Easter Sunday.
Scriptures: John 20:1-18; Romans 6:3-11.
It is hard to see beyond death. It’s just plain hard for us humans to see past that point where this earthly, bodily life of ours comes to an end.
I’m not talking right now about belief, what we to believe say about what happens to us after we die. I imagine as far as what we would say we believe, we here at Sojourners are pretty much all over the map on this issue. Whether or not we believe that dead is just dead, whether we believe on the other hand that there is something on the other side of death, whether we find meaning, even deep meaning in words such as heaven or hell, and what kind of meaning we attach to those words—these are questions we probably differ on…considerably.
But I’m not talking today exactly about belief. I’m talking about something more basic. I’m talking at the level where I have to think that our human experience is pretty much alike. We look into the darkness that lies at the end of our days, and all we can really see is darkness and emptiness.
If we could see clearly what lies on the other side of death, we would be seeing with the eyes of God. But our eyes are not the eyes of God, and when we look into the cavern of death, even if we look for as long and as hard as we can, we are still looking with eyes that are only human. Death remains, and whatever lies on the other side of death remains, a mystery.
This is true, as I say, at a very basic level of our lives, regardless of what beliefs or non-beliefs we may come to hold. I once believed that when I died, I died. That was that. I now believe that death is not the end, that on the other side of death there is another reality, that on the other side of death there is life, there is God.
But that does not mean that I am so terribly different from before, or that I am so terribly different from others who understand death as the end. I still feel the mystery, and I identify with what the women must have felt as they stared into the tomb looking for Jesus: awe, fear, wonder, bewilderment—all those feelings we may have as we try to have the courage to look death square in the face. I still know that I can see only as through a glass darkly, and I know that any way we have of talking about what lies on the other side of death must be poetry. Poetry like that of Paul in First Corinthians 15:
“Someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised, with what kind of body?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body that God has chosen…There is one glory of the sun, another of the moon, another of stars; indeed star differs from star. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown in a physical body. It is raised in a spiritual body…”
Can I tell you precisely what Paul means by these words? No. But they contain a promise, a promise of life beyond the limits of your life or mine, and beyond the limits of life on this planet. We cannot, and we need not, describe what that life is. As one person put it, it is not our business to describe the furniture of heaven and the temperature of hell. But there is a promise here. There is more to Christ’s story, there is more to your story and my story than our physical deaths. That is one of the messages of Easter. Whether we can hear it or not, the promise is there…in Paul’s poetry…in the poetry too of Dylan Thomas:
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one with the wind and the west moon;
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
Death shall have no dominion. Words that echo scripture. Words that again search for ways to express what cannot be expressed, what can only be hinted at. Yet words that for me come as close as any to expressing what it means to me to say “Christ is risen.”
Those words—Christ is risen—are not just about Jesus; they are about me. And the words “death shall have no dominion” are not words that are addressed to me, but rather words that I know need to become a part of me so that my words, my songs, my prayers, my actions manage to say somehow that I have not only heard it said, but that I have taken those words into my soul and even more that I have resolved that “death shall have no dominion”.
Let’s not talk just about the physical end of life. That’s one kind of death. But there are many. Small deaths. Not so small deaths. Let’s talk about things that can make us dead before we die…but that don’t have to, if we have said in our souls that death shall have no dominion…and if there has been a miracle. That’s the paradox, that there needs to be both an act of the will on our part and a miracle to break the powers of death. But let me try to be more concrete.
I want to talk for a moment about depression.
My mother died on Good Friday of 1994. She will always be part of my Easter memories. My mother was subject to depression. So this is not a subject that I arrived at arbitrarily.
A few weeks ago my topic was anger, and I had to begin by acknowledging that there were a number of people in the room who on a regular basis are helping people to work through issues of anger, as counselors or therapists. I need to say the same thing today. I am not a therapist or a clinician. I do not diagnose or treat depression. Even if I did some research, I would not presume to stand up here and give you a lecture on clinical depression. I don’t know medical definitions of depression, or when it may have a chemical cause. There are lots of things I don’t know. I’m not an expert.
What I do know is that I have experienced depression, and that I remain and will always be subject to it. What I also know is that people I love have been and are subject to depression, and have struggled with it, some more successfully than others. I know that it is a kind of death, a spiritual death at the least, and sometimes contributes to physical death too.
I’m not talking, as I say, about depression in any technical sense. But neither of course am I talking about those passing moments of sadness or melancholy that everyone has from time to time. I am talking in a kind of common sense way about depression as that kind of heaviness that is there all the time and weighs a person down, that makes it hard for some people to get out of bed, that can rob a person’s life of laughter, that can make every step we take a difficult one, that can make a person’s heart and spirit feel like an anchor is attached.
