I have a confession to make. It’s been a difficult week of preparation for me. Today is Easter and that makes our text this morning pretty predictable. My confession is that I’ve heard these particular passages so many times in my life they hardly even register anymore. From the time I was born I have been someplace like this every Easter, and for most of my life that included a Sunrise Service, Sunday School and two regular church services and maybe one on Sunday night. And at each of them we heard at least one of the gospel accounts of the resurrection like we’ve had read for us. (And not always well either.) That’s four or five different helpings in one day. This is my thirtieth or thirty-first Easter, and if you just average four recitations per Easter, and if my math is good that’s something like 120 times I’ve heard this stuff. Then factor in any random sermons from one of these texts, any Bible studies I’ve been a part of that discussed this stuff, any times I’ve just read it on my own and five years of Bible College and it no longer surprises me that when I hear someone begin to say, “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark…” I shut down and don’t even hear it. I look like I’m listening (I learned to fake stuff like that in church at a very young age) but I don’t hear it anymore.

There’s an old episode of the original Star Trek where Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to another one of those Class M planets where everybody speaks English and they discover that this one has a political history that parallels Earth’s. In fact one of the tribes on this planet--the Yangs--worships a set of old documents that just happen to be identical duplicates of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution. They even have the same Pledge of Allegiance to the same flag. One difference though. They’ve been reciting the text of these documents--what they call their “holy words”--for so long that they’ve garbled them beyond any meaning. To the point that they’re not even recognizable as words anymore. I thought about showing the bit at the end where Kirk recites them correctly and the Yangs hear their meaning for the first time (and want to kill him) but you’d have giggled--it’s kinda cheesy.

And I have to admit to you this morning that in spending time with this text in preparation for this morning I’ve felt a bit like those Yangs. I’ve heard it so many times that I don’t hear it any more. Like sitting in your living room and you hear your furnace shut off and you realize that you’d gotten so used to the sound that you didn’t even know it was on. I’m like that with the Christmas stuff too. “And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over there flocks by night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid.” Ugh.

And all the while I’m convinced that the story we’re focusing on this morning is the most significant story in human history. So it’s bothersome to me that it doesn’t move me emotionally. For some reason I feel like it should. But what if it’s not supposed to? What if that’s not the point. What if the point is that because it happened I’m alive to be moved by everything else in this world that God created, filled with people that God made? What if we miss something when we focus all of our attention toward the past or the future? I don’t think Jesus died so that we could study his death.

Whatever else your theology requires you to do with it, it is inescapable that the resurrection is about life. It changes everything. Jesus came to do lots of things, and many of them were accomplished through his death & resurrection and I believe that one of them was to give those of us who believe a new perspective on what it means to be alive in this world. Because the fact is that dying and living are very nearly the same thing. Are you alive? (Are you awake?) You’re also dying. We are all of us dying.

I suppose we’ve all known people who found out that their time was running out with a little more immediacy than the rest of us face our mortality with. Our friend Kathy was in her early twenties when she was diagnosed with brain cancer. She lasted a just over a year and for that year it was hard to look at her and not think, “Kathy is dying.” She had been beautiful, and the disease and the treatments wrecked her. She had been an athlete--played college basketball--and we watched as she struggled to find her mouth with the straw in her glass. But her dying wasn’t any more real than my own--just…better advertised.

But you know, during her last year it was hard to look at Kathy and think, “she’s dying,” because she wasn’t. She was living. The talks we had during that time, the songs we sang, the hugs we shared, the prayers we prayed and the tears we cried were made of realer stuff than most of what had preceded them in any of our lives. You have to die to live. Sound familiar?

They buried Kathy Stewart in the early spring of 2000, and the following Sunday at church in Florence Ken, who didn’t know any of this, lead us in “It is Well with My Soul.” And in my folding chair in that gym I cried like a school-girl. And I was alive. And so was Kathy.

There are other stories I could tell you--stories that we here share, but I’m not quite ready to do that yet. These are the stories that move me. More than what I’ve allowed to become of my hearing of the resurrection accounts in the Gospels. But they move me because of that story. The life that they reflect is further evidence that that story was real, that it worked. That love is in fact as strong as death, and apparently less yielding than the grave.

“Get busy living or get busy dying.” I could make all kind of suggestions as to how to do that, but I’m not sure how helpful that would be. Living is going to look as different for each of us as recognizing the risen Jesus did for Mary in John 20:16 and the disciples Nate talked about last week who realized in the breaking of bread what had happened.

But I can tell you that watching life happen to you is not living. That insulating yourself from pain is not living, and that pursuing it isn’t either.

That enslaving yourself to self-destructive behavior isn’t living, and that neither is obsessing about your own behavior until you become the center of the universe.

That allowing your past to force you to stagger through life in some sort of guilt hangover is not living.

I can tell you that letting your circumstances master you isn’t living, and that neither is denying that they’re real.

That walling yourself up against the world around you isn’t living. That wishing we were all the same isn’t living.

That using labels to avoid getting to know people is not living.

That reducing the Living God and the Life he died to give us to a set of rules and behavioral codes and outlines isn’t living.

That living can be incredibly painful, but that if you never hurt it‘s because you‘ve never loved and that‘s no life at all.

And that because of a two thousand year old story that I have allowed myself to become bored with, an eternal kind of life lived in Jesus is never over. And that that changes everything.

“I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.” (Psalm 118:17)

Life is Sweet

by Natalie Merchant