Pr. Craig Mueller
The Resurrection of our Lord: Easter Day
April 4, 2021
How will this thing end?
How will this thing end? I’m so eager to see your unmasked faces. I’m so eager to sing boldly in a full church. I’m so eager for hugs, and touch, and communion with bread and wine. I’m eager for inside dining at restaurants, for concerts, for travel, the list goes on.
If you asked us last Easter how we thought this thing would end—none of us—not even Doctor Fauci—could have predicted that we would have a second Easter with most of us at home.
How will this thing end? Your guess is as good as mine. I suppose there are a number of possible endings. Depends on vaccinations, herd immunity. Depends on the outcome of the Derek Chauvin trial. Depends on the economy, jobs, recovery. Depends on whether the politicization of everything keeps getting worse. Like the adventure we call life, there are multiple endings possible. It all depends!
How will this thing end? With the low-grade stress and worry, with the sorrow expressed or unexpressed, we just want it to end!
Quick survey. How many of you have played a video game in the past year? How many of you can name a video game? How many of you can name a video game with alternate endings?
I asked Jake, our crucifer this morning, what he did over spring break. He said he played lots of video games. I asked him if he ever played ones with alternate endings, and he said yes. They were interesting! In these video games, the choices you make have dramatic consequences on the endgame. There are many different ways the game can end.
And if that’s not enough fun, there are interactive movies that do the same. Have you watched one? Choose your ending! What a concept! If only life were that way! Consider Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Anybody seen it? The movie follows a young programmer trying to create a computer game. It’s based on a choose-your-own-adventure from a novel he remembers from childhood. There are millions of unique permutations. A viewer’s choices impact how their experience will play out on screen. Which means the movie can last from 90 minutes to two and a half hours!
It may surprise you, but there are alternate endings to the story of Jesus in the scriptures. Saint Paul’s words today, were written years earlier than the gospels. There is no story at the tomb. No details. Paul simply proclaims that Jesus was died, was buried, and appeared to many.
The different Easter endings in the four gospels were written during a time of span of about thirty years. Today we have the ending from Mark, the earliest—the most ambiguous and enigmatic of them all. In fact, there’s even an official “alternate ending” to Mark that scholars believe was added later.
But in our gospel today we’ve got three grieving women, thinking this is the end of the story. Jesus doesn’t appear at all. Peter and the disciples aren’t around either. A heavenly messenger tells the women that Jesus is not at the grave but has been raised. And the women don’t shout out “alleluia, Christ is risen!” Rather they are alarmed. They flee in terror and amazement. They flee in fear and silence.
Bewildering, don’t you think? The poet Rumi writes: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
The women at the tomb are bewildered. They don’t yet quite understand what all of this means for them. They had such hopes and dreams for this rabbi, Jesus. It will take time to sort things out. To let the ending unfold.
It’s hard to imagine our futures, and our end. I’ll never forget the final episode of the awesome television show from the early 2000s, Six Feet Under. It was acclaimed as one of the finest series finales ever. The episode has flash-forwards to milestone events in the main characters’ lives. And we see how they died. Through creative editing, we see Clair, for example, who lives to the age of 102, and dies with photographs of her family adorning her walls.
If you could know your ending, would you want to? My sister-in-law lived with a genetic mutation that resulted in a weakened heart. Like her mother and others in her family, she died before age sixty. Right as the pandemic began. Now my niece and nephew are going through genetic testing to see if they have the same mutation. On one hand, the news could be heavy and add worry and stress to their lives. On the other hand, they could make lifestyle choices that could possibly lead to different endings, different ways the coming decades could unfold for them.
Life is unfair. And life is hard. Sometimes it feels like we have no choice or agency over how things will end. We wonder whether we have the energy to keep working for justice and hoping for a better world when there are so many setbacks and so many disappointments. It’s easy to travel on Pessimism Street and get stuck in despair.
I often come back to this spiritual insight: we can’t choose what happens to us. But we can choose how to respond, how to move forward, how to make meaning out of our lives.
And so, as we have for the past year, we get up in the morning. We greet the new day. We do the best we can. We hope there will be some laughter and tears along the way. And that someone our hearts will melt a bit, and that we will find ourselves a bit more humble, and a lot more grateful to simply be alive.
When things are hardest, we remember God’s dream, the ultimate hopeful ending. Like today’s vision from Isaiah. On a mountain the Lord prepares a feast for all people. God destroys the shroud over the people and swallows up death forever. God wipes away the tears of the people and removes the disgrace they carry.
Though we are not together as we would have hoped, though there is so much uncertainty, though we face a long recovery, though our minds are reeling and our hearts quivering, and though all the possible endings kind of freak us out, in baptism God promises to be with us to the end.
Maybe Mark’s odd Easter ending fits 2021. Like the women at the tomb, you may feel bewildered. Fear and terror overwhelm. And it’s okay. We’re human after all. And we’ve got good company in the scriptures.
Yet you are resilient. The words from the heavenly messenger are for you: you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth in the places of loss and death. You are looking at what was. He is not here. He has been raised. A new future awaits you. Go and share the good news!
For with the eyes of Easter faith, endings are beginnings. How will this thing end? The ending to our story is still to be written. And if nothing else, we trust that the risen Christ goes before us. And will be with us, to the end.