April 22, 2001

Paula Womack

North Raleigh United Church

Every now and then I stay up late enough to watch David Letterman's show. I'm not a big fan of Letterman. I much prefer Jay Leno. But I usually do enjoy Letterman's "Top Ten" lists. Each evening he starts his show with some kind of funny statement or question and then lists 10 possible but equally funny conclusions. I've got my own "Top Ten" list for you this morning. Question: How can you tell it's the Sunday after Easter?

Answer Number Ten: There's not a lilly available for purchase anywhere.

Number nine: Wal-Mart and CVS have rotated the Easter candy to the clearance table and brought out the Mother's Day cards and gift ideas.

Eight: The stores have removed the stuffed bunnies from the shelves and replaced them with the newest line of Harry Potter action figures.

Seven: You had no trouble finding a seat at church (even if you were late for worship).

Six: You had no trouble finding a parking place at church (even if you were late for worship).

Five: Doug has packed away the ducklings and won't bring out another live animal during the children's sermon for at least a couple of months.

Four: The number of visitors in the worship service has dropped dramatically.

Three: The number of people who look like visitors but are actually church members who haven't been here for a while has dropped dramatically.

Two: There is a very noticeable decline in new clothing in the congregation.

And the number one clue?! Pastors everywhere take a Sunday off from preaching--including our pastor. So, Doug, enjoy your day today!

Easter Sunday is a hard act to follow. But I asked specifically for the chance to preach the week after Easter to refocus our attention on the often-forgotten day of Holy Week, Holy Saturday. We don't usually celebrate that day in there amidst Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Easter. It's not a part of our usual Easter season rotation, is it? But perhaps it should be reclaimed, because Holy Saturday often seems to be where our feelings reside.

Two disciples on the road to Emmaus were living a Saturday kind of day. For you see, Saturday's that day after the pain of the cross, after the agony of the crucifixion when we disciples have to walk on while all our hopes and dreams lay shattered. Saturday's that in-between time when the "Hallelujahs" of resurrection hope seem far, far from where we are in our world, and we connect with the chaos and fear of the cross. One writer has called Holy Saturday "a sort of bland sandwich filling between the dreariness of Good Friday and the radiance of Easter Day." So often we focus on the crucifixion and the pain Jesus must have felt and then leap to the disciples' joy in the appearance of the risen Lord. But what about the pain and confusion of the disciples at that in-between time, when they were living through a definite "dark day of the soul."

For the Emmaus disciples, things just were not working out at all as they'd planned. Their hopes had been set on Jesus to be a "Super Messiah" who would change the ways their world worked, overthrowing the powers of the day. They had hoped that he would bring an end to their endless struggle for justice. But nothing that they hoped for happened. Instead, Jesus had been arrested, tortured, condemned and executed by the state like a common criminal. People surely would laugh at the confused followers of a crucified leader. The idea of a suffering Messiah was incomprehensible to them. Where could the Kingdom of God possibly be in all of this? Obviously, a new vision of how God works salvation in the world must grip the disciples before a crucified and risen Messiah could be meaningful for them.

Don't we in this congregation know about the pain of Saturday living? Haven't we walked through it with friends facing serious illness and death? Don't we know the disappointment of dashed dreams we've held for members of our families--children who can't be as we need, spouses who don't always understand us, siblings who have wounded us and partners in love who cannot walk with us down a road leading to freedom? Haven't we felt the sting of personal attacks on our church's integrity because of what we believe and the welcome we offer to all people? Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we know about shattered hopes and chaos.

But how tempting it is to jump from the cross to the resurrection without facing our pain. The road into feeling our pain is a difficult one, as Morris West says in The Shoes of the Fisherman, "It takes so much to be a full human being that there are very few that have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price." We all are vulnerable, wounded people. Contrary to popular opinion, we don't always have to keep a stiff upper lip. How healing it would be for us to live into our pain and disappointment, allowing ourselves to be weak for a change, to be vulnerable, to be human--to fully die Good Friday's death knowing all the while that Easter will come again for us and for every last one of God's children.

How freeing it would be for all of us if we could invite one another to touch our pain, recognize its validity and force, cry through it, rage through it and not demand that we instantly repeat like good Easter Christians, "Christ is risen, indeed." Some years life just doesn't feel like Christ is risen, and Easter may not break forth for us until Christmas time, if at all. Perhaps our best effort in those times is to keep walking on the road, just letting one another be, trusting one another to the redeeming power of a resurrection which will come someday. Maybe we can be the ones believing for each other when we each have our turns walking through a time in which we can't quite believe for ourselves.

That's what Jesus did. In the disciples' pain and confusion, Jesus walked on the road with them. They couldn't recognize him, but he was there. He interpreted for them the words of the promise, prompting them by saying, "Don't you remember…?!!" God, through Jesus, was there for the confused and frightened disciples on the road to Emmaus. Josephus, an early Church historian, writes that Emmaus may be translated "a warm bath," for it has a spring of warm water useful for healing. Christ was there on the road to Emmaus, offering healing. Christ was there, believing for the disciples while they couldn't. Someone's got to believe for the folks who cannot.

Elie Wiesel, a Jewish writer, understands the presence of God in our pain. Writing in his book Night about life in Auschwitz, a German concentration camp, he describes in brutal detail the scene of the execution of a Jewish child by the Nazis: "'Where is God? Where is He?' Someone behind me asked…. 'Where is God now?' And I heard a voice within me answer: 'Where is He? Here he is--He is hanging here on this gallows.'"

God suffers with us through it all--thanks be to God. We Christians sometimes have trouble seeing God at work in our world because we have created for ourselves a God far removed from the realities of this world. We sometimes idolize a God untouched by human pain and the powerful effects of evil and suffering. But the God of Good News is different. Father Rutilio Grande understood this God. Grande, a Jesuit priest executed for his work with the people of El Salvador, taught that the vocation of the religious was to announce that "God is not somewhere up in the clouds lying in a hammock. God is here with us, building up a Kingdom here on earth."

Sheila Cassidy tells the story of sitting alone in the church at Ampleforth Abbey. She sat gazing up at a massive dark cross suspended across the transept, but soon found that her gaze was drawn beyond her immediate focus on the cross to a light behind it. She writes, "I think that's how it is, or should be, with suffering. If we have the courage and the stillness of heart to keep vigil, to look into the face of a dying child, into the heart of pain, our gaze will be drawn beyond the blood, the tears and the vomit to the light of the risen Christ."

With Jesus, our call is "to bind up hearts that are broken," sharing the Good News of God with us. But we can't bind up hearts that are broken until we've walked through our own brokenness. As we put our faith into action and reach out to one another, reach out to the world beyond, we must first recognize ourselves as wounded healers, free to experience the deep aches of our own hearts just as we invite others to experience theirs. As one writer says, "The world, alas, is not divided into (caregivers) and clients, but we must all take our turns playing different roles."

Then one day, when as a community of believers walking together through the light of the darkness we join Jesus in the breaking of bread and see the Messiah alive among us, hopes and hearts will be healed. Where do we see Christ risen among us? At NRUC, maybe we find the risen Christ in the faces of our children and the youth and adults who work with them, teaching them of the love and grace of God for themselves and the whole world. That was a message we all needed to hear as children, but many times did not hear in the world in which we grew up. But now the children of the NRUC community will hear of God's love and grace.

Perhaps we see Christ risen through the voices at North Raleigh United speaking out to tell of personal faith stories. In these Sunday Forum story times, we have been able to share the joys as well as the pains of our life journeys. Through the sharing of our stories, we circle the table of God's grace to find our common bonds amidst the beauty and the brokenness of our lives. Or perhaps we see the risen Christ in the ourstretched arms of the paddlers from NRUC who clean a stretch of the Neuse River each year. We cry so many tears about all the damage we humans do to our world, but on this annual clean-up day, we work together to seek healing.

Seeing the risen Christ doesn't take pain or anger or our sense of frustration away, but it helps us make some kind of sense of it all. And we are able to affirm Isaiah's vision, having experienced truly that "the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; on those who live in a land of deep shadow a light has shone."

Anna McKenzie captures the drama of redemption filtered through the lens of Holy Saturday in this poem (from Good Friday People by Sheila Cassidy, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991):

"And so we must begin to live again,
We of the damaged bodies and assaulted minds.
Starting from scratch with the rubble of our lives
And picking up the dust
Of dreams once dreamt.
And we stand there, naked in our vulnerability,
Proud of starting over, fighting back,
But full of weak humility
At the awesomeness of the task.
We, without a future
Safe, defined, delivered
Now salute you God.
Knowing that nothing is safe,
Secure, inviolable here.
Except you,
And even that eludes our minds at times.
And we hate you
As we love you,
And our anger is as strong
As our pain,
Our grief is deep as oceans,
And our need as great as mountains.
So, as we take our first few steps forward
Into the abyss of the future,
We would pray for
Courage to go places for the first time
And just be there.
Courage to become what we have
Not been before
And accept it,
And bravery to look deep
Within our souls to find
New ways.
We did not want it easy, God,
But we did not contemplate
That it would be quite this hard,
This long, this lonely.
So, if we are to be turned inside out,
And upside down,
With even our pockets shaken,
Just to check what's rattling
And left behind,
We pray that you will keep faith with us,
And we with you,
Holding our hands as we weep,
Giving us strength to continue,
And showing us beacons
Along the way
To becoming new.
We are not fighting you, God,
Even if it feels like it,
But we need your help and company
As we struggle on.
Fighting back
And starting over."

Perhaps the Church knows the stories of Easter too well. We sing "Hallelujah" on cue without thinking sometimes. We automatically rejoice that Lent is done, Christ is risen and it's time to eat Cadbury Easter eggs. But what do we do with Holy Saturday and the gap in our celebrations? We are called to walk down the road even as we are in the midst of our confusion and pain. For despite the odds and all the evidence to the contrary, we are never as far from Emmaus and an experience of the risen Lord as we fear.

Thanks be to God.

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