Earthquakes and Resurrections

Here is my message for Easter Sunday. The text was Matthew 28:1-10:

Have you ever had a resurrection take place in your life?  Maybe it was that houseplant that you thought you had killed, but somehow it came back stronger and greener, or maybe it was an appliance you thought for sure was a goner, but somehow it was able to be fixed and kept running.  Maybe it was a relationship or a job that you thought were over, but was somehow renewed and given new life and vitality.  Or maybe, like author and commentator David Sedaris, you’ve seen a more dramatic resurrection in your life.  He recounts the time when the family dog Duchess gave birth to a litter of puppies.  After all the puppies were born, one of them appeared to have died but Sedaris’ mother took the puppy arranged it in a casserole dish and popped it into the oven.  When Sedaris and his sisters reacted with horror, their mother responded “Oh, keep your shirts on.  I’m not baking anyone, this is just to keep him warm. The heat revived the sick puppy,” Sedaris said, “and left us believing that our mother was capable of resurrecting the dead.”

What stories of resurrection remind us is that resurrection is only needed; indeed resurrection is only possible when things appear to be at an end.  You cannot resurrect something that is going well. Only relationships on the rocks can be resurrected.  Only careers and jobs that are lapsing can be resurrected.  Only failing health can be resurrected.  Only when the baseball season appears to be over before it has started can it be resurrected.  Only lives that have ended can be resurrected.  I say all this because while it might be obvious that death and resurrection go together, I think that sometimes we forget it, and so especially in this time of quarantines and shelter at home orders we need to remember, in this time in which we so desperately want and hunger for a return to normal, we have to remember that resurrection comes out of the darkness and despair of Good Friday, it only comes from the death and the tomb, and it means so much because of those things. Indeed this Holy Week and this Easter have a different meaning for most people, I think because of what we are experiencing as a town, a state, a nation and a world. And we have much in common in our situation with the women and the disciples this day.


In Matthew’s account of Jesus death and burial, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, and which Mary that is is not exactly clear, do not bring spices in order to anoint Jesus’ body in the tomb as they do in Mark and Luke, instead they are going to simply be near the tomb. They had been there when the body was placed into the tomb and closed by Joseph of Arimathea, whom everyone knows from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and then they waited. On Saturday, the Sabbath, they are simply sitting and waiting, and while they are waiting, the disciples are holed up together as well, sitting in a house somewhere afraid for their lives and what might happen to them if they leave the house. Sounding vaguely familiar? Everything they had known, their sense of normal is gone, and they have no idea what the future will bring. They are sitting in an in between time, and then we are told that there is a great earthquake as the Mary and Mary go to the tomb.

And so as I was thinking about this passage several months ago and what I might say, I was contemplating the damage of earthquakes and the recovery afterwords and how that played into Easter, never imaging what was about to happen here, and that I would be preaching to a basically empty sanctuary for Easter. Even as I began hearing of other denominations sending out guidance telling them to plan being in the sanctuary for Easter, it just didn’t seem real. I couldn’t imagine not having a sanctuary full of people, and yet here we are, and so we sit in the midst of our own metaphorical earthquake wondering what’s going and maybe more importantly what comes next.

In 1903, French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep published his seminal work entitled The Rites of Passage. The book was important for several reasons, one of them being because it was hugely influential to Joseph Campbell for his text The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which then influenced a small art house film called Star Wars, which is all about hope, but I’m getting ahead of myself. In talking about rites of passage, van Gennep coined the term liminality. He took the term from the Latin word limen, which referred to a stone that was placed on the threshold of a door. It was the physical thing that had to be crossed when moving from one space to another, and so van Gennep called that in-between space, liminal space. It was where we had ended being in one space, or one room, but we were not yet into the other space yet. One time and space had ended, but the new time and space had not yet begun. It’s the sense of Holy Saturday. Jesus has died and is in the tomb, what had been is over, including all the dreams and ideas and promises and beliefs, but the resurrection has not yet taken place, and so the future is totally unknown. That is a liminal space. The past is over but the future has not yet been decided. We are living in that in-between space. We live in a liminal time, just like with the disciples and the Maries, and that can be an uncomfortable place to be, and much of that comes with what we have to leave behind. Susan Beaumont says that “liminality always begins with an ending, an experience of loss. And humankind resists loss. We also resist the unknowing inherent in ‘not yet’ – the loss of control over our own destiny.”

And so if we pay attention to what happens with the women, we are told that they flee from the tomb in fear and in great joy. The fear is over the sense of loss and unexpectedness of what is happening, it’s about the past, but the great joy is about the future. They are experiencing these two things because they are in the in between; that this earthquake in their lives has left them in shock and disoriented, and disorientation is a common aspect of being in a liminal space, or a liminal time, and we can see that because they keep having to be told the same thing. Both the angel and Jesus tell them what they are supposed to be doing, and show them where the future is going to happen. “Tell the disciples to go to Galilee” they say, and Jesus will meet them there. Even here there is a liminal time, from death to resurrection and then from resurrection to going to Galilee. What was is past but what will be is not yet determined. And when the disciples hear the message, they have to be excited because they are going back home, to the place where it all started, and there is significant comfort in home. And yet, they are not going back to the homes they knew, to the normal they knew, because everything has changed. The world has dramatically changed, nothing will ever be the same, and yet they move past that sense of loss into the unknown, into the not yet and once again give up control over their own destinies, because the story of Easter moves from what are they going to do, what are we going to do, to the more important question, what is God doing?<

One of the things that happens in liminal time, because we leave behind our normal patterns and routines is that we are open to new experiences and realities. There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are three feet apart, but in thin spaces that distance is even shorter. A thin space is those times in which we have deeper and more meaningful encounters with God, and often those thin spaces are also in liminal spaces. There are great possibilities in liminal spaces, times for great joy, but also great liabilities and a sense of loss, of mourning, which is where many of us are.  And so we have to remember that death and resurrection are linked together. We can sing the great songs of Easter, but only because we have come through the darkness of the cross, of death and the tomb. Spring is so wonderful and amazing only because it comes out of winter. Summer is not as glorious as the spring is, because it doesn’t represent such an amazing change from what had come before. But to get to spring, to get to resurrection, we have to cross through, or over, that in between time, and that is where we sit in this moment. In a time in which we are supposed to be here together, celebrating, we are instead separated and in our own spaces, and in our own liminal space.

And it’s not just the liminality of this time of sheltering in place and maintaining special distance from each other, but the church itself is a liminal time in everything that’s going on, and the country could be said to be in a liminal time as we have large changes happening all around us in which the future will be very different than how we have been in the past, and perhaps we even have personal changes happening as well. And so it’s important to give voice to that sense of loss, a sense of grief that can, and often is, present in these liminal spaces. Remember Mary and Mary did not go to the tomb expecting to find life, instead they expected to find death, but rather than death they find a path to a new future, a new reality. So we need to name our grief, and there are lots of things being lost during this time that affects people in very different ways. And some of that grief comes from recognizing or remembering that our lives are really to a large degree not under our control, and that causes its own set of mourning. But that too is what Easter is about, and it is what hope is about. As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, we don’t hope for that which is seen. We don’t need hope in the brightest points and most joyous stories of our lives; we need hope in the darkness, in the loss; we need hope in the in-between times when what we knew we could count on is past and gone and we don’t know what the future holds or what it will look like, or maybe even, if we will get there.

But that too is part of the Christian journey. In the early days of the church, as we heard throughout the season of Lent leading up to this day, Easter was a day that new members would be baptized, and we were supposed to have a baptism today, but that too had to be postponed. And baptism is a liminal space. We enter into the waters of baptism, leaving behind our old selves and we exit the waters as a new creation, as Christians. We die to our old selves and are reborn. But the water serves as that threshold, that liminal space, that thin space, where what was is past, and what is to be has not yet been realized, but in that moment we encounter God and God claims us and adopts us and cleanses us and it’s where God gives us hope. And so that is where we sit in this moment, and unlike many liminal events in our lives, in this one we are all being impacted together, we are all experiencing this together. Now some are more affected than others, just like in earthquakes, but we are all being changed, because I don’t know where we will all come out of this, or what it will look like, but I think the world will be a different place on the other side.

But here are some things I hope for: One is that we will keep washing our hands all the time, and that we will stay home when we are sick, because that is just good practice. It also means we need to make sure that everyone has the ability to stay home and be sick and not go to work without risking their financial lives Perhaps we will still remember how to slow down and spend time together and realize what’s really important, which may include being excited about finding toilet paper in the grocery store. I hope that our sense of gratitude for the people who do the work that make our lives possible that we too often take for granted will continue. I also hope that we remember and learn to live into the idea that we are in fact all in this together. That what happens to people in Asia or Africa or Latin America actually does impact us here and that walls cannot stop us from being connected. And that our health is dependent upon the unhealthiest members of our societies, and that some segments of society are more effected by these times because of aspects in their lives that are way out of their control, but are not out of the control of how we are a society, a nation and world choose to live and allocate resources, and to truly know that an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. I hope that we will continue beyond this time of being concerned about the most vulnerable in our country, whether that vulnerability is because of age, or illness or economic reality, or other aspects, and we see the web of connections and ties in which we live and know that what we do has impacts on others and that we remember Jesus words in Matthew 25 that as we do to the least of these so we do to Jesus himself.

This is a liminal time, and unlike the women at the tomb on the first Easter, on this Easter Sunday, we don’t yet know what the future looks like, we don’t yet know what our resurrection story will be. But here is what we do know, here is what we can celebrate this day, and that is that not only are resurrections possible, but that they happen, not just for houseplants or even for puppies, but they happen for you and for me. They happen for the world, and they are most needed in the darkest moments of our lives, in the liminal moments, in the in-between from what was to what will yet be, those times when we not only might cry out to God, but those moments when God is most present for us, working miracles and bringing and offering hope. Because when Easter tells us and reminds us, every single year, but most especially this year, is that God wins. Love wins. Life wins. Easter is the reminder to us that whatever may happen, whatever this day may have in store for us, that God has the power to strengthen and uphold us, and we have the power to do the same for others. That whatever we may face, we never do it alone, and that nothing we encounter is stronger or more powerful than God.

That doesn't mean that everything will work out perfect, that all our prayers will be answered, and that there won’t be pain or suffering or even death, because those are our realities, but God is not overcome by those things, that we are not overcome by those things because we are an Easter people. Grief and loss are part of life, but they are inextricably tied to hope and resurrection, and they cannot be separated, because you can’t have one without the other. Grief leads to hope and loss leads to resurrection. Easter doesn’t lead to Good Friday, but Good Friday leads to Easter, and so even as we find ourselves in that in-between, may we never forget that we are never alone, never abandoned, never forgotten, that God is with us, most especially in the valleys, and that the promise of life and of hope and of new beginnings is there.

We have been here before, and in this community we are approaching the 20th anniversary of the Cerro Grande Fire, and the end of one way of being, and the liminal time in between when everyone was evacuated, and how a community came together to support and love on one another, and the new reality that welcomed everyone back, and the way we overcame, and we know that we will be here again. But what we can have faith in is that Easter is not a one-time event, but something that happens over and over again for we are indeed an Easter people. And our faith resides not in our buildings or our budgets or even our ability to do a good online worship service. But our faith resides in Christ and the promise and power of Easter, and the knowledge that God has this and that resurrections are not only possible, but that they happen, so keep watching and waiting and stay safe, for we are God’s children. I know that it is so my brothers and sisters. Amen.