[A recording of the Hallelujah Chorus by the Senior Choir follows the sermon]
Texts: Luke 24: 1-12; I Corinthians 1: 18-21, 26-31
The Parable of the Resurrection
“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart).” Those are the words of e.e. cummings, words that capture something of what it means to celebrate Easter morning. Here are e.e. cumming’s lines:
I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart. I am never without it –
Anywhere I go, you go; whatever is done by only me is your doing.
Here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart.
We’re gathered once again to mark this event called Easter. I wonder: what do you carry in your heart this morning? I wonder as well about the disciples on the first Easter morning, arriving early on the scene – what were they carrying with them? What secrets, what burdens, what loves, what desires, what pain, what longing did they, do you, carry in your heart? Hold on to those questions, prompted by our encounter with e.e. cummings. Hold on to the question of the things we carry, for they shall help us to understand this parable called resurrection.
Here’s one of the things many of us carry in our hearts on Easter morning. We arrive wondering if we’re being asked to swallow a whopper about a man getting out of the grave. Many of us arrive having a little argument in our heads about just how much of this story we can assent to, and just how precisely we can assent to it. Some of us arrive feeling as though we’re bringing ants to a picnic that everyone else is happy to attend. One of the things we carry on Easter morning is the burden of not quite believing the story, which leaves us wondering why we’re here in the first place.
If that’s something you carry, it’s a burden I’d like to relieve you of this morning. I don’t think the story of the crucifixion and resurrection is about intellectual assent. During the season of Lent, we’ve been focused on the parables that Jesus tells throughout his ministry, the slanted and enchanted tales he spins that both distort the world and create openings toward wonder and grace. Could it be that the story of the crucifixion and resurrection are the final and most important parables that the writers convey? Could it be that Easter morning is best understood as another slanted and enchanted tale, one that instructs us on where and how to find God in human life?
One of the peculiarities of modernity is to fixate upon questions of historical veracity when we approach the matter of the crucifixion of Jesus, and his resurrection. We wonder if it actually happened in the way the gospel writers describe it. But what if that’s the wrong approach? Imagine, for example, that after Jesus told his famous story about the Good Samaritan, some early listeners began scratching their heads, and wondering who the Good Samaritan actually was, and just what hospital he had used when he cared for the man lying on the side of the road. Wouldn’t Jesus have creased his brow in confusion, and wondered aloud about the soundness of mind of his listeners? Wouldn’t those listeners be strangely out of touch with the point of the story, fixating upon something superfluous?
So it is with the parable of the crucifixion and resurrection. It’s one of the burdens we moderns all carry when we approach Easter morning. The point isn’t to verify, or even to worry overmuch, about what might actually have happened that morning. The point is what the stories convey about the world. The stories have power because they disclose something true, something real, something deep about God, about Jesus, and about humanity. These are stories that disclose the deepest truths we can imagine about the world, stories that slant and enchant, destabilizing us, and opening toward grace. The Easter story is a parable we desperately need to carry with us right about now.
And so what of the story, the parable, itself? What do the disciples carry with them on that dark morning? The story divides into two parts – before the announcement of resurrection and after. The disciples begin the story carrying a profound burden. But they conclude the story carrying something else entirely, something that renews and rekindles a hope burning inside of them.
The parable of the resurrection begins in the valley of the shadow of death. There, we find several women visiting the tomb where the body of Jesus had been placed. What they carry are spices that they had prepared the day before, spices to anoint and preserve the body of Jesus. What they carry are adornments for the dead. But they also carry their shock, their mourning, and their grief over the loss of their friend and teacher. They carry within them the burden of their trauma.
The women at the tomb are a metaphor for every human being who walks through the valley of the shadow of death. They stand for every single one of us who at some point or another is forced to carry the burden of death – death as the biological conclusion of life, yes, but also death comprehended as betrayal, as estrangement, as abandonment, as exile. They stand as a metaphor for what it is to be unhoused from one’s being, of having to undergo the process of examining everything they had taken to be true. Where once God had seemed to speak through the words and the life of their friend Jesus, the events of the previous Friday had left them feeling exposed, confused and unnerved. That’s something of what it means to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. It is to come undone, to come unmoored, to come unglued from what had once oriented you. It is to carry within oneself a profound anxiety and alienation from the source of life.
It’s an extreme case that the parable of the resurrection is portraying, but not an unfamiliar one. We all know, with varying degrees of familiarity, what it is to walk through the valley of the shadow. We all know, with varying degrees of familiarity, what it is to carry such burdens within our hearts, within our souls. Children know what it is to fear abandonment. Junior high and high school students know what it is to undergo exclusion. They know what it is to feel shamed for something they’ve done, or failed to do. And the rest of us, at different stages of our adult life, know all too well what it is to undergo loss, to undergo disappointment or pain. Often it accumulates in our hearts, and we become heavy laden with all the weighty baggage we carry.
That all took on an entirely new meaning for me when I sat with our new friends Malik and Zahida the other day, and thought about all they’re carrying within them at the moment. They shared what it was like to be going about their lives, running a business, raising their daughter, appearing regularly before immigration officials, and suddenly to be given a date on which they must leave. They shared what it was like to make an excruciating decision about whether to stay and fight or to leave forever. They shared what it was like to go through their house, and to pack only the most essential things. They shared what it was like to lock that house, knowing that they would likely never see it again, and to get in the car and to drive away. They shared the sorrow of what it was like to say goodbye to their family, their friends, their lives, seemingly forever. And they shared what it was like to be driving to the airport during a nor’easter, only to discover that their flight had been cancelled, which gave them time to reevaluate their decision to leave, which eventually gave them the courage to stay, to enter sanctuary, and to let a new legal team go to work on their behalf.
