Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's April 16, 2006 Easter Sunday worship service.

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There have been a couple of deadlines looming large in my life over the last 24 hours. Two sermons, that is to say, two different sermons for today, one now and one delivered earlier at the community Easter sunrise service at Kingston City Park, which I am glad to report, did not cause me to suffer any bodily harm, having arrived back here safe and sound. So, there has been the homiletic deadline. The other deadline is represented by that version of Good Friday promulgated by the Internal Revenue Service called tax day, April 15. In the recent edition of a little newsletter called “Church Treasurer Alert!” I found this little article, entitled, “Court rejects Minister’s Defense Against Paying Taxes.” It reads:

A minister defended his refusal to pay income taxes by claiming that 1) He was not a citizen of the US but rather of “that place where one day I intend to permanently reside, which is Heaven.” 2) He had been “supernaturally provided for by the Lord Jesus Christ through the unsolicited freewill love offerings of others” [and therefore, had] received no taxable wages. 3) and finally, ”Christians such as myself are precluded by God’s law (the Bible) from depending on the interpretations of men of the law, including the Constitution and the Internal Revenue Code, especially concerning the proclamations of the Pharisees (i.e. the tax code Lawyers).”

I, for one, could have easily predicted how it would end for the minister, for there are no winners, only losers, when it comes to the long arm of the IRS. You guessed it: the article reported that the IRS treated the minister’s arguments as frivolous, and assessed him various monetary penalties. There are some deadlines that even a preacher can’t talk his way around!

Likewise, in hindsight, it’s easy enough for us to predict how the Easter story will end. In our usual reading, the story as told by Matthew, Luke, and John trumps Mark’s story, I think. In their story, Easter creates post-resurrection appearances, joyful seaside reunion meals, scenes of reconciliation and forgiveness, commissioning of Apostles, garden embraces of the risen Lord, and the disciples’ excited shout, “He is risen!”

But, if you’ve noticed, Mark’s Gospel is different. It offers us none of these predictable and comforting stories about the postmortem Jesus. In fact, Mark’s version of the story ends with frightened women fleeing from the cemetery in silence. That’s no way to run a resurrection! Can this be a good technique to persuade and stir new life among the followers of Jesus?

Now, I know, there’s the whole matter of where, exactly, the gospel of Mark, in fact, ends. There’s the passage with the ending as I read it and that’s deemed the oldest and most accurate ending; there’s an additional shorter ending; and there is an additional longer ending, all of which are there in your pew Bible, if you want to look. These two latter textual variants are placed inside brackets to show that they are later additions, presumably a corrective to make sure the gospel would end on a more positive note.

The last verse, verse 8, as I read it earlier, reads: “So 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.” But if I made a literal translation from the Greek of that last clause, it would read: “To no one anything they said; afraid they were for …..” In the original Greek, the text actually ends with a dangling preposition, with the word “for,” almost as if the author of Mark had suddenly been dragged from his writing desk in midsentence.

For my high school English teacher, Mrs. Vale, the proverbial spinster who was valedictorian at Radcliff and purportedly gave up a college teaching position to follow her true passion for inflicting proper English grammar on unsuspecting students, such a grammatical blunder from one of us would have caused her to bleed red ink all over. And maybe you, too, had your Mrs. Vale equivalent who acted similarly when you dared dangle one of your prepositions.

Rules of grammar and memories of hard-nosed English teachers aside, Mark’s ending remains an ending that should give us all pause to wonder and ponder, “why end the story in midsentence?”

Perhaps the key to Mark’s version of the Easter story is what happens a verse earlier. The angel instructs the women: “go tell Peter and his disciples that he is going ahead of you to Galilee.” Jesus has said previously, in chapter 14, on the night of the Last Supper, “after I am raised up, I’ll meet you in Galilee!” Now, the angel repeats the message. Go to Galilee.

Maybe, with his peculiar ending, Mark’s Gospel is trying to impart a different kind of Easter joy, another dimension of Easter faith. As you come to that last verse and contemplate the unfinished ending in that dangling preposition, perhaps its not just the disciples -- as in them -- but the disciples as in the reader, as in you and me, who are supposed to recall the earlier words of Jesus, “I’ll meet you in Galilee!”

Galilee is North of Jerusalem, but more importantly, it is the place where it all began for Jesus in that region around the Sea of Galilee. It’s there, at the opening of Mark’s Gospel, that Jesus first proclaimed the good news. Maybe disciples go not just to that Galilee North of Jerusalem to find Jesus, but disciples are to go back to the beginning of this gospel and read again with new eyes what God is doing through Christ. Like the disciples, you did not understand this story the first time. Now that you have been to the cross and to the cemetery, read it again, but now read it with post-resurrection eyes.

One of the most dangerous temptations we face is the temptation to think that we can fully grasp the meaning of resurrection. Resurrection is the road that our souls take, a road always on the way to someplace else; resurrection is less an event than it is a spiritual practice, a journey, that each one can undertake.

Galilee was an ordinary place. But that’s where Jesus went to wait. We might expect that Jesus would have been tempted to go someplace other than Galilee. Wouldn’t it have been nice for him to stride triumphantly into Jerusalem. Imagine the scene: “Pilate, you made a very big mistake” as the risen Jesus confronts all the important political people. Or, he might have stood on the steps of the temple, addressing the crowd, chiding them for their fickleness and betrayal, showing himself to the multitudes.

Jesus did none of that. He promised to meet his disciples back at the beginning.

Galilee is not a center of power. It is not the hub of religious or civil activity; it wasn’t a tourist attraction or a place for holy pilgrimage; it is simply a place where people live and work and have families, where people struggle to survive and do the best they can. Easter says that the answer lies in Galilee - it is there that disciples will experience the possibility of resurrection and reincarnation into the way of justice and peace.

Beneath all of the pomp and circumstance that preachers and people try to attach to this Easter Sunday, it all boils down, simply, to a matter of having faith and practicing resurrection in these ordinary lives and ordinary places we have been given.

It seems less important, in the end, to me, anyway, that we debate the historicity of resurrection or even the possible endings to the story, but what really matters, is “do you believe it can happen to you?” Do you believe that you can start over and begin again with whateer it is inside your life that is dead and that needs resurrection?

Tucked inside a section of a recent issue of USA Today newspaper, surrounded with articles on Phil Mickelson winning the Masters and Katie Couric going to Prime-time CBS and a story on the conniving President on Fox’s 24, there was an interesting article entitled “We Are Easter People.” “I went to church that Easter out of habit and desperation,” the author remembered She went as a visitor, anonymously, to a large downtown church and she listened and reflected on the sermon that Easter Sunday, and she reflected even more on her life of suffering in this “Good Friday world.” Her suffering included the death of an older sister and brothers seriously ill and her best friend leaving town. “I went to church that Easter out of habit and desperation.” But she came away with a soul touched by hope.

It wasn’t a sudden revelation or an epiphany that solved all her problems, but she came to an awareness that beyond this Good Friday world filled with unfairness, questioning, mistakes, hurts, losses, and grief, there is hope for people who dare call themselves an Easter People.”

“Our American value of reinvention,” the author stated, shows itself in our politics and our policies, in our laws and in our myths. Even in our entertainment. We believe in treatment and rehabilitation. We invest in cures and self-improvement. We celebrate ambition and promotion. Sometimes we carry it too far, with too much changing partners and plastic surgery, but at the core is our belief that we can make ourselves over.”

Yes, we can. By culture and religion, we are a people who believe in possibility. Out of the ashes of our mistakes and our defeats, we can rise again into better lives (USA Today, 4/10/06, Diane Cameron). And with God, resurrection is always possible.

And so, when life itself feels like a dangling preposition, when the promise of Easter’s empty tomb seems impersonal or incredible, when practicing resurrection is itself not easy, when Jesus seems not present, hear his words: “I’ll meet you in Galilee.”

Go back to where it all started and know, by the grace of God, that you can be reborn, that you don’t have to be satisfied with the way things are, or even who you have come to be. That is the message of Easter.

We know that the version of the first Easter in Mark’s Gospel is the earliest of all the accounts we have, and it may very well be the most authentic because, here, there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to gloss over the fear and trembling, the real, honest, raw emotions of the day.

In the geography of the Holy Land, there are two ancient bodies of water. Both are fed by the Jordan River. In one, fish play and roots find sustenance. In the other, there is no splash of fish, no sound of bird, no leaf around. The difference is not in the Jordan, for it empties into both, but in the Sea of Galilee: for every drop taken in, one goes out. It gives and it lives. The other gives nothing. And it is called the Dead Sea (William Sloan Coffin, Credo, 15).

The promise of Christian faith is that Galilee, a place of new beginning and new and renewing life, awaits us all.

Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

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O God, we have dared to gather here because not only have you, in our Lord Jesus Christ, defeated death and triumphed over evil and sin, but you also came back to us and called us to meet in the Galilees of our lives, all those ordinary places, ordinary people with whom and through whom your purposes are shaped. For your continuing new presence among us, for forgiveness, for opportunities to start over, we offer you our thanks and praise.

Even as Easter alleluias are on our lips, we know that we do live in a Good Friday world, filled with suffering and fear. Grant your peace and healing in those broken places in our world, cities and villages and rural locations where children are hungry, parents desperate, and the sounds of terror and war keep resounding through the day and into the night. On this day of joining with Christians everywhere in One Great Hour of Sharing, keep us mindful of the human pain that we can relieve and the lives that we can help to mend by our acts of generosity and care. We pray for the unity of your church on this Easter morning, confident that your purposes will be worked out in spite of our failings as your Church and because of your grace abundant that restores and renews. We offer prayers today, especially for Michael Shivalee, his family, his ministry in Brazil of training those who can go forth and proclaim your gospel of hope; we pray for Samuel and Monica Wombugu and the Grace School in Kenya and their efforts to love and feed all those children in that school. in this time of suffering from draught and deprivation. We pray for all those impacted by our local ministries of helping and support. And we pray for prisoners and their families and the needs they have to receive your word of forgiveness and new beginnings.

Lord, be present with those whom we have specifically mentioned . . . .

Lord, we give thanks for those loved ones dear to us who we remember today, and who have received the fullness of your promise of resurrection and your victory over death. We trust that your rich promises of grace would continue to be poured out upon all of us as we seek to do your will.

By your spirit, lift us from doubt and despair, and set our feet in Christ’s holy way, that our lives may be signs of his new life, and all we have may show forth his love. Praise, glory, and thanksgiving be to you, our God, forever and ever.

Hear us as we pray together: