Easter Sunrise

or How To Hurry Your Worry Along

I had a tricky childhood (as any reader of How to Begin When the World is Ending now knows). But one of the things my chronically depressed single mom did Really Well was ritual, when she could muster the energy—especially at the holidays. She always had a profound sense of the sacred in the midst of the mundane, and attended to minutiae that made life magical.

More often than not we’d wake on Easter morning to every conceivable edge of the apartment covered in perfectly straight lines of jellybeans or jordan almonds that would make Martha (Stewart, not Jesus’ kitchen-maven friend) swoon, our drab dwelling temporarily transformed into a magical Candyland. We’d be finding jordan almonds for months (they keep well. And I still enjoy a vintage extra-chewy jellybean).

For a few years there, my mom must have stayed up most of the night, because she’d wake us up before dawn after working her wonders. Before we could explore to see if the Easter Bunny had come, she’d bundle us up and out the door to go to Easter sunrise service.

My 4-year-old self remembers parking our ancient Dodge Dart near the golden dome of a Greek Orthodox church, but the service itself was in a park across the street, at the edge of some sort of canyon. I have no idea, to this day, where it might have been. I mean, this was Hartford, CT not Sedona, Arizona.

Could this be it??

What my young self thought was a cliff worthy of a Jesus-Satan Temptation Throwdown may have in fact been a mild little sledding hill. But the soul knows what it knows.

I didn’t understand much of what was happening in the worship service, but every fiber of my being knew we were in a thin place between life and death — and that life, for the moment was WINNING. Is there anything else we really need to know about Resurrection Day?

Easter Sunrise service is still my favorite. My church in Berkeley has a longstanding tradition of holding their service in the Berkeley hills, in an otherwise humdrum parking lot at Lawrence Hall of Science with a spectacular view of Berkeley and Oakland, the Bay itself, San Francisco, Marin headlands, Mt. Tamalpais, and the Golden Gate Bridge. We’re looking west, of course, toward the Pacific ocean. The hills behind us hide the actual sunrise, so even when the sun is unobscured by fog, we don’t get the magical moment when it breaks the horizon and chases the shadowed world west.

Looking west at the clergy and the cliff, with fire pit firing and mini altar with flowers ready to decorate the chicken-wire cross.

But the cliff where we gather is still undeniably a thin place, a place of reckoning, a portal, a threshold. I always feel so incredibly tender looking down on the trees and streets and buildings below us, so many stories, so many struggles, hidden joy and naked pain. I feel like I’m looking over God’s shoulder, and fall in love with everybody all over again, just as I’m sure God Themself does every day at dawn, before we have a chance to make Her roll Her eyes again.

Anyhoo. I hope you had a little such wild magic in your Easter or Vernal Equinox or whatever observance you observe related to Life-Laughingly-Punching-Through-Death’s-Disguise. Or if you haven’t yet gotten your spring surge: it’s coming. Anticipate it. Demand it.

Here’s the lil sermon I preached up on the cliff this past Sunday. I wish I had video of our dancing at the end—it’s so exuberant, even before coffee and donuts! You’ll just have to imagine it. Here’s a still, anyhow:

The Easter Resurrection story is one of the few stories told by ALL four gospel writers…Matthew Mark Luke John…and even some other gospel writers whose manuscripts didn’t make it into the Bible! We’re telling Mark’s today. His is the shortest. I guess he wasn’t getting paid by the word. But maybe his is short because he was the first to write his down and we didn’t know much yet about how Jesus came alive again. This is how it goes.

Mark 16:1-8

When the day of rest was over, a few of the women who were Jesus’ closest companions, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body, in case it was beginning to smell bad. 

Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb. In those days fancy people were buried in tombs, and a rock was placed over the entrance. Jesus wasn’t rich or fancy, but someone who was, and who loved Jesus, had lent their tomb to put Jesus’ body in. 

Even though Mary and Mary and Salome were really sad that their friend Jesus had died, they were also thinking practically–so naturally they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

But when they arrived at the spot, they looked and saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. They entered the tomb, and saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side. They were, as you might imagine, entirely freaked out. That’s a direct translation from the original Greek. 

“Don’t be spooked!” the young man said. “You are looking for Jesus who came from Nazareth. He was crucified. But he has come alive again! He is not here. See the place where they laid him? Now go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘Jesus is going ahead of you into Galilee. You will see him there, just like he told you to expect.’”

