When I graduated from Louisville Seminary thirty years ago I bought a leather-bound record book.  I’m not sure why I bought that book.  I guess I thought I should.  It looked official—gold leaf and all. I also bought a mug that day, a coffee mug—a memento. 

I keep the record book in my desk.  For thirty years I have recorded the names of all of the children I’ve baptized, mostly children.  I have baptized adults but more children than adults. There’s another section for the couples I’ve married and there are pages and pages of sermons titles—now over 1,300. That’s more sermons than anyone should write or hear. 

There’s another page for the churches I have served.  For some reason the book maker provided space for up to 60 churches.  I don’t know what they were thinking—this is my fourth church and I pray my last—there’s room left in the book if the Lord has other plans, but he’s going to have hurry because I’m getting older and like it here too much. 

My record book also has pages for pastoral calls, special funds raised, parsonages built (that dates it), lectures and special addresses given, writings published, personal giving, salaries, vacations, and one page called “Notable Events.”  There have been some notable events over the past thirty years, but I confess I’ve not recorded them but I have kept up with the funerals I’ve done.  Before writing this Easter sermon, I went back over all of the names in my book.  The oldest person I buried was Tressie Holtry. She was 106.  There are 216 other names in my book.   

Frankie is one. I buried Frankie on December 12, 1986.  He was less than a day old.  On October 15, 1987, I buried a young man named Richard, 19 years old—cancer.  On September 14, 1990, I buried, Joe, age 25. He died in a solo plane crash.  On October 13, 1991, I buried Michael, age 33, drug overdose.  On February 16, 1993, I buried Kevin, age 28, HIV-AIDS.  On April 28, 1993, I buried, Henry, age 20, accidental gunshot.  On October 16, 1993, I buried Mary Elizabeth, an infant. She was three days old.  And on March 29, 1997, I buried Eric, age 21. He died in an automobile accident.

I’ve done a lot of funerals. These eight stand out but I can tell you there is no good age and there’s no good way to die.  True, it is easier, when folks die of natural causes in old age.  But even then, even in old age, death has a way of leaving us speechless.  Death is insensitive to age or circumstance.  Death seems always to bring an awkward silence.  We don’t have to work hard to walk with Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome to the tomb of Jesus.  We know what that’s like.  It was early that morning when the women went to Jesus’ tomb.  The women are worried about the stone. The stone must be moved for them to complete his burial.

My parents are buried in Jamestown, North Carolina.  Some months after their funerals I went their grave sites to make sure their markers were right. According to their wishes, their markers are plain—just their names, the dates of their birth and their death—that’s all. 

Of course I remember my parents in other ways.  Whenever I go into my shop I see my father’s tools.  There’s a cookie jar in our kitchen that belonged to my mother.  And there are photographs.  One of my favorites, a collage, has a picture of my mother when she came to Illinois after Meredith was born.  There’s another of my dad taken late one afternoon.  He’s rolling in the grass, playing with Meredith when she was just a toddler. My father died four months later. We never knew he was sick.  My sister reminded me last week that my dad would have been 84 today.

We don’t have to work hard to imagine ourselves at the tomb. We know about tombs. 

A few years ago Paula and I went to Washington.  Many of you have been to Arlington Cemetery.  You’ve seen the Tomb of the Unknowns or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We happened to be there during the changing of the guard.  There was a large crowd that day but the only sounds we heard were orders and marching boots. 

Did you notice the trail of rust left by the guards’ boots?  The guard changes every half hour from spring to fall and every hour from fall to spring.  When the cemetery closes; the guard changes every two hours.  That rust trail is made by 21 precise steps, a salute to the fallen.  The trail has been walked for over sixty years. Since July 2, 1937, The Tomb of the Unknowns has been guarded 24 hours a day, seven days a week, rain or shine. 

We know about tombs and the awkward silence they invoke. Archeological evidence suggests that humans have puzzled over death for millennia. As many as 100,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans buried their dead. Archeologists have unearthed the evidence.  100,000 years ago humans recognized that the death of a human was different than the death of prey or predators.  We bury our dead.  Neanderthals, who shared human DNA, likewise buried their dead. The fossil record dates back 300,000 years. 

Human beings have puzzled over death for millennia. The sheer fact that we bury our dead begs a very large question: Why are we here?  Are we mere flukes of nature who happen to be self-aware?  Or, and this is a very big or, does human life have meaning beyond our time on earth?  Is there more to life than meets the eye? 

 

When I was younger, I didn’t think much about death.  When you’re sixteen you think you’re going to live forever.  It’s true what they say, “Life goes by fast.” And the older you get the faster it goes.  I wonder if Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome thought about that.  Jesus was so young. Did they think about the shortness of his life, the cruelty of it all, the unfairness?  They had such hope. 

Clearly, they didn’t expect to find Jesus alive.  They are concerned about the stone. They are occupied with his burial.  Their mind is not on life but death.  Their heads are bowed.  You know the way we do.  They are looking down as they walk to the tomb.  Their eyes and their hearts are downcast.  It is only when they “look up,” that they see the stone rolled back. Entering the tomb they encounter “a young man, dressed in a white robe.”  And they are “alarmed.”  Things are not what they expect. 

The young man tells them, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.”  Before they can respond the messenger tells them: “Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

The last verse of Mark’s gospel is among the most contested in the New Testament.  Some believe the final ending must have been destroyed or somehow lost.  The women do not actually see Jesus.  The last verse of Mark reads, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  Actually, Mark’s original ends mid-sentence with an awkward grammatical construction, a double negative, “they said nothing to no one, they were afraid for.”

“They said nothing to no one, they were afraid for . . .” Aside from critical scholarship which supports this abrupt ending, I think there are other reasons, reasons of faith that support Mark’s awkward silence.  The first is reverence for the sanctity of life.

 

“They said nothing to no one, they were afraid for. . .” 

The awkward silence of Easter testifies to the wonder and mystery and beauty God gives to human life, to every life.  We live in a noisy world, a hurried world and increasingly in a death denying world.  I’m not sure we truly appreciate the profound wonder of human life until we’ve also come face to face with the awkward silence of death. 

Some one said to me recently half teasingly, half seriously that when she dies she hopes all of her friends are really sad.  She wants her funeral to be somber. “I hope they cry their hearts out.” My friend meant she wants to be missed.  She wants to know her life counted, that people cared. 

Human life is not expendable.  The awkward silence of Easter teaches that. One of the reasons I think we have such a time with grief is that we’re in too big of a hurry.  Modern medicine has given us the illusion that death is no longer the last enemy, that we have or can somehow defeat death.  Now, I’m not in any hurry to die.  And if I get sick I’m going to do everything I can to live.  God has hard-wired us for life.  But I’m like my friend, when I die, I hope my family and friends miss me.

Grief is a sign that our life counts for something.   Grief is a sign that we are irreplaceable. When death comes we should be stopped in our tracks.  Christian hope does not diminish sorrow. Hope testifies to the sanctity of life.  As the Psalmist says, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his faithful ones.”  Life is precious.  And what is precious in God’s sight must be precious in ours. The awkward silence of Easter inspires reverence for the sanctity of life.

 

“They said nothing to no one, they were afraid for . . .”

How should that sentence end?  They were afraid for . . . ?  They were afraid because they had to return to Galilee?  They were afraid of the Jerusalem authorities?  They were afraid because they had a story to tell—“Jesus has been raised?”

Obviously, the women told what they had seen and heard.  They returned to the disciples and told them the news.  We’re here this morning because they told that news.  Their story has become our story. And that story is not a general theory about life after death.  Our story is not a philosophical treatment on the nature of the soul or on immortality.  Consider Paul: “I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you . . . . Christ died for our sins . . . and was raised on the third day.” 

The resurrection of Jesus is not the resurrection of just any man.  The resurrection of Jesus is the resurrection of the Son of God.  We have a very particular story to tell, a singular claim.  God does not stand aloof.  God is not uninvolved.  God was in Christ reconciling the world to him-self.  “Christ died for our sins and was raised.”

We are here on this beautiful Easter Sunday because God does not leave us to ourselves.  Life is not full of “sound and fury signifying nothing.”  Life is precious in God’s sight.  We are not lonely pilgrims groping in the dark.  Light shines in the darkness. We have seen the light of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  We have a story to tell.  Frankie and Richard and Joe and Michael and Kevin and Henry, Mary Elizabeth and Eric and Tressie are not lost to God.  Because God raised Jesus from the dead they are not lost.  “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his faithful ones.” 

That is the story we tell.  There is more to life than meets the eye. We are precious in God’s sight, eternally so. That is the Good News of Jesus Christ risen from the dead.  Amen.