I sat in a kind of mute horror as they shared their story, and I began to wonder what it is to carry the weight of such immense decisions, to carry the weight of such immense struggles. I don’t mean to sound grandiose. I don’t wish to be overly dramatic, but Malik’s and Zahida’s story began to feel like what it must be to walk through the valley of the shadow.
Say you were walking through such a valley. Say you were forced to leave everything you had built, everything you had hoped and saved for, everything you had worked so hard to attain. Say you were unmoored, unhoused, unglued from everything you took for granted. Beyond the burdens you would obviously be carrying, what else would you carry? What would you pack and carry to remind you of who you were, who you are? Is there an object you would take to help you recall the fullness of life, the possibilities that may still come to be, the moment in which you would no longer dwell in the valley of the shadow? Is there something we all might carry to counteract the valley of the shadow and its cruel aftershocks? Tell me: what would you carry?
By now, I fear some of you will think that I’ve mistaken Easter Sunday for Good Friday. I haven’t. Here we arrive at the second part of the parable of the resurrection. After sojourning through the valley of the shadow, the women arrive in the garden and discover a stone rolled away from the tomb. They discover strips of burial linen folded neatly within that tomb. And they discover messengers who remind them of truths they had learned long before, throughout Jesus’s ministry. What do they do with the things they carried? What do they do with the spices they brought to adorn the body? What do they do with the grief, the disorientation, and the mourning that they carried within their hearts? And what do they carry when they leave the garden, and tell the rest of the disciples what they had heard the angels say?
We can’t say for sure. But I like to believe they left the burial spices behind. I like to believe they do it as a sign of their emerging hope, a sign of their emerging courage, a sign of their emerging wonder. And I like to believe they carry within them a rekindled flame of life, brought about by the words of the angel at the tomb. What the angel says is this: don’t you remember what Jesus taught you all those years in Galilee? Don’t you remember that he spoke to you about resurrection? Don’t you remember, in other words, that there is a magic to the world more powerful than death, deeper and truer and more life giving than all the many forms that death takes in the world? Do you not remember the healings that he performed, the way he would take the hand of a man sick and shunned, and somehow draw him back toward life? Don’t you remember the way he would find a way when there was no way, finding food and sustenance where there was none, demonstrating what it was to forgive someone after they had wronged you, what it was to embrace someone after they had been shamed, to love someone after they had been cursed? Do you not remember what it was to be given a renewed sense that God is in love with the world, and that God is in love with the frail and fragile humanity of each and every person within the world? Do you not remember, the angel asks?
I like to believe that the women left the burial spices behind, for it was no longer death that they came to behold. And I like to believe that as they left the garden, they carried within them a reawakening of the soul, a conviction that Jesus was living still. I don’t imagine their anxieties disappeared. Nor do I imagine they stopped feeling the aftershocks of their trauma altogether. I simply imagine that something else begins to take shape within them, something that carried them through that day and the days to come, something they carried deep inside of their hearts. I like to believe that what they carried as they left the scene on Easter morning made all the difference. I like to believe it matters still.
I’ll close with a story. When I asked Malik and Zahida about the things they carried, they shared that one of things they carried on that fateful night of the storm was a children’s book called The Kissing Hand. They carried it for their daughter Roniya.
It’s a parable, both simple and profound. Chester the raccoon is afraid of leaving his home on the first day of school. He wants to be with his toys and his books and his friends. Chester pleads with his mother to let him stay. But his mother is wise, and she shares with Chester the secret of the kissing hand. She opens his tiny fingers into a fan, and then she kisses Chester right in the middle of his palm. And the story says that Chester can feel his mother’s kiss run up his arm and into his heart. Even his face tingles with a special kind of warmth. “Now,” his mother tells him, “whenever you feel lonely and need a little loving, just press your hand to your cheek, and think ‘Mommy loves you.’ And that very kiss will jump to your face and fill you with toasty warm thoughts.” Then she takes Chester’s hand and kisses it. And little Chester feels the assurance of his mother’s love. It makes him brave and strong as he ventures forth into the world. Chester carries that love with him, on his hand and in his heart, and it changes everything for him.
Maybe that’s something of what the parable of the resurrection is about. Maybe in the resurrection, we’re given something to hold onto, something to carry, that is stronger than our fear. Maybe we’re given something to hold onto, something to carry, that is more powerful than exclusion, more mysterious and wonderful by far than all that threatens to undo us. Maybe we’re given something to hold onto, something to carry, that makes us brave, that makes us loving, that makes us generous and compassionate and free. Maybe we’re given something to hold onto, something to carry, that connects us to one another and to the deepest and best parts of ourselves. It’s not that the struggles go away. It’s not that we’ll never walk through the valley of the shadow again. We will, just as the disciples did, even after the resurrection. But maybe the parable of the resurrection is a way of saying that even in the valley of the shadow, God carries you in God’s heart, even as we’re asked to carry God into the world in our own hearts. Maybe Jesus lives when we learn to carry one another in our hearts.
I don’t know what you carried with you when you came today. I don’t know, precisely, what you carry in your hearts. But I hope you carry something more within you as you leave this place. I hope you carry a rekindled sense of a magic deeper and truer and older and more powerful than anything that may assail you. I hope you carry the angel’s rumor of Jesus and his resurrection with you.
I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart. Carry one another’s beating, broken, and beautiful hearts. Amen.
THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS
