Imperishable
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
“I am about to put on imperishability.”
– John Ames, in Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is a poem by Mary Oliver that she included in a collection of her poems and essays called “Owls and Other Fantasies.” The poem I’ve chosen feels like an Easter poem to me. It’s called “I Looked Up.”
I looked up and there it was
among the green branches of the pitchpines –
thick bird,
a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back –
color of copper, iron, bronze –
lighting up the dark branches of the pine.
What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
When I made a little sound
it looked at me, then it looked past me.
Then it rose, the wings enormous and opulent,
and, as I said, wreathed in fire.
2. The last eight verses of the Gospel of Mark are our second reading this Easter morning. These same verses were read at our Sunrise Service this morning, and are being read today in churches all over the world. Here is Mark 16:1-8:
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, "Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?"
But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you.'"
Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.
This sermon is a little meditation on a repeating theme:
that for Easter to have any real meaning, it needs us to take an active part,
because the Easter story always was and still is a divine-human collaboration.
And without our response, Easter would be a forgotten first-century footnote.
Today’s scripture lesson makes this point in a very interesting way.
Mark was the first of all the gospels to be written,
so the last eight verses of his gospel
are the oldest ending to the story of Jesus.
There are no resurrection stories, no appearances, no miracles.
Instead, the Gospel of Mark ends with an incomplete sentence.
At sunrise, three women go to the garden tomb where Jesus was buried to anoint his body with spices.
But his body is gone.
And a young man dressed in white is sitting inside the tomb.
When he sees the fear in their eyes he says, “Don’t be alarmed.”
And he asks them to take a message to Jesus’ disciples:
“he is going ahead of you into Galilee – you will see him there.”
The women are bewildered – they turn and run.
The last line in the Gospel of Mark, cleaned up for modern translations, is:
“They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.”
Translated directly from the Greek, the line reads:
“...and no one anything they told, they were afraid for...”
How did Mark’s gospel come to end that way?
Some scholars wonder if he died of a heart attack in mid-sentence.
Or did a Roman soldier walk up behind him and arrest him on the spot?
Or – was Mark a brilliant storyteller who ended his gospel with an incomplete sentence
as a way of saying: it’s up to you, my friends, to take it from here...
He knew that we would have to finish the story.
Two thousand years later, John Ames, the narrator of the novel Gilead,
a minister nearing the end of his life, writes to his son: “I’m about to put on imperishability.”
His words are an echo of St. Paul in 1st Corinthians 15:
“For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable,”
and John Ames’ faith – that death does not have the last word – rises out of the Easter story.
Because the story says that Jesus put on imperishability – and so will you.
This was not an original idea.
Most of the world’s religions believe that the human spirit – the essence in each of us – lives on.
Plato wrote that “the soul of a man is immortal and imperishable.”
Now, whether or not you believe that’s true, all of this got me to thinking:
what is it that makes something or someone immortal – imperishable?
Why do some things last?
The Haydn Mass our choir has been singing for us this morning was composed two hundred years ago.
What is it about a piece of music, a book, or an idea that gives them an ongoing life?
Why do some people’s words and deeds remain vivid and alive in our mind’s eye,
still influencing what we think and do hundreds or even thousands of years after they died?
Because something in us responds to the poem, the music, the idea, the person.
We want to read it, hear it, think about it, or him, or her, again.
There are, of course, some things we thought were imperishable that actually are not.
The snows of Mount Kilimajaro, made famous by Hemingway’s short story,
could be gone in just fifteen years because of global warming and deforestation.
And here in the U.S., there will be no glaciers left in Glacier National Park twenty five years from now
for the same reasons – reasons which very soon will not be reversible.
Imperishability is a not a given.
There are books and ideas that deserve to be immortal.
There is music that deserves to be performed as long as there are people to hear it.
There are people whose lives deserve always to be remembered and emulated.
But they will live on only if we see to it that they do.
Haydn’s Mass comes to life once again because our choir sings it.
An untouched field stays untouched because we adopt measures to keep it that way.
And the story of Jesus is no different.
After he was killed, his disciples went home,
they mourned their loss, they mended their nets, and they went back to work.
In him, they had seen the best that a human being can be,
and in the people who put him to death, they had seen the worst,
and now all they wanted was to be left alone.
They thought it was over.
And it would have been over if they had stayed home.
Jesus’ words and deeds would have become a distant, fading memory.
But as the disciples went about their daily round,
they began to experience him not as a memory but as a presence –
a presence that felt just as real as if he had just sat down and shared a meal with them.
That’s why, when they talked about seeing him, they described it that way.
To them, it felt that real.
As William Sloane Coffin, who died last Wednesday, once said in an Easter sermon:
“It’s clear that Christ’s appearances were not those of a resurrected corpse,
but more akin to intense visionary experiences.”
Two days ago, on Good Friday, people of good faith looked into the heart of darkness.
Good Friday is about Jesus’ death on the cross.
It is a reminder of what human beings at their worst are capable of doing.
And what makes Good Friday hard to bear is that it is still so true today –
in faraway places like Darfur, and closer to home in Guantanamo.
In too many ways, we still live in a Good Friday world.
But even as we admit that this is true, the sun comes up on Easter morning.
And the message of Easter is “Yes, but...”
Yes, there will be dying.
But – something precious and imperishable could survive – if you give it hand.
Easter invites us to look up and see “a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back,”
lighting up the dark branches of Good Friday.
It wants us to feel the presence of what our own covenant calls “the spirit of Jesus.”
And it asks us to respond, to see that God has done God’s part.
Now it’s time for us to do ours.
In the last years of his life, the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, was on stage reciting his own poetry.
He was sitting on the stage, facing a very large audience, and he lost track of his words.
He stopped in mid-sentence, unable to remember the next line.
It was a poem about passion and desire, about longing and hope.
The people could see that he was momentarily lost.
He had written hundreds of poems by the time he was an old man, in the 1970's,
so it was perfectly natural for him to forget a line or two.
As he sat there trying to re-connect with his own words,
trying to recall the sound of the next syllable,
the audience came slowly to its feet, in little groups here and there, until everyone was standing. And then they picked up where he had left off.
They recited the rest of Pablo Neruda’s poem back to him.
They knew it by heart.
Some poems and stories are imperishable.
They can heal in both directions.
God gave us the narrative poem we recite each year on this day.
And as told by Mark, it stops in mid-sentence.
What happens next is up to us.
We could come slowly to our feet, in little groups here and there,
as Jesus’ followers did in the weeks and months after he died,
when he could no longer say the words for himself.
We could begin, as they did, by reciting his words for him, picking up where he left off.
And as we do, we may find, as have millions of people since the first Easter,
that there is something imperishable about his words,
and after a while, you find yourself starting to live them.
Because there is a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back,
something that refuses to die, something both in us and beyond us,
that rises on wings “enormous and opulent and wreathed in fire.”
Amen.