Lifting the Veils. . .
A Religious Misfit Reflects on the Meaning of Resurrection
He was 13 when it happened. It was one of those seemingly harmless days. Everyone's bellies were full; the entire family packed into the station wagon on their way home from Thanksgiving at his Aunt's. Matthew Sanford says he was sleeping. It's probably what saved his life, even though the accident left him broken.
Black ice is what we call it around here. The cool temperature and misty air morphed perfectly right in the middle of the road. There was no way Matthew's dad could have seen it. Once the car made contact, there was nothing he could do. The car missed the bridge but slid off the embankment, tumbling three times end over end. His father and sister were killed immediately. His brother and mother were dealt the other extreme: one had only a bruised shoulder and the other a small bruise on their face. They were fine - at least physically. Matthew was neither dead nor fine; his back, neck and both wrists were broken. His lungs were full of fluid and his pancreas left with an injury that wouldn't allow him to eat for three months. After three days in a coma, he woke up to the news: half his family was gone and he would be paralyzed, waist down, for life.
He says two contradictory things happened right away. First, he no longer wanted to live. Everything seemed dark, silent and lifeless. And yet at the same time, he also noticed right way that his brother and mother needed him to live.
He calls this his first "healing story." Telling himself that he needed to live for them, gave him a reason to live. Looking back he says he believes it was the first way that life reached out and invited him back to the land of the living.
Over time, that story wasn't enough. As the rehabilitation got harder and the progress settled into a more permanent state of disability, a new healing story emerged. This one more difficult to embrace. "I slowly began," Mathew says, "to think of myself as having two lives: one - my walking life - that ended at 13, and now this second life [and new adventure. Rather than the simple narrative of having been handed a tragic life, I found myself thinking in terms of getting the gift of two lives.]"
Again, an invitation back to the land of the living.
And finally, his current healing story. In his memoir, Waking, Sanford says he disagrees with people who, as they age, say things like: "My body is failing me," "My eyes are going," or "My knees are giving out." (We know the drill.) It's typical and understandable, Sanford says, but short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating. He explains that he's come to see that his body didn't fail him or give out on him, rather it was doggedly faithful to him by absorbing all the trauma it did. It kept him living. "My body didn't ask to get hammered and break," he says," and to have its spine shredded and many bones broken. [But when it did, it didn't quit as much as,] it went, 'OK, let's regroup, let's go.' Remember, only a little part of my body didn't heal, only, you know, an inch or two of my spinal cord was not able to regenerate. It might get confused, it might not know how to grow the right cells, but I'm telling you [in it's own way] it's moving towards living for as long as it possibly can."
Friends, do you hear this?! The gift of new life - made possible not through the gift of a restored body, but through the gift of new sight - a new way of seeing.
In a radio interview - the radio interview where I first came across Sanford's story - he sums up his return to life with a moving metaphor of subtle light entering a dark room: "I compare [my journey]," he says, "to walking from a well-lit room into a dark one. At first you can't see anything. But if you sit and you pause and you listen, usually there's enough light to get across the room. You know, it's not going to be like turning the light back on, but, in fact, the world gets this [different glow and] other kind of texture that does make it beautiful. . . My rehabilitation made a mistake with the silence by focusing on the absence of light. It too quickly. . .taught me to willfully strike out against the darkness. . . Another course of action, however, is patience. Stop moving. Wait for the eyes to adjust, allow for stillness, and then see what's possible. Again, it's not going to be like turning the light back on, but. . .the moon [comes] out, sounds gain texture, and the world reveals itself once again.
I am so tempted to stop right here this morning. It's Easter. And Easter's most precious gift to the world is the declaration that resurrection stories are real. And in my mind, it doesn't get any better than Sanford's story. His is most definitely a real and true and beautiful resurrection story.
The problem is, though - and the reason we can't just stop right here this morning - is that as real and true and beautiful as it is, Sanford's is not the story we want. And we've got to talk about that.
Barbara Pescan, in the poem Kaaren read earlier, has it right. These new days, this new life, this other chance most often comes to us as an "unbearable gift."
Why this sadness toward spring? [she asks]
Half smiles at the first yellow flowers,
Tears pooling for no reason with each rain and sunset?
Then bravely she answers: "These resurrections ask more of me than I can give."
She might have even more accurately said, "ask more of us than we WANT to give. . .UP."
I call Barbara Pescan "brave" for answering the way she did, but the same should be said of all of you. You're not naive. You knew what you were in for this morning. If you wanted an easy, feel-good, "every-thing-will-work-out-in-the-end" Easter sermon, you most surely would not have chosen to come here! You know we are different. You know we are pledged to be different. You know that this is a place where we come not just to be inspired, but also to be honest.
And, as with Pescan, our honest answer about real resurrections is that they do indeed ask more of us than we want to give. Simply put, we don't really want new life; we want life the way it was. Forget Sanford's new way of seeing, what we want is to see our father and sister again. We want things put back the way they were - the clock reversed. We want our healthy bodies back. We want our mama's memory to return. We want to hug our little one again. We want our marriage to be like it was. On Easter - as with every day of our lives - we most definitely want the dead to stand up again. . .and walk!
Yet a complete return is just never what we are offered. And we're adults, so on some level we already know this. But "knowing it" and "being able to act on it" are two very different things. Often on the Easter mornings of our lives, we are not really joyous or grateful as much as we are stuck! Pulled - almost helplessly - between these two visions of "resurrection as reversal" and "resurrection as new sight." We know that "new sight" and moving on is the way to go, but we don't want it. And most importantly - we don't know how to make ourselves want it.
That's the struggle so many of us need to talk about, but often never shows up in Easter sermons.
But here's the surprising news: This is exactly the struggle that the biblical Easter story takes on. Of course that's not the way the Easter story is usually presented, but it is in fact how the actual original texts present themselves!
This is seen most clearly in the earliest written gospel - The Gospel of Mark. In Mark's version the resurrection story isn't really concerned about Jesus at all - resurrected or not. He's not the star of the story - rather the focus is on the women who visited the tomb. This is a story about their experience, about their struggle. And what happens? They find the tomb empty. No body. No walking and talking Jesus. No moment of realizing that the tragedy has been reversed. Just this confusing and difficult experience of absence, emptiness and not being sure what to do or feel. (How real this story is!)
Then into this absence comes a stranger - again the emphasis is on the unexpected and the new, not the reassuring. And while this stranger tells them that Jesus is "risen," the text makes it clear that the women don't know exactly what this means, nor does it bring them comfort. They most certainly do not respond as if the tragedy of Jesus' crucifixion has been reversed. Rather the implicit message is that they are being asked to accept a new story, a new way forward.
And there the story ends, with them torn, unsure and in fear, sitting with this "unbearable" - Yes, Pescan has the adjective exactly right - this "unbearable" invitation to move on into something new.
Now, so you don't think that I'm just twisting the story to make it fit my sermon message, it's important to add that one of the earliest edits of this text is one in which a church authority makes this implicit invitation, explicit. These are the verses he added to the end: "And after all this, Jesus sent out by means of the disciples the sacred and imperishable proclamation." "By means of the disciples," you will remember, is not at all how the story was suppose to go. Jesus, the great conqueror, was suppose to bring the Kingdom of God to earth directly, leading his followers in a great battle, not working through them by means of inspiration and memory.
This unsettling twist in the plot, this unexpected new form of resurrection apparently - again to use Barbara Pescan's language - asked more of the early Christian communities than they wanted to give. This invitation to move forward in a new way was received not as a gift but as an unwanted invitation. So the later church authorities simply rewrote and changed the story - adding another entirely different ending in which Jesus himself does came back - original body and all - and chews everyone out for not believing that he was bodily resurrected.
When, by the way, was the last time you heard about that "little revision" on Easter Sunday?!
The point here is that the original story was just too hard to handle. It asked people to give up too much. It refused to put things back the way they were. So we human beings rewrote it.
