St. Paul’s United Church Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009
Not Afraid of the Dark – Rev. David Mundy
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Mark 16:1-8
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Do you know
that three of our staff members, our parish nurse, Beth Lettner,
and Rev. Cathy Russell, and myself, are all children of ministers? Many PK’s or
preachers kids vow that they will never follow in our parent’s footsteps, but a
surprising number of us end up going into the family business!
On
Christmas Eve two years ago Cathy and I got talking and realized that both our
fathers had served the same pastoral charge, years apart. We reminisced about the old house we lived in
next to the church and lo and behold my childhood bedroom had been her
childhood bedroom close to twenty years later.
We also
talked about the basement of the house, which was a dark, unfinished space,
befitting an old house. Some of you have heard me tell of my role as eldest
child on the couple of the occasions when we discovered that we were locked out
of the house. In the basement there was a coal bin, from the days when there
was still a coal furnace. While it hadn’t been used in years, there was still a
chute from the outside, once used to load in the coal and my parents would
carefully lower me into that chute and down into the basement. I then walked
the length of the house, in the dark, to the staircase
It might
surprise you, but I did feel honoured by being chosen
to do this! Needless to say my parents reassured me that everything would be
okay, but no one was lowering them into a coal bin! At age seven or eight,
finding my way through that basement was probably the scariest thing I had done
up until that point in my life. And even though our house was perfectly safe
when I was above ground, there was something about the darkness and the
emptiness that brought out the monsters and the demons. It was always a huge
relief when I got to the light switch and then up the stairs and into the
safety of day.
Easter
Sunday morning is the moment when we emerge from the gloom of the Lenten season
and the profound darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. This is a day for
joy and celebration, and once again we sing our hallelujahs and declare that
because Christ has risen from the dead we too have the promise of eternal life.
Usually on
Easter we listen to the story from the gospel of John of the discovery by the
first followers of Jesus
that the dark tomb in which his body has been laid is empty. John
was the last gospel to be written and it gives us the longest account. We hear
about Mary’s grief, thinking that Jesus’ body has been stolen, but her “sad”
turns to “glad” when she realizes that the person she assumes is the gardener
for the graveyard is actually the Risen Christ.
Today,
though, we heard from Mark, the first gospel, which offers a much shorter version
of the resurrection story and a different perspective as well. The stories in
the last and first gospels are even different in telling who was there and at
what time of the day it all happened. John says that they came when it was
still dark and Mark says it was at the dawn.
In Mark’s
gospel there is a rather abrupt ending, if we use the version which was first
circulated. If you were going to create a story with a happy ending, would your
last few words be “so they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and
amazement had seized them: and they said nothing to anyone, for they were
afraid?”What you heard a few moments ago is the original ending to Mark and
honestly, it’s not very satisfying.
While this
may not be our favourite resurrection story, perhaps
this is the version we need to hear in this year of gloom and doom, of fear and
uncertainty.
Are you
afraid of the dark or the unknown? Perhaps your first reaction as an adult is
that you’re not afraid of things that go bump in the night or of the dark,
although if you woke up in your home to something or someone unfamiliar roaming
around elsewhere in the building you might be dialing 911 in a hurry. We don’t
like to give in to our fears, yet at times they are actually good for us. It’s
been pointed out by biologists that our ancient ancestors developed fear,
including fear of dark and unfamiliar places as a very useful survival
mechanism. Imagine cave-dweller Grog saying to cave-dweller Grunt “did you
hear something out there?” And when Grunt says “oh there’s nothing to
worry about” and gets chomped by the sabre-toothed
tiger, Grog knows that fear can save your life.
This is a
year when fear seems to be at the forefront of just about every public
discussion and lots of private conversations too. We are living in a time which
feels like a dark basement or even a gloomy graveyard, aren’t we? Hardly a day
goes by that we aren’t given more grim information about the economy with
staggering statistics about job loss and economic decline. There are folk in this congregation who are unemployed, or
underemployed according to their skills, or have been forced to move to new job
environments. Still, others of us are anxious about pensions and retirement
savings.
While we
have been focusing on saving the economies of the world, we continue to receive
dire news about the state of the planet. The picture isn’t pretty that way
either. One environmentalist has offered that we have one hundred months, or about
eight years to turn things around or we will face catastrophic environmental
collapse. We hope he is wildly wrong, but the prediction is scary.
The
ultimate fear is the fear of death, and humans are particularly vulnerable to
this anxiety because we know what’s coming. While we now realize that other
creatures grieve the loss of those they love, so far we aren’t aware of the
members of any other species than homo sapiens who are
aware of and ponder their own demise. We
can come back to comedian Woody Allen’s classic line “It’s not that I’m
afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens!”
So, fear
really is one of the most natural things for human beings to survive in this
life.
And yet . .
. and yet, there is another powerful force which counteracts the human tendency
to cower in fear. We are also made for hope, that sense of expectancy which
says that joy and meaning will be ours, even when the evidence seems to lead
elsewhere.
The current
leader of the United States, President Energizer Bunny, has spent the past
couple of years promoting what he calls the “audacity of hope” and even wrote a
biography by that name. It is amazing to see people around the world responding
to President Obama as the bearer of that message of hope. When Obama came to
Ottawa the adulation was overwhelming and you could almost see the Prime
Minister Harper’s tee-shirt that said “I’m with him.”
We need to
have hope for our lives. We need to have hope for economic recovery. We need to
have hope for the well-being of this earthly home. Hope is the candle or the
flashlight which guides us from room to room when darkness surrounds us.
Today we
also declare our hope for our heavenly home, a hope which was born in a unique
way on that Easter Sunday morning nearly two thousand years ago.
Even though Mark is not a “happy ending” gospel
we know that those who came to the tomb quickly realized that something
wonderful had happened, something totally “unnatural” and yet world-changing.
Of course the seeds of resurrection hope had already been sown in their lives
long before Easter morning as they listened to Jesus and watched him. Those
first followers began to piece together a different understanding of what took
place. It is left to the other gospels say more, to share with us how the early
Christian communities overcame their sadness and fear to follow the Risen
Christ.
The invitation to all of us this morning is to stop running, to acknowledge our fears, to know that hope is ours in Christ. In our newest music resource, More Voices United, there is a little chorus from the Iona Christian community called Don’t be Afraid and the words are very simple.
Don’t be afraid,
my love is stronger,
my love is stronger than your fear.
Don’t be afraid,
my love is stronger and I have promised,
promised to be always near.
Christ’s love is stronger than anything that can hold us back from life. We are climbing the basement stairs, one by one and we will emerge into the light of a new day. The supernatural power of the resurrection can create in us all the hope we need to say that we are not afraid of the dark, and for this we say hallelujah, Christ is Risen!