“Good News for Imperfect People”
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
April 4, 2010 – Easter Sunday
Luke 23: 44-56; Luke 24: 1-12
Last night I sat with my family watching basketball and filling plastic eggs with jelly beans and chocolate bunnies. It was in many ways a perfect Easter weekend Saturday for me.
For starters there was good Final Four basketball on. After the Saints won the Super Bowl in February, it might balance things theologically if the Devils win the NCAA basketball tournament in April. We’ll see tomorrow night.
As we put the beans and bunnies in the eggs, I was reminded to make sure not to forget to fill each of the eggs less some young person went on their hunt and found an empty egg on Easter morning.
I think and hope I filled the eggs all right. But even if I didn’t, what would Easter morning be without a little emptiness to help us appreciate its other goodness. After all, the first Easter morning started with emptiness, and out of that emptiness, came life. Let’s hear in our second lesson of how St. Luke describes the events of that very first Easter morning. Reading from God’s Holy word.
It is said that during the Second Vatican Council in 1962, Pope John the 23rd struggled to remember the names of some of his fellow clergy. In particular, he kept confusing Cardinal Spellman from New York with Cardinal Cushing from Boston. After the Pope apologized to the Cardinals several times, Cardinal Cushing sought to put the Pope’s mind at ease by saying, “That’s all right, Holy Father, no one’s infallible.” Cardinal Cushing was right. None of us is perfect.
The first Easter morning certainly brought out all sorts of imperfections. As Luke tells it, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the Mother of James, and a group of women from Galilee who had followed Jesus to Jerusalem went to Jesus’ grave with spices and fragrant oils to anoint the body to try and delay its decay and to cover up its unpleasant odor. When they got to the tomb, they found that the stone had been rolled away and the tomb was empty. They were confused. So God spoke to them through two angels asking, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” For the emptiness of the tomb meant that Jesus was alive.
For the followers of Jesus to want to cover up the smell of the dead body was a natural response to his death. But, as the angels point out, they didn’t need to bring spices and oils to a man who was alive. Then again, most of us living people spend more time than we care to admit trying to cover up our imperfections. There are cosmetics and plastic surgery to help us mask the parts of ourselves we aren’t fond of. Pills can help us tune out rather than confront reality. If we want them, we can find spices of life that disguise flaws and postpone the inevitable.
But do we need to? If our first glimpse of Jesus on Easter morning comes from Luke suggesting that the women were concerned about how bad Jesus smelled, then we might as well admit that our being imperfect is not the end of the world.
Indeed, spirituality begins with our acceptance that we are imperfect. Only when we accept that we are imperfect can we begin to see our need for God and open up to the spiritual, the beautiful, the life-giving parts of our existence. Until we do that, something will always stand in our way.
For me, one obstacle is worrying. I know Jesus said, “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?” And I know doctors and psychologists answer that we can’t add one hour, but we can subtract them by worrying. But I still worry about the safety of my children, about my health, about my finances, about the peace of our world, about whether I am properly using the gifts I’ve been given. Worry can be a stone around my neck and in my path.
Acclaimed Christian author Barbara Brown Taylor writes of her struggles with pride. Her unwillingness to fail. Taylor tells about sitting beside her father as he died after a long illness and how she experienced helplessness and a weakness because she couldn’t do more than hold his hand. Brown’s pride was a boulder that, as she put it, “kept her from trusting the central truth of the Christian gospel: that life springs from death.” When Taylor learned to let go and realized that she didn’t need to do anything more than hold her father’s hand, she writes that she felt a “divine presence,” that God would hold us no matter how far we fall.
On Easter morning, the women of Galilee faced a boulder of doubt. The stone at the grave was gone and the tomb was empty, yet they doubted the reality of what had happened. They had to be reminded that Jesus promised he would die and be raised.
Like the women from Galilee, we go on expecting the stones of life to remain in our paths because it’s often easier to accept the stones than to imagine life without our worries, our pride, our doubts or our imperfections. So the message of God’s angels on Easter morning is particularly important for us. According to Luke, the first thing God said to humanity on Easter morning is, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
If we crave life in the fast lane, we can be tempted to put our faith in and energy towards activities that don’t ultimately bring us life. Last fall a commuter in Seattle put a homemade dummy in the passenger seat of his car in order to sneak his car into the HOV/car pool lane. The dummy actually fooled the police until a policeman saw a dangling seat belt on the passenger side of the car and pulled the man over for a seat belt violation. Then he saw that the passenger in the car was not a living person but rather a dummy with a rain jacket, a Halloween mask of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, a beard and a baseball cap. Try that on the beltway. The trooper issued a $124 ticket and confiscated the dummy.
Sometimes we need a fresh experience of God’s grace to remind us that God, not ourselves, is our source of new life. In our second lesson, the angels said to the women from Galilee, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” We hear that and we might ask, “Who said anything about looking for the living?” The women had come with spices to anoint a dead body. They weren’t looking for the living. They had expected a closed tomb, a large rock and a dead person. The angels gave the women a fresh experience of grace by proclaiming Jesus’ promise to rise again. It is God who made the suggestion that there is new life.
That is the nature of God, to offer life where it doesn’t seem possible. To bring answers out of emptiness. When our behaviors, habits, or relationships, are not life-giving, God can come in unexpected ways to show us where life can be found. Even when life stinks and our best attempts to mask our imperfections fail, God still loves us.
Pastor Tim Keller once wrote, the heart of “the Christian Gospel is that we are so flawed that Jesus had to die for us, and yet so loved and so valued that he was glad to die for us. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. We have nothing to feel superior about yet nothing to prove. We should not think more of ourselves or less of ourselves, but instead we should think of ourselves less.”
The more we think about God’s Easter miracle of bringing life where it didn’t seem possible, the more we are compelled to ask the question, “What are we going to do with our gift of new life?” What are we going to live for, given the time we have and the unique emotional, physical, and spiritual attributes we each have been given?
Woody Allen put the question this way, “How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?” Allen continues, “If only God would give me some clear sign. Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.”
Dostoyevsky made the point in the Brothers Karamazov writing, “The secret of man's being is not only to live, but to have something to live for.”
Harry Potter even suggests how important it is for us to ask and answer the question. I loved reading the final Potter book, Deathly Hallows. The series is in no small part about the acceptance of death, for the more the villain, Voldemort, seeks to avoid death, the more twisted he becomes. In their final confrontation in Deathly Hallows, when Harry has tasted death, Voldemort asks him, "Why do you still live?" To which Harry responds, "Because I have something to live for."
I have seen in hospital rooms, what studies show over and over, that when people are struggling with life and death, if they have a goal, something to look forward to, it can help them find life, even in the face of death.
In visiting several of you this year, I have seen copies of the book The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, on many a table or nightstand. If you aren’t familiar with him, Randy Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and in 2007, he agreed to give a lecture the school called a “last lecture.” Carnegie Mellow has a tradition of frequently having a professor give a lecture to answer the question, “What wisdom would you impart to the world if you knew it was your last chance?” The request to Pausch was prophetic, for a month after agreeing to give the lecture, he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, which ultimately took his life. He could have cancelled the lecture, but gave it, and said it was partly for the students and partly for his three children, all age 6 or younger at the time, to “put himself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for (them).”
Two lessons from his lecture in particular caught my attention. First, Pausch said, “Look for the best in everybody….because if you wait long enough people will surprise and impress you.” That’s good advice. Look for the best in everybody. Including yourself. We don’t need to be perfect to be helpful, joyful, soulful, and worshipful.
And secondly he said, “Make sure to have fun.”
Friends, let the promise of Easter, that nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God is Christ, free you to have fun as you dream about how to use the gift of life God has given you.
I love how the poet Mary Oliver playfully writes about God’s gift of creation and the need for us to make use of the time we have.
She asked, “Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
What are you going to do with your Easter gift of new life? God gives us the freedom and responsibility to answer that question for ourselves. And the invitation to join God in the transformation of the world.
Even as the day starts with darkness, remember that God has a history of turning darkness into light. Even if the day starts with emptiness, remember that God has a history of bringing meaning out of emptiness. Even as we face the imperfections of our mortal lives, we declare on Easter that because of Christ, death is not the final word. For God has a history of leaving no stone unturned to seek, save, find and free what seems lost.
That’s why the women from Galilee left the tomb on Easter morning and rushed to tell everyone they could about the miracle they had experienced. They had found their meaning in an experience of God’s grace. Why should they be the only ones? Thanks be to God. Amen.
