2018-04-04
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Mark 16:1-8
A few weeks ago, I was teaching about “God and Family” to a scout seeking a merit badge. Part of the task is to look at your heritage, and to get a sense for the uniqueness of your own family. So the scout and I were talking about names, his and mine. We first looked up the meaning of his name. Then, because I had forgotten exactly the meaning of my own name, I looked it up, too. Hamilton means—and I know you will be suitably impressed—“treeless hill.” I know, I know—you envy me and wish your name meant something as special as that!
When I googled my name, one of the websites had this to say to parents who might be considering naming a child Hamilton: “Unless it runs in your family, . . . you might consider something less imposing—and without the teasable nickname Ham” (https://nameberry.com/babyname/Hamilton).
Imposing! Really?! Actually, despite the less-than-ideal nicknames, I’ve always loved my name. It’s not difficult to spell—in fact, when I make reservations, I use it rather than Throckmorton. And it’s just different enough that when I hear it, I know I’m the one being addressed. And there’s a real benefit in that. A few months ago, in fact, as I was walking down a hall at church one Sunday morning, suddenly, from around the corner, I heard just a snippet of a conversation. “Hamilton is amazing,” I heard. And I was elated. They didn’t even know I was coming, so I knew they weren’t just blowing smoke. “Yes,” the second person said, “what a remarkable person—really, a superstar!” And I walked around the corner, chest puffed out just a little bit, full of the kind of affirmation that makes you feel fantastic. And just as I turned the corner, one of them said to the other, “Yeah, we saw the show in Chicago and were just blown away by it.” “It was totally gripping” said the other—“best show ever!” Oh! Not moi, the musical “Hamilton”! I was ever so slightly deflated!
Today, in case you’d forgotten, is not only Easter. It is also April Fools’ Day, the first time these two days have coincided since 1956. That hallway moment was, for me, a kind of April Fools’ joke. You know the kind of joke I’m talking about. “Hey, your shoe’s untied.” “Your zipper’s down.” Sometimes, such jokes come in the practical variety, as well. When I was in college, classmates—never me!—would short-sheet someone’s bed—you know, fold the top sheet over in such a way that a person could only get halfway into bed. The best one I ever heard about was the group who totally took apart their friend’s VW Beetle and rebuilt it—on the roof of their dorm! That’s commitment!
It may sound odd to be talking about jokes and April Fools’ Day on this, the holiest day in the Christian year. What in the world could jokes and Easter possibly have in common? Some might think these two days are a universe apart, that maybe it’s sacrilegious to even mention them in the same breath. Shouldn’t Easter have a kind of solemnity about it?
Well, yes and no. A theologian named Miles Townes puts it this way: “Jokes have a structure, usually a premise and a conclusion held in tension. A good joke in the functional sense depends on our ability to see the difference between the world as it is and as it could be. A good joke in the moral sense, then, depends on our ability to see the difference between is and should . . . [A] good joke helps us to see the distance between who we are and who we should be.”
Years ago, when I was in seminary, I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury preach. As he began, he told the story of a predecessor of his visiting a huge cathedral somewhere in England. Some of you will know that, in the Church of England, there’s a kind of liturgical formality; when the priest says, “The Lord be with you,” the congregation responds, “And also with you.” Well this day, as the Archbishop got up to speak in this massive sanctuary, he couldn’t tell if the sound system was working. So he tapped on the microphone, and said “There’s something the matter with this mic.” And the congregation dutifully responded, “And also with you.”
Now I’m not going to analyze that joke, which would only ruin it. But allow me to point out that we’re led to expect one thing—a kindly and comforting and grace-filled liturgy that lifts us all—and we get instead something of a momentary fiasco. What is is: best intentions can fall apart. What should be is: liturgies and social interactions that sing with grace.
Easter is sort of the great, cosmic, divine joke on what we often perceive the created world to be like. We all know the is of our lives: sorrow, fear, failure, family friction, job frustration. And the great looming one: the storms of death that hover ever on the horizon. The story of suffering and death—crucifixion, in other words—is never far from our minds and hearts. That’s the reality, that’s the is of daily life, a life that often breaks and bends under its frequent assaults. The gloomy tomb not uncommonly has its way.
Cynicism and alarm and despair can eat away at life. And then, early on a Sunday morning, just as the sun is coming up, three women, who have just seen their world shattered, arrive at the tomb of their despair. I suppose they want to look the figurative monster in the eye, to face their grief and emptiness, and eventually to move past it. They know that a heavy stone blocks their journey, and will likely keep them from moving on. To their utter shock, though, the stone has been moved, and the cave of their anticipated anguish becomes for them a portal to what might be a new and unanticipated future. That open door is the should be of their lives.
What they discover, in other words, is that, by grace, they have been given the chance to get past what blocks their healing, their flourishing, their fearless living. The set-up: nothing at the tomb is as they had thought it would be. The joke: what they had assumed was inevitable is turned totally around. The punch line: what was dead has been made alive. God’s resurrecting power has made laughable the old, sad reality.
The promise of Easter is that, when God’s resurrecting power takes root, it brings light to the shadows, lilt to the tuneless cacophony, life to what had been dead. It soothes the pain. It calms the worry. It dislodges even the specter of death. And in doing so, it shifts the earth on its axis. That’s the joke. And it’s a joke that comes with fullness and hope and joy. It’s a joke that fills what’s dead and empty with life and grace.
