“Quite Suddenly”
Matthew 28:1-10
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
Easter Sunrise Service – 2014
There is no more appropriate place to worship – especially
on Easter – than out here in the swaddling embrace of new spring growth,
beneath the natural light of the heavens, whether they shimmer with that light,
silky blue that heralds a clear, bright day, or whether they hang low and gray,
heavy with the promise of rain.
I love the sound of human voices singing Alleluias,
too, but if there exists more unfettered joy and gratitude than birdsong, I
have yet to hear it.
Out here there are no doors that must be locked, no pews to
claim as our own. Out here, our feet
rest on the earth herself, and our faces feel the unfiltered cool of morning
air. Perhaps that same air, carrying
tiny pollen spores, irritates eyes and noses, but its perfume cannot be
bought. It is grace. And what perfume we do buy draws to our skin
all manner of curious insects wondering what strange blooms we are, and what
help we might offer to them in the quick and harried dance that is their life.
Inside a church building we walk through hallways and
doors. We traipse back and forth on
aisles.
Out here we travel far more open pathways. We wind our way from place to place, from town
to town, realm to realm at the beckoning of beauty, at the demands of danger,
by the necessities of appetite and season, and by the urging of our dreams.
Inside a church building we expect to be expected to feel
the expectations of holiness in rooms that have been set aside as holy space
for worship. But out here, mystery, as
it does most graciously and naturally, slips up on us in the most unexpected
ways.
“Quite suddenly, Jesus stood before them in their path.”
Out here, perhaps far more memorably and more often than in
there, the risen Christ invades our paths.
And I say that not to diminish the ways in which we do encounter the
risen Christ “in there,” in our worship, fellowship, and work. But even those of us who spend many of our
waking hours inside those walls, we still spend more time out here,
don’t we? So, if what we do in there
fails to connect with who we are and what we do out here, we may never
recognize that the risen and rising Jesus is more than some theological
doctrine about which to argue, or worse, some convenient tool for moral and
political control. That's exactly what
Constantine saw in Jesus, and Christianity is just now beginning to recover
from – to be resurrected from – its 1700-year bender as the most
powerful, state-sponsored religion on the planet.
If what we do in there fails to connect with who we are and
what we do out here, then that place becomes a well-sealed tomb, and we the
lifeless guards.
Out here, along unguarded paths, Jesus stands before
us. He gets in our way. Long before Matthew writes his telling of
Jesus’ story, Paul discovers this firsthand.
At a time when he still knows himself as Saul, this fiercely devout
Pharisee, his breath fouled with murderous intent, makes his way to
Damascus. His mission is to stalk and
torment those whose paths spark and shudder with the playful presence of the
risen Christ.
Then, ‘quite suddenly, Jesus stands before [Saul in his]
path.’
Knocking the human plague to the ground, Jesus says, 'Saul,
what are you doing?'
“Who ARE you?” asks Saul.
‘I’m Jesus. You
know, the one whose followers you’re picking off like barn rats. It’s me you’re after. And now I’m after you. I want you.
I can really use your passion, your conviction, your tireless energy.
‘But here’s the deal,’ says Jesus, ‘there’s a whole lot of
me in you – in fact, there’s more of me than ever, now. You just haven’t acknowledged that yet. You have yet to appreciate my side of
you. So, instead of feeling empowered,
you're scared. You've scared yourself
into a blind rage.
'Here, this is what blindness looks like. Try that on for a while, but don’t worry, it
won’t last too long. And when your eyes
open again, you’ll see everything and everyone very differently. Now, get up, and tell your comrades to take
you to Damascus. You'll see me there,
and I’ll let you know what to do next.’
Jesus stands in our way, too. And he doesn’t just get in our paths, he puts
us on new paths, Easter paths, paths of redemption.
I remember one such sudden, in-my-path moment. Before telling my story, though, I need to
tell you one that Frederick Buechner tells.
When one of Buechner’s daughters was a young woman, she
went through a nearly-fatal bout with anorexia.
One day, while she was in a hospital, Buechner found himself driving the
back roads near his home in rural Vermont.
