John 19:40-20:17 | Easter Sunday 2000

*Preached at Grace North Church April 23rd, 2000*

One of the most important people in my wife Kate's life is a young autistic man named Keith. Wave, Kate! Kate has known Keith since he was a little boy, and has watched him grow up over the many years of her friendship with the boy's mother, Mary Jo. Now, some autistic children are quiet and reserved, but Keith possesses that rare sort of autism that might be called "extroverted" autism. Keith has limited cognitive ability, but he is always on the move, always talking, always getting into something.

One day Kate was horrified to discover that Keith had begun an art project involving a permanent magic marker and the hand-crafted quilt her grandmother had made. At first she was furious, and utterly aghast at what had become of her cherished family heirloom. In the very next moment, however, she was able to encompass the totality of the situation: Keith had not intended to destroy anything; and there was the very real possibility that if she were not careful with how she expressed herself, something much more precious than a quilt would be damaged.

Her emotions shifted from rage to compassion, since she knew the most important action to take was to simply separate Keith from the quilt, to remove the temptation, and thereby remove the possibility of transgression. And in that moment, another, much more monumental shift occurred. Kate suddenly realized that THIS MUST BE HOW IT IS WITH GOD. We are all like Keith, with a limited capacity for understanding, and God is like Kate, knowing the whole situation. And like Kate, God's feelings are not focused on rage or punishment, but on prevention, restitution, and protection of God's beloved.

That epiphany began a landslide in Kate's understanding of the world. Her myth of God and what God wanted, how God felt, God's relationship to human beings got turned on it's head and utterly reinvented. And now, every time she sees the mark on that quilt, instead of feeling anger or resentment, she remembers the depth of her love for Keith.

This kind of mythological shift is not unusual. It happens all the time, in our personal lives, and in the lives of entire cultures. Myths are stories that make sense of our lives. To call something a myth is not to cast doubt upon a story's historicity, but instead, it describes a story's purpose, it's function. It serves as a template against which our own experience is measured, and in doing so, our own experience is given meaning.

So what happens when a myth begins to lose its relevance to a culture, or even to an individual? Kate had been brought up in a fundamentalist home, and her myth of a punitive and angry God no longer had relevance for her. In her realization of how God must really feel about us when we sin, not angry, but concerned and protective, it sent her whole mythological construct of the universe spinning. Her myth of God underwent an evolutionary leap that day, one which she has yet to fully fathom.

Myths either evolve and adapt or they die and are forgotten. They speak to us about what is most important to us, what is most important about us. They are especially adept at speaking to us about those questions of meaning which science or logic cannot hope to comprehend.

One such question which we deal with so frequently in Christianity is redemption. The questions "what do we need salvation from? And how does God provide it?" have been asked from the beginning of time, and every religion has at least one answer. Christianity itself has had more than one answer, as its mythology has evolved and shifted over the past 2000 years.

For instance, since medieval times, the answer to the question "What do we need salvation from?" is "sin." And the answer to the question "How does God provide salvation from sin?" is "through the vicarious atonement on the cross." This theology was first expertly articulated by St. Anselm in the 12th century, and it reflects the medieval disillusionment with the natural world, and evidences a creeping gnosticism in the church's natural theology.

But that was not always the doctrine of the church. In the early Christian church under Constantine, the answer to the question "What do we need salvation from?" was "Death." The answer to the question "How does God save us from death?" was "by the power of the resurrection."

You see, in the early church-and we are talking roughly the third and fourth centuries, here-the church believed that it was not the crucifixion that saves us, but in fact, the resurrection. Eastern Orthodox churches even today carry on this "theology of resurrection." In Orthodox teaching, the cross is almost incidental. God' redeeming work was wrought not by Christ's death, but by his resuscitation. In the Orthodox myth, the universe was in harmony, evolving the way God intended it to, but the Fall in the Garden began a de-evolution of the universe, introducing entropy into the picture, the consequences for human beings being the inevitable demise of the body.

In the miracle of the resurrection, though, God changed the rules. When Christ arose, the power of death was broken forever, and the freefall of the universe was reversed, and the rightful evolution of the universe could resume. In Orthodox theology, it is not human beings alone who enjoy the benefits of the resurrection: all of creation is transformed. All is made new, and death holds no more power in the ultimate scheme of things.

Myths shift. And to help us all remember, I've made a bumper sticker: shift happens. It happens, and it's a good thing it happens. For if myths do not help us make sense of our lives, then they are forgotten, and newer, more useful myths must take their place.

The Passover supper is another fine example. In this ritual which Jews the world over have celebrated for thousands of years, a meal is set which transports the participants back in time so that they may participate in their ancestors' liberation from slavery.

When we eat our own ritual meal, the Eucharist, today, we are transported back in time to participate in Jesus' final supper with his followers, so that we may become one of them. And whereas the Passover celebrates liberation from slavery, the Eucharist celebrated liberation from death for the early Christians.

This shift was, of course, necessary, since increasingly in the early church, it's members were gentiles, not Jews. One myth had to give way to another, so that the meal's imaginative impact in the minds of a new generation of Christians could continue.

When we turn to consider the myth of the empty tomb, there are a number of interpretations possible. We can believe that the resurrection was a literal, physical event, as many early Orthodox Christians believed. Or we can believe that Jesus' resurrection was a spiritual event, as the ancient Gnostics, and many new religious movements (such as Unity) believe. Or you can choose to believe that the resurrection was a metaphorical event, that yes, Jesus' body stayed in the tomb, but his message and his movement rose in the imaginations of his friends and followers.

The resurrection is a myth in which we all, in one way or another, must participate. HOW YOU participate, of course, is up to you. The myth is important to us because it inspires us to get up when we are knocked down. The myth inspires us to be virtuous, because we know that "you can't keep a good man down." Because Jesus did not stay in a tomb, we can stare death and hell in the face and say, "I'm not stayin' down either!"

But if your interpretation of the resurrection does NOT inspire you to get out of your grave, of course, then we have a problem. The myth is no longer operative, and it may be that your mythology needs to shift. If you believe that the resurrection is only a metaphorical event, I challenge you to consider the implications of a dead man returning from the underworld, and promising to bring you back from it as well.

If you believe the resurrection is a physical, literal event, I invite you to consider a metaphoric interpretation, and ponder the possibility that if Jesus is not raised and alive IN YOU, then no resurrection 2000 years ago is worth a pile of beans.

Myths are tools, they are stories that either work for us, or they don't. If a myth is not working in your life, perhaps it's time to take it out and give it a good look, and to consider how it might make sense in another way. But be careful, because in so doing, you may send your entire universe spinning, and vertigo can cause nausea, which is something many Christians, especially little, chocolate-eating ones, already have enough of on this august day of days. Let us pray.

Christ, death could not hold you, and nor can any myth which we construct about you. For you will burst through any cages which human beings contrive to keep you in. You trample down death by death, and myth by myth, until our stories become malleable again, and live within us. Christ, death could not hold you, nor can we. As you come forth from the tomb into a restored universe, let your story call us likewise forth, into a world of new meaning. Challenge us to change, for then we shall be like you: different, yet the same. May our stories be changed, from the relative safety of the page to a revolutionary force in our waking lives. For you are the one who transforms all things: stories, and lives alike. You are Jesus, the living Christ. Amen.