The Door is Open

Preached at Prescott Memorial American Baptist Church
April 8, 2012/ Easter Sunday
Mark 16:1-8


I remember it myself. The April 8, 1966 issue of Time Magazine asked on its cover, “Is God Dead?” It was just after the release of Harvey Cox’s book: The Secular City. Bold black letters. I was fourteen. We were the kind of family who kept both the Bible and a copy of a current Time Magazine on our coffee table. Dead? God dead? I had seen my own father’s dead body. I had seen people rolling his casket into the church. Organ music playing in the background. Sweet smelling freshly cut flowers everywhere trying to disguise the reality of death. The preacher standing in his black robe saying reassuring words. Women, including my mother, with handkerchiefs dabbing at their eyes and everyone sniffing. I had seen death, thrown handfuls of dirt into the grave and come back to the church for funeral food.

But what would God’s casket look like? Would it be small and artsy? Huge and too heavy for anyone to lift? And which church would be chosen for God’s funeral? Certainly not the Presbyterians. I had seen Presbyterians smoking cigarettes and I knew God despised that sort of thing. I had seen Catholics drinking beer and wine. Their church would not be chosen. I knew Methodists who danced in their Fellowship Hall and that would leave them out of God’s favor. But beyond the chosen place, after the funeral service … what would we do without God? How would any of us (Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Nazarene…) pray? All of us would be thrown into a pile together: orphans, left alone and outside the eternal life and love of God. We might have to learn how to get along – without God! We might be forced to manufacture some kind of counterfeit love on our own—without God! We might have to stop worrying and trust that life has meaning and we are loved. Imagine that. Just imagine that.

Well Jesus was certainly dead. There’s no question about that. Mary Magdalene, Mary and Salome walked toward the tomb with fear in their hearts because they had seen Jesus and knew he was absolutely dead. This man who had talked about The Kingdom of God was no longer talking. The man who had urged people to be merciful toward one another had received very little mercy in his last hours. Jesus, who had recently raised a friend from the grave, was laid in the grave himself. He was dead and those who knew him best saw it clearly and without a doubt.

So very early on the morning after the Sabbath was over there was a small group of frightened but courageous women who went to the grave to anoint Jesus’ body. Their concern was about the stone. It was very large and heavy. Who would roll it away?
And when they got to the tomb they looked up (they looked up) and saw that there was no need to worry about the stone, no need to be anxious about entry into the tomb. The stone was rolled away. The door was open.

Studs Terkel has captured the story of 69 year old Helen Sclair, a cemetery familiar. She visits and tracks cemeteries as a full time occupation. She says, “I was born into death. My mother died while she was giving birth to me. I grew up in foster care in Lake County, Illinois. My foster family took me to visit my mother’s grave in Missouri. I remember the first visit so clearly. It was a Sunday afternoon and I had welts on both my knees, bee stings. I suppose I was about three years old then.

A few years after that first visit to the cemetery my grandparents started dying. Funerals were in people’s homes back then. I remember one of my grandfathers laid out in his living room and me trying to crawl into that coffin. I wanted to pat his cheek, wake him up. He was the one who taught me to read and I didn't want to let him go.

There was no movie theater in town so folks went to funerals. That was the thing to do. It was a terrible thing if you missed a funeral.”

Ms Sclair says she lived for Saturdays while she was growing up because she spent Saturdays in the cemetery—decorating graves, pulling weeds, tending old tombstones and carrying buckets of water up from the creek to water plants.

She says, “In the nineteenth century everybody knew about death. In the twentieth century nobody knows about death. In the nineteenth century nobody knew about sex. In the twentieth century everybody talks about sex and death has become the new pornography. It’s a cultural crime to talk freely about it. But to my way of seeing things—well, death is a part of life, an important part of real living.”

And real living is full of the hope that comes with recognizing that the stone has been rolled away between death and life. God’s love is the doorway of hope forever.

Yesterday’s Commercial Appeal included a story about my friends, Randall Mullins and Sharon Pavelda. David Waters wrote about their struggle with Randall’s undiagnosed illness. For a while Randall’s swallowing difficulty and his esophageal challenges made the neurologist say it was ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. That’s a death sentence. There is no known cure. Swallowing food was life threatening so Randall got a feeding tube inserted into his abdomen.

Every day presents new challenges. Randall says, “We felt like we were suddenly plunged into the abyss.” Death was knocking at their door and they decided to open it. Were they afraid? Yes. Sharon says, “We have come to believe that being afraid is not the same thing as having no faith.” They try to stay in the present where they can enjoy each moment- as it is, even with its mysteries and fears. They live in the open doorway where love is alive in life and in death.

Death is frightening. The grave leaves us living with sorrow. For many of us the experience of grief is alive and fresh in our hearts. I won’t try to act as though the pain of death can be minimized. I lost my mother a year and a half ago. I saw her lying there in bed--dead--and being dead is very different than being alive. It came suddenly—even though we had been sitting and waiting for over a week. Death comes as a permanent condition. There’s no replay button to push. Once death comes it is final.

Or is it? Is death final? The end? Or is it an opening into something new? Maybe something very familiar? I ask because we are celebrating Easter today, a day when we restore our hope that life is eternal. A day when we celebrate a tomb that could not hold our Redeemer. We, the people of hope, celebrate. A day when three women looked up from their fears and worries to see that the stone was already rolled away.

The door is open for us to recognize that the love of God is alive and intended to give us hope, peace, joy even now. Resurrection is not just about the after-life. It is not only a comfort for those who are grieving.

Resurrection is about new life and new hope right now. Because every minute we live can be a resurrection moment. Now is eternal. The door is open between life and death because the love of God lives with us here and there. In life and in death we are loved by the same God. Whether we live or whether we die we are at home with God.

As Randall Mullins says, “Our fear is in some ways a gift. It gives us opportunity to feel alive and more dependent on the presence of God’s grace.”

We find ourselves worrying about the price of gasoline and whether or not we can afford to get to work, get the kids to school. We worry about the broken relationships in our lives and whether or not we have done enough to bring healing. We worry about our careers and whether or not our work is meaningful enough. We worry about termites, paying taxes, the basement flooding and the refrigerator going out. We all worry; it's part of the human condition to worry.

Right now I encourage you to look up. Like the women at the tomb so many years ago, look up. Raise your chin and let your eyes softly gaze above your head. Just the act of looking up feels hopeful, as if there is something above us that is active and larger than our worries and fears. Even now.

Somehow in one way or another as we look back over our shoulders at by-gone worries and days gone by: the stone has been rolled away. We walked into each moment and found that a way had been made for us to let go of our fears and take hold of our faith. Over and over again.

The door is open. The women walked into the tomb to see that death had not had the last word. Life comes to us through the open door of God’s eternal love for us. And it is life that lasts forever. Beginning now.

Amen