April 12, Easter, An Opening in the World

Jeremiah 31:1-6, Colossians 3:1-4, Matthew 28:1-10.

This Easter is a gift. And it does not belong to us! “Easter is not church property.” I have said that every year in order to welcome the visitors not from our church and our friends not from our faith. This year it’s still true, and in a new way, because this Easter is not what any church would have chosen.

No organ, no choir, no trumpet, no glory, but quiet, as quiet as the original Easter in Matthew, when the followers of Jesus were alone, or in twos or threes. They had to face a new reality they had not prepared for, and come up with answers they did not know the questions for. The quiet was broken by only an earthquake, and this pandemic has been one long, slow shaking and rattling of everything we’ve always counted on. This Easter is manifestly not church property.

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. So did I. This week I went to see Green-Wood Cemetery, as much for inspiration as for exercise. I made five trips and I varied my routes through it, but I always included the Old First graveyard, in the middle of Green-Wood.

Let me remind you that our old church cemetery was moved there, and our Dutch gravestones are the oldest in Green-Wood. It’s ironic. Our sanctuary may be closed but our graveyard is open; well, our graveyard is a sanctuary too. And it is unique in its design, like no other spot in Green-Wood that I have found.

I enter the Green-Wood gate at Prospect Park West. Here there stretches a wide open field, with the gravestones all in rows. This is the public area, with everyone the same, the general population without definition.

Then I walk up across an open ridge, and it’s breezy, and one grassy area has no gravestones. Are there bodies hidden underneath? I keep walking across the field and then I enter the woods.

This is not like other woods, because there is no undergrowth—because of the graves. There are no straight rows here. Everything twists and turns with the hills and valleys, and the avenues are a labyrinth. In the woods are the family plots, and monuments, and imposing tombs, some built into the hillsides and others like small temples.

I look for names I recognize and I read the inscriptions. The names are for remembrance and the inscriptions for hope, and in between remembrance and hope is silence, their past lives hidden beneath these stones. However important these people may have been before, the only importance they have now is that they are dead.

You know, the early church built no monuments to the apostles, nor even marked their tombs. Not even Jesus’ tomb was regarded with significance. It wasn’t till the Fourth Century that the so-called Holy Sepulcher was fabricated as a place of pilgrimage. It’s also notable that, apart from the death of  Jesus, the New Testament shows no interest in the deaths of its main characters.

I think I know why. Why talk about their deaths when they were already living in the resurrection? They were already raised with Christ, and that larger truth superseded the deaths they still must die. Where they were buried, was with Christ. Where their lives were hidden, was with Christ, in God. I am sure this was believed by many of those whose graves I pass.

In the center of Green-Wood, you turn left onto a path and cross a ridge, and opening below you is a spacious, level glade within the trees. It is the lovely circle of the Cedar Dell, and its rim is a gentle slope that lowers to an entrance. This is our Old First graveyard.

The surprise is that the stones are in a large circle, not in rows. So this is not the public undefined, nor a family plot, this is a congregation, gathered around its center, a community at rest, and yet open to the world around it.

In the center is no monument, but it doesn’t feel empty, with all the gravestones focused in on it. This is our own little Stonehenge. This circle is a communion of saints, its quiet rest is the forgiveness of sins, its hope is in the resurrection of the body, its sanctuary is the Holy Catholic Church, and at the center is the unseen air of the Holy Spirit.

This place is a gift. As a place of the dead it reminds me that I have died with Christ, as a place of remembrance it reminds me that my life is hidden with Christ in God, and as a place of hope it reminds me that already I have been raised with Christ.

One of you told me that you visited this place last week and you found it “fulfilling.” What I heard in your word “fulfilling” was also: satisfying, and encouraging, and inspiring, and that you can see the Kingdom of God. It lifts you up. Me too. I find the place uplifting. It’s wonderful how this piece of ground can “set your mind on things that are above, not things that are on earth,” as St. Paul says.

What St. Paul means by “things that are above” is not celestial space nor a static heaven, but the dynamic government of Our Resurrected Lord, who sits at the right hand of God, and the coming of his Kingdom on earth as it in heaven, both present and future.

This will be the restoration of all things, for which the resurrection of Jesus is the pledge, and already that includes you, even though you still must die, because you have been raised with Christ. Already it includes this earth, and your bodies, even our dead ones, and so this graveyard is quietly prophetic, when it is fulfilling and uplifting.

And it’s instructive. It offers us a message, for how to live our lives in the present and the future, we who need this pandemic to be done. We want to close it off, and get back to life as it was. That’s only natural. But the temptation is to close our future off, to go back to the same closed systems of power and possession, like back to the same destructive economy of endless consumption for material prosperity. We want to defend our way of life and repossess it!

But the resurrection calls us to lives of openness. Not to the undefined openness of the big public field at the entrance, but to the focused openness of this glade within the woods. Just so your open future centers on Our Lord and is defined by the rim of the Kingdom of God, and yet it has no walls and you can see into the woods around you. This sanctuary has no ceiling and heaven starts just above the ground and it’s heaven all the way up. Your choices are both open and defined. You are guided by the definitions of the Kingdom of God and you keep your center on the Lord Jesus.

You know, in St. Matthew’s telling of the story it’s not so much that the tomb is empty as that the tomb is open—the tomb is open to the world. The resurrection of Jesus has made an opening in the world, this world. When you are raised with him, you go through his opening out into this world, in love and hope and empathy into all its closed-off places. And notice that it was as Jesus went into the world that the women met him.

He was the same, but not the same. He was both familiar and a stranger, both their friend and someone they would worship. And if you have died with him and been raised with him, it’s also true of you within the world, that you too are something of an alien friend and familiar stranger. You’re even sometimes a stranger to yourself, and an alien to your instincts and your comfort.

When this unsettles you, take relief in knowing that your life is hidden even from yourself, with Christ, in God. You do not fully belong to yourself, for Christ has made an opening in you and in the closed-off parts of you. This will unnerve you, but (I’m hardly the first one to say it) that that’s how the light gets out of you.

Our church has been forced to open up. We always wanted people to come into our sanctuary, and now we’re going out into your homes. And just as the two Mary’s had to leave the tomb and go back home to meet Jesus on the way, so now we will expect him to keep his promise to meet you at your home in the breaking of the bread. And as the Resurrection has opened up the world, even a simple human action like breaking bread is open to the creative power of the Holy Spirit, and that extends to all the other daily actions that you do.

This sacrament in your apartment will be both strange and familiar, like Jesus, and it might feel awkward, though less so for those of you who live alone, but in your broken bread there is a miracle that is hidden with Christ in God. On this Sunday this sacrament is not church property, and we receive it as a strange and lovely gift.

The supper is for remembrance and for hope. By it we remember him, and in it we hope for the feast of love of which we shall partake when his kingdom has fully come. In between, in the meantime, we are not hidden from each other but alive to each other, one body, a temple, living stones, and we open ourselves to each other in this feast of love.

Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.