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

And that, my friends, is right where Mark stops the story.

---

When Jesus was alive and well and preaching all over the place

Before he died

Before this mysterious young man dressed in white surprised the women with the news that he was alive again

[Kids, who do you think this young man was?]

One of the things Jesus told us, often, was NOT TO WORRY

He said it in his sermon on the mount, overlooking the Sea of Galilee

Not unlike us here today, standing at the edge of another part of the world, looking down on all the sleepy people and sweet places we know below 

Of all the hard things Jesus asked us to do

NOT WORRYING and not being afraid might be the hardest

I wished he’d told us HOW to worry instead of NOT to worry

Because not worrying is just unrealistic, AMEN?

Jesus said not to worry and not to be afraid

But then the very first Gospel written down

The one closest in time to the actual life and death of Jesus 

Ends like this

With fear and terror

RIGHT AFTER the young man in flowing robes told them not to be afraid, and WHY

Because he had come alive again!!! IT was a MIRACLE!

Not only were the women who were among Jesus’ closest companions

Who had spent YEARS soaking in his serenity, his joy, his wisdom

Not only were they TERRIFIED 

But they actually RAN AWAY and didn’t tell ANYBODY 

(so it says in the Bible, but the must have told SOMEBODY bcause after all, here we all are! 

In running away they disobeyed not one but TWO direct orders from an angel

My theological take on this is: UGH

But then: HMMMM

And finally: AHHHHHH

Because there’s what Jesus said

And there’s what the people closest to him DID

They worried. They were terrified. They looked in the tomb and saw nothing, no friend, no God

The last time they’d seen him, Jesus was dying, and not only dying, but hurting as much as a human can hurt

They hurt with his hurt

They had been looking forward to seeing him one more time, even if he wasn’t really there anymore, just his still-warm body to embrace

And now they didn’t even have that

They were in the lowest of low places

The scaredest of scared places

A wise woman once said, Courage is fear that has said its prayers

I wonder if that is permission

If the women disciples also give us permission

To be afraid

Even to be very afraid 

And then to stop being afraid

Because we have felt our feelings and said our prayers and found a little bit of courage

Here’s the thing about [the physiology of] being afraid: 

you literally can’t stay afraid for a very long time

Your body starts to calm down, unless you feed it another bolus, another blip of fear

And there are ways to hurry your afraid along

After or while you say your prayers

We can to MOVE!!!

Ex-form, Interplay: reach high, shake it off, hug it out and especially: 

DANCE

It is very, very hard to dance and still be afraid

Especially when you are doing silly dances

To be silly and to dance at the same time is to thumb your nose at the devil

[TRY IT!]

Sometimes I tell people: everything turns out all right in the end

If it’s not all right, it’s not the end

We’re looking ahead down the road toward a lot of moments that we hope will be a definitive end to evil and death

The way the first Easter was supposed to be

Some people think a healthy election with no voter suppression will save the day

Others worry that that won’t be enough to turn us around, because the world will still be burning as it is turning

Still others want to burn the whole thing down: not the earth, but all that humans do to torch it and torture one another

Then we come up here, and look down at our little city…feel such affection, how small and vulnerable it all looks

It’s almost unbearable the tenderness…we are looking over God’s shoulder 

How will it end? In Tragedy? Comedy? Romance? 

Some people added an extra ending to Mark

They couldn’t bear that the story ended with the women running away, afraid

What kind of story is that?

Other people have other ideas about why Mark ended it where he did

Some of them are silly

Like: he got hand cramps

He ran out of printer paper

He left it on a cliffhanger hoping it would get picked up for a second season on Netflix

But I wonder if: he wanted us to finish the story

To see for ourselves Jesus walking around in the world

To BE for ourselves Jesus walking around in the world

Before we can do that

Let’s really feel the fear

Let’s be freaked out like the women at the absence of God

To not know what it means

To fear the worst

And then say our prayers

And then act as if the answer to our prayers depended on us and not on God

Taking to the streets

Those sweet, sleepy streets down there

Taking his love and his serenity and his wisdom 

Let’s do all the hard things Jesus asked us to

But first let’s dance it out

(Silly happy dance moves to the folk classic Lord of the Dance follows!)

Flower cross in process, and the final result: