Sermons from the Pulpit
The First Day of Creation
Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on Easter Sunday, April 23, 2000, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.
Exodus 14:10-14, 19-31; 15:20-21; Mark 16:1-8
Easter performance anxiety is a fact of the preacher's life, you might expect. But in fact most preachers eventually receive a revelation that sets them free from it. One of them describes it thus: "It has always helped my anxiety about the Easter sermon to remind myself that God is the center of attention not me. I fall into thinking I have to prop up the Gospel with mighty preaching when actually the reverse is true. So let's calm down and let the work of God work."
Or, as I myself like to say, all we have to do on Easter is show up.
Having now lowered your expectations about as far as it is possible to lower them, I am ready to begin preaching.
"He is going ahead of you," said the surprising young man in the white robe sitting inside the otherwise empty tomb. He is going way ahead of you, so far ahead that he's out of sight, but whose fault is that? He can't help it if you're so slow of foot and so short of sight that you can't see him. You have always had trouble keeping up with him, and you always will, because you are so thick in the head - that's the point that Mark's Gospel is continually driving home, from beginning to end. But not to worry, Mark also says: Just keep moving in the direction in which the Spirit tells you he's headed, and when you get there he'll be there waiting for you.
At what point does this stop being directed only at the disciples, and start having something to do with us? Imagine that the surprising young man is speaking to you, and imagine how you might respond.
If it were me, I'd want to know where I'm supposed to go, in what direction, in order to get to the place where he's going to meet me. And the surprising young man would answer, "Why, to Galilee! He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you. Don't you remember?"
"But that was the disciples!" I protest. "That was two thousand years ago. What does Galilee have to do with me? Where am I supposed to go, what direction should I take, where will Christ be waiting for me to find him?"
And the young man would answer that question with another question, "Well, dummy, what is Galilee?" And then, at last, if I have any wits at all, I might begin to see.
These people are Galileans. Galilee is where they are from, it's where they would have gone even if he hadn't told them to go there, even if he hadn't told Mary to tell them to go there; it was the only place they had to go to.
So go home. Go where you would have gone anyway. Go back to the place where you keep the clothes that you wear every day, and take off your Easter going-to-church clothes and put them on. Go back to whatever you're having for Easter dinner, and back to whomever you're having it with, and back to whatever else is left of Easter Day including the dirty dishes and the wretched weather and the resurfacing of all your family complications that every holiday brings forth, and tomorrow go back to the rest of the same old same old. Thus says the Lord through the surprising young man in white. Happy Easter.
This is the way that the Gospel according to Mark has been driving us nuts for these two thousand years - and the way Mark ends his Gospel is the worst of it. The women went out and fled, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The end. That's no ending! Why, in the Greek New Testament, the Gospel according to Mark ends with a conjunction, as if the pen ran out of ink in the middle of the sentence.
Mark's last chapter was found to be so unsatisfactory that it got rewritten at least three times in the early centuries of the church, three different bogus tacked-on endings, all of them pious frauds perpetrated by people who were afraid this dreadful ending was bad for the faith of the faithful. Scientific textual analysis has exposed this and Mark's original non-ending has been restored, but that doesn't mean anybody has to like it.
And I agree: It is a dreadful ending. But it's a terrific beginning, and that's what Mark was after. This is deliberately designed to be the Gospel that has no end.
Or maybe I should say it's the Gospel of which the end is to be written by the hearer and the reader, which is to say by us.
Two things the early church did right off the bat that set it apart as a distinct community with its own peculiar witness. It didn't repudiate Judaism. It went on serving the God of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel. It went on being the people of the Book, and that Book went on being what we are now pleased, in innocent arrogance, to call the Old Testament. But two things it did that were new: It began talking about Resurrection, that scandalous thing, and it moved its Sabbath and holy day from the seventh day of the week to the first day of the week. This is the behavior of people who are interested in beginnings, not endings.
You know your Genesis. You know that the first day of the week is the first day of Creation. In the beginning the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. That was the day that God created light, and separated night from day, and it was good. And if you ask Mark, Easter morning is just as huge a beginning as that, Easter morning is Creation's new beginning, and a dead man walking back to Galilee is God's wind blowing all over again.
So you know where to go from here. Go home. Back home. If there's any question about where that is, there's an easy way to tell: It's probably a place or a situation that wears you out and you were kind of hoping God would take you away from it. Go there.
Only be warned: Christ has gone ahead of you and will be there waiting for you when you get there. Always has been, in fact, but you weren't expecting him and might have missed him. Now you've heard the story and you won't be able to miss him. Unless you're really determined to - we can deny anything successfully, at least in our own eyes, if we work at it hard enough. Such is human nature.
But those who are less than fully resolute in their denial - and I imagine that includes all of us, or what would we be doing here? - those who are less than fully resolute in their denial will find themselves getting ambushed by this resurrected person even on their own familiar turf, even in their deepest, best-worn ruts.
A walking wind from God with flesh and a face, hands and a voice, who rolls away large stones or commands them to be rolled away. Always in pursuit of us, which is why he's been called the Himmelshund, the Hound of Heaven, and such a good pursuer that he gets where we're going before we do and waits there to welcome us back into our own homes.
This is what you are going home to. The first day of the week, the first day of Creation, and the day of whose Resurrection? It was Mary who got resurrected in this Gospel, didn't she? The Resurrection you're heading home to could be yours. Alleluia: Christ is risen.
Amen
He is going ahead of you. -Mark 16:7