Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 20, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Let’s face it. We live in a world that to all appearances is dominated by death. There’s death everywhere. Death to the left of us, death to the right of us, death behind us, and, for all us, death ahead of us. We have just seen the latest in the endless series of human endeavors that use death as a tool, as an instrument of policy. Sometimes it seems that the powers of the world so systematically create, maintain, and use institutions and policies that produce death on a massive scale that we must almost conclude that death is not merely their tool, it is their intention. A great lay theologian of the 1960s and ‘70s named William Stringfellow, who has been important to me perhaps because like me he was a lawyer, reached precisely that conclusion. Maybe we don’t want to go that far, but I think we have to concede at least that we often willingly accept government policies and economic, political, social, and legal structures that produce death, even death on a massive scale, as their foreseeable and inevitable consequence. Sometimes, as much as I don’t want to, I pretty much have to concede that Stringfellow was right.

We certainly see the moral force of death at work in the way the world’s powers reacted to Jesus. Jesus threatened their legitimacy. More than that, actually. His word of God’s Kingdom delegitimized their worldly kingdoms. It revealed their claims of supremacy and moral authority to be lies. Their response was predictable. It wasn’t dialogue, mediation, or reconciliation. It wasn’t even debate or argument. It was: "Crucify him!" In other words, it was the usual and customary resort of the powers of the world to death as a tool of policy, as a means toward the end of preserving their positions of power, privilege, and authority. It is ever thus. The tomb is the world’s answer to God.

But we’re here today because we know that there is a better way. We’re here to celebrate that better way, to rejoice in it, to revel in it, to open our hearts to it, to let it flow into and through us and to transform us into more joyful, faithful servants of our risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. That better way is God’s way. It is the way of life. Christ’s Resurrection is God’s eternal No! to the power of death. It is God’s eternal Yes! to life-life here and now and eternal life forever more. The tomb was the world’s answer to God in Christ Jesus. The empty tomb is God’s answer to the world.

And it’s striking, isn’t it, that in Mark what have for an Easter story is just that-an empty tomb, together with a simple statement from an angel that Jesus is not there, he has been raised from the dead. There are more verses in the current version of Mark after verse 16:8, where our reading ended this morning. In those verses, the women do tell what they had heard and Jesus does appear to the Disciples and then ascend to heaven. But those verses were not part of the original Gospel of Mark. Other writers added them much later. The actual Gospel of Mark ends with an empty tomb and an angel announcing the Resurrection. The angel tells the women (in all four Gospels the first witnesses to the Resurrection, and the first Apostles, that is, those sent to bring the Good News of the Resurrection, are women) to go tell the others, but they don’t do it. They don’t do it because "terror and amazement had seized them" and "they were afraid." So as the Gospel of Mark originally ended, we are kind of left hanging. We are left wondering how the story is going to play out. Are the others going to hear the great good news? Will they really see Jesus in Galilee as the angel said? I suppose given the way this Gospel originally ended we could even wonder whether the angel was really telling the truth. The fact that the huge stone that had so worried the women had in fact been rolled away and that Jesus’ body was not there certainly suggest that he was telling the truth. As a lawyer I can tell you, however, that those things sure don’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was.

Now, maybe you find that ending unsatisfactory. Those later writers who added accounts of Resurrection appearances to Mark’s Gospel certainly did. And yet, it often happens for me when I spend time with Mark’s version of things that I find myself strangely attracted to aspects of Mark that at first reading seem quite unsatisfactory. Let me try to explain why I have come really to like Mark’s strange, seemingly incomplete ending to his Gospel.

We start with the tomb and what it signifies. The tomb is of course a symbol of death, in this case specifically the death of Jesus the Christ, God’s Anointed One, the one whom we confess to be Lord and Savior. The tomb should have been the end of the story. On this earth at least, for us the tomb is the end of the story. Tombs say to us: It’s over. Death has had the last word. This person’s story has ended; there’s nothing more to tell. That’s the wisdom of the world. When the world wants to be rid of someone it kills him. Problem solved, or so the world thinks. In the world’s mind, death closes the book.

Our Easter story starts with such a tomb. It starts with such an end. The three women of Mark’s account are coming to the tomb bearing spices. That means they are coming to perform the traditional rites for the dead, for a body that is finished once and for all. As far as they know, it’s over. Death has had the last word. Jesus is dead. There was no doubt about that. He’d been crucified and buried. Not only that, the tomb had been sealed with a huge stone. It was over. He was dead and buried, and he was going to stay that way. These women knew the way the world works. They knew what to expect. They were in mourning because someone they had loved was dead, and there was nothing they could do about it. Most of us have been where these women were. As many of you know, I’m there right now.

When they got to the tomb, however, there was just this one little problem. That huge stone that had so worried them had been rolled away, and Jesus wasn’t there! Instead, there was an angel telling them something absolutely impossible: "He has been raised; he is not here. He’s on his way to Galilee." It can’t be! People who are alive get up and walk out of caves. People who are alive go from Jerusalem to Galilee. Dead people don’t. The world doesn’t work that way Death is death, and that’s that. End of story.

Well, with the world yes; but we aren’t talking about the world here. We’re talking about God. And with God, clearly, death is not the end of the story. Death is not the end. God is not about to let death have the last word. And so that we may know that, so that we may live with the hope, indeed with the assurance, that our life with God does not end when we die, God raised Jesus from the grave, God got Jesus out of that tomb and sent him on his way to Galilee resurrected in glory and alive once more. With God, life not death has the last word. That empty tomb is the sure and certain sign that life with God goes on, that the way of God is life not death.

And that really is why I like Mark’s apparently incomplete ending to the story. The story is open ended. It leaves so many questions unanswered. It leaves a canvas as yet unpainted, a novel as yet unwritten. It leaves not certainty but possibility. It leaves not a story told but a story to be lived, a far country to be discovered, a journey to be taken, a treasure to be unearthed. And that’s the way it is with life, isn’t it? We have not yet lived our futures. They remain fields of unlimited possibility, in this life and beyond this life. Mark, the original Mark, leaves us with the unknown horizon of that unlimited possibility. Mark invites us to walk toward that horizon and to do it with the knowledge that if we do Jesus will meet us there, in this life and beyond this life.

Unknown horizons are scary places. Life is a scary place. The three women of Mark’s story were so frightened by the totally unexpected and open-ended possibility of new life that the empty tomb presented to them that, at first at least, they couldn’t even tell anyone about it. We often react the same way, or at least I know I do. And yet, because of Easter we know that Jesus Christ, risen from the dead and alive once more, is there in our future, there beyond the limited horizons we impose on ourselves, there in this life and beyond this life inviting us to new possibilities, beckoning us to new life.

It is indeed easy to conclude that the way of the world is death; but as our Call to Worship this morning said: "By our presence here, we are saying that we choose life." We choose life with all of its uncertainties and scary possibilities because, while death may be the way of the world, life is the way of God. We are here choosing life because we can, and we can because God raised Jesus from the dead to be our Lord and Savior, to be with us on the journey, to be with us as we move into those unknown horizons, those limitless possibilities, that new life that God places before each one of us. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah! Amen.