Wander to Be Found

 My dad’s whistle was notorious in our neighborhood. He can do one of those really loud whistles, you know, the kind where you put two fingers in your mouth and blow like when you’re at a Neil Young concert and you don’t want to shriek “whoo hoo!” like a little girl, not that it’s bad to sound like a little girl, but anyway, he doesn’t even need his two fingers. Somehow, he just magically curls his tongue in just the right way, blows, and out comes a piercing sound that bounces off of the building of the grade school across the street from our house. Everybody knew the Frayer whistle, and so, everybody knew when we were having dinner, or when it was time for our baths, or when we hadn’t finished all of our homework. And we Frayers knew that if we heard that whistle, we had about two minutes to race home, or face the consequences. 

But as long as we were in earshot of that whistle, the neighborhood was fair game. We raced our bikes through the streets, we climbed trees, we played kickball in the parking lot. We performed dance routines on the steps of the grade school, dug in the dirt underneath the giant oak, and searched for buried treasure and dinosaur bones among the weeds and wild onions next door.  After a brief lecture about avoiding windowless vans and never taking candy from a stranger, we could wander and roam all day. We were free. And that whistle was our tether that brought us back home. We were the sheep. And Dad, or maybe Dad’s whistle, or maybe my mom’s homemade Mac and cheese was the shepherd.

There are some pretty funny stories out there on the internets about sheep that have gone astray. There was “Shrek,” who hated getting sheared so much that one day he just up and ran away. On shearing day, when all the other sheep were lining up for the shearing shed, Shrek was nowhere to be found. Somehow, no-one knows for sure, he got out of his pen and went to live alone in a cave in the nearby wilderness. I suppose, he’d just had enough of flock life, and wanted to see what the great world out there had to offer. He escaped capture for six years, until his owner came upon him one day. At first, he didn’t even realize that Shrek was a sheep, let alone his sheep. But maybe it was the look in Shrek’s eye, or maybe it was Shrek’s response to the sound of his shepherd’s voice, but somehow he finally recognized this sheep as his. He took him home and finally had him shorn. They took over sixty pounds of merino wool fleece off of him, enough to make twenty men’s suits. Shrek had so much wool surrounding him that there were old wives tales going around that he’d carried evidence of wolf attacks, but never got a scratch. He became an icon, renowned throughout the land, and even got to meet the prime minister. Then there was Baarack (get it?!) who also ran off from his flock, and when they found him, he could hardly see, he was covered in so much overgrown fleece. And of course there was Shaun and Ewenice (get it?!) And Pickles, all domesticated merino sheep who wandered from the fold and were eventually found, carrying massive amounts of wool on their bodies. All of these, of course, pale in comparison to Chris, who wandered on the lam (get it?!) In the wilderness for over seven years. When they finally found him, they had to give him a sedative so that they could shear off over ninety pounds of fleece while he slept, enough to put him in the Guinness Book of World Records. He was terribly weighed down by the stuff, he could hardly see for it covering his eyes, and he would walk with a limp in his back legs for the rest of his life because he carried all that wool on his back for so long. 

There’s not much difference between kids and sheep. Or adults and sheep. Prone to wander, lord, I feel it.

But see, I think we need both the sheep and the shepherd. The sheep aren’t much without the shepherd. And the shepherd needs his sheep. We need the adventurous spirit of the fifth grader testing her boundaries, streamers flying from her handlebars and glow-in-the-dark spokey dokes clicking on the rims of her tires, and we need her dad with his special whistle to tell her when it’s time to come home. We need the adventurous spirit of Shrek or Pickles or Chris, so that we can break out of our pens and take our chances in the wild wild world. And we need to be found so that our good shepherd can finally take some of that weight off of us that we’ve been carrying around for so many years. I mean, it’s heavy and we’re starting to limp and bump into trees, after all. We need a shepherd who can recognize us when we’re filthy and full of sticks and shards and shreds from years in the woods, when we’re so covered in our own wool and muck and grime that we can’t even see straight. And we need to listen hard for the sound of his voice so that we can trust that he is here and has come to take us home. We might even need a mild emotional or spiritual sedative so that the shepherd can do his work to free us from so much junk so we can frolic and play in the pasture with our friends once again. 

The point is - where can we go from God’s spirit? Where can we hide from this Shepherd? We can come to him. He can track us down.

We’re given freedom to wander, and freedom to be found.

It’s been a long pandemic. It’s been a long winter. And it keeps coming back for more. It snowed on Wednesday and Covid keeps coming at us with new variants. And it occurred to me that I think I’ve preached 41 sermons in a row. I’ve talked and talked for 41 Sundays straight. And I think maybe it’s time I shut up a little. I think maybe it’s time we ventured out into the wilderness and out into our neighborhoods and wandered around for awhile. It’s time for me to set you loose. You don’t always need a lowercase s shepherd to show you where to go. Jesus the big S Shepherd will find us. We can explore and take risks and eat what’s provided and sleep when we need to and even find ourselves a little bit lost for awhile. We can do this because we know the Good Shepherd’s voice. We can hear him when he calls. Or, at least, we can know that when we hide in caves and in layers and layers of our own protective but heavy wool, when we climb trees and scrape our knees, even when we ignore the whistle to come home, there’s someone out there looking for us, and he will come to us. It may take awhile. But he’s out there looking, always searching, and will give up his whole life searching for us, if that’s what it takes. So I guess today I just want to invite us to play, to explore, to take risks, to wander into the forest, to grow our fleece thick and see what we can see. Jesus will send his shrill whistle when it’s time to come home. Jesus will find us as we’re caught in our own brambles and thorns, and he’ll gently lift us out and take us home where he can tend to our overgrowth, relieve us of our burdens, and free us to run freely once again. 

So today I want us to try something a little strange. Or maybe it will at least feel strange to us. It’s actually pretty deeply rooted in our Christian tradition. Rather than sit and listen to me talk and talk, I want us to break out of the pen and go on an adventure. I want us to take a moment, or rather three, and listen hard. I want us to take three minutes and just listen for Jesus’s voice. I want us to listen for that whistle telling us that it’s time for dinner or we have long division to finish or that our bath is ready. But in the meantime, I want us to stretch the limits, explore the caves, let our hair go flying behind us as we try to petal our legs as fast as we can down the neighborhood streets. It’s going to be awkward. It’s not easy to sit still for such a long time with nothing else to do other than just listen, and breathe, and listen again. But I want us to try. Go wherever your mind takes you, whether that’s serious or silly, adventurous or safe as a warm quilt. Just sit for a while and listen for Jesus. Maybe you will hear his voice. If you do, you will surely recognize it. What is it saying to you today? Did he remind you of something? Did he show you something new? Is it time to come home? Or is it time to break free? Is it time to let go? Or is it time to keep going? 

Let us listen now. If you fall asleep, listen. If you get anxious, listen. If you get distracted, listen. If you get lost or scared, come back and listen to your breath. If you want to get up and walk around, go for it, and listen to each step you take. If you hear something, follow where it leads. If you hear nothing, let it be. There is no doing this right. There is no doing this wrong. Let us listen now.

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The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures;

He leads me beside still waters;

He restores my soul.

He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil.

For you are with me; your rod and your staff — they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

Thanks be to God.

By These Wounds

  There’s a meme going around Facebook. It comes from a series of tweets. First, the meme started with “We interrupt this coverage of a police officer’s trial for the killing of a black man to give you news of a traffic stop shooting of a young black man by police.” Then, this meme was adapted to “We interrupt this coverage of a a traffic stop shooting of a young black man by police that interrupted the coverage of a police officer’s trial for the killing of a black man to give you news of the coverage of the shooting of a 13 year old boy of color who was shot by police.” And then the meme was changed to say, “We interrupt this coverage of the police shooting of a 13 year old boy of color that interrupted coverage of a traffic stop shooting of a 20 year old black man that interrupted coverage of the police officer trial for the killing of George Floyd for news of eight people killed in a FedEx facility in Indianapolis.” And I am just done. 

I am done, and I’ve never even been a victim of gun violence, I’ve never known anyone who has been a victim of gun violence, I don’t have to worry when my boys play with their nerf guns in the front yard, and all I have to do is tell them the stories about it and try to explain racism to them at the dinner table while they eat their buttered noodles and chicken nuggets. 

And they sigh as I tell them yet another story of an African American who has died at the hands of ones who are sworn to protect them. They say, “Ugh, mom. Not again. Didn’t we have this talk just a couple of months ago?” And I am just done. I am done. And it doesn’t have any real direct, immediate impact on my life. I am done, and the only thing I can think to do is write another sermon about it, and I know it’s totally not enough, but I’m so done with having to do even that. 

Can you imagine, for just a second, the done-ness of those whose lives have been directly impacted by this violence? Can you imagine the frustration and the heartache and the despair and the absolute anger of those who live in fear, everyday, that they or their children will die at the hands of a gun, maybe even at the hands of a police officer with a gun?

