ROLLING AWAY THE STONE

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

April 16, 2006

READING

Easter Meditation by Rudolph Nemser

The deepest truth I have discovered is, if one accepts the loss of what has been, friendship or an understanding, a way of life or a beloved person for reason gone away, if one gives up clinging to what is irretrievably gone pretending it is not lost, or refusing to live any other life than what we had with what can never be or be lived with or in again, then the nothing which is life, you without that friendship or person or place or feeling – you as your are now, life as it presently is is not barren, but enormously fruitful.

New things happen, new growths take place, fresh strengths, greater understanding.

Everything that one has lost comes flooding back again out of the darkness, memories, dreams, enjoyments, sounds of a voice, touch of a hand, come back brilliant and alive, come back as glorious parts of life, one’s relation to it is now free and unclinging. You can go on now, live with the past, taste that part of life that was lived, but also create an untried life without denying the relationship as it was, you can be free and unclinging in change,

but the richness of the nothing when what you love has gone and there are few familiar markings, contains far more: it is the all-possible, it is the spring of freedom.

We can be true to the past without being its prisoner. We can embrace the present. It is all possible.

We can move into the future with hope, and even expectation.

SERMON

A tomb is no place to stay, writes the Rev. Richard Gilbert, be it a cave in the Judean hills or a dark cavern of the spirit. Easter arrives at this most glorious time of the year when the world is exploding with new life, erupting in all its extravagant display, to remind us that the tombs we experience in our lives are not ending places. All of us encounter loss in our lives, but there can be a path to renewal if we can find a way to roll away the stone.

That image of rolling away the stone is one of the most dramatic moments in the narrative of Jesus’ life and death. Here is how it emerges in the Easter story: The gospels report that after Jesus died his body was brought down from the cross and laid in a cave to await preparations for burial. A large rock was placed at the opening to the cave to assure his body is not disturbed and the retinue that brought him departed.

When his followers – tellingly it is the women – returned to tend to him, they found the rock removed and his body gone. Instead there was a figure, or perhaps a couple of figures, dressed in white who informed them that Jesus is not there but had risen.

As I said, it is a dramatic moment, one that the biblical narrative has been anticipating all along with foreshadowing and references to prophecy. For the players in this drama, though – Jesus’ followers – there is nothing welcome about it. It is cause, we are told, for terror and amazement. The gospels, however, offer the device of these angelic attendants to direct the attention of the followers elsewhere. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” they ask. The Jesus you knew is not here. And so they leave, uncertain what to make of this interchange and the news they have been given.

The narrative then goes on to tell us how Jesus’ followers are comforted and reassured by his appearance to them, as a stranger on the road or appearing suddenly in their midst, how he invites them to touch him, examine the wounds he endured at his death. He even eats a meal of fish in their presence to convince them he is truly there. Then, delivering parting wisdom and assurance that his influence will be with them in their days ahead he ascends into the clouds.

Now, before we go much further I’d like to take a moment to reflect on how we might regard this narrative. The gospels present themselves, and are widely taken among many believers, to be fairly true representations of an historic event. Yes, we are told, the details vary from account to account, but that is to be expected. Any time you ask several people to describe an event they have all seen together different people remember different details with more or less accuracy. But that doesn’t refute the factuality of the event itself.

That may be so, but it ignores the larger question of the purpose for which the gospels themselves were intended. They were never offered as unbiased accounts of historical events. They are gospels, after all, the proclaiming of good news, declarations of faith, announcements of what is presented as God’s plan of salvation. And so it is not unreasonable to conclude the communities that wrote them constructed their narratives and selected each parable, each detail of Jesus’ life with an end toward buttressing their understanding of that faith.

One of the reasons scholars have been debating for generations how much of what we have from the early Christian church – not just the gospels, but also material that got left out of the canon, such as the Gospel of Thomas, or Mary, or the recently released Gospel of Judas – represents what Jesus truly said and did is because they recognize how the agendas of different writers played into how the Bible was written. Still, by carefully reviewing different accounts of Jesus’ words and their historical context it is possible at least to narrow in on some of the more reliable texts.

When it comes to accounts surrounding Jesus’ death, though, this enterprise reaches a whole new level of complexity. Here we are dealing with more than conflicting versions of Jesus’ words. We are confronted with a foggier, theological domain: a debate over Christianity’s defining faith event, the claim of Jesus’ ascension from the grave. How each of the early Christian communities from which these different versions of the gospel narratives emerged understood the circumstances of Jesus death and their meaning defined who they were.

We can even find places where internecine politics of the early Christian community are woven through the different stories of Jesus’ passion. In each gospel, arguments about which disciple was where and said or experienced what served to telegraph the claims of one group or another for supremacy.

All this is a way of saying we should be especially wary of claims to fact in the Easter story. The one fact we can be sure of is Jesus’ death, but beyond that we enter a different realm centered on the position of faith from which one approaches this story. For my part, I find little reason to spend much time on claims of Jesus’ physical resurrection. I am content to regard Jesus as a powerful, prophetic teacher who met an end much like other such teachers at the hands of an oppressive state.

What interests me about the Easter story is what it says as a metaphor for how we experience and recover from loss. I’ve suggested that in thinking about this we center in on that pivotal moment in the Easter story, the rolling away of the stone. The different gospels describe this moment in different ways but in each the moving of the stone comes as a surprise. No one is quite sure how it happened, but when Mary Magdalene and others come by the cave, they find it open and Jesus’ body gone. Instead, there is a ghostly figure telling them Jesus is gone, has risen. “Why,” it asks, “do you seek the living among the dead?”

