Day 112 - Christian Faith - Terror and Amazement

A sermon delivered Easter Morning at First Presbyterian Church, Easter Sunday, March 31, 2013

Job 14, Mark 16:1-8

Easter is the heart of Christian Faith?

We often interchange faith and hope but Christian Faith isn’t hope. Hope always has a lingering doubt of the outcome. For example, I can leave the dermatologist thinking, “I hope she knows what she is doing if that biopsy of the spot on my shoulder is not benign.”  I may have faith in my doctor’s ability to do a biopsy or excise a mole, but the doubt of hope is always there, was a cancer and was it completely removed?

Then Christian Faith is scientific certainty? It is not. We find scientific certainty in tomorrow’s sunrise. We know with a certainty, not with hope or faith, that it will rise based on our experience and objective facts. It has happened every day of our life. We know the earth’s spin and rotation about the sun causes night and day. Sunrise and sunset are as certain as our own physical death.

  Christian faith is more than provable, scientific certainty. How can Christian Faith arise in the absence of any objective supporting fact?

Job’s Godly Faith and Hope.

Job’s miserable struggle hoping for freedom from his tormented existence is a clue. In Job 14, Job looks to God for a redo – resurrection after death to repair his life of misery…But Job suffers the pain of objective hope. All his experience says the body dies and is no more.  We are not like the stump of the tree that sprouts upon the scent of water. No one has seen a dead person rise from the grave or come back with a good report. No one has seen the budding smile of a person with that reprieve.

Job abandoned objective hope of resurrection with the famous comment, “ A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last… mortals… pass away… and [go] unnoticed.”  

There is a nagging question…”What about Job’s ongoing conversation with God who is so real that Job was willing to argue and protest the damage God allowed to be inflicted upon him?”  Job’s had certainty about the reality of God that created a difficult doubt, “Is this a good God who upon demand will explain and right this treatment, or a capricious God to whom all Job’s perfection in worship and honor as described in chapter 1 are for naught?  

We know Job has absolute faith in the presence of God, it is so certain and unshakeable that he demands an explanation.  But Job feared God. The very first verse (1:1) says, “Job was a blameless and upright person, one who feared God and turned away from evil,” because in 28:20-28 , God said to humankind, “Truly the fear of the Lord, [that] is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” (from Ps 111:10, Prov. 2:5, 9:10).   Job asked our two questions, “Do you bring me into judgment?  Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean thing?”

Job’s faith in God rests on his awareness of his human fallibility - being an unclean thing in God’s presence that evokes the fear. Job’s faith in God, however, anticipates Christ’s coming.

The Christian Faith, the Story of a Modern Day Job.

I came to understand Christian Faith early in my days of volunteering after Katrina from a story of a man named Buddy who barely survived Katrina.  Buddy lived in Pearlington, Mississippi, a small hamlet about a mile or so from the Gulf and a few hundred yards from the Pearl River. Like almost every one his house was inundated and almost washed away. One day he told me his story about why he didn’t leave before the storm.

As Katrina approached, Buddy stayed behind, not because he wanted to but because he had to. He realized the danger of Katrina very early before the storm came ashore. But in the early hours of dawn before landfall his mother, sister, a cousin and her four kids had not left. Trees felled by the high wind already blocked the roads. By that time it was too late to leave. Then his friend Howard calls him. Howard lives a few short blocks away but can barely walk even with a walker. Howard was frantic because the fire department promised to evacuate him but in the end abandoned him.

 “So, Mr. Henry, then I surely couldn’t leave. I got over to Howard’s in my truck as fast as I could and drove him back over to my house. Even with a chain saw it took me over two hours to get there and back. We all got into my house intending to wait Katrina out.

"The wind, rain and snapping trees were terrifying. When the eye came over us and the sun came out, we all went outside. The road north to I-10 was fully blocked by fallen trees. There was no way I could drive out, no electricity for my well, and no cell phone service to call for help. We were stuck.

“While I was standing there in the road looking south towards the Gulf, all the sudden about a hundred yards away this wall of water rises and slowly rolls towards me pushing broken trees and all sorts of debris before it. I turned and ran towards my house, yelling ‘get everybody in the house, get in the house!’

“The water was up already to mid-calf when I was half-way to the house and I was starting to think maybe the house wouldn’t make it. I kept my fishing boat in the front yard, so I started yelling to the family, ‘Get in the boat! Get in the boat!’ But mother yelled no way, how is Howard to get in?  They did all get in.

“By the time I got to the boat all I could do was hang on in water about head deep. I managed to swim the boat over to the submerged porch in spite of the current. We were all going to get on the porch but the water from the storm surge was still rising. It was raining like crazy again and I decided we had to risk getting into the house because the boat was too dangerous with that many people in it in the rain. In a few minutes the water was high enough into the first floor I could tie the boat tight up against the porch roof so everybody but Howard could climb onto the porch roof. We would have to break into the attic but we had no tool.

“I knew my submerged truck was parked in the yard over by the oak. I started swimming towards the oak where the truck ought to be.  Lord! My family was screaming because they thought I was caught in the current and washing away. My feet bumped the open door or roof of my truck. I took a deep breath and went down. I managed to grab the doorframe and pull myself into the bed of the truck fighting the current. I felt my tool chest, fumbled the latch open and felt and grabbed my crow bar and surfaced. Then I shoved the bar under my belt and pushed off against the trunk of the tree and swam to the boat.

“I climbed on the porch roof and tore a hole in the wall with my crow bar. My cousin and I lifted Howard out of the boat and everybody else scrambled up into the attic about the time the wind started really picking up again. We waited out Katrina in the attic. The roof was so low we couldn’t even stand up. It was the most frightening experience I’ve ever had, the howling wind, trees cracking, shingles tearing off the roof and the water was still slowly rising.  All sorts of things were floating and blowing by on the water and you could hear the furniture bumping the walls downstairs.  We all were paralyzed by fear. My mother cried constantly the whole eight hours we were in the attic, ‘We are all going to die.’ ”

Buddy took a deep breath and continued his story.

"When the water subsided we got down out of the attic into the house. Everything inside was fouled by nasty-smelling sludge. Outside everything was thrown about and scattered. The damage was just unbelievable. It took almost two hours but I walked over and checked out Howard’s house, or I should say Howard’s lot. His house was off the foundation and crushed.

 “Mr. Henry, Howard would have died if not for me. That is when I knew I was supposed to stay. Because I stayed, I saved Howard’s life.

Here we were three years later and tears still welled in the reddened edges of Buddy’s eyes as he finished the story.

“But there is a little more, Mr. Henry. A few days later I was still cleaning out all the filth in the living room when my neighbor Joe came over to talk.  I guess he wanted to compare the damage in my house to his.

“Joe was looking at my living room wall where I had a crucifix up near the ceiling that amazingly managed to stay put through all the water. The high water mark on the wall just touched Christ’s outstretched arms on the cross.  It was something else.

Joe asked me, “Buddy, are you going to put that crucifix back on the wall after you are done cleaning up this place?”

“Yep, I sure am.”

“Well, Buddy, how about putting Jesus a little closer to the floor this time.”

Buddy and Joe found a completely unreasonable faith in Christ through that flood. The hours of misery and terror of death left them with an outrageous faith that the crucified Jesus delivered them.  How did Buddy and Joe, and for that matter all of us Christians, come to know faith in our deliverance through the resurrection of Christ?

Mark’s Gospel of Faith: There is a way home.

You say, “we know it because we read about it in Mark’s Gospel story.” Do we?  Most biblical scholars conclude Mark’s Gospel ended where I stopped reading. Mark is plain and to the point, there is no choir of angels announcing the birth of Emmanuel, or pregnant Mary as proof Jesus was born a man. Mark begins with a frightening mad man eating locusts and wild honey dressed in camel hair, living, preaching and baptizing in the wilderness near the Jordan River proclaiming the coming of One who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.

Jesus appears suddenly, is baptized to a heavenly proclamation that “You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased,” and immediately is driven out into the same wilderness. Forty days later he returns and immediately begins his ministry in the synagogue at Capernaum where he preached and cast an unclean spirit from a person. The spirit exclaimed, “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God,” but Jesus rebuked him to be silent about his identity. (All this in the 1^st  25 verses!)

Until his entry to Jerusalem Jesus denied his identity and told those he healed to be silent about the healing, but not about their faith. True to his humanity, he was horribly murdered by human hands and abandoned by his disciples who lost faith hiding in fear and dark misery mourning their lost hope. In Mark only the evil spirits proclaim, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

This is a radical Easter story with no concrete evidence of the resurrection.  There is no road to Emmaus, no great commission, only a perplexing empty tomb that tests the essence of Christian Faith.

Only the faithful women remain. In the good times they anointed his feet at great cost, cooked, offered him water, begged for unmerited mercy, and in the end, stood sentry to his death on the cross. Now early after the sun had risen on the third day they go to the tomb with spices intending to take appropriate religious care for his body.

To their surprise and fear, the tomb was open and a man dressed in white inside said to them,  “Do not be alarmed. (!) You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Go and tell the disciples and Peter that he has gone ahead and will meet them in Galilee as he told you. The women fled in terror and amazement, telling no one for they were afraid.” That is the end of the Gospel story. It leaves us the question of Christian Faith: some terrified, amazed and speechless women running away from a missing body with a command from a young man to tell the others something irrational about Jesus meeting them in Galilee. Terror and amazement.

If we translate two Greek words as “terror and amazement” or “confused and shaking,” we cannot understand Christian Faith. Terror and amazement understate the full power of the events at this empty tomb. For the word translated as fear think “tremble.” More appropriately the Greek means feeling a paralyzing or deadly, heart-stopping fear of not being able to fulfill a religious duty. For the word translated “amazed” think ecstasy. It more appropriately means a God-inspired awareness of spiritual truth. It is the sense of ecstasy of understanding an absolute spiritual truth. Mark is telling us the two women were petrified to the point of death, not by this man in an empty tomb, but by the certainty they were in God’s presence receiving the revelatory knowledge of Good News, fearing or doubting their own adequacy to respond to the call of faith. Would the men believe the women? Could they convince them? The young man’s words and the absence of the body offer no proof of resurrection. Any one could have stolen the body. Their Christian Faith in the resurrection was not rational, objective discovery but a sublime and subjective knowledge that they were in God’s presence hearing the gift of resurrection, “Christ is risen, He will see you in Galilee” and the daunting command, “Go tell the others.”  Finally we get to the essence of Christian Faith: Amazement in the Holy Spirit’s presence that Christ is risen, tempered with the fear of our ability to respond to His call to action.

Christian Faith, Quo Vadis? 

What a message, “Christ is risen, He will see you in Galilee.” I can’t stop thinking about the words. They go all the way back to Egypt and the Red Sea, Moses on Mt. Nebo, and Joshua at the Jordan.  “He will meet you in Galilee on the other side of the Jordan River in the Promised Land.”  

John Carroll, my NT professor wrote, “(Mark) invites and evokes faith and openness to seeing God’s work in the world when our eyes can’t show it to us.” This, friends, is our Christian faith: We know and act by the Holy Spirit in the truth of Christ’s resurrection. It is our unjustified and certain salvation. Opening ourselves to God’s presence brings the knowledge of faith that there is a home.  Let me say it again, Christian faith knows there is a way home.

With such faith, what more can we give to His honor than our all, and go tell the others there is a way home. Amen.