Point Me Toward Tomorrow
an Easter  sermon based on Mark 16:1-8
By Dr. David Rogne

Ben Haden tells the story of a group of four-year-olds who were gathered in a Sunday School class in Chattanooga.  The teacher looked at the class and asked:  "What special day was last Sunday?"  A little four-year-old girl held up her hand and said, "Last Sunday was Palm Sunday."  The teacher exclaimed, "That's fantastic, that's wonderful.  Now, does anyone know what today is called?"  The same little girl held up her hand and said, "Yes, today is Easter Sunday."  Once again the teacher said, "That's fantastic.  Now, does anyone know why we celebrate Easter?"  The same little girl responded and said, "We celebrate Easter because Jesus rose from the grave," and before the teacher could congratulate her, she kept on talking and said, "but if he sees his shadow . . . he has to go back in for seven weeks."

It's not easy to keep the Easter story straight, especially when so many other things get attached to it.  So today I'd like for us to go over the story once more, not only to pick up some of the details, but to see what the resurrection of Jesus means for our lives.

In the Gospel according to Mark, which was read earlier, we heard how three women came to a grave to do what people have traditionally done for the dead, but they couldn't even find the body.  Instead, they heard the words, "He has been raised; he is not here."  Truly, something significant had happened for Jesus, but what is the message this event has for us.

The first thing this Easter narrative says to me is that life is filled with temptations to hold on to the past.  When those women came to the tomb, it was out of respect for a remembered life.  There had been no time to render the last service to the body of Jesus.  The Sabbath had intervened, and the women, who wished to anoint the body, had not been able to do so.  Now the Sabbath had passed, and as early as possible, they set out to accomplish their sad task.  They had heard Jesus preach and teach, they had witnessed his acts of compassion, they had thought that he was to become the Messiah.  Then they had witnessed his cruel death and burial.  Their minds were occupied with thoughts of what might have been.  As long as their attention was focused on the past, their gloom was unrelieved.

And hasn't that been our experience too?  When we lose someone we love, we are frequently led to the place where we can be close to the body that housed that spirit.  We may make visits to the grave.  No doubt that is a normal part of grief.  But on those occasions, we are tempted to reflect on the past, and if we are not careful, we may make the past the center of everything that is important.

Aristotle Onassis began his incredible career as a seventeen-year-old refugee with only $100 in his pocket.  At the pinnacle of his power, in 1973, his estimated worth was more than one billion dollars.  His philosophy was captured in one succinct statement:  "All that really counts these days is money.  It's the people with money who are the royalty now."  In 1973, his twenty-four-year-old son, Alexander, was killed in a plane crash, and the world of Aristotle Onassis began to crumble.  Onassis was unable to cope with his grief.  Time magazine quoted one associate as saying, "He aged overnight.  He suddenly became an old man.  In business negotiations, he was uncharacteristically absent-minded, irrational, and petulant."  Within one year, his fortune declined from one billion to half that, and not long after, Aristotle Onassis himself died.  Grief can cause us to live in the past.

Guilt, too, can tie us to the past.  In San Jose, California, there is a house which was built over a 38-year period at a cost of 5 million dollars.  The 160-room house has stairways that lead to blank walls, corridors that lead to unopenable doors, 13 bathrooms, 13 stair steps, 13 lights to a chandelier, 13 windows to a room.  The house, built by the widow of William Wirt Winchester, son of the manufacturer of the Winchester repeating rifle, is also referred to as a "guilt house."  A spiritualist in Boston told Mrs. Winchester that if she were to move West and start a never-ending building project, she could provide a home for the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles and assuage her own guilt over those deaths.  Her method of dealing with guilt gave her no rest.  Instead of facing it and leaving it in the past, it occupied her whole life.

Fear is another thing that can keep us in the past.  Thomas Noton tells of a woman who writes romance novels.  She's written twelve novels.  If each were exactly 65,000 words, that would be a total of 780,000 words.  Each novel has all the basic elements of fine fiction.  This lady has gone to the trouble of creating a minor city with an ocean-front location.  She creates common landmarks that are visual in each novel--linking one novel to the next like a running soap opera.  Yet, this woman has never had a book published.  A single rejection slip so devastated her that she quit sending her work out.  She dreams about being published.  She continues to write.  She's working on another novel, set in the same beautiful city-by-the-sea, with characters that walk off the pages, and scenes that intimately involve the reader.  Yet, she has no plans to send this one out either.  She is imprisoned by fear of rejection.