Many years ago, when my brother Tim was in college, he had a roommate named Dan. Dan lived on a shoestring budget, barely eking out those college years, getting by with just the basic necessities. Dan had a little jar of Taster’s Choice coffee that he kept in one of the kitchen cupboards. It was a tiny jar, holding just a few ounces, and as it got close to empty, my brother Tim had an idea. Without telling Dan, Tim decided he would add some coffee to that little jar every other day or so. So the jar never ran out of coffee. One day Dan said to Tim, in utter amazement, “I cannot believe how long this little jar of coffee has lasted!” I don’t know if Tim ever told Dan what he had been doing. But I do know that’s the only practical joke I ever heard of that, rather than causing a roadblock for the other person, benefited them. Tim later did the same thing, by the way, with another roommate, whose nearly-empty bottle of shampoo Tim kept filling a little bit at a time.
I suspect that’s an incredibly tiny version of the joke God is constantly playing with us. As our figurative coffee and shampoo run down, and we near empty, the Holy One is constantly replenishing our supply, filling our empty bottles, making alive, in truth, what once was dead. You come here today, maybe partly out of habit, maybe to please someone who wanted you to come with them. But at bottom, I think you and I come here today to be reminded of that greatest of all truths: that God can and does make a way out of no way, that whatever it is in us that decays and declines and disintegrates can be turned around by the God for whom all things are possible. The stunning joke is that God conquers even death.
The very end of Mark’s story of Jesus is one of the oddest parts of the Bible. While the other three gospels all end with an appearance of Christ to the disciples after he has died, in Mark, the ending leaves us scratching our heads. Usually, on Easter, we read from John’s gospel, in which the risen Christ appears to Mary and then the eleven remaining disciples. It’s a happy, satisfying ending: Christ dies and then returns.
In Mark’s telling of it, though, three women come to the tomb where the body of Jesus had been laid to rest. There they encounter an angel who tells them that Jesus’s body is no longer there, and that they should go on ahead to Galilee, where they will see Jesus, just as he had told them. All fine and good. The women, though, are petrified, and they run from the tomb, “as fast as they [can], beside themselves, their heads swimming. Stunned, they [say] nothing to anyone” (16:8, The Message). Repeat: they say nothing to anyone. End of gospel.
The joke here, of course, is that Jesus doesn’t appear to them where they expect to see a dead body at the cemetery. No. Instead, the word is that Jesus will appear to them alive as they go back to Galilee, back to the place where they eat and drink and work and live. The whole notion of resurrection may lead us to expect some supernatural visitation from the Ruler of the Universe. Mark says instead, ‘Uh-uh. That’s not what you get with resurrection. What you get is daily accompaniment in the comings and goings of your life and even your death. What you get is God’s blessing as you live a life of service and love.’ That’s resurrection power: a holy blessing, a divine benediction, as you and I live out the mission appointed to us by God.
So off they go, to their workplaces and homes and neighborhoods. And while the story says these women were apparently not convinced, and were too afraid to tell anyone, the only possible way we could know about the angel’s visit, and the ultimate joke of the story, is that one or more of them must, in fact, have reported the incident. The simple message? God’s resurrecting power takes shape through, and is conveyed by, you and me. You want to share in the upside-down joke that is the grace of new life? Try playing a practical joke that benefits someone rather than victimizing them. Try forgiving someone who doesn’t expect it and may not have the slightest idea how to react to it. Try offering yourself to God’s work of justice and mercy. Try remembering that it doesn’t matter how dispirited you are today, or how awful you may feel about yourself, or how ashamed you may be of something you’ve said or done. None of that matters at all, when brought into the light of God’s redeeming grace. The joke, the beautiful Easter joke, is that God loves you more than you could possibly love yourself, that every slip or slight you’ve ever made is forgiven, that grace attends those who serve and love, and that all, finally, shall be well.
Billy Graham, the great Christian evangelist of the last century, died a month or so ago. In 1960, about ten years after he began his public ministry, he wrote a retrospective reflecting on that decade of his life. He had been invited to give “a personal account of the failures, triumphs and development of [his] mind and faith” over that time. This is some of what he wrote: “I am glad to be alive at such a time as this. What a moment to be an ambassador for Christ; what an hour for the proclamation of the gospel. Christianity is the religion of crisis. For a world in ferment it is made to order, for it fits the heart and needs of [humankind] like a glove. This is the time to make Christ known . . .
“I recall a magnificent saying of Brindon to [Scotland’s Pictish] King Brude, uttered long ago. ‘What shall I find if I accept your gospel and become Christ’s man?’ asked the king. Brindon replied, ‘If you become Christ’s man, you will stumble upon wonder after wonder, and every wonder will be true.’ [This is God’s brilliant joke:] If in this hour of crisis we will dare to be Christ’s [women and] men, even in a time of blighting disillusionment, we will come upon wonder after wonder, and every wonder will be true” (https://www.christiancentury.org/article/first-person/what-ten-years-have-taught-me).
This is the Easter joke. And it is the great Easter promise. Christ is dead. No, Christ is risen! Be overcome by that wonder.