The Day of Resurrection-Easter Day Year B

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.” i Her invitation is to embrace the beauty of the unknown and be nourished by new possibilities we would have never dreamed. 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.’ 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.” iii 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 i.Paintner, Christine Valters. A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hungers in Lent. Broadleaf: Minneapolis, 2024, pp 29-31 in kindle edition. ii.Ibid pp198-199 iii.Ibid. p 201 iv.Ibid. pp 217-218