Isn’t that the way it is with us? When we suffer a loss, we try to comfort ourselves by going about the routine duties of our lives, looking for reassurance even if we can’t restore what was lost to us. We are in that sense living in the past, in the company of that which is dead to us, a place that may offer comfort even if it doesn’t hold hope.

Our first step to healing comes when we are jolted out of that reverie, forced to confront the world that is breaking in us whether we are ready or not. In the Easter story, the moving of the stone literally opens up a new way of looking at the world for Jesus’ mourners, one that shifts their own attitude toward their lives.

This story brings to mind a British film that appeared some 15 years ago entitled “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” The film features Nina, a woman in her mid 30s who is grieving the loss of her husband, Jamie. Jamie had died quickly after a brief illness and Nina, some months later as the film begins, is still unable to process her grief.

She has a therapist who calmly listens to her sobs and cries, but none of it seems to make much difference. She shows up diligently for her work as a translator, but rebuffs efforts of her friends to draw her out socially.

Nina and Jamie, we learn quickly, were devoted to each other, at a level that truly touched each others’ souls, and nowhere was that expressed more deeply than in their shared love of music. Jamie was a cellist and Nina an accomplished pianist. Early in the film wee see Nina holding Jamie’s cello like a lover’s body, inconsolable.

And so, imagine Nina’s response one day when she sits down at the piano to play one of their favorite duets and she seems to hear Jamie’s cello accompanying her. She plays along, smiling at the memory, until she suddenly realizes that she doesn’t just seem to hear him. She truly does hear him, following her every line, her tempos matched by his. When she ends, she turns around, and there he is, at the cello, as if nothing had happened. She shrieks and runs to him, hugs him, touches him. It is him in the flesh. He can’t explain quite how it happened, but here he is. For how long? He doesn’t know. And she doesn’t care, the impossible, her every dream, is realized before her.

Nina doesn’t tell any of her friends or neighbors, figuring they wouldn’t believe her and not wanting to share him anyway and they share a couple of delirious days together. When the time finally comes for Nina to return to work she wears this mysterious smile all day, but is also preyed upon by doubts. Was that a dream? Will he be there when I return? That evening she is frightened when Jamie plays a joke on her by hiding at first when she arrives home, not answering her call, then popping out at her.

Nina is also a little nonplussed that Jamie has some not especially kind things to say about her housekeeping and how she has rearrange what used to be their apartment in his absence. And she is surprised later when some friends of his from the dead show up at her apartment. They’re perfectly nice follows, but she’s not crazy about them being there, and they seem to want to spend all their time there watching videos of classic movies. Jamie, meanwhile, has come down with a cold and complains of being freezing in Nina’s apartment, turning the thermostat up to suffocatingly high temperatures.

While all this is going, Nina happens to make the acquaintance of a wonderful man, one who is clearly interested in her but who she is not yet able to respond to.

As the days go by, things at Nina’s apartment do not go well. Each day she arrives home to find Jamie making bigger and bigger changes, taking up rugs and putting away paintings. At the same time, the crowd of dead friends of his who gather in Nina’s apartment around the TV set at all hours continues to grow. Finally, Nina is fed up and orders the crowd out, despite Jamie’s petulant looks. As they leave, she turns to him and asks plaintively, “is this how it was?”

The next day when she arrives home she can’t find Jamie. Even the rats that had evacuated her apartment after the arrival of the ghosts return. Facing the empty apartment, she decides to test the waters for a day with her new friend.

When evening comes, she gathers up her courage and decides leave her apartment to join him for the night. As she walks from her apartment toward the man’s car after gathering a few things, we see Jamie appearing at her window with a wan look on his face. His friends are gathered around him smiling, patting him on the shoulder and shaking his hand. Congratulations!

It is a bittersweet moment when we as viewers realize what perhaps even the “risen” Jamie didn’t know until that moment, that his task on returning was to release Nina from the deathly grip that her love for him had fastened on her life. It was not he who needed to be reborn; it was she.

She needed to give up, in Rudolph Nemser’s words from our reading, “clinging to what was irretrievably gone, pretending it was not lost.” This tells us that the first step in recovery from loss is recognizing and accepting the loss and finding in that acceptance not resignation but renewal, the understanding that “life as it presently is is not barren, but enormously fruitful.”

What I find in Easter is not the magical story of a prophetic figure’s resurrection and ascension, but the rebirth of a community gathered around the teachings of love. The transition that the story tells is of a demoralized people awakened and empowered to carry those teachings forward. The real stone that is rolled away is the one that has been resting on their hearts with their grief, and it is not so much their vivid experience of Jesus’ presence as their own ability to reflect on their experience of him and move forward with their lives with new purpose and hope. It was ultimately their renewal, not that of Jesus, that transformed their community.

We dare not denigrate the pain of loss. Whatever its cause, it wounds us; it bows us down. But there is renewal to be found, not in the breaking in of some magical force, but in the strength we possess, in our own natural gifts: informed, strengthened, seasoned by all that we have gained from our companions in life. We ourselves can find our own prophetic gifts and become agents of a hoped-for world.

Once we reach that understanding we are ready to receive all the wisdom that our experience has to bestow, flooding back again out of the darkness. The sights, the sounds, the memories, the love are no longer dead to us. They are part of us and inform who we are. New things happen. New growth takes place, fresh strength, greater understanding.

We can awaken on a fine spring morning and find, with Mary Oliver, how redeemable everything is, the world and everything else swirled in a shining cup into which we stare, only to find our own darling faces reflected back. We can learn to rise from our dreary tombs, pushing back the stones of denial and fear, accepting what we have lost and what of it will remain and resolving to live the life handed to us with courage and hope.

So be it.