Death and Our Song

Easter Sunday C

Over the past month, I have attended or officiated four funerals. The deceased were people of different genders and ages and ethnicities. Two were people who had lived long full lives and passed away peacefully. Two were people whose lives were tragically cut short. There were in some cases ashes at the funerals, in some cases bodies; in all there were memories and stories. There was grief, there was music and prayers. And in each case, the congregation of mourners said their “amen” to strange and wonderful words like “Even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

Rationally, that’s a pretty weird thing to say in the midst of grief over a death. And this may seem like a strange way to begin an Easter Sunday sermon on this glorious San Jose morning when the sun is shining and the flowers blooming. Thanks be to God! So I’m guessing you probably didn’t come here come today to be reminded of death. But then, it’s not as if I need to remind you. Death is all around us. This is the first Easter in three years we’ve been able to gather in church, and that’s because—as we all know—the threat of mortality has hung heavily over our communities these past two and a half years.

More recently we’ve been witness to terrifying reports of civilian massacres in Ukraine, and a yet another American mass shooting in Brooklyn. We could turn off our screens and try to ignore this bad news, but that is never the way that Christians have preached the Good News of Jesus Christ. Instead, we’ve looked death in the face and said things like “we will all be made alive in Christ,” and further on in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, “death has been swallowed up in victory.”

I believe in resurrection. In the gritty, bodily resurrection that follows even violence and betrayal. And thereby assures us that our own messy embodied reality is holy, and wholly worthy of God’s undying love. To speak of victory over death is to claim victory over every other human fear, and alleluia is an honest thing for people to say in response. But notice that the reality of Jesus’ resurrection—whatever it may have been—doesn’t actually make sense without the reality of death. And that’s surely why we begin the great fifty days of Easter at the very tomb of Jesus, in the company at least three women who had come expecting to do the normal work of tending to a deceased human body.

Remember what the Gospel of Luke told us? They had brought spices. And likely also oils for anointing, and tears as well, just as Mary did when she anointed Jesus’ feet at Bethany. The women came fully prepared to tend a corpse in its natural process of decomposition, something they understood how to do. But instead they found an empty tomb and two strangers telling them that all the rules of life and death had been broken. This, the women didn’t understand. Neither did Peter, evidently. And if I’m honest, I don’t really understand either. But what these biblical characters did know—and continue to teach us—is the importance of showing up at the tomb.

From the tomb itself, they actually did not learn anything about what the resurrection would mean for them. Rather, they learned that the tomb is the place where expectations go to die. What tombs have you found yourself visiting this year? Loneliness? Persistent anxiety? Disappointment? Self-doubt? Fear? Broken relationships? What if something new were emerging now? Are you ready for resurrection? What would it take for you to let go of your expectation of loss and grief?

I ask that question in all pastoral humility. We’ve all lived through a hard couple of years, and perhaps we’ve resigned ourselves to the persistent discouragement of the pandemic. But sometimes we plan and prepare ourselves for grief—we even have the spices or the resignation letter or the memorial video ready—and we get something entirely different. Are we open to new possibility? In some ways it’s actually easier to cope with the known reality of death that the mystery of resurrection. Which may be why they disciples had to kneel down and peer right into a tomb before they could meet the resurrected Lord. Jesus’ wasn’t the only death that weekend: their expectations had to die as well.

Something strange and wonderful happened in the three-day dark of that tomb. Something that defied not only mortality and the laws of entropy, but also the expected psychology of human beings. After the empty tomb, the disciples did not move though the stages of grief and move on; they moved out and among and even beyond their communities with an improbable story that bears retelling every year. It goes something like this: what might once have been a tomb may yet be a womb. Death need not be locked door, but could actually be a key to the kingdom. Yes, we can bury our hope in a grave, but God won’t let it stay there.

The resurrection of Jesus changed the meaning of death—and all its fear and shame-inducing cousins—for all of us. Forever. We don’t have to entirely understand what went on in the dark of the tomb in order to love it and let it live in us. But we can take courage in the signs of resurrection we see everywhere. Because I have been privy to your grief and loneliness during the pandemic, I see resurrection life in this gathered community right now. “Every parting gives a foretaste of death” said German philosopher Arthur Schopenauer in the ninetheenth century, and “every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection.”

We have stared death in the face, and yet we live. The Christian life is not a life that denies death; rather, is a life that acknowledges the reality of death—including the anger, pain, and grief that accompanies it—but insists that death does not have the final word on who we are or how we are to live. We’ve been seeing this—and saying this—since a few perplexed woman told it to some doubting men 2000 years ago. Some of us tell the Easter story with bewilderment, some with amazement, some with quiet confidence, and some with soaring poetry. In the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom—so named because it was said that his words sounded like gold—told it this way:

“Come you all: enter into the joy of your Lord. You the first and you the last, receive alike your reward; you rich and you poor, dance together; you sober and you weaklings, celebrate the day; you who have kept the fast and you who have not, rejoice today. The table is richly loaded: enjoy its royal banquet. The calf is a fatted one: let no one go away hungry. All of you enjoy the banquet of faith; all of you receive the riches of his goodness. Let no one grieve over his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed; let no one weep over his sins, for pardon has shone from the grave; let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free…

O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? Christ is risen and you are abolished. Christ is risen and the demons are cast down. Christ is risen and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen and life is freed. Christ is risen and the tomb is emptied of the dead: for Christ, being risen from the dead, has become the Leader and Reviver of those who had fallen asleep. To Him be glory and power for ever and ever. Amen.”