Why do you look for the living among the dead? Luke 24:1-12
Easter Sunday 2007
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” What a startling question posed to startled women, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary and others, who have come to tend to Jesus’ body. Can you imagine the scene? You are going to the cemetery at early dawn when the morning mist is in the air. The only sounds come from the birds, the rustling of wind in the trees, your own footsteps and the footsteps of your companions. The sun is slowly rising on the horizon to greet yet another day that may not seem worthy of a greeting to you. Your grieving friends are your only comfort.
Someone you deeply love has died and you have mustered up all your energy to come and face the lifeless body. You have come to tend to it with pleasant oils that, however precious they may be, will not accomplish the one thing your heart desires. They will not bring your loved one back to life. They will only accomplish a final act of caring before the body is sealed away from you forever. You come to the grave bracing yourself for another wave of heart-breaking grief and you find that someone has tampered with the burial site. The stone is gone. What is going on? Isn’t life hard enough already?
A part of you wants to run away from this nightmare, afraid of what you may find. Another part compels you to find out what has happened and you inch forward into the tomb, hanging on to the sleeves of your friends. And – nothing! Then, before you have a chance to catch your breath, two men in dazzling clothes appear right next to you and scare you half to death. You brace yourself and hear the words: “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember, how he told you, while he was still in
As you slowly get your breath and heart rate to return to normal, you realize that they didn’t ask out of curiosity why you were looking for a body. They are wondering why you are so surprised and out of touch. “Remember,” they say as they feed you words that slowly turn a key in your mind that unlocks memories that had left you confused before. Your mind turns to a scene in the past when Jesus was speaking about being handed over and crucified before rising again. You remember how everyone was shaking their heads not wanting Jesus to talk about difficult things that threatened their own ideas about the future. Remember?
Then you hurry away from this place of death with a strange feeling in your stomach. The heavy weight of grief is increasingly turning into butterflies of excitement. Is it possible? Is it really possible that he has risen from the dead? When you reach your other friends who are gathered together, you once again step into an atmosphere thick with fear and confusion, grief and disappointment. Your words of hope and remembrance cannot penetrate the hurt and get dismissed as idle tales, as the words of women so often did. Only one of the disciples will investigate. Peter will go to the tomb but even he will first have to find his faith and his voice. You already have yours or do you? What will you do with it?
I ask you, what will we do with this wild and wonderful story of Easter? Will we believe? Will we proclaim what we have found like those women did on Easter morning? As we ask ourselves these questions, it seems wise to consider what it actually means for us to stop looking for the living among the dead and remember the promises of resurrection despite hardship. I would like to take a look at this question from three perspectives: our relationship to those who have died, our relationship those who are living but have no life to give and our own approach to our everyday existence.
First, let me begin with how we think of those who have died. Many of us gave flowers in remembrance of loved ones who have died. Others have other ways to honor loved ones on this day of Easter. For some of us the loss happened years ago. For others it’s so fresh that it still steals our breath from time to time. We remember our parents, children, spouses, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends. We cherish our memories and make peace with whatever pain there may have been between us as we go on living our lives.
To stop looking for the living among the dead is a way of saying that we have to refrain from closing the chapters of their lives and to include them in the hope of Easter living. Bereavement counselor Thomas Attig suggests, in fact, that we might perhaps learn to think of our relationship with those we have lost as an ongoing dance. We must not hold them too tightly as we dance and need to allow them to be other than ourselves. We continue to discover them and interpret them as we get older and as we seek to live and honor what they valued by how we live. I would go on to say that those who have died here on earth are still evolving not only in our own understanding of them but in their own relationship to God, to themselves and to us.
To stop looking for the living among the dead in this sense, then, is to allow ourselves to take the resurrection seriously and to hope for those we so dearly miss. In other words, I believe that the last chapter in my sister Gudrun’s life with God was not written on the day that she collapsed in the rain in the parking lot of a discount store where she had taken my mother to shop. Her physical heart stopped that day, yet, her life goes in ways I cannot fathom but only believe. To stop looking for the living among the dead in this way is to remember and live the faith of Easter.
Secondly, what about living with those who have no real life to give? How do we stop looking for the living among the dead in that sense? How many people do you know, or perhaps, you know this feeling too well yourself, who keep trying to get love or respect from the very person or persons who are incapable of giving it to them? Imagine a person stuck in a profession that drains them and which they only entered to please their father or mother or grandparent. They keep pushing harder to get to the next level of success irregardless of how empty they feel because the love they are looking for still isn’t coming. There are countless other stories that describe how we look to the wrong people for the love that only those who really embrace their own lives and God can give.
