I was eating my lunch outside my office one day in
Maryland when one of the construction workers who was working on our new church
stopped and said, “Afternoon, Reverend.”
He was not one I had met before, so I figured he must be new to the job.
I stuck out my hand and said, “My name is Michael.” He briefly looked horrified that I had given
him that information, and replied, “Thanks, Reverend, I’m Bill.” We exchanged some pleasantries about the
lovely day. After you’ve been a
clergyperson for awhile, you get this sense that somebody wants to talk to you
about something other than the weather.
He did.
Suddenly it came out.
“You know the truth, don’t you?”
Being an Episcopalian I said, “The truth about what?” Again he gave me that momentary look like
something was terribly wrong. “You know,
he said, the truth about, about him.”
His voice lowered and he furtively pointed skyward.
“If you mean God,” I said, “I can tell you what I know
about him. But it won’t be the whole
truth.” I know I shouldn’t do that to people, but I am who I am.
“You’re a Reverend, how can you not know the truth,” he
replied. I said, “It takes your whole
life to discover what the truth is, and then we only really know it when God
reveals it to us face to face.” I knew I
had lost. “But I need to know the truth now,” he said. “I can’t believe you don’t know the truth,”
he said as he wandered off. I didn’t
pursue him; I thought I had probably done enough damage.
I never saw him again. Turns out he was a temp. Or maybe an angel sent to test me or just
mess with my head.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have available to me yet what I
came to say a few weeks ago, that the truth is not a doctrine or something we
might call “a fact.” The truth is a story.
The Truth, or the Gospel, is not a proposition to sell but a story to
tell. May Bill the construction worker
and I would have had an interesting
conversation about stories, although I’m pretty sure that is not the answer he
was looking for.
Mary Magdalene does not believe in the resurrection in
this morning’s Gospel reading because she is taught it. She experiences it. It is a story that
happens to her and then a story she tells.
And it is that story, told and re-told, passed on to the next person and
the next, that is the truth we call resurrection.
After his death, Jesus’ disciples, men like Peter and
women like Mary Magdalene, did not go around teaching people something like the
Nicene Creed. They went around telling
what Mary first told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” And in telling their story their intention
was not to “prove” anything. It was to offer something. It was to offer an
experience. It was to offer the possibility of being part of the story that
begins, “I have seen the Lord.”
I can say to you with all sincerity that I believe what
we are about to say in the creed. I
believe Jesus rose from the dead, and I look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Some
people in progressive churches like this one have trouble believing in the
resurrection, particularly as an historical fact, and that is perfectly
fine. I would defend your right not to
believe it with every fiber of my being.
But I happen to believe in the resurrection, and that is
mostly because I have a very strong sense that I am part of the story that
began, “I have seen the Lord.”
Now I, of course, have not seen the Lord, not
directly. His mother has not shown
herself to me either, about which I am somewhat resentful, but we remain on
good speaking terms. But I have
experiences that connect me to that story.
Some of those experiences involve cemeteries. One thing I continue to miss about my old
church in Maryland was that we had a cemetery.
And I miss that cemetery especially on Easter Day, because my second
Easter there, in 1992, I decided we were going to have the Easter Egg Hunt in
the cemetery.
As you can imagine, that was not everyone’s first choice,
but somehow I talked them into it and about 20 kids ran all over that cemetery
finding Easter eggs. It was an amazing
sight. What better place to have an Easter Egg Hunt than a cemetery?
A funny thing happened then, some of the older folks in
the congregation came out to watch. Some of them had been pretty grumpy about
our doing this, but when they saw the kids having so much fun, they relaxed and
some of them came over to me and we walked around the cemetery and they told me
story after story of the folks buried there.
I could still walk around that cemetery and tell you some of those
stories.
I have never been the same since. Now when I go to visit my grandparents’
graves, which are at two different cemeteries in Avoca, when I drive in the
place seems alive to me. I know,
bizarre. But when I walk around stories
just keep bubbling up—it helps, of course, that it’s a small town and I know or
am even related to most of these people.
What those stories do is break down what seems to be the
obvious truth, the facts. These people
are dead and I am still alive and there is no connection between us anymore.
But that is not what I experience. The truth is not in the fact of their
deadness and my being alive, facts though those may be. The truth is in the stories we share. The
truth is in the memory that is kept.
Relationships do not die. Jesus
said, “Mary,” and she knew who he was.
And that goes on for me in those cemeteries. I am not just experiencing pleasant (and some
unpleasant) memories. I am experiencing
an aliveness that I cannot explain. Despite all signs to the contrary, these
people are not dead.
We
in the church know how this works. It is why Jesus gave us this thing we do
together at this Altar, to keep his story living, to make it an ongoing story
of Jesus and you and me and millions upon millions of people who have come to
an Altar to do what he asked us to do:
“keep my memory,” “remember me.”
It is such a simple thing, but, for many of us in our tradition and
other sacramental traditions, it is the source of our truth. It is why we
believe.
That does not translate well to “sound-bite,”
Bible-verse” evangelism. All we can do,
if we are honest to ourselves, is say, “Let me tell you a story," or "Tell me a story." Together we can find the truth in it, because it is a story of truth, one that ultimately begins, "I have seen the Lord."
It is a story that is the truth, a story that we are
alive—and forgiven, loved and free, despite all signs to the contrary.
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