An African-American father posted his thought process about how he has to plan his day with these concerns as a very real reality. He lists all the things he has to do in a day, followed by the names of people who have died doing those exact same things. He says, ”I need to drive my two-year-old to daycare tomorrow morning. To ensure we arrive alive, we won't take public transit (Oscar Grant). I removed all air fresheners from the vehicle and double-checked my registration status (Daunte Wright), and ensured my license plates were visible (Lt. Caron Nazario). I will be careful to follow all traffic rules (Philando Castille), signal every turn (Sandra Bland), keep the radio volume low (Jordan Davis), and won't stop at a fast food chain for a meal (Rayshard Brooks). I'm too afraid to pray (Rev. Clementa C. Pickney) so I just hope the car won't break down (Corey Jones). When my wife picks him up at the end of the day, I'll remind her not to dance (Elijah McClain), stop to play in a park (Tamir Rice), patronize the local convenience store for snacks (Trayvon Martin), or walk around the neighborhood (Mike Brown). Once they are home, we won't stand in our backyard (Stephon Clark), eat ice cream on the couch (Botham Jean), or play any video games (Atatiana Jefferson). After my wife and I tuck him into bed around 7:30pm, neither of us will leave the house to go to Walmart (John Crawford) or to the gym (Tshyrand Oates) or on a jog (Ahmaud Arbery). We won't even walk to see the birds (Christian Cooper). We'll just sit and try not to breathe (George Floyd) and not to sleep (Breonna Taylor).” 

These are things white people simply do not have to think about, these are things that I simply don’t have to think about. 

And yet. And still. I’m done. If it were my child gunned down by police, if it were my father held to the ground with a knee to his neck, if I were my son pulled over and then subsequently killed because he was scared and he panicked, I would absolutely want to burn it all down. I would want to break the windows and loot the stores and shout in the streets. Calm dialogue hasn’t worked. Asking for justice is simply ignored. Demanding that the system fix its own broken system is not only illogical and laughable, but about as effective as banging your head against a wall. No wonder folks are fed up. 

I’m amazed that the streets of Chicago are burning as we speak.

How do we come back from this? Are we, as a society, lost forever? Are we destined to keep repeating history over and over and over again until we finally destroy ourselves? I’m seeing a lot of crucifixions. But not a lot of resurrections. 

I have no answers today. All I have to offer today is this story of Jesus who comes back.  And I think that if we really look closely at how Jesus comes back, we’ll find some hints about how we can move forward. 

We need these fifty days of Easter, we need these stories of Jesus’s resurrection and the subsequent disciples’ disbelief, we need to soak them in, we need to savor them and sit with them and tell and retell them because they show us what resurrection really looks like. And, you know, we could really use a little bit of hope right about now.

Often, I think, we think of resurrection or salvation as this happily ever after story. The prince wakes the princess with a kiss and he puts her on his horse and they ride off into the sunset. We think of resurrection and we think that the bad guy finally gets what’s coming to him and everything gets fixed and it all goes back to the way it was before. We tend to think that it’s just like rewinding the tape and coming up with a different outcome, one where loved ones are returned to us and the storm never comes and everything is finally made perfect. 

But that’s not the resurrection story we get. 

Jesus comes back to us, not in a shining, polished suit of armor, not with the devil in a cage, or with all the isms and phobias and stereotypes of our world defeated, but in the form of a man, a man who still hungers, a man who is still a little bruised up, a man with holes in his hands and a big gash in his side. 

If we believe that Jesus came back to us again, if we believe in the resurrection, if we trust in the miracle that happened on that third day, we must ask ourselves, “If Jesus can be resurrected from the dead, why isn’t he also, you know, healed? Why can’t they fix him up a little? Polish him up? Make him clean and shiny?" Why not close up those wounds, stitch up his side, and fill his stomach and maybe even correct his astigmatism while they're at it? 

Why does Jesus still carry the scars of his death after the miracle of his resurrection?” 

And my hunch is that it’s because that’s just not how real resurrection works. 

When something bad happens, it happens, it’s done, it cannot be undone. Jesus was still beat up and mocked. The disciples still ran away. Jesus was still nailed to a cross and killed by the powers of Rome. Jesus will always carry that with him. Those scars won’t rub out. Those wounds won’t just disappear. The trauma is still there. Jesus will forever walk with a limp, maybe literally, but definitely emotionally. When something bad happens, it’s still always bad, even if there is a resurrection. 

The mistakes we made are still mistakes. The hurt still hurts. Jesus is still beat up and broken and he still has hunger. He’s still human with all the baggage and pain and trauma that comes with it. Those hurtful stories of his past don’t just disappear. 

But maybe that’s exactly how the resurrection works. “By his wounds we are healed,” not because God needed a punching bag in order to somehow get out “his” anger for our disobedience, not because through some slight of hand we are replaced with Jesus at the end if the executioner’s rope, it doesn’t mean that we go back in time to change the past like some billion dollar budget Marvel movie or a ride in a DeLorean with a retrofitted flux capacitor, it means that we can take those scars and those wounds and those limps and those heartaches and we can understand them and interpret them a little differently, maybe even in a way that brings more life than we originally thought possible. Jesus comes to us, still broken, still wounded, still hungry, and that tells us that we don’t need to be fixed or to be changed or to forget our heartbreak, we simply need to be held, to be fed, to be seen and to be loved and known even as we carry all that evidence that we’ve been beat up and broken along with us. 

Honestly, on the day that I die, when I’m coming to Jesus just as I am, with all my wrinkles and bruises and scars and mistakes and plaque-filled arteries, and having him embrace me in his arms and hold me and know me and see me and be with me, both of us, together, with our battle wounds out for all to see, I would rather be received, be resurrected into that, be transformed into that kind of newness, than to be given wings and a white robe and a harp and to float up on some cloud for the rest of eternity. I want to still be me. And that means all of me, my brokenness included. Resurrection means that Jesus comes to us, still wounded, just like we are, but not defeated. Jesus comes to us, still broken, but with a reinterpretation and a reorientation and a new realization of who he truly is. 

Jesus opens our minds to understand the scriptures, to understand the stories - some really, really horrible stories - that have been a part of our lives, a part of our histories. God is wounded. God stays wounded. And God is re-wounded every time one of God’s beloveds suffers as God has suffered. And God is resurrected. God stays resurrected. God is re-resurrected, every time one of God’s beloveds finds hope in their story, every time they gain a better understanding of what they’ve gone through, every time their sins are remembered but forgiven, every time we find new meaning and new understanding and new hope in our once heartbreaking stories. There’s no going back and fixing it. But there is going forward with new understanding, new experiences of peace, new hope for the nations. 

There’s no magic wand to wave that will bring all these dead boys and men and women of color back to us. They are gone. We, as a society, will carry those wounds with us forever. We should feel those wounds as deeply as we are able, because that is how any of this with be resurrected. By his wounds we are healed.

Maybe the parents will be reunited with their kids, and wives will be reunited with their husbands, and everything wrong will be made right again. But until then, we’ve got to mourn and get angry and do whatever we can to keep it from happening to one more boy or one more man or one more woman. And that means we need to really feel what’s been lost. We need to put our fingers in the holes in Christ’s hands and our hands in the gash in his side. That means we've got to feel it, really feel it, every time someone loses their life because of an unjust system. Because every time one of these little ones is lost, Jesus is pierced, again and again. Until we see the woundedness that this causes to Christ - and therefore, to us - none of this is ever going to change.

And. We have to look for the resurrection that is going on today, right now, in our very midst, even as we carry the pain and the wounds of own own sin. There is still resurrection. There is still new meaning and new hope that can be found.  We can do both. We can touch Jesus’s wounds. And we can say, “My Lord and my God.” We can put our hands in his side, we can be reminded of the horrors of that day, and we can speak to him, feed him, listen to his words. We can have joy along with our disbelief and our wondering. 

We can carry the death of Christ in us so that the life of Christ may be made known, may be revealed, may be resurrected right here, right now, right in our midst.

We can demand justice out of the agony of our hearts. We can be done with it all. And we can wait and work towards and expect the resurrection.

Thanks be to God.

Waiting It Out

John 20:19-31

 So apparently, my pediatrician gave my mom some advice. Maybe it was when the first of us, Julie, was born. He told my mom, and then, later, she told me, that there will come a point in every day when you, as a mom, will just be done. You’ve been with the kids all day, they’ve grated at your nerves, they’ve asked and demanded and whined and spilled and destroyed and pooped everywhere, but you still have a few hours to go before dinner and baths and bed, and everyone, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, is just going to freak out. You’re trying to get dinner going, the kids are tired but it’s too late for a nap, your partner isn’t home from work yet, everybody is hungry, and somehow you’ve got to make it through the next few hours, holding it together, until you can finally get some rest so you can it all over again tomorrow. Our pediatrician told my mom that, during those witching hours, on the hardest of days, you’ve just got to put the kids somewhere safe and wait it out. Stick them in their crib, put them in the play pen, go hang out in the garage or lock yourself in the bathroom, and just let them, and you, feel whatever you’re feeling. It’s a mutual time out, and it’s good for everybody.

