Sermon: Re/membering
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Sermon: Re/membering Text: Luke 24:1-12 Date: April 4, 2010 (Easter Sunday) Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church What brought the women who had collapsed in fear before Jesus’ tomb rising again to their feet? If you were to boil their recovery down to one word, it would be this: Remember. The dazzling messengers announce the resurrection, and then say to the trembling women, “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then, Luke tells us, “they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven, and to all the rest.” Remembering has to do with more than recall in Luke’s gospel. Remembering, says one commentary I read, has to do with a re-presentation of a past event in such a way that understanding, insight, awareness, and perception are included as well as simple recollection. Remembering in this story meant not just recollecting what Jesus said or the way he said it, but meant a dawning understanding, an “Aha!” That “AHA” was not merely insight but conversion. Theologian Edward Schillebeeckx speaks of the resurrection experience of the first disciples as a conversion experience. Those first disciples had known Jesus and walked with him, eaten with him, listened to him, worked with him, prayed with him, argued with him. They were his disciples in the same way many teachers of Jesus’ time had students who tried to be like their masters. But this new reality called for a deeper conversion yet. The disciples had to overcome their certainty about death and open themselves to an alternative reality. (I was reading somewhere a little quip about the deeply unsettling nature of Jesus’ empty tomb—“If the dead won’t stay dead, then what in the world can we rely on?” ) These women had to let the good news sink into their minds, hearts, and souls (Jesus has risen, is still alive, has triumphed over death; I am still his disciple, he is still my teacher and lord). They are standing on a fulcrum of history in the global sense and in a very personal sense: pulling from the past their memory of accompanying the living Jesus on his way, and pulling from the future a new horizon of possibility they had not quite grasped until this moment. That’s all captured somehow in this one word, this one moment: Remember. The musical “The Fantasticks” has an evocative little song about remembering. “Try to remember a time in September…” I’m going to skip to the second verse because the lyrics brush up against what the angels might have been trying to spark in the memories of the women at the tomb as they invited them to remember. Try to remember when life was so tender The reason I wanted to sing that was to call to mind that to remember in this instance is not the end in itself. It leads to something--to following. That’s what remembering meant for these women at the tomb; not mere reminiscence but recognizing, rejoicing, recovering, rekindling, reclaiming, reinvigorating, reflecting, refreshing, reforming, rebounding, rejoining, reliving. All emerging from “remember.” One preacher I know asserted in a sermon that “the opposite of remember is not forget; the opposite of remember is dismember.” Now, that’s an ugly word. Dismember is a grisly word. But let’s ruminate on it for a moment in the context of the gospel. Surely what the Romans (egged on by the religious authorities of the day) meant to do by crucifying Jesus was to dismember his body; but more importantly, to dismember his movement. They meant to tear it apart in the most gruesome way imaginable to put an end to what they saw as a nascent revolution. They very nearly succeeded. Most of the disciples were cowering behind locked doors in the days surrounding the crucifixion. But these women, part of the nearly-dismembered Jesus movement, gathered up their courage and went out to the tomb to tend to Jesus’ broken body. And while they were there, they re/membered. (I’m spelling it with a slash to signify the opposite of dismember.) They remembered Jesus’ words and his life. They experienced the new reality of resurrection. They picked up their shattered hearts and hopes, their dismembered dream, and put their lives as disciples back together. Personally restored enough to rise, they ran back to the community to remember there, to re/member that fractured , dismembered circle of followers. To put the community of the living Christ back together. My preaching professor, Joey Jeter, points out that the Greeks had a particular word, apokatastasis, which hints at everything being put back together and made right. It leans toward a time when all of creation, now hopelessly sundered and fractious, will be restored to peace and harmony.[1] In Acts 3:21 it is translated as the time of “universal restoration” that God announced through the prophets. Jesus himself was such a prophet, announcing the Kingdom of God, a time of restoration of God’s world. Whenever we gather at the Lord’s table and remember Jesus, we are defying the dismembering centrifugal forces of destruction in this world and participating in re/membering God’s beloved into community. The Body of Christ, the Church, defies the death-dealing forces that would dismember Christ’s movement and re/members Christ into history. The earliest disciples evidently experienced the Presence of the risen Christ so powerfully that their remembering his words and ways took on a new life in the continuing, remembering community of faith. They energetically took up his work, taking the raw material of memory and weaving into their own lives of testimony and ministry. Ever since that first Easter, generations of Christians have experienced the Presence of the risen Christ as individuals and communities. And generations of the faithful strive to re/member Jesus in such a way that we bring the world closer to the universal restoration that God yearns into reality. Seeing a recent production of The Grapes of Wrath got me thinking about how those of us who remember Jesus in a sense have inherited a living piece of his soul in which we all share. In that story, Jim Casy, formerly a preacher, muses that a fella ain’t got no soul of his own. After he is killed standing up with some working people striking against unfair wages, Tom Joad remembers Casy aloud to his mother. Tom recalls, “One time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, and he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good, cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ‘less it was with the rest an’ was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn’ think I was even listenin’. But I know now a fella ain’t no good alone…” Tom gets fired up after Jim’s death about doing what Jim was trying to do, fighting the good fight for the working people. When Tom talks about carrying on Jim Casy’s work, Ma Joad is terribly worried. She asks, “How’m I gonna know ‘bout you? They might kill ya and I woundn’ know. They might hurt ya. How’m I gonna know?” Tom laughed uneasily. “Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one—an’ then…” “Then what, Tom?” “Then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casey knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See? God, I’m talking like Casy. Come of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes.”[2] Wherever Jesus is re/membered in the land of the living, wherever the work he did of embodying the Kin-dom of God in all its righteous, inclusive, extravagant glory is taken up and carried on, Christ will be there. Living. Among and between us. Seems like we even see him sometimes. Try to remember how Christ was so tender That no one wept without him caring Try to remember how Christ was so tender That no one starved without him sharing Try to remember how Christ was so tender He gave his all, his life not sparing Try to remember, and if you remember, Then follow… [1] Jeter, Joseph R. Re/Membering: Meditations and Sermons for the Table of Jesus Christ St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1996, p. 147 [2] Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath New York: Penguin Books, 2002 edition, p. 419
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