Please note: the homilies at the 5:00 p.m. Sunday liturgies at St. Paul’s are not preached from fully written manuscripts. This is an approximate transcript of what was preached at 5:00 p.m. on April 4, 2010, based on my brief outline.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

Almost 20 years ago, in 1991, in January, I traveled with my college choir from cold Minnesota to a wondrous, beautiful land—a land of lush gardens, of fruit trees, fragrant patios, lush green grass, and warmly lit poolside pathways that glimmered in the evening light.

I traveled to Florida.

It’s hard to overstate the effect such an incredible, magical land had upon a Midwestern boy like me, particularly in the month of January. I come from Garrison-Keillor stock. Florida was nothing less than awesome.

And it was there, in that verdant garden, that I discovered (to my own dismay!) that I had fallen in love with my roommate. There was no more doubt. It was time for me to “get real,” as the saying goes. All the anxious denial and repression finally became…silly. So when I returned to wintry Minnesota, feeling depressed and confused, I met with Pastor John, one of the pastors at my family’s Lutheran parish in St. Paul, and I told John, “I’m pretty sure I’m gay.”

Pastor John showed not even a little surprise at the news. And he quickly dispensed with my first concern: “I’m concerned,” I said, “because, well, God doesn’t like gay people.”

“Oh, is that so?” he asked. “Well, let me ask you a couple of questions about that. First, how do you think God feels about loving relationships? Do you think God wants more of them, or fewer?” And then he asked, “And how do you think God feels about you, and your body, and your sexuality? Do you think God is embarrassed, or regrets creating you? Do you think God thinks God made a mistake by bringing you into being?”

These questions were, for me, the beginning of a resurrection in my life. And Pastor John was like those shining figures in tonight’s Gospel, who stood at the empty tomb and asked Jesus’ friends, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” For me, I was looking for the living—for my life as a healthy, happy adult—among the ‘dead’ of anxiety, the ‘dead’ of fear and dread, the ‘dead’ of shame. And Pastor John proclaimed—in his own way—that “He is not here. He is risen.” So for me, God raised Jesus not in a garden in faraway Palestine of the first century, but in a garden in Florida, bursting with citrus fruit—even in January. And in my first encounters with Pastor John’s Good News, I began to turn toward life in my journey as a young adult.

And yet, this was a lot to take in. In some ways it was too intense, too much, for me to handle upon first hearing. Like the first witnesses of the resurrection, it has taken me many years to puzzle out the Good News I received from my good pastor. (His second question—the one about God not being displeased with me—that question in particular continues to be an issue for me.)

And so, like those first witnesses, I continue—even today—to go through the process of recognition, orientation, and integration. Recognition: in one of our Gospel’s accounts of the resurrection, the news that Jesus had been raised was so disorienting that he was actually unrecognizable at first. Orientation and integration: it takes time to make sense of all this. It wasn’t until the fourth century that followers of Jesus began to depict artistically the crucifixion; Jesus’ horrible death was so traumatic that his friends needed the distance of centuries to look back upon it. And the resurrection was, if anything, even more disorienting and upsetting. What could this mean? What now?

And so today, tonight, I raise this question for our reflection and comments: how, in your own life, do you look for the living among the dead? And how also do you look for the living among the living? Remember, it’s rarely a quick and easy experience. If you’re like me, it’s a process, a process of gradually awakening to the grace-filled news that “He is not here. He is risen.”

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