Lifted into the Air by Nightingales
- Details
- Created on Monday, 25 April 2011 14:27
- Written by Gary E. Smith
Originally preached on March 27, 2005
You will remember that we left the story last Sunday with Jesus having come down from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem, come down among all the crowds and the cries hailing him as the Messiah, an entrance fit for a King, we would say, and then, somewhere and sometime after this chaos, Jesus has some private moment, a private moment just short of the city of Jerusalem during which, according to Luke, he weeps, a moment in which he cries, not for himself, but for the city itself; he cries, not for himself, but for others. Jenny spoke last week of the choice before Jesus, to enter Jerusalem or to turn away, to face the authorities or to continue a ministry of revolution. When we left the story, Jesus has ridden on to Jerusalem, entered the temple there, looked around and continued on with his disciples to Bethany for the night.
It has not been an uneventful week: the day we call Maundy Thursday, remembering the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples and then Good Friday, the tumultuous day of his arrest, his ridiculous trial, and his tragic death. Thursday called Maundy because of a Latin word that remembers Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, reminding them that he is no king but is a servant to the end. Friday called Good, and I cannot imagine why, unless for the irony of it all, just as when we say “good-bye” and there is nothing good about the leave-taking at all.
But it is now Easter morning, and the story continues. The story has not ended with Jesus’ death. We are told that after the crucifixion Jesus’ friends have observed the Jewish Sabbath, the Saturday, and now the Sabbath is past, and three women, Mary Magdalene, a loyal follower and one who was with him throughout most of his ministry, and Mary the mother of James [James being one of the disciples] and Salome, by some accounts, a sister to Jesus’ mother, these three women head out to where Jesus has been buried, in order to wash his body and prepare it according to their customs.
What happens next is the miracle and the mystery of the day: a large stone which had sealed the entrance to the tomb has been rolled back, and just when they are wondering how this could have happened, they look into the tomb and there, to their shock, is an angel, a messenger, in the shape of a young man. How to explain this? This messenger tells the women [in my own unique translation], “Don’t be afraid. I know it is Jesus you are looking for, but he is not here. He is risen from the dead and will be with you still, even as you go on with your lives, even as you go on living the kind of life he promised you could have, even as you spread his teachings to others.”
Can you imagine their surprise, these women who had come to prepare the body of the dead, and to hear the news instead of Jesus not dead? The Gospel of Mark says, “They fled from the tomb. For they were seized with trembling and terror. And to no one did they say anything. They were afraid, you see.” And the Gospel of Mark ends right there. This same Mark who had left the Palm Sunday story so abruptly with Jesus looking around the temple and going home has these three women filled with terror, running off at full speed, and the story ends.
Well, Mark’s story ends. But THE story does not end there. And I have been thinking this past week, with all the Easter sermons I have preached in my life, what is there that is new to say about this? And for those who only hear me preach once a year at Easter, how do I not repeat myself, or does it matter? It would be easy enough to get caught up in the lilies and the sounds of brass and the choral descants and the energy of a full room. It would be easy enough to gloss over this story and rejoice in the coming of spring: birds singing, long lines at the car wash, the baseball season well under way. Forrester Church said that someone “once described the classic Unitarian Easter sermon as ‘Upsy Daisy’: biologically correct resurrection without tears. The problem is,” Forrest said, “we are not flowers.”
I am drawn to Mark’s story of what is happening. What is Mark telling us? What is the story behind the story, I wonder. In the telling, Mark can’t wait to tell us what happened. Most of the sentences begin with “and,” as in “and then they… And then… And then…” What is happening here on Easter, beyond the flowers and the singing? There are three women, on a morning like this: the sun has risen, just as it rises every day; the women are grieving, just as people grieve now; the tears they have running down their faces are just like the tears that run down our own faces; these three women are doing what is both expected of them and what they want to do, a duty done in some anonymity, just as women are often called upon to do tender things in these days, often in anonymity.
Mark is saying: there are three women. This is what happened to them. And maybe we can imagine what is happening to them, up to a point. They have come to the tomb, with the expectation of death. They have left Jesus’ body there earlier at the tomb, wrapped in cloths, and they have gone away in shock to observe the Sabbath, according to custom, and now, thirty-six hours later, they are returning to finish the job. They are expecting to do the business of death.
And instead the body is gone. Someone is waiting to tell them that Jesus is not there but has gone on before them and they will see him again. I don’t think it particularly matters what we believe about all this: large stones moving, a body disappearing and reappearing again, a messenger, real or imagined. Who needs to be rational about these things on such a wonderful morning? Let’s keep it simple. The women came expecting death and instead they found not-death.
The same possibility exists for us. Forrest Church also said that we, you and I, walk around, most of us, most of the time, expecting death. I think he’s right. Watch people in the cars that pass you. Look at people coming up off the escalator at Park Street Station. We hurry here and there. We have earphones to block out sounds. We talk on our cell phones in places where telephones could never reach us before. We watch the stock market go up and down. We become fanatic about avoiding carbohydrates, salt and cholesterol. We walk on a Stair-Master in front of a mirror. We unload hundreds of employees and pay the CEO a ka-jillion dollars for a platinum parachute. Hello?
We are people in pain, inflicting God knows what on our children, on our parents, on our friends: neglect, slights, pettiness, revenge, blame. We carry all this history with us in here on a Sunday morning. And we’ve developed very sophisticated armor to take care of all this, blocking out the sadness and the regrets, going from one day to another. Sometimes we catch ourselves just sighing, and we don’t know why but we do know why. This is life, putting one foot in front of the other. Our money and all our possessions can’t buy us out of this predicament. We know that life is supposed to be more than this.
The question for Easter, the question for each and every one of us is this: does our life have meaning? I know that I have just listed a rather grim picture of who we are, and, of course, that does not tell the whole story. Most of us love our children, do good works, try real hard, laugh at the absurdities of who we pretend to be, but the question is still there: does our life have meaning? What I do know is that people are hungry for meaning, for purpose, including our selves. “What on earth am I here for?” Or, more grammatically correctly, “For what am I here on earth?”
The poet Mary Oliver, a Unitarian Gospel writer of today, writes in her poem “Landscape,” “Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead. Every morning, so far, I’m alive. And now the crows break off from the rest of the darkness and burst up into the sky – as though all night they had thought of what they would like their lives to be, and imagined their strong, thick wings.” Or Li-Young Lee’s poem about peach blossoms, read here on other Easters, this poem of resurrection: “O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard…to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background…”
So, when will we live? And this is the surprise of Easter. We come with the women to the tomb expecting death, and, my friends, we find not death. So what are you doing here this morning? This is what we could be doing here, beyond the flowers and songs. We could be living. We could go out of here after the Hallelujah Chorus and live. Wouldn’t that be an amazing thing? Let’s not fret over whether Jesus really rose from the dead or not. How about you? Are you ready to rise from the dead?
Forrest says, what if we looked out into eternity right now, each of us, looked into forever “and then look[ed] back. Look[ed] back on how amazing it was. Wasn’t it amazing? The people who loved us. The people who tried. Our parents, no they weren’t perfect, but neither are we. Our children, if we are blessed to have children. Our friends, the sun and moon, touch and sight, taste, hearing, smell, every miracle we take for granted every day of our lives until we die.”
“Do all this,” Forrest says, “remember how profoundly you are blessed, and you [can be] resurrected. Resurrected from taking life for granted rather than receiving it as a stunning, unaccountable gift. Resurrected from living death rather than blessing life.” What a morning this is, “pushing life out of inner tombs and outer pain,” Max Coots says. “Unless we move the seasons of the self, and Spring can come for us, the Winter will go on and on.”
The Spring has come. Easter has come. The new possibilities of life, your life, are before you. Are you ready? Are you ready to rise from the dead and to live again? How amazing this is! “No one would ever have guessed I was being lifted into the air by nightingales,” writes Billy Collins, “hoisted by their beaks like a long banner that curls across an empty blue sky, caught up in the annunciation of these high, most encouraging tidings.”
Sunday Morning with The Sensational Nightingales - Billy Collins
It was not the Five Mississippi Blind Boys
who lifted me off the ground
that Sunday morning
as I drove down for the paper, some oranges, and bread.
Nor was it the Dixie Hummingbirds
or the Soul Stirrers, despite their quickening name,
or even the Swan Silvertones
who inspired me to look over the commotion of trees
into the open vault of the sky.
No, it was the Sensational Nightingales
who happened to be singing on the gospel
station early that Sunday morning
and must be credited with the bumping up
of my spirit, the arousal of the mice within.
I have always loved this harmony,
like four, sometimes five trains running
side by side over a contoured landscape––
make that a shimmering, red-dirt landscape,
wildflowers growing along the silver tracks,
lace tablecloths covering the hills,
the men and women in white shirts and dresses
walking in the direction of a tall steeple.
Sunday morning in a perfect Georgia.
But I am not here to describe the sound
of the falsetto whine, sepulchral bass,
alto and tenor fitted snugly in between;
only to witness my own minor ascension
that morning as they sang, so parallel,
about the usual themes,
the garden of suffering,
the beads of blood on the forehead,
the stone before the hillside tomb,
and the ancient rolling waters
we would all have to cross some day.
God bless the Sensational Nightingales,
I thought as I turned up the volume,
God bless their families and their powder blue suits.
They are a far cry from the quiet kneeling
I was raised with,
a far, hand-clapping cry from the candles
that glowed in the alcoves
and the fixed eyes of saints staring down
from their corners.
Oh, my cap was on straight that Sunday morning
and I was fine keeping the car on the road.
No one would ever have guessed
I was being lifted into the air by nightingales,
hoisted by their beaks like a long banner
that curls across an empty blue sky,
caught up in the annunciation
of these high, most encouraging tidings.