Luke 24:1-524 On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 5 In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?
Whenever I go for a walk and come upon a bench with an inscription, I am drawn to learn the name of the one in whose memory that bench is placed … I am looking to learn why this place was important to them … … In the same way, I have often been inspired by those I have never met except in a graveyard. Maybe you’ve had this experience as well. As I meander among the tombstones I am looking to learn about the lives of those whose remains are beneath my feet. I look to meet a life in the stone that marks its passage.
I notice how many years they lived … what relationships are still visible because they are named in stone … and often am intrigued by the epitaph … what a family has chosen to say about this life … or about life itself … in just a very few words: … gone but not forgotten; people living deeply have no fear of death; she was most alive in the mountains; life is not about waiting for the storm to pass … its about learning how to dance in the rain …
On a recent trip to California, we stayed a few days at an abbey we used to visit years ago when we were graduate students. It is the home of a monastic community of Benedictine monks. They began in Belgium; spent a number of years in China before being expelled in the 1950’s. They have made their home in the high desert foothills of the Sierra Madre mountains north of LA ever since. On one of our walks, we found ourselves wandering among the graves of the monks who have died over there in the last 65 years as well as many oblate laity who also sought to follow the rule of benedict as a way of shaping their lives in the world.
Each grave marker was the essentially the same … no fancy headstones or decorative shrines … just river stones embedded in simple concrete crosses … but each marked a unique life. Sometimes there were symbols of the individual’s life placed at the foot of the cross that marked their place, sometimes an order of service from their funeral mass enclosed in a plastic bag and held down with a stone. Sometimes there was a succinct phrase placed on the grave marker that captured the essence of the person whose body was buried there.
As we wandered among the graves, I was struck by how much life there was in this place for the dead … how much living was held in this place … the years of living, the relationships that shaped each life … the impact each life had …
The stories our tradition retells on this day are stories of women taking their grief to a fresh grave. Having been powerless to prevent the execution of their leader they come to his tomb to do what they can. They have come to give him a proper Jewish burial.
The story empties the tomb of everything that matters to them and fills it with strangers who seem oblivious to their grief. The first words the story speaks sounds like an accusation … a cruel question to pose to these bereaved women … WHY ARE YOU LOOKING FOR THE LIVING AMONG THE DEAD? The story leaves them speechless. Actually, they weren’t looking for the living … in truth, they have come to do what they could for the dead. If we put ourselves in their place, living must have been the last thing on their minds. They have just managed to put one foot in front of the other because they are following their broken hearts … and the tomb is the only place their hearts could take them on this morning.
In the early days of grieving, in the numbness of going through the motions of living, in the effort it takes just to breathe … we are largely unconscious of our search for the living among the dead … our search for the memories that bring the living back to us again … our search for what will help us live again … Though some part of me wants these strangers in the story to empathize with these grieving survivors … to tell them they are sorry for their loss … the story refuses to speak any platitudes … it just poses a rather timeless question … why do we look for the living among the dead … could it be because it is the only place we are likely to find it. This is the long witness of the earth. The things of death are always what create the conditions for life. Day comes out of night. Spring comes out of winter. Life grows out of the humus of what has gone before. The burial ground of the seed is the birthing ground of the flower. A scarred hillside charred with fire, grows green with tender new shoots. The magnificent old growth forest is littered with nurse logs … the body of the fallen becomes the ground which nourishes the new generation that rises up out of it. The places soaked with memory are the places where life rises up out of death. Energy is never lost, it just changes form.
This is also the long witness of spirituality … in a time when churches are empty, books on spirituality fly off the shelves. In a time when religious institutions are in decline, spiritual practices are on the rise. In a time that finds that an-all powerful-all knowing god is no longer in his heaven, we are discovering the sacred everywhere. In giving up our claim to having bound up the word of god into these 66 ancient books, we find inspiration and revelation everywhere. In freeing Jesus of Nazareth from all that we forced him to become, we find enduring wisdom in his life rather than saving grace in his death. In dethroning ourselves from having dominion over the earth, we discover a new relationship with this planet, our home. In accepting ourselves as ever evolving creatures neither fatally flawed nor in need of redemption, we see our potential to rise into a new humanity that is responsive and responsible for our becoming as one being among the many.
In the world of this story, the women came looking to bury the past … and instead they walked into the mystery of an unimaginable future … They came looking for a corpse and they found within themselves the possibly to live in the ways their teacher had taught. They came looking to do what they could for the dead and found something alive in themselves. Easter is the name our ancients gave to the god of fertility. Easter is our name for the experiences we have of awakening to the regenerative nature of life. Easter is every experience we have of finding the living among the dead … of finding hope in the ashes of despair; finding possibility in the places that reek with impossibility; finding the places where endings are just beginnings backward; of finding capacity in community. On this day we celebrate our quest for life … the miracle of resilience … to let pain deepen into passion and purpose … to hammer anger into life giving action … to let memory move from wistful and nostalgic to hopeful … to carry us from the past into the future … to the miracle of becoming a community who empowers each generation to find what is living in the midst of what is dying … and to nurture that life. This is a time to ponder: where are we looking for life?
-Nancy Steeves
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