Still others want to hold on to the past because they are afraid of dying themselves.  Charles Platt, in an article entitled "Silicon Man," tells of his decision to have his body preserved.  "So far, in the United States, perhaps one person in a million has made financial arrangements to be frozen after death.  And I am one of those people--a crackpot or a visionary, depending on your point of view.  I have contracted to store my remains in liquid nitrogen.  Two or three centuries in the future, when medical science is sufficiently advanced, I hope to be brought back to life."  He tells how he became impressed with the possibility of preserving the body by visiting Alcor, a cryonics organization in Riverside, California.  He then continues:  "Cryonics isn't cheap, and Alcor's current minimum fee of $41,000 is out of reach for most of us.  The fee can be covered by a life insurance policy that makes Alcor the beneficiary.  To me, this money wasn't trivial.  But facing my own mortality turned out to be much harder than coming up with the cash to pay $450 a year for the life insurance premiums and the annual Alcor membership fee."  The fear of dying can cause many people to hold on to what is familiar--even a worn-out body--rather than to embrace their future.  Like those women coming to the tomb, we are tempted to hold on to the past, but the past is not where we find life.

The second thing this passage suggests to me is that God helps us in the present.  Those women, heading for the tomb on that Easter morning, became aware that they had a problem:  there was a large circular stone covering the mouth of the tomb.  It would be too big for them to push aside.  They were confronted with their own helplessness.  Then they discovered, upon arrival, that the stone had been rolled away; the obstacle had been removed.  More than that; the grave was empty!  And there was someone there to tell them what had happened.  What they could not do had been done for them.

I would submit that God provides help for us, too, in dealing with our present problems.  There are some things that are beyond our ability to deal with unaided.  They are bigger than we are, and if we don't get help they will destroy us.

God rolled away the stone on that Easter morning, not to let Jesus out, but to open the tomb for inspection.  Death does not need to hold us in fear, for Christ has overcome death, and because he lives, we too shall live.  That puts a new light on the present.

The third thing this Easter narrative says to me is that Jesus not only meets us in the present, he leads us into the future.  The women at the tomb were met by a messenger who told them that Jesus was going before them into Galilee.  Jesus was always like that, out in front, leading the way, his face set toward the future.  That is why the author of the book of Hebrews calls him the pioneer of our faith; he was out on the frontiers.

At the southernmost point of South Africa is a cape round which the storms are always raging.  For a thousand years no one knew what lay beyond that cape, for no ship had ever returned to tell the tale.  It was called the Cape of Storms.  In the sixteenth century a Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, successfully sailed around the cape and found beyond it a great calm sea, and beyond that, the shores of India.  So the name of the cape was changed to the Cape of Good Hope.  Until that first Easter morning, death had been the cape of storms on which the hopes of all humankind were wrecked, and no one knew what lay beyond it.  But now, in the light of Easter, it has become, for all who believe in Christ, the cape of good hope.  He leads us through death.

By the resurrection of Jesus, God gives us a new way of looking at death.  It is true that death temporarily closes the door on relationships here, but it opens the door to other relationships.  Henry Van Dyke, in "A Parable of Immortality," reminds us of that opening door with another analogy taken from the sea.  He wrote, "I am standing upon the seashore.  A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.  She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.  Then someone at my side says, 'There, she's gone!'  Gone where?  Gone from my sight . . . . that is all.  She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination.  Her diminished size is in me, not in her.  And just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There, she's gone!' there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, 'There, she's come!'"  And that is dying.

When I think of St. Paul's saying about death having no sting, I sometimes say to myself:  'One bright morning, God's people that have so feared death will look into its ugly jaws and shout--"O death, where is your terror, O grave, where is your bite?"'  Thank God that on the first Easter morning, by delivering Jesus Christ from our final enemy, God has removed all the teeth and the terror of dying; and if we are wise, the terror of living as well."

When the women in our Gospel reading for this morning headed out to the grave where Jesus was buried, it was with heavy hearts, because they were aware that Jesus had died.  But when they arrived at the tomb, found the stone rolled away, discovered that the body was gone, and heard the testimony of the messenger:  "He has been raised; he is not here," they got the rest of the message:  "Jesus is alive; he is going on ahead of you to Galilee. Go and tell his disciples."  By his resurrection Jesus turns us from the past and points us toward facing all the tomorrows without fear. Amen.