quietly to visit the tomb of their dead friend and leader, the one who had made God so present in their lives.

Fresh in their grief, all unprepared, they tumble into startling drama:

Earthquake!

Lightning!

A dazzling angel, who tosses aside the massive rock sealing the tomb, and then casually sits on it, while the governor’s best soldiers go catatonic in shock.

Special effects are marvelous in movies and TV, but they are damn scary to live through.  I imagine the Marys must be burying their faces in each other’s shoulders and waiting to die,

when the angel calls out, announces resurrection, coaxes them to view the empty tomb, and speeds them off to carry the news.

No wonder they “ran from the tomb in fear and great joy!”

Mary and The Other Mary have been tossed into a new world,

one where all the certainties are gone,

earthquake is par for the course,

death is not death,

and they – the often overlooked women – they are responsible for reshaping the minds and hearts of the other disciples with this news so that those disciples can go to Galilee to meet the risen Christ and begin a whole new life that changes the world.

Are you ready for that?

Mary and Mary surely weren’t ready,

but that’s resurrection.

That’s Easter.

That’s actually what this joy is all about.

It’s about life-giving changes that turn everything we’ve expected upside down.

Easter happens, more or less predictably, every spring in the church’s calendar.

But Easter happens, too, in our own lives and world from time to time.

An unexpected opportunity that sweeps you to a new home halfway across the country or the globe.

Babies happen.

And ice cream.

Yes, ice cream.

Anyone here like ice cream?

So you’ll understand why a particular news story caught my attention last week when it was headlined by a new and different ice cream shop.

This particular ice cream shop is in Butare, a provincial capital in Rwanda.  And this month Rwanda is marking the 20^th anniversary of the genocide that devastated that country.  For a period of just over three months in 1994, sanity and relationships shattered and death took over, as eight hundred thousand Rwandans died – mostly the minority Tutsi population, but also thousands of Hutu who opposed the genocide while its kill-or-be-killed atmosphere prevailed.

It’s a devastation I can’t truly imagine, a national death that spelled the end of everything for so very many people. More shock and grief and desolation, probably, than even the Marys carried to Jesus’ tomb.

But Easter happens in the midst of that horror, too.

More slowly and painfully than the fast special effects Matthew offers from that dawn in Jerusalem,

but after that horror comes the challenge of new life,

with all the certainties upset,

and an opportunity to change the world.

Even with ice cream.

This shop in Rwanda started from a conversation between American entrepreneurs and a Rwandan woman with a dream of assuring her struggling neighbors that life is sweet.

Now the shop - the only ice cream store in Rwanda - is staffed with women who’ve learned to promote reconciliation and bend expectations as survivors of the genocide, and are they are facing the massive cultural challenge of teaching Rwandans to eat ice cream.

One of the shop’s employees remembers her first taste of ice cream.  It reminded her of the hailstones that fall on her home, she told the reporter, rubbing her jaw as if in pain. “I wondered if it was dangerous,” she said.

That’s Easter.

Like ice cream,

it’s sweet, bright, dangerous joy that knocks down custom and expectation and requires us to reshape our lives, even our world, around abundant life.

You see, ice cream is as alien to Rwanda as resurrection is to death.

In spite of a warm climate and a general love of milk, ice cream is new and shocking.

And then there’s the fact that in Rwanda, unlike in Lombard, you can’t sit out on the corner or stroll down the block from the Dairy Queen licking at your cone. It’s a culture that simply doesn’t eat in public.  Munching in the street is rude, embarrassing, or shameful, like burdening all your neighbors with your private needs.

But you know ice cream, right?

You know the power of the simple physical joy that comes from the bright, cold sweetness – at least if you lick, and don’t chomp or gulp your way to a headache!

Ice cream joy is a gateway drug for resurrection and abundant life.

The manager of Inzozi Nziza (“Sweet Dreams”) is quoted as dreaming of the renewable joy that can come with opening Rwandan culture to this sweet, startling treat.

“We would like to change the culture,” she says, and describes eating ice cream as freedom from fear, an opportunity to enjoy the abundance of life. 

Ice cream is the bright, simple symbol that life has delight in the midst of struggle.  Ice cream cones are a symbol of a deep change, of a kind of freedom to express abundance and joy that matters tremendously in the long-lived pain and devastation that Rwandans have experienced.

For the shop’s manager, the sight someday of Rwandan teenagers walking down the street eating ice cream cones will be the sign that “real peace is here to stay.”

That’s Easter.

Resurrection.

Rwandan ice cream.

Bright simple joy that’s part and parcel of an earthquake of change,

the leading edge of lively abundance, 

a sweetness that challenges the certainties of death, but demands that every other certainty change, too.

Can you taste that, like cool milky sugar on your tongue?

Will you taste that - taste abundant, Easter life - the next time you open a pint, or lick a cone?

Like Mary and Mary at the tomb, like the women of Inzozi Nziza,

God challenges us, today, to let go of all the certainties,

to plunge forward into earthquake and the unexpected,

to use our freedom and joy to reshape our hearts and minds, and those around us, so that we’re ready to meet the risen, living Christ in ordinary Galilee,

ready to change the world.

That’s Easter.

That’s resurrection.

And it’s a lot like ice cream.

Bright, simple, risky, joy that knocks down all custom and certainty, opening our world to abundant life.

Can you taste it?

Alleluia!!

How Rwanda's Only Ice Cream Shop Challenges Cultural Taboos NPR, All Things Considered, 10 April 2014

Genocide In Rwanda, UN Human Rights Council

Inzozi Nziza, Blue Marble Dreams

What's Good?

Good Friday - Lombard Community Worship Service

There is an entire “how-to” course on bullying in the story we hear tonight. Verbal abuse, physical abuse, deliberate humiliation; ringleaders egging others on to gang up on one victim. Even his best buddy is pressured into joining the bullies, denying their friendship, giving in to the power of the crowd.

It’s all there.

Some things just don’t change that much, from generation to generation, or millennium to millennium. We talk about bullies most at school, but we have bullies in offices, neighborhoods, and families now. And we have bullies in the story of our salvation.

That’s not good news.  It’s horrifying.

But Good Friday is, precisely, horrifying.

What’s “good” today is not the pain and abuse, the isolation and the betrayal.

What’s “good” about today is the reality of God in the midst of that horror.

What’s good is that today we stop and listen, so that we can truly hear and see God in this story of violence and humiliation. 

Today we listen to rejection, insult, and cruelty, we grieve for Jesus’ pain, because we live among that violence too. We keep it at arm’s length when we can, but some of us live with it in our homes, at work, at schools, and all of us live with it in the news. And so often God seems to be missing from those stories in the news, the school, the workplace, even the family in pain.

Tonight is “good” because in this story, we know that God has been the one neither you nor I would want to be, and so when we hurt, when we are lost, we know that God is there, too, and you are not alone.

Tonight is “good,” too, if we listen to this story and learn to see God in the face of the victim; in the painful stories of the news. And it’s good if that changes us, teaches us to love and admire the people in our own lives who are isolated, despised, and abused.

Tonight is “good” because God is here, one flesh with every victim of violence,

one heart with each of us who has been insulted or humiliated,

one with us as we grieve that pain, for Jesus,

and for isolated neighbors and lost children.

Tonight is “good” in the story of our salvation

not because Jesus suffered,

but because we remember that even God suffers,

and that only love can overturn that pain.

Only love can disarm the bullies,

only love can transform isolation, humiliation, and insult,

so that life can be set free.

In the end, that’s what’s good,

the painful, hopeful truth that only love can set life free,

your life, my life; 

the life of an abused child, of a lonely neighbor,

or the life of God, waiting among us, to burst free in love,

tonight at the foot of the cross, tomorrow at the tomb,

any day in resurrection.

Only love can set life free.

And it will.

So for this good and painful night: listen, hear, see,

and above all, love.

Mark the Spot

Every Good Friday, every Holy Saturday, as Jesus is placed in the tomb, and life seems suspended for a time, I read to myself this passage from Thomas Lynch's The Undertaking.

I want a mess made in the snow so that the earth looks wounded, forced open, an unwilling participant. Forego the tent. Stand openly to the weather. Get the larger equipment out of sight. It's a distraction. But have the sexton, all dirt and indifference, remain at hand. He and the hearse driver can talk of poker or trade jokes in whispers and straight-face while the clergy tender final commendations. Those who lean on shovels and fill holes, like those who lean on custom and old prayers, are, each of them, experts in the one field.

And you should see it till the very end. Avoid the temptation of tidy leavetaking in a room, a cemete. ry chapel, at the foot of the altar. None of that. Don't dodge it because of the weather. We've fished and watched football in worse conditions. It won't take long. Go to the hole in the ground. Stand over it. Look into it. Wonder. And be cold. But stay until it's over. Until it is done.

On the subject of pallbearers - my darling sons, my fierce daughter, my grandsons and granddaughters, if I've any. The larger muscles should be involved. The ones we use for the real burdens. If men and their muscles are better at lifting, women and theirs are better at bearing. This is a job for which both may be needed. So work together. It will lighten the load.

Look to my beloved for the best example. She has a mighty heart, a rich internal life, and powerful medicines.

After the words are finished, lower it. Leave the ropes. Toss the gray gloves in on top. Push the dirt in and be done. Watch each other's ankles, stamp your feet in the cold, let your heads sink between your shoulders, keep looking down. That's where what is happening is happening. And when you're done, look up and leave. But not until you're done.

So, if you opt for burning, stand and watch. If you cannot watch it, perhaps you should reconsider. Stand in earshot of the sizzle and the pop. Try to get a whiff of the goings on. Warm your hands to the fire. This might be a good time for a song. Bury the ashes, cinders, and bones. The bits of the box that did not burn.
Put them in something.
Mark the spot.

Feed the hungry. It's good form. Feed them well. This business works up an appetite, like going to the seaside, walking the cliff road. After that, be sober.


Lynch, Thomas. The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. New York. W.W. Norton & Company. 1997. pp 197-198.