The best part about Easter, you know, except Jesus, was probably the bacon. We knew it was coming. Kathy brought 12 or 13 pounds of the stuff through customs and Susanne saved it until Easter, for the big feast after worship. We were each allowed 3 pieces, which was really one piece cut up into three smaller parts. Miraculously it was more than enough. I can still smell it.
The second best part about Easter was being with the community up on the Mount of Olives that night for another famous potluck. I’m not too sure how it happened, but Mark ended up playing for us his selection of Easter songs. I’ll spare you the details, but I will tell you that I’ll never hear the Doors “Break on Through [to the other side]” the same way again.
I have my own Easter playlist. The first song comes from a lesser-known band of misfits, The Hold Steady. They tell a story of a girl named Hallelujah. Of course her friends just called her Holly and Holly was a hoodrat, she had been disappeared for years and lost to the streets. But then one day she finally came back. You see, she reappeared one day at Easter Mass, hair done up with broken glass. Limping left on broken heels she said, “Excuse me father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?”
Another person who might be able to speak to how a resurrection really feels, another story that carries with it a chorus of resurrection is the story of Tabitha.
We don't know much about Tabitha. She was an ordinary saint, a woman who cared for the vulnerable and poor with good works and charity. We know that she was a talented seamstress, spending her life making sure that widows and other people in her neighborhood were clothed and covered.
We know she lived in Jaffa and probably saw a beautiful sunset or two over the Mediterranean Sea; she probably knew what it felt like to have the wind and sand whip through her hair as she smelled the warm and salty water ebb and flow as the tide washed over the beach.
We know that she died. We know the ordinary grief that was shared by her friends and neighbors as people ordinarily do. We are, after all, ordinary people who have grieved in our own ways and in our own lives.
This ordinary saint is remembered in an extraordinary way. It has been recorded that she was “matheria,” a woman disciple of Jesus, the only person in the whole of the New Testament who gets that particular designation. We read that her name was translated from Aramaic into the Greek, that the writer of this text took care and attention to translate Tabitha to Dorcas so that the readers and hearers of the Greek text would know that her name means gazelle, a metaphor for beloved.
Tabitha is God’s beloved but she is also the beloved member of a community. A community that grieved her death; a community that gathered to wash her body and make preparations her for burial; a community that sent for Peter to come and be with them.
Peter saw visiting her grief-filled community as part and parcel of his mission to bring the gospel to all nations and to the ends of the earth. God’s mission does not skip over the reality and implicationsof the promise of Christ’s resurrection for the pain and suffering of individual lives. We know that this is an extraordinary story.
Peter came to her home, into the room where they had laid her, the upper room—not unlike the room where the disciples hid themselves after Jesus’ death and before they heard and saw his resurrection—and, after excusing everyone and everything from the room, Peter told Tabitha to get up.
And she did.
Life came springing forth from death. Peter raised Tabitha from the dead. Perhaps an Alleluia is in order. Tabitha is risen, Alleluia!?
But there’s something lurking in the corner that we just can’t escape. No matter how much we’d like to be, we are not Peter. We can’t put ourselves into this text. At our words the dead do not come back to life. We grieve ordinary saints with the same ferocity, saints that were as sweet and pleasant and beloved as Tabitha, saints with the same spirit of extraordinary compassion for the poor and vulnerable. The life-giving story turns and slaps us in the face because all we see is death. We experience enough Good Fridays with no Easter Sundays. When we experience the death of someone that we love, no matter how much we try, how hard we believe or how eloquent our words, we cannot bring the dead back to life. We can’t even scream our powerlessness away.
A Manifesto:
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of the everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window into your head. Not even your future will be a mystery anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.
So friends, everyday do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance for what man has not discovered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Sat that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such results. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. Practice Resurrection.
So goes the manifesto known as Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry. I think he’s on to something. Despite what the world expects from you and gives to you, choose instead to practice resurrection.
Practicing resurrection is perhaps first a failing, a recognition that the lions and the lambs are not sleeping yet. That there are still tears that we cry. That there are still hungry people. That the poor are still with us. That wars rage on. That death does sting. That this very list goes on and on.
Practice doesn’t make perfect, but practice does make permanent, in your memory, in your bodies and in your souls the promise of God’s faithfulness: to a redemption that gives birth to a new creation; to peace that will end all wars; to a banquet to welcome and feed the multitude of people; to life on the other side of death.
Practicing resurrection means learning what resurrection is and is not. Resurrection is new life. Resurrection isn’t reversal. Resurrection means first that some sort of death has taken place. By its very nature, practicing resurrection is not living backwards, as if we could turn back the clock, but resurrection is living the future into the present. It is preparation of a future event with full anticipation despite present circumstances. It is engaging the present realities to bring about a new and different possibility. Life in spite of death. Love instead of fear. Peace in the face of violence and war. The lifeline instead of the bottom line.
To practice resurrection is to perform an action now in faith and hope while waiting for the not yet of the resurrection. Now there are tears to cry. Then, God will wipe away every tear. Now there is death, then there will be life. Even now we live knowing that there is life on the other side of death.
One last song, Alleluia. St. Augustine says: We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.
The St. Olaf Choir once sang a text whose only word was Alleluia, sung over and over again. The director at the time, Kenneth Jennings, told the choir to think about it this way: “from the dawn of creation, from the beginning of time there has been a song of Alleluia sung continuously. We don’t always hear it; it is often drowned out by the noises around us and in us, but this song of Alleluia is going on even now and will continue to the end of time. All we’re doing is making the Alleluias audible.” To practice resurrection is to make the Alleluias audible.
That’s our task as well. Living in this new life, living as an Easter people, surrounded by death as we may be, we gather as a community just as the disciples did around the table of the Lord and we make the Alleluias audible. We make the Alleluias audible by working against everything that is death-dealing in us and in the world.
We make the Alleluias audible by helping those with whom we work, to see where God is at work in the world. We make the Alleluias audible sometimes, if truth be told, under our breath, sometimes through tears, death still has a sting, death still deals strong blows and at times the Alleluias are all but drowned out, but we continue to sing because God continues to raise us through death to new life. We sing because we are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.[1]
We are not Peter. We cannot raise people from the dead, but we can and do practice resurrection when we welcome new life, new life that has had a past, new life that has come from death and deadly circumstances. We practice resurrection not by looking at the dead and whispering, life, life, but in working life where death has already made a claim. We are not Peter, but we stand in the same resurrection hope and future together as God’s beloved.
You are God’s beloved. You are the sheep in God’s fold whether you have heard his voice in shouts or whispers, praise or lament, or in sheer silence. You are not alone. No one and no thing can snatch you from the palm of God’s hand. And God will wipe away every tear.
And for that reason we as an Easter people can say
Christ is Risen, Alleluia!
[1] This paragraph and the two before it come from Dr. Kathryn Schifferdecker in the best sermon I’ve ever heard. Sermon delivered at Luther Seminary Chapel, Spring 2007.
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