Easter Sunday (A)

April 7, 1996

Manger, Cross, and Empty Tomb

(Matthew 28:1-10)

A friend of mine was recently talking about life and death. He is in his seventies and has been quite successful in his profession. He has had some heart problems that have caused him to reassess matters of diet and exercise. In a very pensive mood, he shared with us his own musings about his life and the lives of loved ones who have recently died. Then he read this somewhat tongue-in-cheek statement about how life is sort of backwards:

"Life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time, all your weekends, and what do you get in the end of it? ... I think that the life cycle is all backward. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live 20 years in an old-age home. You get kicked out when you're too young. You get a gold watch; you go to work. You work 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement.

"You go to college; you party until you're ready for high school; you go to grade school; you become a little kid; you play. You have no responsibilities. You become a little baby; you go back into the womb; you spend your last nine months floating; and you finish up as a gleam in somebody's eye."

Sooner or later, all of us are forced to think rugged, tough thoughts about life and death. Into those thoughts come some religious questions. They come no matter how irreligious or dismissive we might have been about the very notion of God, much less the possibility of a God who is personally interested in us.

Frankly, I've come to a point in my life where I spend a lot of time thinking about life and death. According to the actuarial tables, I still have a couple of decades plus a few years left to live. At the same time, in the last three years, I have lost three of my best golfing buddies to death, each of whom were in their sixties, and have also lost my oldest daughter to death. And I preside at a lot of funerals. So I don't have the luxury of living in denial of the inevitability of mortality.

Not only am I -- by my age, circumstances and vocation -- prone to somewhat philosophical reflections about my own life and death and the life and death of those close to me. I am also a person like you -- who reads widely, goes to my share of movies, talks to a lot of people and, as a result, observes the gamut of human experience all the way across the spectrum from the joy of giving birth to the grief of death's farewells. There are times when life seems so long lasting. I have the feeling like I've always been here and will always be here. In fact, it is difficult for me to think of anything but a continuing sequence of tomorrows.

Then there comes that 4:31 A.M. shaking of my house, the swaying of the chandelier, and the flicked-on television shows me a TV studio in shambles. What at one moment for us was the cognitive reality that an earthquake of some force had hit Southern California was now an existential trauma when we realized that Anne's parents were not that far from the epicenter. We rushed to their home, driving over streets with open cracks, past houses with toppled chimneys, seeing stores with shattered windows, a fire hydrant burst, and scores of people wrapped in blankets sitting out in front of their houses.