Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Easter, 2006
One of the real surprises of my life as a parent was discovering just how much children love the telling and retelling of the same story. When my daughter was young, I bought her The Story of Babar the Elephant. My thought was that we would read this story a few times together and then go on to something else. But this was not so. Oh no—we read The Story of Babar the Elephant many, many times a day, pausing especially over the most frightening parts, but then always reading through them to a happy conclusion.
Out of this experience, I came to more fully understand something I had learned while studying for my graduate degree in literature. Stories, especially ones with traumatic and perilous turns, can give a kind of satisfying order and meaning to life.
And so it also is with our own lives. Stories—the ones we tell ourselves and tell others about our lives is a away we bring some kind of satisfying order and meaning to our lives.
We can imagine that the three women visiting the tomb in our gospel for this morning had probably already begun telling themselves constructing a story about what had happened to them and to their friend and rabbi Jesus.
The story likely went something like this: Jesus had come proclaiming that the kingdom of God, a realm where God reigned, was here and now, and that it belonged to the least in society. To demonstrate and make this kingdom accessible, Jesus had healed the sick and eaten with outcasts and had surrounded himself with a group of disciples and followers who were peasants and women. These disciples and followers and others had hoped that he was the promised Messiah. But he had run afoul of the political and religious authorities and had been arrested and executed, his disciples scattering in terror.
Now it was time to do the only thing they could do in the face of such a traumatic story. It was time to go to the tomb and care for the body of their friend, after which they would begin picking up the pieces of their lives in the light of this disappointing event.
And so it’s no wonder that the three women were speechless when this story about what had happened to Jesus and to them was upended by a rolled-away stone and a young man in white proclaiming that Jesus had risen. They were speechless because he had destroyed their story of defeat and shame and replaced it with they knew not what. And so the Gospel of Mark ends with these words: “…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.”
And so on this Easter morning, how do we describe this new story which is not just the three women’s new story but is our new story and is Lisa’s and Owen’s and Cheryl’s and Guy’s new story? How do we describe life in the light of the resurrection?
Some say that life in the light of the resurrection can’t be described—it can only be proclaimed. Others like myself, though, have to give it a try—have to look for whatever imperfect images we can find that point to the indescribable but definitive Christian story, a story about God being stronger than death, a story about the impossibility of our falling outside the love of God.
Some years ago Margaret Edson, an elementary school teacher from Atlanta, Georgia, wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning play entitled “Wit” about Vivian Bearing, a professor of 17th century poetry, and her fight against ovarian cancer. In the play, we witness Vivian’s last few hours of life. Vivian is a witty, powerful, prickly personality, capable of dry “asides” to the audience, no matter what awful thing she is going through.
"It is not my intention to give away the plot," she announces at the beginning of the play, "but I think I die at the end. They've given me less than two hours."
In those hours, Vivian, a scholar of John Donne, takes center stage, interrupting her doctors, nurses, and students to explicate her own story. In the midst of it all, one of Donne’s Holy sonnets about death keeps rattling around in her head, though its message gives her no comfort, for she knows it primarily through her own critical analysis:
“Death be not proud, though some of have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so…
Why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally.
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
As the play goes on, though, Vivian realizes that her story is moving inexorably to the conclusion she has dreaded. She grows weaker and needier. It’s then that a visitor, her own professor and mentor, now an elderly woman, comes into the room.
“Vivian, is that you”? she says. And when she recognizes her: “Oh, Vivian.”
And then this older woman does something completely out of keeping with the decorum of academia. She removes her shoes and gets in the bed with Vivian and holds her. She then takes out a book she has brought to give her grandson and reads her a story. It’s not John Donne, of course, but it has something to do with what Donne writes about. It has something to do with life in the light of the resurrection. And so with special apologies to the most erudite among you:
Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away
So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”
“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you, for you are my little bunny.”
“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.”
“If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother. “I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”
“If you come fishing for me,” said the little bunny, “then I will become a rock on the mountain high above you.”
“If you become a rock on the mountain high above me,” said his mother, “then I will become a mountain climber and I will climb to where you are.”
“If you become a mountain climber,” said the little bunny, “I will be a crocus in a hidden garden.”
“If you become a crocus in a hidden garden,” said his mother, “I will be a gardener and I will find you.”
If you are a gardener and find me,” said the little bunny, “I will be a bird and fly away from you.”
“If you become a bird and fly away from me,” said his mother, “I will be the tree that you come home to.”
Life lived in the light of the resurrection is the story of what God will endure and break through in order to claim us. Life lived in the light of the resurrection is the story of a God who rewrites all our stories, especially the ones with traumatic and perilous turns, so that they can have new and surprising meanings, meanings that we have neither seen nor dreamed of.
Works Cited or Consulted
Jim Lehrer interview with Margaret Edson, April 14, 1999.
Margaret Edson’s play Wit as quoted by John Buchanan at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago
The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown
