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"Salem.....Where a Warm Welcome Awaits You"
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THE GOSPEL FOR SEEKERS (The following sermon was preached by Pastor Barbara Melosh on April 16th, 2006.)
Easter is a festive day—the high point of the Christian year. It’s a time of joyful celebration--the celebration of Christ’s victory over death and the new life that brings to us. The new life of Easter comes at the same time as the new life of spring, so nature itself joins the celebration, with spring flowers blooming and the whole earth waking up again. Today, with the baptism of Kaitlin Susanne, we rejoice in the new life among us—Christ’s church on earth has one more member, joined to us with word and water. This is a joyful day in the Christian calendar, and yet, as the festival at the center of Christian faith, it is also a day pierced by other emotions—a day that evokes, for some, ambivalence, anger, or indifference. Our memories, our disappointments, our hopes—all of these color our emotions on Easter. As I look around and see all your faces, I wonder what has brought you here, and what you bring with you. Some, likely, are visiting friends or family. Some are here to celebrate with the congregation as we welcome Kaitlin Susanne into the church. Some maybe are here because you saw our bright red banner or got our door-hangers. Some of you are long-time members of Salem or were members of Salem; maybe you grew up in the neighborhood and now live further away; and so you don’t usually come to church here any more. Or maybe you have fallen out of the habit of church-going altogether, but still, at Easter time you look for a church. Maybe you do this in honor or remembrance of parents who brought you to church, or with nostalgia for a childhood faith you don’t feel any more. Some of you are here because you are here almost every Sunday, but for you, too, this day is different and maybe not altogether comfortable. You got here and found someone sitting in your seat. Or you are thrown off by a congregation that doesn’t know all the responses as well as you do, or isn’t sure what to do at communion. For everyone who might be squirming in the pews today, for whatever reason, be at ease—in the welcome of God’s open arms, there’s a place for all of us. I spent a lot of years outside “church” myself. Some of those years, I didn’t get to church even on Easter, partly because I didn’t know when it was. It’s easy to lose track of Easter if you’re not in church. It’s a moveable feast, leaping around the calendar with wild abandon. That’s because the date is set by the moon—how weird is that? And Easter is strange too, when you think about it. Here’s one telling measure of that strangeness. Easter has never really made it as a secular holiday, even in a culture with the most creative and robust advertising industry in the world. Oh, you’ll see some signs of Easter in the stores—chocolate bunnies and cellophane Easter grass, extra cartons of eggs and Easter egg dye, pastel foil on candy wrappers. But that note of celebration is haunted by the dark side—the Good Friday linked to Easter. The death on the cross—death that is necessary for resurrection. The scandal of Christ crucified—not just a savior who died, but one who was tortured and executed. There’s just no way to make that into an upbeat message that encourages you to buy something. Not only that, Easter is strange because of the resurrection. Jesus risen from the dead. What are we to make of this, in the 21st century? For everyone who has asked that question, for everyone who might be squirming a little in these pews, for whatever reason--this Easter gospel is for you. Mark doesn’t try to explain what can’t be explained. Instead, he takes us right into the scene of that first Easter morning. Three women come to the tomb with spices, to anoint the body of Jesus. They are the faithful remnant—women who stood at the foot of the cross while all the disciples had fled. Now, they come to care for Jesus’ defiled body—disgraced by crucifixion. On the way, they’re worrying about how they’ll get to the body—who will roll away the stone at the entrance. When they get there, the stone has been moved, but the body is gone. Inside the tomb, they meet a young man in a white robe, a figure who is never identified. He tells them the good news—Jesus has been raised from the dead. He tells them to bring the message to the disciples, “He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” Now it is their turn to flee. “Terror and amazement had seized them,” Mark tells us. And that’s the end of it. No resurrection appearance. No running to tell the story. No meeting in Galilee or on the road to Emmaus. Only this: “they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In the original, the last word of this gospel is “for”—a word that rarely ends a sentence. It’s as if Mark was sitting at his writing desk and cut off in the middle of a sentence—some have imagined that he was dragged off by Roman soldiers, since this gospel was written to a people under persecution, maybe early Christians in Rome. It leaves us hanging. We’re stopped short, left in the terror and amazement of that first encounter with the empty tomb. It’s an ending that has disturbed Christians for centuries, so much so that other writers supplied new endings. You can find those in many Bibles—endings that revise the women’s silence, and have them telling the story; endings where Jesus appears in person to confirm the resurrection. Or, you can avoid Mark and his abrupt ending, and go to the story of Easter morning as it is told by Matthew, Luke, and John. But Mark leaves us with the empty tomb, and silence. It’s the gospel of Jesus Christ for seekers—whether you are investigating church for the first time, or edging back, or still eagerly looking for God after a lifetime of church. The empty tomb—it’s a space of possibility and openness. A place where all your questions are welcome, where all your fears and hopes are already known, already accepted. A place for terror and amazement. A place to fall silent—caught, for a moment, in the unspeakable wonder and mystery of Easter. Thanks be to God.
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