Depressed and exhausted, he parked by the road to consider all that was
happening, and “quite suddenly, Jesus stood before [him in his] path.” Buechner describes his experience this way:
“Out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a
license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the
dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST.
“What do you call a moment like that?” asks Buechner. “Something to laugh off as the kind of joke
life plays on us every once in a while?
The word of God? I am willing to
believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany.
“The owner of the car turned out to be, as I'd suspected, a
trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of
the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me
the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to
this day. It is rusty around the edges
and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.”1
Trust.
I had been at Cross Roads for several years when I left
town by myself one Sunday afternoon for the first few days of a two-week
vacation. I was excited because I was
going up to the mountain house alone – or mostly alone. I did take one dog, Bandit, with me. Marianne and the kids and the other dog would
join me later in the week. On my way out
of town that Sunday afternoon, I stopped by the hospital because a woman who
was very loosely associated with the church lay close to death. I’ll call her Miss Nita.
This part of the story is confession. I did not want Miss Nita to die, but not
because I would miss her when she was gone.
The truth was, you see, that Miss Nita could be utterly selfish, even
mean, and if someone were going to interrupt my long-awaited Sabbath time,
please God, don’t let it be her.
On Tuesday morning, Miss Nita died.
Wasn’t there someone else who could do her funeral?
It was really for her sister-in-law, a church member and
very dear friend that I came back. But
my path back was not a peaceful one, because, Brothers and Sisters, I was being
consumed by a selfish rage. I repacked
my stuff and began the three-hour trek back to Mebane. And as I came down that mountain, for every
foot of elevation I lost, I lost a little more control. By the time I was on I-40, every safety valve
I had was blown. I’ll say only this: It
is a good thing dogs can’t talk. I would
not have wanted Bandit repeating what he heard.
Now, I’m not one bit proud of this, believe me. But you need to picture a young pastor
screaming his way down the path back home, because in the midst of one of my
outbursts a car passed me. It was a
small station wagon. Mounted on the back
of the station wagon was a bike rack, and a single bicycle hung on the
rack. Perfectly centered in the
triangular frame of the bicycle was the car’s license plate. It was a Vermont license plate. It was a vanity plate, and there against that
solid green plate, in white capital letters was “the one word out of all the
words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then:”2 SILENCE.
That license plate looked as big as a billboard to me. And that one word shouted louder than anything
that had tumbled off of my careless, reckless lips.
“And immediately, something like scales” (Acts 9:18)
began to fall from my tiny, angry heart.
And “quite suddenly, Jesus stood before [me in my] path.”
Every time I remember that experience, Jesus says something
new to me. This time I remember him
saying, “Allen, listen to yourself! You
are channeling your worst Miss Nita.
Look, there’s a whole lot of me in you – in fact, there’s more of me
than ever now. You just haven’t
acknowledged that yet. You have yet to
appreciate my side of you. So, instead
of feeling empowered, you are deaf with unjustified fury.
“I love you, Preacher, but you just need to shut
your mouth right now. You really need to
be silent – and to listen. If you will live through the Living Me in
you, you will look back on this as a moment of powerful, stone-moving,
tomb-emptying grace.
“Now, you and I,” said Jesus, “we’re going back to Mebane,
and we’re going to go celebrate Miss Nita’s life, because regardless of what you
think, I love her. You can go
back home and seethe your way through all of this if you want to. But if you choose that path, you’ll just
gather all those other people, people that I love just as much as you and Miss
Nita, around a hole in the ground, and you’ll leave a hole in everyone’s
hearts.
“Or you can go back home, and realize that you are in
Galilee. You'll see me there. And you can help all your brothers and
sisters to see me, too. You can help
them understand that I AM bigger than Miss Nita’s aggravating bitterness ever
was. And you can tell them to look for
me even at her funeral, because I AM deeper, broader, more mysterious,
and more permanent than death itself.
“Do you hear me now, Allen?
Miss Nita's funeral will be a perfect place for you to tell everyone
that I AM alive!”
And so he is.
Alleluia!
1This
quotation comes from Frederick Buechner’s book, Telling Secrets. I do not currently own a copy, but I found the quotation on this website: http://frederickbuechner.com/page-group/landing/quote/QoD-Trust
2Ibid.
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