“The Inevitable Meets the Impossible”

John 20:1-18

A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

Easter Sunday

March 27, 2005

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214 

Phone:  446-0960 FAX:  446-0960

phillchu@twcny.rr.com

          There it is, and here we are, gathered around this . . . victory.  It’s not our victory.  It isn’t up to us.  Most everything is up to us.  Our life, how we live it; our duties and responsibilities, how we spend our time, our successes and failures, our loves and losses, the things we cause to happen and the things that happen to us and how we respond.  Some of it makes us happy and some of it makes us sad.  We are fulfilled by some of it; some of it leaves us empty.  Life is what we make of it, we often hear said.  And so it is.  But Easter says something else.  Easter says that life is what God makes of it. 

          Isn’t this what Jesus had been saying all along, during his brief time on earth?  “Blessed,” he said, are the defeated, the outcast, the marginalized.  These are the ones he chose to associate with, the ones who were most vulnerable to the powerful and strong.  He picked his disciples from a cross-section of society, people who would likely never have chosen to share their lives, let alone love one another.  It was the last who would be first, he said, and those who would be greatest must become the least; those who would lead must serve.  This is hardly the life we’d be inclined to make for ourselves on our own.  And he was the “least” of all, as pathetic a looking king as you’d ever see, standing there as the Roman soldiers and the others mocked him and spat on him, blood trickling down his face from his crown of thorns.  Deserted by his friends he stood there alone against the might and power of the Roman Empire, their machinery of death about to make quick work of him - and “like a lamb led to the slaughter he opened not his mouth.”   

          Did his resurrection change any of this?  Did he come back from the grave to settle the score, to rule over those who ruled over him, to put his friends in high places so now all could see from those high places what God’s justice really looked like?  No.  Many have tried to do so in his name, or in God’s name, in various times and places, including today.  The life that God makes starts in the quiet, out of the way places, like in a graveyard, just before dawn.  It starts where hope has died, and all that’s left is to prepare the corpse for burial. 

          There are places like that, tombs like that, all over.  Recently such a place was Ashley Smith’s apartment in suburban Atlanta.  Her craving for nicotine led her to go out for cigarettes at 2 o’clock in the morning.  She ran into the gun of one Brian Nichols, wanted for rape and murder, who led her back into her apartment, tied her up in the bathtub, and told her he would not kill her if she did everything he said.  Her life had been in shambles.  Her husband was stabbed in a dispute and died in her arms.  She developed a drug habit, been arrested for drunk driving, and had to give up custody of her young daughter to an aunt.

          Maybe it was because her life could not get much lower, but she decided that she would treat her captor like a human being.  She had a copy of Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life in her apartment, which, as some of you know, is a kind of Christian guide for making it through one’s life by continually asking what God has intended for you.  Ashley read from one of the chapters, which centers on the role of Christian service, on the idea that in every moment there is a chance to serve others.  She talked to him, made breakfast, and told him her story, and he listened.  She reports, “He said he thought I was an angel sent from God and that I was his sister and he was my brother in Christ and that he was lost, and God led him right to me.”

          As Andrew Sullivan writes in his essay about this in Time magazine, “One was a monster, the other a woman barely able to care for her 5 - year old, looking for cigarettes in the dark.”  Out of this “tomb,” by way of God’s grace, new life came.  Brian Nichols, Sullivan writes, “saw his purpose: to serve God in prison, to turn his life around, even as it may have been saturated in the blood and pain of others.  She saw hers: to make that happen.”

          Sullivan ends his essay with a quote from a Leonard Cohen song, which kept him going in a dark time in his life: “Forget your perfect offering.  There is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.”

          Easter, I think, encourages us to give up on perfection - not to try any less to be the best we can be, not to rest from our responsibilities to others - but to not seek perfection in these things.  We should not forget that Easter has its beginnings in our refusal to accept God’s love, our decision to rely on our own strength and our own resources.  These are admirable qualities, but it does not take much to turn them against others and to cut ourselves off from God.  If life is what we make it, we can make quite a mess of it. 

          Easter isn’t interested in the past.  We can be assured that human justice will, in its imperfect way, attend to what has been, and it is our responsibility at the very least to see both victims and victimizers as human beings, whether or not they act like it.  Easter is interested in the future.  Our Lord meets us in a new way, a new way for him, a new way for us.  “Do not hold me,” the resurrected Christ says to Mary, who didn’t recognize him in the light of the early morning, and because she was expecting to see a corpse.  Her hope was dead, as dead as he was.  When hope has died we expect that women who meet the gun of a murderer at 2 o’clock in the morning is the kind of situation that can only end tragically.  When hope has died there are only ashes and mourning.  But even now new life is stirring beneath the ashes of the inevitable certainty of death. 

          Mary heard him say her name, and what came flooding back were memories of his companionship, the closeness of his love, the sound of his voice.  All things from the past.  But she couldn’t hold on to that.  He would be present in a new way from now on, in the way that he said, in a way that anyone could hear him say their name when hope has died, or when we’ve made a mess of the life we’ve tried to make, or when events have conspired to back us into a corner from which no escape seems possible. 

          Easter meets the inevitable with the impossible - inevitable to us, impossible for us.  Our faith is built on the witness of those who saw and heard the impossible meet the inevitable - and whatever you think about what actually happened on that first Easter morning, it is the witness to the victory of the impossible that has touched and turned and transformed the lives of believers ever since.  You can’t kill it, not because we won’t give up hope but because God won’t give up on God’s world, won’t give up on us.

          Once there was a large gathering in the old Soviet Union, where a very learned man spoke for an hour on the merits of atheism, a very reasonable human doctrine.  When he was finished, a young Russian Orthodox priest asked if he could respond.  The moderator said, “Yes, but you can only have five minutes.”  The priest replied, “I won’t need that much time,” and strode down the aisle, up to the platform, up to the microphone.

          He looked out at the large crowd and shouted out in a loud voice, “Alleluia, Christ is Risen!”  And the response thundered back, “The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!”

          The priest turned to those on the platform and said, “That is my speech.  I need no more time.”

          Easter meets the inevitable with the impossible, and we are witnesses - maybe reluctant witnesses.  Maybe, like Mary at first, we think that our salvation depends on holding on to what we’ve had or what we’ve known of God’s love and grace and forgiveness and can only witness to that.  Maybe the inevitability of the world’s suffering and despair holds us back from new life, and we focus more on our own imperfection than the light of God shining through its cracks.

          But this is the day that Lord has made, and ours are the lives God would shape and form and transform this day.  Give witness this day to the life that continues to be victorious over death, the light that refuses to go out - for Christ is risen, He is risen indeed! 

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