When a person is in that kind of a situation, it is hard to see beyond it, just as it is hard to see beyond literal, physical death. That’s the very nature of depression. There may be natural causes to make a person feel down. What turns it into depression is when we can see no way out, when the cloud that envelopes us is so thick that we have trouble taking an interest in anything “out there”, that we have trouble even seeing anything out there. And so we begin to feel cut off and helpless. We know it is not possible for us to just decide to wake up in the morning and say, “O.K., that’s enough of that, now back to life,” though others may think we should, which only adds to the sense of isolation.
So what is it that allows a person who is depressed one day to say to himself or herself, “I can’t make the sadness go away, but it doesn’t have to control my life.”? What is it that allows a person gradually to begin caring again about…the world…about people…about himself? What is it that allows a person caught in the grips of depression to say to herself: “This death shall have no dominion over me.”?
I can only speak for myself… and I believe it is God. Whatever that change is that needs to happen in some dark place where no one can see but that results in the stone being rolled away, whatever that change is, it is brought about by God. When that happens I believe it is a miracle. I have experienced it as a miracle. God reaching down into some very dark place and finding the “me” that is buried under an avalanche of, well of heaviness—not just worries and troubles, but that weight that has been too much for me—God reaches down and finds “me” and brings me out of that tomb with her own hands. There is no other explanation. God has found me and brought me out. I couldn’t do it myself.
Now, of course, this doesn’t happen just all at once and once and for all. Just because a miracle happens and we’re able to set out in some new direction, doesn’t mean we’ll never want to hide under the covers again. That’s where we come in. This all requires an intervention of God, but it requires resolve on our part too. It requires God to say to us, “It is my will that in your life death shall have no dominion.” But also requires us to be able to say that on our own and in our own ways, that here and now in my life, death shall have no dominion.
The same dynamic it seems to me is at work in so many areas of our lives. The powers of death come in many forms. In the series of sermons I have been working on during Lent, I have tried to name some of them. Whether its fear, anger, racism or any other power of death, God says today through the resurrection of Jesus Christ that death shall have no dominion.
It is not that we can make fear go away, or even that it should go away, but that it does not control us, need not control us, must not control us. We don’t struggle with fear because it would make us happier or more serene to be without fear. It is true that we would happier and more serene, and that would be a good thing, but finally we struggle with fears because God says and we need to resolve that death shall have no dominion.
It is not that we can succeed in making racism go away, though it should go away, but it is not that we will make it go away. But what God says, and what we need to reinforce with our own resolve, is that neither racism nor the guilt over racism will control us. Racism is a power of death and it shall have no dominion over our lives.
I want to tell you about a passage from a book called The Immense Journey by Loren Eisely. He was an author my mother liked very much and this was a book she liked. Eisely tells of the day when he was hiking over a mountain and grew tired. He stopped in a clearing under a tree to take a nap. When he woke up there was some kind of a strange commotion in the trees up above. He looked up and saw a raven sitting on a branch and holding in his beak a baby bird. The sound he heard was the screeching of the bird’s parents. This is the way Eisely tells the rest of the story:
“The sleek monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment, and sat still. Up to then, the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of the woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties, drawn by the cries of the parent birds. No one dared to attack the raven, but they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, sat there unperturbed, unmoving, untouchable. The sighing died down. It was then,” Eisely continues, “that I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of the protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal notes of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the bush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats, joyously as birds are known to sing. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven…but they sang because they were singers of life and not of death.”
The powers of death come in many forms. We do not have the power to rid ourselves of them, any more than we have the power to wish away the fact of our physical deaths. We sometimes do not even have the power to resist them very well.
But God has power to break the spell they cast over our lives.
And we have power to sing out in protest. And we have power to keep on looking where our eyes cannot see,
…to keep on straining to see beyond death, beyond the limits of our earthly lives, …to keep on looking for that place where God will reign and where all people will live finally as sisters and brothers,
…to keep on looking for that place where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes,
…to keep on looking for that place where death will be no more, neither will there be mourning, or crying, or pain anymore.
And we have power to open our spirits to hear the word that God addresses to us today, and we have power to speak that word ourselves, in our own voice, which will be shaky and faltering sometimes, and that will always be a very human and imperfect voice, but to say nevertheless in our own voice, in our own lives, the best we are able, the very best we are able: Death shall have no dominion. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 23, 2000