Mark 16:1-8            The Scraps of our lives in our arms: In search of Resurrection              E/GR            April 8/07

1. We come with the scraps of our lives in our arms.  Death, loss, fear, worries about our children, parents, partners, friends, jobs, relationships.  I can easily see the women we just read of coming to the tombs with the scraps of their lives in their arms along with the ointment.  Somehow they had to get beyond the age-old agonizing question, “Why?”, to “How”  “How do we go on?”  And even “Where do we go on?”

1. Somehow, someone began to reflect back on what the messenger had said.  Go to Galilee.  Galilee the place where the journey with Jesus began.  And the beginning of Mark’s Gospel is very clear.  The Gospel, the good news is about the Way of Christ, and the kingdom of God. And the way of Christ is about death and resurrection.  “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34)

1. Our job now, as was the disciples then, is to discover what that means.  What the Holy Week and Easter stories tell us.  Because in amongst the mystery and the ambiguity, I believe we can find the meaning of the stories.  If we stay in Holy Week where we’ve been all Lent, we’re left cynical and hopeless.  This is how it is, the powerful and the wealthy are in charge.  If we skip right to Easter, there is a danger of it being a nice, though important story about winter turning to spring.  But Easter- that’s God’s no to “it’s just how it is”.  There’s way more than the fragments of our lives.  There’s way more than the terror and reality of our aching world.  Easter shows us what God is like.  Augustine said it in an amazing way, “We without God cannot, and God, without us will not.”[i]  God is saying in Christ’s resurrection, that this new life, this incredible transformation has begun.  We don’t have to do it alone, and God won’t do it without us!

1. So we’re off in search of resurrection.  Perhaps the hardest thing we’ll ever do, because it involves dying to old ways of being, and rebirth to a new way of being.  It doesn’t get more personal.  It has to do with our ego.  Our self.  It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the self. It has to do with where our center is.  The ‘small self’ is centred in our concerns and obsessions, our and our needs.  Or it can be centred in success and achieving.  So the issue is not to do away with self.  It’s to choose what we put in our centre.  When God is in the centre, we too are transformed by God’s power.  Transformed from broken pieces, scraps of our lives, to people fully alive.  Centred in and radically trusting God, as did Jesus.  Free from fear.

1. A woman describes her life as lived in fear, in the shadows, in pain.  Any movement out of the shadows was tentative, pain-filled, and assumed that was how life was.  In holy conversation, sometimes called counseling, she was able to talk, feel accepted, write about and share her pain in a healing way.   In time she was able to offer the pages up to God in a holy flame, as she burned the rest of her garbage.  The old fearful self was dying even as the new was being born without the burden of hurt and shame and grief and guilt.  New life without the pain, the weight, the fear.  This resurrected life, as we saw in our Lenten Walk Journals, takes many different forms.

1. Transformation often begins with individuals.  But Easter transformation cannot stop there.  It is both political and personal.  To our very human question of what ails us, the vaguely or not so vaguely uncomfortable feeling that something is not right, the answer is egotism and injustice.  There must be personal transformation and political transformation.  The domination system we’ve been talking about, the way things are in terms of economics and war and power, what the world would have us believe is normal, are not of God, and do not have the last word.  Easter is God’s no to those powers.  Easter is God’s yes to the power of love and justice.  The way Jesus walked, taught and lived.  The earliest and continuing proclamation, “Jesus is Lord” means that Caesar, or any subsequent manifestation of domination is not!

1. Political transformation is born of Jesus’ passion for justice.  Born of God’s passion for justice.  A passion that led Jesus to risk his life to confront the way of domination.  The human problem is injustice and God’s justice is the solution.  Jesus envisioned  a world he called the Dominion of God where God is in charge and we play by God’s rules.  This is God’s passion, the kind of world the prophets dreamed of where all people are considered equal, able to live without violence and worthy of respect and enough of the world’s goods to live healthy whole lives.  Love is absolutely the core of this good news, and justice is the way we make love known.[ii]  Borg and Crossan word it that “love is the soul of justice, and justice is the body, the flesh of love.”[iii]

1. We can put that flesh on love in so many ways.  One of Stonewall, Rosser and Grosse Isle UC’s ways is helping a refugee family.  Justin grew up in Sudan, and moved to Canada six years ago due to the deplorable conditions in his home country. Justin makes his livelihood working in a windows factory and his wife has now obtained full time employment in health care. They have a family of seven with five still living at home.

1. Justin is also an ordained Anglican minister, serving the Sudanese community in Winnipeg. His brother and brother’s wife were both murdered in Sudan, leaving seven orphaned children. In November of 2005, Justin went back to Sudan and was able to get the children moved to Uganda where they are a little bit safer than the constant fear and danger they were living in. The 18-year old is looking after her six siblings and Justin was assured that the house was theirs as long as he forwarded $400 US monthly. Since moving to Uganda, the children are able to attend school. Justin has filled out all the paper work and is applying to adopt all of the children including the newest baby that has been born to his 17-year-old niece.

1. Justin and his wife have put aside everything they could in order to purchase a home. Now there will be a home for everyone to live in when he can get them to Canada. He has a permit to start renovations as soon as they take possession and has lined up help to build bedrooms and a bath in the basement.  They need to raise $15 - $20,000 to provide airfare to Canada for Justin's extended family. Stonewall UC is making this their Easter project to help raise this money.

1. We have Father Kasanga down the road also trying to bring his family to safety.  There are many ways to help him for now, and perhaps another refugee family when we experience the rewards and justice of this.  We recognized last year there are many issues around water here and around the world.  Who owns it?  Who has control?  There are questions of land use, ownership and sharing.  Supporting women’s shelters or fostering children.  Many exciting ways to put flesh on our love.

12.  How do we put together the scraps of our lives?  We go back with the disciples to the beginning.  To follow the way of Christ.  With the scraps of our lives we come to this altar.  The place we are promised the resurrection we’re searching for.  Transformation – personal and political – the way of Christ.  We choose this way because it is how we find the peace and the power of resurrection that we yearn for.  Let us share that peace with one another.