Whenever stories like these appear in therapy sessions in my internship site, one of the therapists is quick to tell a story about dealing with his mother. (I have permission to share this). My friend learned a long time that his mom is so wrapped around herself that she cannot truly welcome others. No matter what he does, there is always something wrong with it. He loves her but he knows that engaging her perpetual disappointment drains those looking for her approval of life. His sibling is still looking for it and fights with her every day. My friend is not.
When he went to see her for her 75th birthday in another state, he braced himself for the encounter at the door. Sure enough, the moment the door opened, his mom pointed at my friend, an accomplished and well respected professional and father, and said, “You are not coming to my party.” “Why is that, mom?” my friend asked. “Just look at your hair. It’s a disgrace. It’s too long. You are getting a haircut today or you are not coming.” My friend thought for a moment and proceeded to ask: “Do you have any pretzels?” “What are you talking about?” his mother retorted. “If I can’t come to your party, I’d like to have pretzels when I watch the game on TV.” My friend attended the birthday party and celebrated his mother’s life with his hair intact. When people ask him how he can do that, he replies that he loves her but has learned not to look for love from someone who cannot offer it in life giving ways. It is in that particular sense that he does not hurt himself by looking for the living among the proverbial dead. Instead, we can remember and look to the life giving risen Christ, who urges us onward in living our lives as Easter people assured of the love and presence of God that will sustain us in this life and the next. We can look for the living among the living.
Thirdly, how do we apply the idea to stop looking for the living among the dead to ourselves? Ho w do we avoid living as though we are dead? Sounds like a strange idea, doesn’t it? After all, we are all sitting here breathing and alive. I think that to ponder that question forces us to consider the quality of our living. Theologian Kirk Jones points out in his book Addicted to Hurry how often we use phrases that describe our own vanishing or disappearing. How often have we said, “I don’t know whether I am coming or going.” “I don’t know who I am anymore.” “I feel like my life is passing me by.” “I’m not feeling like myself.” “She just isn’t herself.”
When we feel this way we are not truly alive to ourselves, breathing though we may be. Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to be inundated with busyness, gotten lost in the rat race of keeping up with the Jones’ or are still busy looking to the wrong people for life giving love. Perhaps we have given up on ourselves and lost touch with our deepest desires and God given gifts.
It is so amazing, and yet perhaps not surprising, that often our best teachers about living are those whose lives are more overtly on the line. When people like Elizabeth Edwards refuse to be defined by metastatic cancer, they are not denying the life-changing and invasive nature of this chronic and incurable disease. They know of pain and frustration and having to adjust to what another person has called “the new normal” of uncertainty and treatments and emotional and physical ups and downs. They are saying to us “Don’t go looking for the living among the dead.” I think that also means, “Stop writing me off and defining me by one thing. I am full of life and love and I am going to keep on living. I am going to pay attention to my life and the things that really matter in God’s sight and I am going to keep on giving of myself as long as I can.” That is not denial. That is Easter hope that we all need to remember and learn to live!
Take the example of Darryl Stingley, the former Patriots football star who died this week at the young age of 55. He was a first round draft pick in 1973after leaving college early and played five great seasons for the Pats. He was known among his teammates for his incredible work ethic and for his capacity to pick the team up emotionally after tough loss by serenading Stevie Wonder songs. He also caught lots of touchdowns! Stingley’s life would be irrevocably changed during a pre-season game in 1978. He was trying to catch an overthrown pass from Steve Grogan and, while suspended in the air, got hit so hard by a defensemen that his neck was broken. Stingley became a quadriplegic. When asked about those early days after the injury, Stingley said, “Early on there were a lot of questions in my mind. Questions about life in general. Questions if I would even live. But I have such a strong faith in God.” He also said that he had to ask himself, “In who, and how much, do you believe, Darryl!?”
Moving forward for him meant learning to forgive the player who injured him so that he wouldn’t be filled with bitterness. It also meant finding new ways to use his keen intellect and big heart. He was active in his sons’ lives as best as he could. He also managed to finish his college degree even though he was dependent on constant care. Stingley created the Darryl Stingley foundation in
I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
Of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days
To allow my living to open to me,
To make me less afraid,
More accessible,
To loose my heart
Until it becomes a wing,
A torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance:
To live
So that which came to me as seed
Goes to the next as blossom
And that which came
To me as blossom, goes on as fruit.
As we now proceed to remember the Easter promise of Christ and place our own flowers which symbolize that life giving hope of Easter, let us consider how we will refuse to die an unlived life or live in fear, how we will refuse to look for the living among the dead. Let us consider how we wish to catch fire and inhabit our days in such a way that our hearts become a torch, a living promise of Easter living so that the newness and transformation that God offers this day will come to us as blossom and go on as fruit. Amen.
