The Day of Resurrection-Easter Day-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg
The Day of Resurrection:
Easter Sunday Year B
March 31, 2024
This year as a part of my Lenten
observance, I’ve been reading the book A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our
True Hunger by Christine Valters Paintner.
In this book, the author invites us to get in touch with our true hunger
that we so often try to feed or placate with other practices, practices that
draw us away from the heart of God and from our own truest hearts. She has written a Lenten retreat to encourage
us to consider fasting from these practices and in the space opened by that
fast, embracing more life-giving practices over the different weeks of
Lent. As a part of this Lenten practice,
I’ve been invited into a different fast each week for the past 6 weeks—fasting from
multi-tasking, from anxiety, from speed and rushing, from always trying to hold
it together, and from list-making. It has
been a challenge, this gentle invitation to examine and re-shape my own inner
landscape and spiritual life. But it’s
the final fast that I really want to delve into here today, on Easter Sunday.
The
final fast has been to fast from certainty.
Paintner writes, “Fast from certainty and attempting to control the
outcome of things so that you might grow in trust in the great mystery of life.” Her invitation is to embrace the beauty of
the unknown and be nourished by new possibilities we would have never dreamed.[i]
When I’m faced with uncertainty, my temptation
is to try to force something to happen to bring about certainty through
results. This is not always
helpful. Others can become paralyzed or
frozen in the face of uncertainty—a sort of spiritual stuckness. In fasting from certainty, there’s an
invitation to befriend the opposite of certainty, which isn’t necessarily
uncertainty but is, instead, mystery or even that delicious word
precarity.
The writer and theologian Kate Bowler in
a talk titled “There’s no escaping
precarity,” says that precarity suggests something that is given but can be
taken away at any time. It helps to
describe the contingency of uncertainty.
Bowler says that Dorothy Day described precarity as the ability to live
inside uncertainty without always trying to imagine it’s the thing you’re going
to get over. [Bowler posits that] It’s the question we’re always trying to
answer. How do we live beautifully inside
things we cannot change? As Christians, it’s our job to learn to live inside
precarity as people of hope. People who live in the not-yet-ness of the Kingdom
of God.”
There’s no better gospel reading to
invite us into mystery, into precarity, than the story of Jesus’s resurrection
from Mark’s gospel that we just heard today.
Where other gospel accounts give us visions of the Risen Christ (who is
mistaken for the gardener), a race between two of the disciples to see the
empty tomb, or an angel in dazzling white sitting on top of the stone that had
covered the entrance to the tomb, Mark
gives us a mysterious young man dressed in white as messenger to tell the women
not to be afraid, that Jesus is no longer dead and has been risen, and to tell
the disciples that he has gone before them back home to Galilee, where they
also need to go in order to see him. And
then what happens in Mark’s gospel? The women flee in fear, and Mark tells us
that they tell no one because they are afraid.
And we can’t really blame them, can we? as we have done this ourselves in the face of
unfathomable mystery, in the face of unyielding, unrelenting precarity. But it’s interesting because this is how the
gospel of Mark originally ended—with a big gaping mystery, teetering on the
knife edge of precarity and no further evidence of Jesus’s resurrection.
So what might this ending, this story,
have to teach us about living with mystery or about the precarity of our own
lives?
The
word mystery offers us a sense that something is continuing to unfold that will
eventually be revealed. Henri-Frederic
Amiel writes, “Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up
your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination but leave a little
fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing
bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for an
unknown God.”[ii]
Mystery invites us to stay open to possibilities,
to potential. It invites us into a humility
that comes with not knowing, and it invites us to loosen our attachments around
how we think about God and also how we think our lives are supposed to turn
out.
“Often we meet this mystery in the place
of our own unfulfilled longings. Howard
Thurman writes about the patience of unanswered prayer: ‘Slowly it may dawn upon
the spirit that there is a special ministry of unfulfillment. It may be that the persistent hunger is an
Angel of Light, carrying out a particular assignment in life.’[iii] It’s an important reminder that the spiritual
life isn’t always about happiness or comfort.
Instead, it often calls us to stand in uncomfortable places and to meet
and embrace God in the unexpected places in our lives.”
We know that the story from Mark’s
gospel didn’t really end there-with the women fleeing in terror and not telling
anyone the good news of Jesus’s resurrection.
If it had, none of us would be here together right now. It’s an important reminder for us that there
is a gift in the unexpectedness of mystery and if we are always rushing toward
certainty, or like me, trying to force it, then we miss out on the revelation
of God’s presence. God also has a way of
helping things unfold for us so much better than we could have ever even planned
or imagined.
Your questions to ponder today on this
Easter Sunday are:
Where are you currently craving
certainty and how are you being called to embrace precarity, to lean into the
mystery that is slowly unfolding in and around you? Can you remember a time in your life when
what unfolded was even better than what you had planned or imagined? As you ponder the gifts of mystery and
examine your need for certainty, what hunger in yourself do you uncover?
In closing, I’ll offer us all Christine
Walters Paintner’s blessing that she uses to close the chapter on fasting from certainty.
God
of Holy Darkness,
be
with us in our desire to know,
in
the ache to be certain,
in
the longing for assurance.
Sit
with us in the long quiet nights,
hold
us in our winter seasons.
Wrap
us in the grace of mystery,
finding
comfort in this mantle
of
unknowing as we rest our thoughts.
Remind
us of how everything emerges
from
the black fertile womb space
of
new beginnings, from the rich soil
where
seeds are planted.
Sustain
us in the times when
not
knowing is painful, fearful, anguished.
Abide
with us in the space
of
sacred Mystery, bring comfort,
whisper
words of love to us in the silence.[iv]
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