Luke 24:1-8
We all know what it feels like to go back to the cemetery for the first time. Somehow that first visit is always the hardest visit. Because it makes death real in a tangible way. The one you love is really gone, and they are not coming back.
Shannon Michael Pater, Senior Minister at Central Congregational United Church of Christ in Atlanta, Georgia, relates his own experience of losing someone important to him when he was just a boy:
I always refer to her as “the one who loved me the most, and I knew it.” My great-grandmother loved me in my formative years in ways that continue to inform how I understand myself. She would hold me close to her heart and sing “Jesus Loves Me” in her rocking chair; but it was the way she cherished me and treated others that instructed me in the truth of the lullaby. “Yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so;” but my great-grandmother showed me so.
Like many of the women of her generation, she set an extravagant, welcoming table. Sunday dinner was where you went to be reminded who you are; at that table you knew that everything was going to work out, even if you could not currently see how. It was at that table that I acquired my theology of the Table; the seminary classroom paled in comparison. The presence of God was easy to see in the buttered biscuits, fried chicken, and lumpy mashed potatoes; the fellowship nourished the soul.
My great-grandmother died days before my twelfth birthday and just months before dark shadows came to my family. At the time I needed her most, she was gone and the Sunday dinner table was cleared and not reset. My great-grandmother, who had been born Christmas morning, was buried on Valentine’s Day. My heart was sealed in the sarcophagus with her body; the light seemed so dim that I thought it had been extinguished. I was lost in the dark.
That must have been what it felt like for the women who came to Jesus’s tomb on that first Easter morning. They were lost in the dark without him. They came to do the very last thing for him that they would ever be able to do: anoint his body with spices and wrap it in clean linens and lay it on the shelf in the tomb. But when the women got there, they were stunned to see that the stone that had been covering the entrance to the tomb had been rolled away. And when they dared to go in and look, they saw that Jesus’s body was missing. They couldn’t imagine what might have happened to it, and they just stood there, not sure of what to do.
Suddenly, two angels appeared to them. The women were so terrified that they fell down with their faces to the ground. And who could blame them? It was probably a very frightening thing to see an angel right there in front of you. The first thing the an-gels said to the women was, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” What? What did they say? The women must have been so confused. The reason they came to look for Jesus in the tomb was because they knew he was dead; they had seen him die. They had watched as Nicodemus and Joseph laid his body in that tomb. There was no doubt about it in their minds; Jesus was dead. Where else would they come to look for him?
But the angels also said, “He is not here; he has risen!” Jesus wasn’t dead. He was alive! He had left the tomb on his own; no one had taken his body away. He was nowhere to be found in that cemetery. The women should be looking for him somewhere, anywhere else. Because Jesus had been raised from the dead and was alive!
I absolutely cannot imagine what I would have been feeling or thinking if I had gone back to my mother’s grave for the first time and found that it had been dug up and her body was missing. I can’t even begin to picture two angels meeting me there, telling me that she wasn’t dead, but alive. I don’t know how I would feel if they said to me, “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” But I understand what it means after the fact. I do visit my mother’s grave whenever I travel south and have the opportunity; it is one of the top priorities on my list. I go there to remember, to cry, to smile, and to leave flowers. I know that my mother isn’t really there among the dead. She is not to be found at Cool Springs Cemetery in Forest City, North Carolina. She has risen. She is alive. She is in heaven. And she is with me, in spirit.
We are sometimes guilty of looking for the living among the dead in other ways, too. Nancy Claire Pittman, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Ministry at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma, writes, “We want to tend the corpses of long dead ideas and ideals. We cling to former visions of ourselves and our churches as if they might come back to life as long as we hold on to them. We grasp our loved ones too tightly, refusing to allow them to change, to become bigger, or smarter, or stronger. We choose to stay with what we know in our hearts to be dead, because it is safe, malleable, and so susceptible to burnishing through private memory. The words of the [angels] are a challenge to stop hanging on to the dead and to move into new life. They are reminders that the Holy One dwells wherever new life bursts forth.”
I have been thinking a lot about this idea of looking for the living among the dead as I consider the situation of our church. This church has a wonderful history. There were many good years in the past. I have heard about high attendance, large numbers of children and youth, plays and pageants that were put on, parties and fellowship times, dinners and fundraisers. And those were wonderful occasions and years in the life of the church. But they are only memories. Those things are all in the past. And the past will never happen again. It is, in some ways, dead. And new life is not going to be found there, however much we might wish it to be. You can’t go back and make the church like that again. Don’t look for the living among the dead.
Instead, remember that new life is to be found in and with Jesus, who is risen from the dead. And new life is possible for our church, and it can happen well before the church is actually dead. New life can happen here, but not if we are looking backwards. New life is ahead of us, so we have to look forwards. I remember reading one time that there is a good reason why windshields are so much bigger than rearview mirrors. It’s because we are moving forward, not backward, and we need to see where we are going, not where we have been.
In order for new life to come about, some things will have to change. And change is a scary word, a scary place to be. But we have to step out in faith and make it work. For months, the chairperson of my church council in Warwick had a saying at the top of the agenda for our committee meetings. It said, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” If nothing changes, then the church will see the same results of its actions (or inactions). But if nothing changes, the church is going to continue to decline in membership and in funding for ministry. And sooner or later, that will mean the death of the congregation. I know that nobody wants to see that. So the answer? Be willing to change. Be willing to look for life in new places. Remember that the living cannot be found among the dead. And claim the promise of Easter of hope and resurrection.
Shannon Pater eventually found solace in his grief. He wrote:
For many years, Christmas morning and Valentine’s Day were a source of bitter memories for me; the death of my great-grandmother was devastating to [me]. I never saw men in dazzling white, but I did have to come out of the tomb. I had to stop looking for the living among the dead and seek her among the resurrected; it required sacred memory. I had to remember what she taught me on her lap and at the table; I interna-lized her voice and now incarnate her love. The tale took a long time to tell, but finally, in my own time, I was able to whisper “alleluia.” The long journey of Easter starts at an empty tomb; you have to unpack your own wonder and amazement.
I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And I believe in the resurrection of my mother. I also believe in the resurrection of dying churches. Do you? Then let’s stop looking for the living among the dead; let’s move forward. When we do, we will be amazed at the new life Jesus will create there.
