"A Place Called Resurrection" [Easter Season Sermon]

“Christ Pantocrator” mosaic from Hagia Sophia

3 Easter, Year B  [1]

Lessons:

Acts 3:12-19
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48

Psalm 4

A Novel Beginning

“Resurrection” is the name of a town in a novel by Jonis Agee.[2]  

 Life in this small town is filled with dark secrets as well as with the transforming power of love.

The novel is told through the voice of Moline Bedwell, a woman who returns in mid life to her hometown in the Ozarks, a town she fled at the age of sixteen.

These words of Moline open the novel:

“In a person’s life, [she says] there’s always some place that possesses them, I figure, some place that owns a chunk of your soul, and a person cannot dispute it or escape it, not even in her sleep.  It’s the place where desire begins, the place longing brings you back to. For me, that was the little town of Resurrection, right on the edge of the foothills called the Ozark Mountains, smack dab in the middle of Missouri . . . It was as big a town as a person needed, once you’ve been there long enough."

I’ve come to believe that we all have our own version of a place called “resurrection.” 

A place that is always far more than geography.

It’s that place where–sometimes shadowed by fear and regret–our longings and our hopes come together.

Three Revelations

Certainly our Gospel for today takes us to a place like that.

Now perhaps we need to be reminded that this Gospel is the last of three revelations—all of which take place on one single day—that day we call Easter Sunday.

Indeed the other two revelations build up to today’s climax.

The first revelation is where the women arrive very early in the morning to find that the tomb where Jesus’ body had been placed was empty and to discover two men there in clothing shining like lightening proclaiming that Jesus is not here, but is risen as he had told them in Galilee.

And the women then remembered what Jesus had told them

Next came a second revelation where two travelers who had been disciples of Jesus—one named Cleopas—were walking along the road that led to Emmaus. Devastated by the events of recent days, they were joined by a stranger. We are told that stranger was Jesus but that the two travelers didn’t recognize him

As they walk, the stranger engages with them in a conversation about the events that had just taken place in Jerusalem and reminds them what was said in the Scriptures about himself.

When they arrive at the small town of Emmaus to spend the night at an inn, they invite the stranger to join them for a meal.

It was as the stranger took bread, blessed and broke it that the travelers recognize the stranger who had been traveling with them was the risen Lord.

Jesus then vanishes from their sight but the two travelers were so energized by this mysterious encounter that they rush to Jerusalem to join other disciples of Jesus and to tell them what had happened at Emmaus.

After they had arrived in Jerusalem and just as they finished telling their story something happens to that roomful of disciples—it is the third revelation in Luke’s Gospel.

The evangelist begins with these words:

Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

And peace was just what this little group needed to experience.

For by now the disciples were caught up in an almost unbelievable tumble of emotions.

Their initial response was captured by Luke with words like “startled”, “terrified”, and “disbelieving for joy.”

All of a sudden they had to confront a truth more terrifying than their recently shattered dreams following the death of Jesus:  they were beginning to see that death–even a horrifying death by crucifixion was not the end of their story.

Their story was far stranger than they had ever imagined.

There had been a miraculous wrinkle in time.

And so the disciples were invited to touch and to see.

Memories of the Future

Swedish researcher David Ingvar made the intriguing discovery that the human brain creates time paths for future activity.

Much as a preacher hates to admit it, as you are listening to my words this morning you may also be thinking about something else you need to do today or even what you will do if that something else doesn’t work out.

In other words, you might right now be creating time paths, or action plans for the future.

These time paths make up what Ingvar calls “memories of the future.” [3]

All of a sudden, in that little room in Jerusalem at the end of a momentous day, there were time paths opening up for Jesus’ disciples. 

They were starting to create “memories of the future.”

During the course of Jonis Agee’s novel, the transformation that Moline gradually experienced in the little town of Resurrection was the gradual emergence for her of a set of “memories of the future.”

She began to discover that Resurrection–her place of return–was rich with promise for her future.

“There had to be mercy . . [she reflected]. . because without that, none of us would ever be able to imagine life . . .

Maybe the only proof we got was that there was such a thing as hope to begin with.Otherwise, the world was just too damn mean and ugly to be worth staying around for.

I knew I’d been in hell for years, numb to love, and I couldn’t say it wasn’t of my own making.  I just knew that getting out of it made this place, this poorly equipped, half-ass little town in the middle of the Ozarks, as good as any place I could ever hope for. A sort of paradise.

I could bear anything at this moment, just as long as I got to stand here and feel the grace of good light . . .”

Each of us, I believe, longs to find the “grace of good light” in our place called Resurrection.

Where Past and Future Meet

Moline came to understand what the disciples in Luke’s gospel came to understand and what we can come to understand as well:

That our “memories of the future” are intimately woven together with our past.

“. . . They were wrong, [as Moline put it] we’d all been wrong. You couldn’t outrun your history, you couldn’t just abandon your past.  It was all there someplace, waiting for the future, waiting for you.”

The encounter between the risen Christ and the disciples led to a teachable moment and this brought back the past once again.

But instead of the immediate past which just a few moments earlier had plagued and devastated the disciples,

Jesus brought them into the deep past–Jesus brought them more fully into their own saving story.

He artfully drew threads of connection and fulfillment to Moses, to the prophets and to the psalms.

Jesus took them to their writings—the scriptures–-to the sacred story of their deep past–and then went on to open up for them a call into the future, a call more compelling than they had ever known before.

They were now to be witnesses to the world of God’s resurrection life and to the gift of God’s forgiveness.

“Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

So how can we come in this Easter season to our own place called Resurrection, to that “small town” of longing and desire we carry in our hearts.

How can we go beneath the fears and the shadows—the regrets and the disappointments that cloud our lives—to hear the again the words of the living Christ spoken to us, personally:

“Peace be with you.”

How can we come to a place of recognition, to where we can see and touch for ourselves that divine presence which alone gives life and hope?

How can we rediscover and claim our own deep past, our own saving story?

And then how can we live into those powerful “memories of the future” which can open for us pathways of sanity and service, justice and hope, in a world riddled with confusion, conflict and chaos?

Moline described her town of resurrection:

“It was as big a town as a person needed, once you’ve been there long enough."

During this Eastertide we are invited—you and I—to return to that deepest part of ourselves—to that place called “Resurrection”—and there to discover in a personal way the life-changing presence of the Risen and Living Christ.

For Alleluia. Christ is risen.

Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.

____________________

Endnotes

[1] This sermon was given at St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday, April 15, 2018.

[2] Jonis Agee, South of Resurrection. (New York:  Penguin Books, 1997).

[3] I first saw this work discussed in Leonard I. Sweet, soulTsunami  (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1999), p. 24.  A further exploration of this subject is available.