The sermon at the Easter Day outdoor worship I attended came close to naming the truth of what gospel actually is, but then retreated. Recognizing the fear and exhilaration of the Resurrection witnessed in Mark 16:1-8, instead of saying that the fear is real and defeated, destroyed by the exhilaration (the unpreached God is swallowed whole by the preached God, to use Martin Luther’s way of describing God’s knowing of us and our knowing of God), the pastor told us we live with the fear, it is not cast out albeit it is engaged. We live with the tension of knowing fear and experiencing joy…..and thus, though the preacher did not articulate the result to be a wished-for freedom (for who actually tries to point to a pie-in-the-sky bye and bye? Not many thankfully) the preacher still ended up there: we were given only hope for a liberation now instead of actually being liberated right then and there on a Sunday morning after the Easter baskets and before the Easter Dinner.
But… good in this Easter sermon was a quote from Jurgen Moltmann: something relaying that resurrection is not an appreciation for or a believing in a fact but rather a participation in life. Also good, a poem segment by Walt Whitman about our life being the next verse to be written.
It is very good to turn the Easter message away from a gift of the afterlife toward, instead, the gift of this life and how we participate in God’s life, resurrection, in the living and giving of justice and love in and through our daily lives.
True enough, and good enough, almost.
Almost good enough.
My friend Jill posted on social media on Easter Day wondering just how those living with the grief of lives dead, like her 20 year-old son now gone 8 years, are not simply to live in a wish for a resurrection that somebody else knows but we do not know. In the preaching I heard Easter Day, if Jill were there to hear it, she would have been encouraged to live her life striving to fulfill a completed justice that someday she will know completely but does not know now and her job, our job, if you will, today, is to stay the faithful course (which usually means stay positive, loving, giving, believing in God even as we hedge our bets that any of this God thing is real at all). We sat, in this Easter morning Service, on the pavement of the parking lot outside on the church campus, facing the Sanctuary building. We sat on the outside looking in. It was a metaphor for me on where I was placed upon hearing this pastor’s proclamation: on the outside of complete joy, looking at what someday will be ours, and told that this is our existential truth (my words) that we are to endure if not also embrace.
Here is the truth (may I be so bold): we do not now see and feel resurrection. The last thing we need to do is constantly attempt death-defying and death-denying antics to convince ourselves, and others, that we do. All the church-talk about being blessed (seeing the good, receiving the good) as the method of choice to banish the darkness falls short. Those who speak it know it’s short-comings even as they converse but it is a testimony, it seems to me, in their own hearts to say it (“blessed!”) and so it continues.
I have no problem with recognizing the good and reveling in it. I wish, in fact, I could do more of that (as you are likely to also wish I would as you are furthered depressed by my inability to look the other way and just get on with it: either in epicurean delight or stoic demand!). But please don’t tell me this good is a sign of God. Not when I also see and feel the opposite and, if God be omnipotent (an attribute one cannot redefine away as much as we try to justify God and blame ourselves or some Devil for the evil and suffering we experience) for which, then, God is responsible.
The early disciple of Jesus named Paul writes correctly, I think, that the good news of and from God comes by hearing (Romans letter, chapter 10). This hearing is literal and excludes other senses, including vision (seeing) and emotions (feeling). What this tells us is that there is indeed a way to know God’s goodness even as we flee (and rightly so, but we try to talk ourselves out of it because, well, we aren’t supposed to be afraid of God!) God’s destroying power. Luther called it, as I referenced earlier, knowing and encountering the “preached God” (note the audibleness of it all) even as we run from the “unpreached God” (the majestic divinity who simply acts with impunity and cannot do otherwise). I cannot see or feel God but I can hear God and that word that I hear, “I forgive you and I love you, by my virtue, not yours,” is not only all that I have but also all that I need. So, Luther radically points out, God battles God, not some other supernatural power, and ends victorious. The preached God, revealed audibly, even and perhaps especially now because there just is no seeing Jesus these days, swallows up and eats for lunch the unpreached God, no thanks to us. It is important to remember we are not inventing a second God here. Both unpreached and preached are one God. It is just that God cannot help being less than God unpreached in very much the same way we cannot help being human. But God can help being more than unpreached. God can be preached, the naked God (unpreached: raw, poisonous in majestic glory) clothed (preached: cooked, nutritious in humbled infamy) now and forever in Jesus Christ.
So, don’t try to talk yourselves into seeing and feeling blessed when it is not there. And don’t deliver Easter sermons that rightly acknowledge the tension of knowing a curse while the world parties on but do not deliver a word that resurrects now. Instead, curse the darkness of the unpreached God with the blessing of Christ (not the blessings of Christ!).
Job’s wife told him to curse God and die. He did not. He cursed God and lived. How can such a thing happen? Job got the whirlwind word that changed his life. He received, against all odds and the majestic, all powerful (unpreached) God, the word (preached) that saved him no thanks to him. Blessed there, he lived.