And yet, ironically, since there is this paper trail, since we actually know that people re-wrote and changed the story, the edited text implicitly remains true to its original message: Either way, the text screams loud and clear that we human beings have a major & tragic problem letting go of the hope that things can be put back the way they were! Or another way to put this is to say: the ancient biblical texts don't promote wishful thinking; they surprisingly speak out against it!
Again, not the usual thing you hear on an Easter Sunday! But most certainly the very thing we need to hear.
Forget all the stuff that too often gets thrown around in Unitarian Universalist congregations on Easter. Forget the usual stuff urging us to reject the supposedly superstitious traditional tale in favor of the more "truthful" contemporary resurrection stories! It's entirely the opposite. We need the original traditional tale! It's our contemporary story that leads us astray. Because, above all, our contemporary culture is a culture steeped in the myth of resurrection by reversing the clock. "You can be forever young," commercials tell us. This cream will reverse the wrinkles. These pills will add years. Our heroes are those who "beat the odds" and "overcome all obstacles" to restore things to what they were. Think about what we are doing with this so-called "war on terror." It is so clearly a wishful dream rooted in the myth that we will - someday, somehow - be able to eliminate terrorism entirely and get back to how things were before 9/11. It is a dream! A childish and dangerous dream about being about to reverse the clock.
One of the most insightful things that Matthew Sanford points out when he speaks is how passionately and exclusively we as a culture lifted up Christopher Reeves. Sanford is quick to honor Reeves' chosen way of fighting his accident, but Sanford is just as quick to note the dangers. Sanford points out that Reeves - Superman! - was an example of someone for whom healing was defined only in terms of reversal. While alive, Reeves devoted all his energies to conquering his disability - to raising funds for research to re-grow the nerves in his spinal cord. "We will beat this," Reeves famously declared. "I will walk again."
It was heroic, inspiring and important, but also limited, Sanford says. It's not at all clear, suggests Sanford, that Reeves - Superman! - helped us learn how to heal.
And maybe that's the best way to boil it all down this morning. Today, on Easter, what matters to me most is that we find healing. I don't really care about the stale debate over whether Jesus was really bodily resurrected or not. And I don't think you really care about that either. What we want and need most are not reminders about why or why not the bodily resurrection was real, but rather help in our personal struggles to embrace the reality of resurrection by new sight. And even more than that: I think we also long to know that, in this struggle, we are not in a battle against life, but supported by it.
Which brings us full circle, back to Matthew Sanford and his beautiful witness to the way life - over and over again - offers us the gift to subtle light. Listen again to his words:
"It's like walking from a well-lit room into a dark one. At first you can't see anything. But if you sit and you pause and you pay attention, usually [you're offered] enough light to get across the room. You know it's not going to be like turning the light back on, but, in fact, the world gets this other kind of texture that makes it beautiful. . . the moon [comes] out, sounds gain texture, and the world reveals itself once again."
This is the Easter voice we need to listen to. This is the real Easter voice that has been there right from the start. And not just that: this is the Easter voice we need to embody and share - over and over again - with each other. Our great gift as a misfit Easter community lies in our commitment to remind each other - not that dead bodies can rise - but that life continually offers us new light and new sight when death and loss make our days grow dark.
One final note: Before leaving today, I hope all of you take the time to stop by the Social Justice Art Gallery in Room 110. On display there is a statue carved by one of our members: Pat Kester. Pat gave it to us as a gift of love, and as a gift of gratitude. He has told us he doesn't want any thanks; he just wants us to recognize the statue as his way of saying thanks for the healing this church has brought to his life. The inscription on the statue reads: "Lift the Veils that Cloud, the Beauty that Surrounds"
You will notice that my sermon title is taken from and in honor of that inscription.
I confess that choosing this as my sermon title and sermon topic was not easy. I had originally wanted to develop this sermon around my all time favorite Easter sermon title: "You can't keep a good man down!"
But Pat's words obviously make for a much more important sermon: Lift the veils that cloud the beauty that surrounds!
May that be the way we all experience our Easters.
Amen.
March 23, 2008
NOTE: To learn more about Matthew Sanford and his story see the wonderful radio program that inspired this sermon. Information about Sanford's book, Waking, can also be found at this website.