I
thank Susan for writing a luminous Easter poem for us. Poetry, after all, is the language of
Easter. We may speak in prose the rest
of the year, but on Resurrection Sunday, only mystical metaphor and surprising
paradox and bracing imagery will do. If you left behind your frilly Easter
bonnets today, that’s fine, but I hope you brought your poet’s heart. We simply
cannot sing alleluias or declare the
great affirmation that “Christ has risen!” unless we do so as poets.
So
before we peer into the emptiness of Christ’s tomb, I invite you to hear a poem
that introduces other images of emptiness.
This poem, attributed to the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu,
notices the empty space in a wheel, a pot, and a room:
Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn't
is where it's useful.
Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot's not
is where it's useful.
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn't,
there's room for you.
So the profit in what
is
is in the use of what
isn't.[i]
Emptiness
has value: in use of things, in the life of faith. This poem names three common
items that are valued because of the space they don’t occupy. A wheel is formed by the
spaces between the spokes. A clay pot is able to
function because it creates an
empty space.
And a room is able to hold you because there is emptiness
within.
When we look at wheel or pot or room, we usually pay attention to the
materiality that takes up space,
but
the poet notices the importance of the empty space—where the pot,
for instance, is not. The poet reminds us to see
emptiness—within a wheel, a pot, a room—as positive. Emptiness supports functionality and
possibility.
To this list of things that are
useful because of the space they make possible I would add Christ's tomb.
This sermon is my ode to the emptiness of the tomb that allowed the Jesus of
history to walk forth as the Christ of faith.
When
the women who came to anoint Jesus’s body with spices and oil first enter Luke's story of the resurrection, they peer into the
dark. They assume they’ll meet death.
Death is perhaps life’s greatest certainty, especially graveside. But this
tomb is empty. Oddly, Jesus is neither
in the grave nor anywhere else in the twelve verses the lectionary offers today
to celebrate resurrection. In this
entire pericope, there is no mention even of Jesus' name. It's as if Jesus has fallen off
the stage in the drama of his life. Except in the first chapter of Luke, which
reports events prior to Jesus's birth, and the first verses of
chapter 3, which focus on John the Baptist, this is the only portion of Luke's Gospel devoid of Jesus's words or deeds. The text itself is as empty of his
name as the tomb is empty
of his body. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother
of James are named. Peter is named. Two men dazzlingly arrayed are described. But at the very point when Luke's readers
anticipate seeing evidence of Jesus's defiance of death, they find no sign of him. There's no trace of the object of their
search who is the subject of Luke's Gospel.
No
signs of life. But no evidence of death. Instead,
we enter
into emptiness.
The
emptiness of which this story speaks, let me hasten to say, is not
nihilistic. If we think a vacant space has no possibility for meaning, if we trust solely in what is prosaically physical and
material--then the Easter tomb may confound or terrify us--as it first
unsettled the women who entered into that dark abyss.
But
inside that empty tomb is potentiality.
Because inside that tomb there is hope for new life.
And inside that tomb there is a means of new
direction.
Easter,
like any new spiritual adventure, like Creation itself, starts with emptiness: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the
Spirit of God was hovering” (Genesis 1: 1-2a). Emptiness was the condition for Creation that
Genesis captures poetically.
Modern science is also impressed with the potency of emptiness. I realize I promised you poetry today, but science sometimes sings to me as elegantly as poetry. NASA’s website explains what has only recently been discovered: that “roughly 70% of the Universe is dark energy,” that dark matter makes up about 25%” of the Universe, and that “the rest--everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter--adds up to less than 5% of the Universe.”
One of several current explanations for dark energy “is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood. The first property that Einstein discovered is that it is possible for more space to come into existence” and “’empty space’ can possess its own energy. Because this energy is a property of space itself, it would not be diluted as space expands. As more space comes into existence, more of this energy-of-space would appear.” Thus, an essential, expansive energy is still at work today, which scientists at this point simply, poetically, dare I say, spiritually, call a mystery.[ii]
In
the Christian epic, the mystery we retell is about an empty tomb that becomes
a womb out of which the Risen Christ somehow, in some sense, emerges. In liminal space, the burial clothes of Jesus
are cast aside, and the Christ of faith is able to stride forth, unfettered by
death clothes, imbued with a renewed and renewable energy, animated by God’s
loving Spirit.
