"Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

In the Gospel of Luke, the women came to the tomb with spices to prepare Jesus’s body for burial according to tradition. They worried about who would roll the heavy stone away from the tomb so they could do their work. But they arrived to find the stone already moved and no body. And from the men who waited for them there at the entrance to the tomb came the question, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

In that question is the meaning of Resurrection for me and the challenge it presents for my life. Why do we find the living among the dead? It shouldn’t be that the living would choose to be among the dead. But as I look back over my life there have been times when I have hidden from life there among the dead.

My life is a series of deaths and rebirths: times when my old life is over and a new life must begin. And the awesome promise of the Resurrection is that it will begin again. The first time I spoke in this church I talked about a time of great darkness in my life—a time when there seemed no future. That was for me a time of hiding among the dead. I didn’t want to be noticed and I couldn’t ask for help, so I withdrew from the fullness of life and hid there in the darkness. That wasn’t the only time I have died and been reborn, but from that time on I have known that however painful it is to be reborn, I will be.

My mother’s death, my sister’s divorce, a time of chronic illness, the break of a close relationship with my brother, my call to ministry—these are all times when life as I knew it ended and new life began. Each time I struggled to make sense of things that made no sense and each time I found myself in a place of darkness and confusion. These are never overnight events—they are long and painful and I struggle to hang on to old, familiar, much-loved patterns of behavior and understanding. But once the process starts there is no turning back. It is truly a time of new birth and like a baby I am clumsy and fragile and I need once again to learn things I thought I knew.

None of these events compare to death, and yet for me each of them prepares me for that inevitable event in some small way. Because each time I learn the lesson of the pain of death and the joy of rebirth, I believe more fully in the promise of the Resurrection—that in some way death has been overcome by the power of life and hope has overtaken despair.

"Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

I look there because I know that others can be found there.

Whether through the death of a loved one or a dream, the loss of a job or a home, illness of body, mind, or spirit—we sometimes withdraw from life. And we wait for a time there in the darkness, barely alive. And hopefully in that deep darkness comes a glimmer of light and we slowly begin to climb up out of the darkness toward the light of life. And every once in a while in that glimmer of light there is a hand to help us. The hand of someone who cares reaching into the darkness to call us back and help us as we begin our new life.

"Those Who Bow Shall Rise"

And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two angels stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the angels said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen."

There’s a four-year-old in our congregation named Benjamin. Last week he and his father dropped into my office while they were out delivering Easter baskets to Ben’s friends. He was, Ben said…the Easter Benny! Now that’s not just a cute pun because I’m pretty much of a realist when it comes to theology. When I put on my thinking cap and sharpen my pencil and work out the calculations and do the analysis and the real brainwork, well, I place a lot more of my trust and confidence in the Easter Benny than I do in the theological equations that give us the resurrection or God or even the Easter Bunny himself. The way I see it most of the real work of the world—be it the works of creation or imagination or compassion or forgiveness—most of back-breaking heart-wrenching real work of this world gets done by the Easter Bennies—whether they’re the pagan Easter Rebecca’s, or the Christian Easter Mallory’s, or the Easter David’s or the Easter Boti’s or fill-in-your-own—or somebody else’s Easter-Benny-like name.

In the 19^th century, when this and other Unitarian churches were exclusively Christian (and that, by the way, signals my response to the question, "Is this a Christian church?" because my answer is, "Of course, this is a Christian church…but that’s not all we are because we’re also Jewish and Muslim and Buddhist and pagan and things we haven’t thought of yet)…but back to my theme of realism…in the 19^th century, a Unitarian named James Freeman Clarke wrote a Sunday school catechism with questions-and-answers and to the question, "Where do the dead go when they die?" the answer—I kid you not and he was not trying to be funny—the approved answer was "Not very far."

Ours is a here-and-now this worldly…this/this/this/this pay attention to THIS-oriented faith. This person, this child, this pain, this need, this yearning, this hope, this injustice, this outrage, this fleeting not-very-far moment now. Mary Oliver said, "What are you going to do with this—your one wild and precious life?"

This being said, I must now proceed to say that there is—in THIS not-very-far life—there is more than we can see…there more than what I know, for sure…there much more than we think there is.

And here I am not a bit ashamed about mixing up into one grand confabulation…the arrival of spring and the celebration of Easter and I gladly use big words like resurrection and photosynthesis even though I can’t explain either one, and wonderful little words like egg and God, and even shorter fabulous words like "Ah!" and "Oh" and the very best wordless not-words like ________!… I’m not ashamed because life just is more than our heads and our hearts know, and we never never have it all figured out.

There’s a Coleman Barks poem titled "The Railing" that goes like this:

"Nobody knows what’s going to happen next." (That’s what the child yelled out to the stunned people in the restaurant.)