That’s similar to the advice I got when I became a mom and the “terrible twos” were just around the corner. Although I’m convinced that “threenagers” have it harder. See, what happens with little ones who are just beginning to learn that they are separate from their parents, that they are their own independent beings, but before they have the language to express what they want or what they’re feeling, all they know to do is to throw themselves on the ground, kick, scream, and flail around, until their caretaker finally figures it out and gives them what they want. We can’t have that, of course. Then we’re just training them - or they’re training us, rather - that whenever they want something they can’t have, they just put operation temper tantrum into place, make a big enough scene, embarrass the parents, and get everyone else to judge their parenting in the middle of the cereal aisle, and voila, two boxes of Cocoa Puffs find themselves into the grocery basket with the milk, the bananas, and the peanut butter. But once again, great advice, I was told, just put them somewhere safe. Take them somewhere where they can feel their feelings, express themselves however they know how, but keep them safe, sit with them and watch them, until the feelings pass and they wear themselves out.

When my brother died, I was twelve. He was six, and of course, my whole family was devastated. I have no idea how my parents got through that horrible time. I remember crying so hard that my head was throbbing, and I’d never experienced a pain like it. Of course, that kind of headache is pretty familiar to me now. Anyway, my mom’s friend, Mary, sat with me on the bed while I cried and cried, and when I’d worn myself out, and my head was exploding, she gave me a handful of chewable Tylenol  because I couldn’t swallow the adult ones and put me to bed. In the morning, my mom was sitting at the kitchen table, with, I think, Aunt Debbie maybe?, and they were having brownies and beer for breakfast. We all knew that nothing could be done. Nothing was going to fix this. We were just going to have to feel how we felt and eat the brownies and take the Tylenol and go to bed and feel it all over again the next day. So people sat with us. They brought cookies and casseroles and McDonald’s Big Macs, and waited with us in the dark.

I’d forgotten about that. I’d forgotten about that space we all need. Sometimes we just need to put ourselves in a safe place and wait. I forget about that each time I criticize those disciples for hiding away in their little locked room with their tail between their legs.

See, I love Thomas. I love that he doubts. I love that he’s not in that room when Jesus shows up because that means he’s out there doing something, and he’s not cowering somewhere with his head in the sand. I used to be so hard on the other disciples. What are they doing in that room? Why don’t they believe the news that Mary Magdalene has told them? Why aren’t they out there, out in the world, facing it head on, confronting the powers and principalities that have killed their savior, and maybe, just maybe, those same powers have now been upended and made impotent by that same savior.

I guess I’m just naive to think that after they deserted Jesus in the garden, after they ran off and left the women to mourn and bury and anoint, they’d actually believe Mary when she says that she has seen the Lord. That they’d be emboldened by the news. They’d finally buck up, collect their courage, and be the men Jesus needed them to be in the first place. 

But that’s not real life. That’s not real humanity. When terror strikes, some of us stick around and fight, but most of us choose the flight. When threatened, most of us run away and hide. And maybe instead of being critical about their choices, we can see ourselves in them. 

Sometimes, when hard things happen, we just have to go somewhere we can keep ourselves safe and just wait it out. 

Sometimes, all we can do is take the prescription sleeping pill, wrap ourselves in our favorite quilt, and hope that tomorrow brings something better.

Sometimes, we need the sun to set on our anger. We need to sleep off the overindulgence. We need the three day waiting period. We need to wait until the fever breaks. We need to take deep breaths and count to ten and sit shiva and just be present to how we are feeling. Nothing else. That’s it. Find someplace safe. And wait.

The Gospel of John makes it clear that the disciples are locked up in their room because they are terrified. They are afraid of “the Jews,” which really means that they’re afraid of a few folks in leadership who have a lot of power and control, not of all Jews themselves. After all, they’re Jews, too. So they’re staying together. And they’re staying where they feel safe. And they’ve locked the door behind them. They are gathering together to mourn, to cry, to be angry, to have brownies and beer for breakfast, to ride each wave of exhausting grief until they wear themselves out and finally fall asleep. It makes sense. They are tapped out. They have reached capacity. They are at that point where it’s best just to put yourself somewhere safe and wait until the storm passes and the sun comes out again. 

And maybe the sun won’t come out again. Their savior is dead, after all.

Except. He’s not.

Jesus shows up. He goes to their safe space. He goes to where they are. He enters in to that closed room full of sweat and tears and body odor and he doesn’t berate them for running away. He doesn’t lecture them about hiding in fear. He doesn’t criticize them for not believing what Mary has so clearly told them. Instead, he stands among them. He stands among the tears and the grief-torn garments and the women urging the men to at least stay hydrated, and he says, “Peace be with you.” They’re hiding. But Jesus finds them. They’re cowering in fear, but Jesus reaches them. It’s astonishing, really. The one who experienced the full brunt of the trauma of Good Friday has come to comfort the traumatized on Easter Sunday. The one who still carries the wounds in his hands and the gash in his side comes to them, where they are, as they are.

And yay! Hooray! Jesus is alive! “We have seen the Lord!” they tell Thomas. And that lasts for what, a half a second? Because the next time we see them in the text, just a week later, they’re back in that room, behind those locked doors, wrapped in those same tear stained blankets, drinking flat beer and crying it out. Are they really any more faithful than Thomas? Do they really have more “belief” than he does? They got to see. They got to hear. Somehow they finally believed enough to tell Thomas all about what he’d missed. But they still end up back in that room. They still find themselves terrified and weeping and needing that safe space just to sit and wait. Just a week passes, and nothing has really changed.

And you know what Jesus does? He doesn’t tell them, “Well, you had your chance. Too bad.” Nope. He comes to them again. He finds them. Again. He reveals himself to them. Again. And John tells us that he keeps doing it. He says, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book.” See, belief is not about assenting to a series of prescribed creeds or signing your name on the dotted line. I think belief comes from Christ, is rooted in Christ, and comes to us as Christ. As author Serene Jones tells us, “When doubt crowds out hope, we can be confident that Jesus will come to meet us where we are, even if it is out on the far edge of faith that has forgotten how to believe.” Jesus meets us in the temper tantrums and the afternoon witching hours and in the crying headaches and in the locked rooms where we’re just trying to keep ourselves safe. 

Jesus doesn’t knock. Jesus doesn’t ask, “is anybody home?” Jesus doesn’t ring the door bell and when he doesn’t get an answer he just walks away. No. Jesus isn’t asking for permission. Jesus isn’t giving us the password or teaching us the secret handshake or sending us directions to him in invisible ink. Jesus is barging right in. Get out the hand sanitizer because Jesus is breaking quarantine. He’s showing us his open wounds. And when he does, Jesus breathes on us, whether we’re masked or not, and gives us the gift of himself. Jesus is entering in to exactly where we are hiding and cowering and licking our wounds, Jesus is coming in and breaking all the rules of social distancing and proper pandemic protocol, and Jesus is giving us peace. Jesus enters in to the places where we don’t believe, those places where we have lost all hope, and he reveals himself to us. And he keeps breaking in, he keeps revealing himself, he keeps getting so awkwardly close to us that we can feel his breath on our skin, over and over, again and again, week after week, for as long as the doors remain locked behind us. 

This is no excuse for us to lock our church doors or sit on our hands and twiddle our thumbs. No. Jesus wants us out there. But until we can do that, he is going to come to us in here. 

Sometimes, all we have to do is find a place where we can be safe, and wait. Brew some tea, take some Tylenol, wrap yourself up in your great grandmother’s afghan and just wait. Feel what you feel. Jesus will come. We don’t even have to leave the door open for him. And when he does, maybe for just half a second, we’ll see him and we’ll hear him and we’ll experience him and it will be real for us. And when the feeling and the conviction and the so called “belief” that we hold on to is gone, he’ll come back again. And he will keep coming back. He will keep coming to you. Until it feels real for you again. Until you can say, with total astonishment, “My Lord, and My God.” Until you can hear, with your whole self, “Peace be with you.” 

Thanks be to God.

This Tomb Holds Emptiness Now.

Mark 16:1-8

Dan and the boys have been in Michigan all week for Spring break. That means I have had the whole house to myself. I can have cinnamon rolls for dinner if I want. I can sleep in for as long as the dog will let me. I can play The Decemberists as loudly as I want at any time of day. I can listen to, and concentrate on, NPR’s All Things Considered, and my toilet’s splash zone has never been cleaner. There’s no arguing, there’s no bickering, no laundry, no legos strewn all over the living room floor. It has been amazing…ly lonely. I’m so glad that they’re coming home tomorrow, because I’m not so sure what I’d do with one more day all by myself in my big quiet house. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder. At least, when the things absent happen to be the most important things in your life. 