And
ever since, followers of Jesus have used baptismal words and waters, in which
they are poetically “buried” and then raised from, to embark on a similar
spiritual journey that one Gospel writer called a new birth. We don’t pretend that the faith journey is as
simple as a ceremony, but we do think there are spiritual lessons for us that
are pictured as a death to the old and a rising to the new. Other religions have other beautiful symbols
and ceremonies depicting transformation.
But baptism is our practice and our poem.
In
order to follow the Risen Christ, we figuratively enter the tomb until we cast
off, like binding grave clothes, deadening compulsions and patterns: our
killing prejudices, bitterness, greed, and anger; our destructive feelings of
pride or unworthiness; our life-sapping addictions to substances or others’
approval; our enslavement to culture’s claim on us; our plain ol’ meanness or
fear or our need to be in control.
When
we can enter an emptiness where our truest self can separate from the death
clothes we thought made up who we are—which often happens after great loss or
disillusionment—it at first feels like a kind of death. But this little death
can eventually lead to newness and growth.
The Spirit that hovered over the waters of creation still moves among us
today, bringing life from emptiness. The
dark tomb may actually become for our new selves a womb. So says the hopeful poem
of resurrection.
What
happens inside the empty tomb for individual Jesus followers can happen for the
church itself. As Christ's new body, the church
needs a spaciousness. In the tomb we
have not only received new life but a new message. Christ is risen is the message we must live
out and share—though maybe not in ways you’ve come to think of as evangelism. All the other Gospel accounts of the
resurrection include instruction at the empty tomb to tell the other disciples,
but in Luke that instruction seems implicit and the women do indeed tell the
others. Of course, their message is
considered “an idle tale” at first, a crazy story.
Some may think we’re crazy, new
church, as we leave behind the petrified parts of 20th century
Christianity and move out to follow the still moving spirit of Jesus, to listen
to the still speaking God. Let’s thank
God the Church can return to the tomb of rebirth at times, but let’s not hunker
down into an entombed existence. Instead, let’s seek what enlivens our spirits
and gives life and liveliness to others.
So here is my prayer for us on this
Day of Resurrection. I think you and I
have been with Jesus in the tomb for 3 days, figuratively, for 3 years,
literally. I have gratefully experienced
with you God’s spaciousness and creativity among us. I think we have been
learning some difficult but saving lessons that apply to us as individuals and
some, which I’m speaking of now, that apply to us as a faith community, and
these lessons are not quickly learned if they are deeply learned.
For instance, I think we are
casting off hand-me-down doctrines if they reek of death. I think we are in the process of recognizing
that God’s liveliness is not served by clinging to others’ limiting expectations
of the programing a church must offer, or the kind of building a church must
occupy, or a list of “thou shalt nots” the church must maintain, or liturgy and
language the church must use.
We are participating in what
Phyllis Tickle describes, in The Great
Emergence, as a great rummage sale the Church holds every 500 years or so,
in which the dominant forms of Christianity lose their place of pride and some
items in the Church’s attic get tossed.[iii] That
doesn’t mean we are discarding traditions willy nilly. In fact, we are reclaiming some previously
under-valued traditions. But we are
trying to use these days of pared-down spaciousness of mind and heart and
spirit to see ourselves—and the Christian faith—unfettered by culture’s trappings.
I think, my friends, that Open Table is increasingly going to walk out of the Open
Tomb to bear witness to God’s limitless love. I think we will increasingly be
able to speak and act against the powers of death that continue to crucify with
military might, religious slogans, corporate greed, entrenched prejudices,
short-sighted leadership, and disregard for the poor.
As we exit the tomb/womb of renewal, having looked for Jesus where we thought he would be, let’s remember that he’s likely a step--or probably a leap, quite possibly a light year--ahead of us. Our goal is not more bucks in the plate or more butts in the pews. Our aim is to follow Jesus. To a place of emptiness. And new life beyond.
Christ is not here. Christ is risen.
We postmodern, poetic Christ-followers
can proclaim that message without fully fathoming it. We can proclaim it best by living it. The God we have met in Jesus is alive. Alleluia!
[i] Lao Tsu,
“The Uses of Not” from Lao Taoe Te Ching.
Trans. Ursala K Le Guin. Reprinted in Leading from Within, ed. Sam M. Intrator
and Megan Scribner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007) 197.
[ii] http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/
[iii] Tickle,
Phyllis. The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why. Grand
Rapids: Baker, 2008.
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