Sermon: Un-ending
Texts: Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Mark 16:1-8
Date: April 12, 2009 (Easter Sunday)
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
What’s the very best thing about reading fairy tales? Well, the opening line has its charm: “Once upon a time…” Those words create a delicious sense of anticipation, getting the listener revved up for a fanciful story.
Even better than “once upon a time,” the beginning formula, is the typical ending: “And they lived happily ever after. The end.” How many stories have you heard that wrap up with that thoroughly satisfying formula? And they lived HAPpily ever after…the END. (Sigh.) It’s so comforting. Looking forward to the expected happy ending can keep you going through any number of perilously dark forests and encounters with fiendish villains. Your heart may gallop with fear for a time, but you can endure it, because you know what’s on the last page. And they lived happily ever after…the end.
One would think that the Gospel of Mark would have as wonderful an ending as the countless fairy tales we have heard, concluding neatly and happily. If you read all the way to the end of chapter 16, you get something like a happy ending: “So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accomplished it.” [Mark 16:19-20]. However, the early manuscripts of Mark all lack this neat conclusion. Scholars generally agree that it was tacked on later by another author. As we hear the end of verse 8, which the vast majority of scholars agree is the original ending of this gospel, we find it distinctly lacking neatness, happiness, even ending-ness. Let me remind you of how the NRSV renders the last sentence: "So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." As scholar Thomas Long points out, not only does this verse fail to provide proper narrative closure, it also lurches to an awkward grammatical stop. A more literal translation would read, "To no one anything they said; afraid they were for..." It ends as abruptly as if the author had stepped off a cliff with scroll and pen in hand while musing on how to bring the gospel to a close. Or as if the author of Mark had suddenly been dragged from his writing desk in midsentence. Some students of the Bible, profoundly uncomfortable about the abrupt stop, have speculated that the author was indeed dragged off in midsentence, perhaps to martyrdom as the Empire practiced extreme censorship. (Yeah, that’s it…) That heroic scenario has comforted some, but there’s really no evidence for it.
In a commentary on Mark, the late Donald H. Juel tells the story of one of his students who had memorized the whole of Mark in order to do a dramatic, Broadway-style reading before a live audience. After careful study, the student had decided to go with the scholarly consensus regarding the ending. At his first performance, however, after he spoke that ambiguous last verse, he stood there awkwardly, shifting from one foot to the other, the audience waiting for more, waiting for closure, waiting for a proper ending. Finally, after several anxious seconds, he said, "Amen!" and made his exit. The relieved audience applauded loudly and appreciatively. Upon reflection, though, the student realized that by providing the audience a satisfying conclusion, his "Amen!" had actually betrayed the dramatic intention of the text. So at the next performance, when he reached the final verse he simply paused for a half beat and left the stage in silence. "The discomfort and uncertainty within the audience were obvious," said Juel, "and as people exited the buzz of conversation was dominated by the experience of the nonending." [1]
As uncomfortable as it is, it is instructive to stand at the ragged edge of the gospel and ask what the author meant by such an ending, or I should say, non-ending, un-ending. Are we supposed to learn something by being denied the happy ending and satisfying closure we crave in our stories and in life itself?
The women who went out to Jesus’ tomb early on Easter morning were not expecting a happy ending, but they were undoubtedly expecting closure. “Closure” is a word that is bandied about a good deal these days, especially in therapeutic settings. The online dictionary’s seventh definition spells it out as “an often comforting or satisfying sense of finality, or something that provides such a sense.” We speak of victims of crime or abuse needing closure, or grieving people needing closure. The women heading out to the tomb were grieving, and they wanted to finish the job of preparing Jesus’ body for burial that had been cut off by the inexorable sunset of the Sabbath the Friday before. It was not a pleasant task, but it was one they knew well, and the ritual itself would help bring comfort and closure as they said farewell to their friend.
We hear in the story that they hadn’t quite worked out how they were going to get the heavy stone blocking the entrance to the tomb moved so that they could get at the corpse. The sight of the stone rolled away was the first clue that something in their world had gone seriously awry. That was followed quickly by the shock of seeing the mysterious young man who brought them the message that God had raised Jesus from the dead and the sight of the empty tomb. So they fled, seized with terror and amazement. Who can blame them for running away? Their world was turned upside down, and where they had looked forward to some closure, they got an un-ending instead. D. Cameron Murchison reminds us that even in grief there can be a measure of relief. He writes, “In this case closure was closure not just upon an important personal relationship, but also closure on a world-embracing dream.” He suggests that they may have been experiencing, in the midst of their grief, a deep relief that they would no longer be burdened with the challenge of costly discipleship. Instead of being “off the hook” they discovered “to their terror and amazement—the challenge still before them.” If the dream is in fact not dead, if the reign of God is at hand, then there is still work to be done, risks to be taken, dangers to be faced. No wonder they ran! [2]
It’s understandable, but still a little disappointing. I had been pulling for the women disciples, hoping they would do a little better than the men who had been in the spotlight in this gospel with their squabbling, denial, betrayal, and desertion. The women had at least watched the crucifixion from a distance, and had come out of hiding to finish the burial rituals. But here they wind up in terrified silence as well, leaving us with the unfortunate word “afraid” as the last word in the story. They’re in the same boat as the pitiful men.
The story of disciples isn’t a very heroic one in the gospel of Mark. But it is a very hopeful story. You see, the non-ending of this gospel is really an open ending. The last word printed may be “afraid” but the last word spoken is a hopeful word. The divine messenger says, “Go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” Do you see what this means? None of the disciples have been fired for non-performance of discipleship duties. Jesus expected and predicted their various failures, and still promised to meet them in Galilee on the other side of his death and their failures. He has forgiven them in advance and plans to re-engage with them in the next phase of his activity on Earth. There’s the hope, there’s the continuation of the story—in the implication of forgiveness for a set of imperfect disciples who will continue in their role as disciples.
Remember, when Peter boils down the significance of Jesus’ life in the sermon we heard in the Acts reading the climax of the message is that those who believe in him receive forgiveness. It is impossible to overstate the importance of forgiveness in the Christian life. Forgiveness is what revived the Christian community after Jesus’ death and resurrection as the disciples repented of their fearful lack of faith and set out on a new life as Christ’s partners in the post-resurrection era. What’s more, forgiveness is what makes it possible for us to engage with the living Christ as partners in Christ’s ongoing mission in spite of our myriad failures. Because which of us has been able to go even a whole day without falling short in our discipleship? Yet Christ is still going ahead of us and inviting us to follow.
I have been studying and meditating on the principles of non-violence that Martin Luther King, Jr. taught during the six weeks of Lent this year. One of the sub-points under the fifth principle, “Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate,” is this: “Nonviolent love is unending it its ability to forgive in order to restore community.” Unending in its ability to forgive. My “aha” with this gospel lesson this year is that the non-ending, the un-ending of Mark is inextricably linked with unending forgiveness. What is forgiveness but a clean slate, a chance to rise again from whatever pit of failure we might have stumbled into, to rise up to new life as Christ’s partner? Christ has an unending ability to forgive our failures as disciples, and an unending will to give it another whirl with all the on-again, off-again disciples from pitiful Peter down to meager me. Amazing grace.
It’s thrilling to be alive knowing that the living Christ is still abroad, drawing millions of disciples into new adventures of love and daring. You never know what Christ may inspire next, either in your own life or in the lives of others. This came home to me again last week as I was reading one of the Sojourners blogs. Sojourners is a magazine and a Christian community dedicated to social justice, led by Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why the Right is Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. They are planning a major conference on ending poverty in Washington D.C. this month. I was skimming their regular weekly email when a headline caught my eye: “Rush Limbaugh to speak at Mobilization to End Poverty conference.” Huh? The blog said Limbaugh had developed a friendship with Jim Wallis and had accepted his invitation to deliver a keynote address. They had been dialoguing, according to the story, and one night an anguished and sleepless Limbaugh called Wallis at 3:00 a.m. seeking spiritual solace. Wallis told him to read his Bible, and Limbaugh’s random flipping through his King James Bible had his index finger land on this passage from James 5:
Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.
A bit harsh, Wallis noted, but with 2000 verses on poverty in the Bible it’s not too surprising Limbaugh would hit one of them. The story said Limbaugh’s response to the Word was swift and dramatic: “Here and now I give half my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” (Quoting Zacchaeus, who said this after encountering Jesus.) Limbaugh also announced that he was inviting Wallis to be co-host for his daily radio show, giving it a more faith-based focus. He was quoted as saying, “The way Kathy Lee needed Regis, that’s the way y’all need Jesus…” [3]
Do you believe it? As I was reading it, I kept asking myself , “Really?” After a while it occurred to me to look at the date of the blog. Guess what? It was written on April 1. Yup. April Fools day. It was Sojourner’s little foray into satire, after the style of the Onion and other such parodies.
So Rush Limbaugh isn’t about to join Sojourners in their quest to cut the number of Americans living in poverty in half in the next 10 years. Some of the readers were not inclined to laugh at the joke; one wrote that she “was nearly moved to worship” when she read the story as true, and felt it was cruel to joke about such a thing. Another said he read the article with tears in his eyes and resurgent hope that “God is still speaking;” he was about to forward it to his church email list, rejoicing in the Good News delivered on the verge of Holy week, when he saw by the punch line that it was a joke. A horrible, ugly joke, in his opinion, that demeaned all of those who have true hope for a better day in America.
Tell you what. I thought it was marvelous. Not just because it was funny, which it was, but because I believe in the resurrection, and therefore I believe it really could happen. God is still speaking. We do have true hope. The little fairy tale about Rush Limbaugh joining forces with the Sojourners community is not particularly probable, but it is decidedly possible. Christ has an unending ability to forgive an infinite number of disciples, and at any moment any one of us or a whole passel of us at once could repent of our fearful small-heartedness and set out on a new adventure of love. Even Rush. Even Dee. None of our stories is yet at an end, and Christ is going on ahead of us to lead us into new life.
Lordy, lordy, it is invigorating to inhabit this planet with a risen Christ on the loose. Hard to tell how the gospel story will end. Some folks don’t think the un-ending of Mark is any accident; thinkers like N.T. Wright believe it is not complete because every generation of disciples adds their chapter to the story, bringing it nearer to completion. If the women running from the tomb in Mark’s gospel won’t tell the resurrection story, who will? Will you tell it? The gospel story won’t end until the last disciple of Christ has taken their last breath on the last living planet. Then we can talk about an ending.
Speaking of the ending, I’m not even sure that we disciples should be aiming for the classic “and they all lived happily ever after.” It’s a little too tidy, and there’s a fair amount of dissent over what happiness is, anyway. Perhaps it’s enough to say “and they all LIVED.” They all lived the vibrant-hopeful-forgiven-loving life of Christ’s partners.
And they all lived…ever after. The beginning.
[1] http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3392
[2] http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/april-12-2009-easter.html
[3] http://blog.sojo.net/2009/04/01/rush-limbaugh-to-speak-at-sojourners-mobilization-to-end-poverty/