When Dan’s grandfather Stew passed away after an amazingly full life and then a slow battle with Alzheimer’s, Dan’s grandma, Punky, who was Stew’s wife for almost seventy years, said, “It’s like I’ve gotten him back somehow. I feel closer to him now than right before he died.” Somehow, in Grandpa Stew’s death, she was able to find him again, and that’s pretty much the clearest definition or understanding we can get for resurrection, at least, on this side of our lifetimes.

So what a weird thing to experience - Stew is gone and yet he’s more here than ever.

My kids have been absent from my presence this whole week, and yet I’m probably thinking about them more with more presence and more patience and more affection than I did right before they left. Now that the house is quiet, I miss their squealing and pestering and arguing and laughing more than ever, and somehow, that makes them all so much more real for me.

Sometimes, the absence of a thing makes that thing present in a new or different or maybe even more obvious way. For instance, If we really want to see the stars, we have to go somewhere where there is absolutely no light at all. It’s in the darkness, in the absence of light, that we can see the heavens. That darkness is a little bit terrifying, but it’s necessary. We need the darkness, otherwise we can’t see.

What a weird, but extremely human, thing to experience - to encounter the risen Christ by looking at where he’s not, to gain a fuller understanding of who Jesus is by being told that he is not here.

This passage in Mark completely undoes everything I’ve been working towards with all of you through the last forty days of Lent. Every night I’ve been trying to show you how God is present in the pennies and the rocks and the pencils and the honey and the soap and the sand and salt of our everyday lives. “See!” I’ve been saying, “Jesus is here! Jesus has been here all along!” 

And today we hear, “Jesus is not here. Look, this is where they laid him, and it’s empty now.” 

Today we celebrate absence: Jesus is gone. And that’s a good thing. 

Are you familiar with this concept in art called “negative space”? It’s this idea of the space between things. It’s in the empty or blank or “white” areas in a space that we can contrast with the main design or colors or shapes in a work of art. Sometimes we don’t even know what we’re looking at until we take this negative space into consideration. A classic example of this is Rubin’s vase. It is a picture of two silhouettes facing each other, but they’re painted entirely black. (Or white, or some other saturated single tone color). You can see the two faces quite clearly though. But if you look at the space between them, the white space that defines these two faces, you can also see something else appear, in this case, it’s a vase or a chalice. Ask two people what they see first and you might get two different answers. One person will insist that the picture shows two faces, while another person will claim that it’s a picture of a vase or a cup. So who is right and who is wrong? Well. The truth is that they’re both a little bit right and a little bit wrong. You need both the positive space and the negative space to make the picture depict anything at all. Without the white chalice, or, rather, without the absence of the chalice, you’d not be able to see the faces. Without the black faces, or rather, without the absence of the faces, we wouldn’t be able to see the presence of the chalice. The object being defined is only being defined or discerned or experienced because of what is not there. This is the beauty of black and white photography, right? You make a negative of the picture first so that the image can then be revealed. Or think about sculptures. We have to remove the stone in order to reveal the figure hidden beneath. We have to take something away in order for it to become something more. This is a vital concept in all of art. What is being revealed or experienced or shown to us because of the absence of something, or rather, because of the presence of what is not there?

This is the reality of our entire universe. By some oversimplified but believable calculations, it’s been determined that if we took all the matter in all of the universe and shoved it into a corner, it would take up 0.0000000000000000000042% of the “space” that is the universe. I don’t even know how to say that number. The universe is made up of mostly emptiness, nothingness, absence. The vast, miraculous, awe-inspiring presence of the universe is made out of nothing. Out of absence.

The white-robed young man says, “Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.” Look at what’s not here. This tomb holds emptiness.

Or another example is with music, right, I think? Would we have music if there were no space between the sounds? We need the space between, places between the notes, the parts where the sound is not so that we can hear the music at all. There is no melody without the silence in between. There is no music without the absence of sound at varying lengths and repetitions throughout the composition. We need the emptiness in order to fully experience the presence. 

“Don’t worry. You’re looking for Jesus. He’s not here. See, look where he’s not.” 

Theologians have a name for this concept, too. They call it “apophatic theology.” This is also known as the “via negativa” in more philosophical circles. The only way we can know anything, according to these thinkers, is by experiencing some absence of it. It’s this idea that once you think you’ve got a hold of some idea, it slips out from between your fingers. As soon as you’ve got something that cannot be pinned down pinned down, then you’re no longer talking about that something anymore.  Apophatic theology, therefore, attests that God is so great, so “other” than us, that the only way we can know anything about who God is is by making claims about who God is not. God is the absence of hate, for instance. Or God is not bound by time or space. Or, God is not “here.” Or God is not this or that. God is not…whatever. I mean, they have a point -- what can you say about which nothing can be said? 

No wonder the Marys and Salome were so freaked out. God has suddenly changed the rules. They’ve got whiplash. For the last three years they’ve been following Jesus around and he has been telling them that God is in the here and the now, in their very presence, in the sheep and the seed and the salt and the flowers and the yeast and the broken people of this world. And now, they’re supposed to see him where he’s not. They’re supposed to find him in his absence. 

But if we took all of those “God is not”s and painted a picture with them, we’d have some negative space, wouldn’t we? We’d have some places where the paint was not. And in that negative space, in that space between all those places that we’re sure God isn’t, we might find a little bit of God. We’d get some kind of image out of all that negative space. It’s a little bit mind bendy, I know, but just stick with me if you can. The angel, or the random guy in the white robe, whoever he is, tells these women that Jesus is not here. The angel tells them to look in the space where he was but isn’t any longer. He tells them to find hope in Christ’s absence. See the miracle in the nothingness. Because the absence means that he’s not in the tomb. He’s not here. He has been raised. He’s not where you expect him to be because he’s actually where you’d never believe in your wildest dreams he’d actually be - he’s out there. Something is emptied and filled inside of these women all at the same time, and it totally freaks them out. They, too, become dislocated - they have no grounding any longer because the ground beneath them can no longer be counted on. The sun no longer simply sets in the evening and rises in the morning. The rock they cannot move has already been moved. There’s an angel just hanging out in an empty tomb. The dead no longer stay dead. The absence of Jesus actually means the presence of Christ. 

What if God is in those spaces? What if we encounter God in a new way in all those places we are sure God cannot be? God in the empty tomb? God in the sorrow? God in the pandemic? God, not in the “here” but in the “there”? God being present even in the spaces where God is absent? God returns to us when we open the tomb and expect to find Jesus but instead find…nothing. And that “nothing" is the good news.

There is no “proof.” There is no evidence. There’s only absence. All they get to confirm that Christ has risen is an empty tomb. And an announcement from an ethereal being. And more work to do. They’re told “do not be afraid,” they’re told to “look,” and then they’re told to “go.” 

And this is the original ending of the Gospel. This is what the earliest Christians got: a whole lot of mystery and fear and nothing. Later, as they scrambled to make meaning, they added the rest of the verses, but first, there’s just chaos and confusion and nothing. I love this ending of Mark’s Gospel because it’s not about right belief or right action or concrete evidence of anything. All they have is the absence, the place where Jesus used to be but is no longer. 

God is not here. God is on God’s way. God will meet you there. 

God is not here. God is there. God has been in the empty spaces all along. 

And. 

God is still here. God is still present. The incarnation - the seeds and the pearls and the  yeast and the humanity of Jesus - is still a place where we can experience God. Jesus is still Jesus. And God is still God. We can see both the faces and the vase. We can hear God in the silence and in the sound. 

The resurrection is that “moment” or that “space” where God is both here and there, God is both in and out, God is present wherever God is absent, which means that God is present, present, present, in everything and in every-not-thing. God is here in the now, and in the not yet. Like the psalmist says, “Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I hide from your presence? If I go to heaven, you’re there. If I make my bed in hell, you’re there, too. If I say ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.”

God is in the inhale and the exhale. And God is in the space between the inhale and the exhale.
God is in the belief and the disbelief.

God is in the grief and worry and alarm and terror and amazement and fear and even disobedience of these women who run off without doing any of the things the angel instructs them to do. They run off and say nothing to anyone. Perhaps, rather than a deficit or a fault of these women, maybe it’s exactly the right response. They are filled with fear. Awe. Wonder. That Old Testament-y “fear of the Lord.” Amazement. The only response to that can be silence. The only response to that can be…nothing.

There’s art between the art.

There’s music in the pause.

There’s a whole universe in the emptiness of the universe.

Missing my family makes them present to me in a new way.

Grandpa Stew comes back to us, even after he has left.

God is present, even in the absence.

Do not be alarmed (even though of course you will be); you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. This tomb holds emptiness now.

Go. He is not here. He is there. You’ll see him when you get there. 

Thanks be to God.