Have you ever gotten to the end of a good book or a good movie and said, “Really, that’s it?” Some endings do not satisfy us. We need closure. Living in the middle of our own stories we may wonder how it’s going to turn out. In the first half of life you may wonder, will we win that soccer game? Will I graduate, get into a good college, get a job, be successful, get married? In the second half of life you may wonder, will I raise children well? Will I be healthy, live a long life, enjoy meaningful work, retire, enjoy time with the people I love? IN the twilight, you may wonder, how will I die and what really happens then? Will I be remembered? Will the ones I love be okay? Along the way, we face many threats, stresses, and things that cause pain. When things are going tragically wrong in our lives, we may become very discouraged. We hear the nightly news or read the daily paper and wonder if the world’s story unfolding before us is a good story or a bad one. It’s certainly a messy one, where violence threatens, the vulnerable are exploited, the weak suffer, and the innocent starve. And in our own lives, we experience losses, disappointments, pain, grief, frustrations, fatigue, and failure. We feel powerless and defenseless, so we seek escape from reality through entertainment, vacations, and self-indulgences. Rather than face and address the world’s problems we run and hide, afraid to deal with reality. Sometimes I think sleep is a daily escape from reality, in which we might dream alternative stories. Like the women at the tomb we accept the world as a tragic story, in which we play a small and insignificant role in its unfolding. We, therefore, attend to our own self-interests. And we go about our business every day. We show up, we weep at our losses, we bury our dead, we try to move on. Along the way, some good things happen to us, for us, because of us. We may even be grateful for those moments. But despite the good we are permitted to give and to receive, we are not all that optimistic. We wait with expectancy for more bad news to come. And it does. We become desensitized to it, so much so that we don’t even think about the future very much. It produces anxiety anyway. The future is an enigma, a mystery we dare not speak about. With live with deep uncertainty. We have no imagination, no energy left to generate what we need the most. A future colored with HOPE.
The women fled the tomb and said nothing to no one for they were afraid. The end. Really? That’s the best Mark could do with this story. No resurrection appearances. No sharing of the good news. No rejoicing. No lilies. No majestic hymns like the one’s we sing today. Easter is characterized by an empty tomb, the interpretation of a stranger, and a couple of frightened women running away. Hardly credible testimony. Mark leaves us not sure what to believe. Of course Mark’s entire story from beginning to end is like this: The people who should believe, don’t get Jesus. And the people who do get Jesus, are not credible witnesses. A demon-possessed man and a Roman centurion offer the best testimony to Jesus’ identity. Hardly believable. His own disciples abandoned him, denied him, betrayed him. They surely did not believe him when he said that he would suffer, die, and be raised. They believed that their own failure was the end of their story. They believed the building of the new Kingdom project failed on Friday afternoon, when the cross finished its work and Jesus’ breathed his last. And so the gospel ends in failure. Except…
There is one character in this story who may yet come to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, One character who may be bold enough to tell others that they believe it too. There is one character who may stake their own lives on the validity of this story without evidence or credible testimony to back it up. One character left, on whom the writer depend to keep this story alive and let it shape their lives and the future of the world. There is a character who sees hope in this story about an empty tomb and the declaration of a nameless stranger. Who?
You. What this world needs more than anything is a storyteller that creates the capacity to hope. The capacity to imagine a world that is not just falling apart, not just drifting in space, not just overrun by evil, greed, decay, suffering, and death. What the world needs is people who believe that, if there is a GOD, and if that God is good, and if good will overcome evil, then this GOD must first make good on a promise by raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. Because if his life was truly a great life, an abundant life, a life worth imitating; then his violent death must not be the end of his story. We need a story, a dream really, that promotes the power of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation of broken relationships. We need a story that encourages non-violent solutions to major human strife, the possibility for real change of hearts and minds, and the strength of love to make a broken world new and whole again. We need to imagine a world after death, a world after suffering, a world after injustice. We need to envision an empty tomb and a promise that the crucified one is on the move, in the world, bringing resurrection life and hope to everyone and every thing he touches. Because when your life has been touched by his, everything changes. Everything old is being made new, everything lost will be found, everyone who dies will be restored to life again. The women in Mark's gospel said nothing to no one. In response, this is our mission; Say Something to Someone today. Do not be afraid. Share the good news. Alleluia! Christ is risen. Amen.
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