All Who Find Religion Strange
Psalm 118; Mark 16:1-8
April 16, 2006
By Rev. Dr. Jeanne Knepper

Christ has risen and forever lives to challenge and to change all whose lives are messed and mangled, all who find religions strange. Christ is risen, Christ is present, making us what he has been—evidence of transformation in which God is known and seen.

Oh, there are so many longing for that evidence, evidence that God is real and present in this messed and mangled world, so many who twist in the hard space between strange religions that demand impossible beliefs and a terrifying and lonely emptiness. Singer Libby Roderick has captured that longing in her lyrics:

I wish I still believed in angels hovering somewhere in the air
Living just to do for humans what the humans do not dare
I wish I felt them all around me when the pain comes bursting through
I wish I still believed in angels, but I still believe in you.

For all of those who find religion strange, and I know that includes some of us, we might be the only evidence they see of a transformation in which God can be known and seen.

But let me tell you a story, a story of death and resurrection, a story of Theresa. When I first met Theresa, she only had a couple “good hours� a day. The rest of the time she slept, recovering from an illness that had nearly killed her. She was a bright, engaging woman, and over time, as she recovered more of her energy, she told me a good deal of her story.

Theresa was a chiropractor who had also trained in massage therapy. A virus spread through the practice where she worked with others. Most of her co-workers were sick for a while and then recovered. So did Theresa, partly. But then she passed out, entered a coma she would stay in for weeks, caused when the virus attacked her pancreas, shutting down insulin production. Theresa, who had not been a diabetic before the illness, spent those months in a diabetic coma, hovering between life and death.

As she told me of her experiences of that time, she used language I’d read elsewhere, spoken by others who had what we call “near death� experiences. She talked of a warm and loving light, and of being in the presence of Jesus, of feeling a tremendous warm love that surrounded and assured her, then told her she had living yet to do.

Theresa was not a religious woman before her experience, but she came out of it with a profound trust in God. At the center of everything, she knew, she truly knew, was a deep and abiding love. Although she came back to her healthy self slowly, and had many challenges that her disability and profound lack of energy caused, she did not lose heart. Beyond all trouble, beyond all economic challenges, beyond all disability and struggle with a mind that had been starved for oxygen, beyond all of that, Theresa knew that there was a God, a God of love more profound than anything she could explain. And the knowledge of that love made everything else okay, even when it wasn’t. Theresa could trust God. It was enough.

In that she shared an experience with a 14th century woman called Julian of Norwich. Julian was an anchoress, which is to say, a woman who had entered a religious order of seclusion, who devoted her life to contemplation, to prayer, to love of her fellow human beings. Julian was terrible distressed by the human suffering of her day, as well as by the concept that many of them, having suffered in life, would suffer through eternity in hell. When she was not quite 31, she fell into a seemingly mortal illness, losing all sensation in her body as it grew colder and colder. She was given last rites. She did not expect to live through the night.

But then she recovered, and wrote that she had received a vision of Jesus in her illness. She wrote:
And so our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts which I could raise, saying most comfortingly: I may make all things well, and I can make all things well, and I shall make all things well, and I will make all things well, and you will see yourself that every kind of thing will be well . . . And in these . . words God wishes us to be enclosed in rest and in peace.

Sometimes, when times are hard, Julian’s words come back to me in a song I’ve come to cherish: Ring out, bells of Norwich, and let the winter come and go. All will be well again, I know.

“All will be well again.� It’s near to what the angel, the white-clothed messenger, told the women who came to wrap Jesus’ body with spices:
Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. But 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.

“All will be well again.� Did they believe it? Not on your life, Mark tells us. Terrified, of the messenger, of Jesus’ absence, of his crucifixion, of what unknown dangers lay in front of them, they fled, silent.

Do you know that this was the original ending of Mark’s gospel? Really. Take your pew Bible and open it to page 55 of the New Testament. There you will see something you find nowhere else in the Bible: three endings to the same book. There is the original ending, which we read as our gospel lesson. Then there is a different ending. One that appears in later manuscripts, but not in the oldest ones: That they told those around Peter. And then, even a third ending, newer yet, that contradicts a good deal of the first one, saying that Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene and she did go tell the others, but they didn’t believe her.

Well, it’s pretty easy to see why some of those who copied the manuscript would be moved to amend it: what a strange, sad way to end the story of the good news of Jesus Christ: “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.�

Why ever in the world would Mark end his gospel that way?

There are two reasons, I think, both related to what was going on in the lives of the Christian community when Mark wrote his gospel, shortly before 70 CE. You see, Christianity had spread—contrary to the ending of the gospel, people did tell the story, and it had spread. Nearly 40 years after the death of Jesus, there were Christians all around the Mediterranean world, from Northern Africa to Israel, to Turkey and Greece and even Rome. But as it spread into these many cultures, it sometimes took on the character of miracle religions that circulated, the many local religions characterized by miraculous birth narratives and bodily resurrections, of healings and miracles and marvels. For Mark, the power of the gospel was in the fact that God, by choosing to come among us in the life of Jesus and to take on human suffering, had ended the power of evil, had defeated death and terror and fear. It was a much needed message, especially just then. His story emphasizes that saving act of love, not physical resurrection.

For a second reason, there was the political trouble in Rome. You see, in 54 CE Nero, then only 17 years of age, had become the Emperor of Rome. [By then, he’d already had his mother, his adopted father and his step-brother killed to get to that position.] Nero was young, brutal and unpopular. He undertook hugely expensive building projects, depleting the treasury and further alienating the populus of Rome. This was the atmosphere in July of the year 64, when a huge fire burned almost a quarter of the city of Rome. Rumors began to spread, that Nero had had the area burned to make room for more of his building projects. The Senate, his own Roman Senate, was becoming very critical. In this desperate situation, Nero looked around for a scapegoat and found one: the generally unpopular, small, but growing Christian movement, made up of people who refused to worship the Roman gods, who persisted in criticizing his accumulation of wealth. The Christians, those haters of all that was good and patriotic about Rome, those outsiders, those strangers, those who harbored runaway slaves and dissatisfied runaway wives—the Christians terrorists had torched the city. Let us have a war on their terrorist ways, he proclaimed. Christians were charged and convicted, “not so much for the crime of incendiarism as for hatred of the human race,� claimed the contemporary historian Tacitus. A law was passed: “It is not lawful for Christians to exist.� And the persecutions began.

Christians were rounded up, covered in animal skins, and set upon by wild dogs. Christians were crucified and set on fire to light Nero’s gardens at night. Christians were gathered into throngs so that Nero could drive his chariot at and through them. It went on and on, so far that eventually some Romans began to doubt the Christians’ guilt. Eventually, there were revolts in Gaul, Spain and Africa. Eventually the Senate declared Nero himself to be an enemy of the state. He committed suicide, and chaos reigned in the Roman Empire for a period. And in that time, in the midst of the persecutions, Paul was killed in Rome, and Peter, and so were many of the original leaders of the community of the followers of Jesus. All of this had happened, and the world hadn’t come to an end.

This was a spiritual crisis for the early followers, who believed that Jesus’ life and death would be followed soon, maybe immediately, by his second coming and the end of time. All this terror, surely that had been the end of time coming upon them. But then, it didn’t end. And suddenly it became apparent that the needed to be a way of transmitting the stories to a next generation of Christians, a generation that was living through these terrible persecutions for being Christian.

So, Mark wrote his gospel, using some material that may have circulated as early as a decade after Jesus’ death, but fashioning the message to speak to the followers who were facing such a terrifying time. And he told a story of the great ones, the ones who had been with Jesus himself, the ones who should have known it all by heart, of those ones being completely, totally terrified, frightened into flight, into silence.

But, of course, the ones hearing the story knew that that was not the end of the story. God had brought courage and telling out of flight and fear, God had brought faithfulness out of terror, God had brought life out of death. Maybe the ones who had been there had fled, but someone, maybe small someones, maybe insignificant someones, maybe people as little regarded as themselves—someone had had the courage to tell the story, had had the faithfulness to act as though God had walked among them, had had the stout-hearted nerve to proclaim the name and life of Jesus, to tell of his suffering and of God’s transformation of suffering into resurrection, into new life. And they could, too. You, Mark was saying, you who hear this story in a time of trial and terror, are you going to run away into hiding, or will you be one of the ones who proclaims good news just when the world needs it most?

And that might just be our world, a world torn apart again by fears of outsiders who are accused of being terrorists, a world where illegal immigrants are being made scapegoats for our economic sins, a world where we recoil in sick dismay at the some of the choices we are making as a nation. We live in a world where increasing numbers of people experience free-floating panic, a “cosmic, undifferentiated, nihilistic terror that the universe itself is essentially warped and malevolent, that existence is hopeless, and that there is nothing to be done and nowhere to hide,� to use the words of Richard Grossinger. Do you know that feeling, that paralyzing terror? That is the death, the horrifying fear that God has challenged, has defeated.

This is the good news, the gospel, the Easter story: we have this assurance that God, who is in all, who was in Jesus, who is in us, that this God loves us, loves justice, acts in the world, and will never, never, never, leave us, no matter how scared and hopeless we feel.

Terror, panic, discouragement, oppression, injustice, cruelty and evil are never the end of the story. God is. Hope is. And we, you and I, are called to be the angels, the bearers of hope in a hope-starved world.

All will be well again, I know.

Alleluia. Amen.

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