Remember?

A sermon on Luke 24:1-12:

It’s an uphill walk from the bus station in Chihuahua, Mexico, toward the cathedral on the city’s plaza—not a walk you would normally look forward to with a 35-pound backpack strapped to your shoulders.

But we’d arrived at dusk, we were hungry, and the guidebook said there was a good, cheap, clean hotel—The Plaza Reforma—not far off the main square. So we hoisted our packs and started walking.

Now, I’d memorized the directions to the hotel during our bus ride, but finding your way through a strange city in the dark can be a challenge—particularly if you’re in Mexico and you don’t speak Spanish. So Karee and my brother were a bit skeptical when we got to the Hotel Reforma.

“I thought it was called the Plaza Reforma,” Karee said.

“Must’ve changed the name,” I said.

“Maybe we should ask to see a room first,” my brother said. The lobby was filthy.

But I was confident. “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, “and it’s only for one night. Let’s just check in and find some dinner.”

Famous last words. I’ll spare the gruesome details, but suffice to say, we will never spend another night at the Hotel Reforma.

And in the morning, on our way to breakfast, we found the Plaza Reforma, a cheap, clean, well-lighted hotel just four blocks from the rat’s nest where we’d spent the night.

Without a word, Karee took the guidebook and read aloud the directions I thought I’d memorized:

“Going uphill from the bus station,” it said, “you will pass several small hotels, but this is Chihuahua’s red-light district. Best to keep going to the top of the hill, where there are three small, relatively quiet places to the right.” One of them was the Plaza Reforma.

Karee and my brother looked at me accusingly. “I guess I didn’t remember that part of the directions,” I said. But I was forbidden to choose the hotels for the rest of the trip.

What we fail to remember can change our lives forever. “The root of all sin,” some have said, “is forgetfulness.”

II.

It is just before dawn on the first day of the week, and the women who loved Jesus are walking in silence to the tomb. The chill of the desert air makes them shiver, and their bare feet are wet with dew. The fragrance of the spices they have prepared surrounds them. They are on their way to anoint the body of their master.

They are grieving, each in her own way, hearts heavy in their ribcages, dark circles under their eyes from a sleepless night. Every time they close their eyes they see his body and the nails being driven into his wrists. Their eyes are red from crying.

They have gotten up early, dressing in the darkness, careful not to disturb their sleeping families, to be faithful to their prescribed task. In their culture, the ritual of anointing the dead falls on their shoulders. It’s simply what you do when someone has died, much as we might make a casserole or pasta salad and drop it by the family’s house. Like us, they take comfort in that ritual task; it gives them something to focus on, something to do. They learned it from their mothers, and they will teach it to their daughters, and while it’s not much, they might say, it’s all we can do. Even saying that is a part of the ritual.

But when they arrive at the tomb, they find the stone door already rolled away. Looking at each other with furrowed brows, they duck their heads and shuffle in through the tiny door. But the tomb is empty. The body is not here.

The women are perplexed.

Here they are, ready to do their job, to get on with the business of ritual mourning, and the body is missing. Without it, their spices are useless. Without the body, what are they supposed to do, standing in the half-light of a rock-hewn tomb on the morning after the Son of God was put to death by human sin?

All that they had dreamed of, all of the hope they invested in Jesus, in the coming kingdom of God, was crushed at the crucifixion.

And now they stand there in the empty tomb, minds racing, trying to figure out where/what/how/why to go on. It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland experience: Nothing is quite what it seems. Looking at the empty tomb through the lens of their life experience, there’s nothing that allows them to make sense of it.

Just what are they supposed to do now?

III.

We all know that feeling: Sometimes we’re just not prepared for what life throws at us.

The baby we’ve dreamed about, anticipated, joyfully prepared for, the baby who was going to make us a family: the baby never makes it home. What are we supposed to do?

The job we studied for, paid our dues for, counted on to fulfill our dreams: the job turns out to be deadening, all-consuming, a black hole ruining our marriages, our health and our relationships, but we’re too far in to get out. What are we supposed to do?

The family we used to love, the family we used to laugh and cry with, the family that was the center of our lives—now it’s only a place where people yell and nasty words are spoken and we never feel quite safe. What are we supposed to do?

What are we supposed to do when our dreams don’t turn out the way we wanted them to? When our hopes shrivel up like a pasture during a drought? Or our spirit becomes as skinny and pitiful as a calf whose mother’s milk has gone dry?

What are we supposed to do when life isn’t what we thought it would be, when we’re at that place we never dreamed of, when nothing in our experience allows us to make sense out of what’s happening in our life?

Sometimes, in our anxiety, we look for something—some peace, some sense of grace, some comfort—in a compulsive addiction to booze or drugs or sex or money, in the grinding pace of work and family and community that leaves no time to brood on what we’ve lost, in the grade we get on a test or in how much money we make or in how quickly our church is growing or what somebody else thinks of us.

But none of those things make up for what’s missing. So what are we supposed to do? What have we failed to remember?

IV.

Like us, in search of comfort, the women at the tomb have turned to an ordinary task—anointing the body—only to discover that things are not ordinary. And that perplexes them even more.

Then suddenly two men appear and say: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has been raised.”

And then come the words that are the pivot for the entire scene: “Remember how he told you.

“Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”

“Then,” writes Luke, “then they remembered his words.” And immediately they recognize what has happened: Jesus, the Christ, has been raised from the dead. What the Master has said is true—a truth they see only by remembering the words that point to it.

Those words are what they need to overcome their anxiety and confusion, and they leave the darkness of the tomb for a morning growing brighter by the minute, eager to tell the rest of the disciples what’s happened.

By remembering the words of Jesus, they were able to recognize the truth about the empty tomb. Through the spectacles of their own limited experience, it meant nothing.

But through the more powerful lens of the gospel story, their confusion suddenly became clear through the act of remembering.

V.

Remembering, for a Christian, is not just to recall past events; it is to be aware of God’s presence with us at all moments, to carry the ancient story of God’s relationship with us into the present and into the future. Remembering brings the Kingdom of God into the present moment, allows us to see our lives in the context of the gospel, to realize who we are, truly, and whose we are.

For the women that morning, remembering the words of Jesus is a wake-up call. Just as an early-morning phone call in a strange motel room jolts you awake, those words of Jesus bring the women at the tomb to a totally different consciousness. They are able to see reality differently, to wake up and recognize the empty tomb as truth, because they remember what Jesus has said.

This is good news! In God’s Word we find resources to overcome our doubt and anxiety. Through God’s Word, we know we are not alone. In remembering the gospel story—using it to look at the events of our life in a new way—we can see truth; we can wake up and see our ordinary tasks, our ordinary lives, in an extraordinary way.

Part of discipleship means seeing the world through Christian glasses—and Christian glasses are different than the glasses of rationality, the glasses of capitalism, the glasses of sexism, the glasses of racism, or even the glasses of the Presbyterian Book of Order. Christian glasses remind us of the ultimate context of our lives. They show us where God’s story intersects with our story.

So I ask you: Where are the sealed tombs of your life? Where, in a fit of confusion or grief or disappointment have you sealed off something you love or something you are afraid of or something you are ashamed about, some relationship that was once important to you? What would you do if you rolled that rock away and discovered the tomb was empty? Would it frighten you or confuse you? Would you stand there, perplexed?

Or would you turn to the gospel story to make sense of it? Could you remember what Jesus said and see that empty tomb—that place where a new and unprecedented life begins—could you see that empty tomb through the lens of the gospel? Could you trust that by remembering the Word of God, your confusion and anxiety would lose their power?

VI.

Many Easter Sundays ago, when I worked as a chaplain, I stopped to visit a woman about to be discharged from the hospital. She was still hooked up to IV’s; her face was drawn and sharp, and she was very thin. But she smiled when I walked into the room.

Holding her hand, I said, “You must be very happy to be going home.”

“I am happy,” she said. “I am going home to die.”

Her name was Carmen. Her cancer had spread, and she had decided not to pursue treatment. She made a joke, and we laughed. She assured me that dying did not frighten her. “I trust God,” she said. “I trust God. And I want my family, my children, around me.”

When I left, she handed me a hot-pink, plastic Easter egg. “Now don’t you open that and look inside,” she said, “until it’s time to go home.”

I was amazed at Carmen’s trust in God as she peered into the face of death, and I wondered how it was that she had avoided the anger, confusion, and anxiety I so often saw in people who were dying.

Hours later, as I left the hospital, I reached into my pocket for my car keys and found that pink egg. When I opened it, a handwritten slip of paper fell out, like the fortune in a fortune cookie. It said: “He is risen! He is alive! Hallelujah!”

Carmen was dying, but she had remembered the Word of God. She knew what it meant to find the tomb empty, and she understood her life and death in the context of the gospel.

May we be as wise as Carmen, remembering the words of Christ in the midst of our confusion and thereby understanding our lives in a new way.

He is risen! He is alive! Alleluia! And amen!

India Calling

It started with an e-mail from God.

OK--not from God. From me. But perhaps God had a hand in it?

Read about church member Kay Pugsley's mission trip to India in February in an article from the April 1, 2004, issue of the Wise County Messenger.

Understanding Holy Week

The period that Christians call "Holy Week" begins Sunday, with Palm (or Passion) Sunday--the entrance Jesus makes into Jerusalem for the final week of his life as a human being.

The website Faith and Values has an excellent collection of resources for understanding Holy Week in the various Christian traditions.