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PAST SERMONS
"When Stones Are Rolled Away"
Easter Sunday sermon
March 27, 2005
Rev. Robert M. Hardies, senior minister
READING
The reading this morning is from the Gospel of Mark. The earliest gospel. What I am sharing is the final paragraph of the entire gospel. I think you'll find that what is striking is how abruptly it ends. By the starkness of this earliest Gospel account of Easter morning. This is Mark 16:1-8.
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the Mother of James, and Salome brought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?" When they looked up, though, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he 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. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." But the women went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them.
And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
SERMON
My sermon today is about a stone. "Well of course," you say, "The stone. The stone that the angel rolled away from the tomb, so that the women could see that Jesus had been raised. That's the stone that you're going to preach about on Easter morn."
Well... sort of. I'm gonna get to that stone. I'm going to come back in a moment to the Easter story. But really, I want to tell you a story about another stone this morning. About THIS stone, right here. And I hope that by the end of the sermon, we'll be able to see a connection between this stone and the stone that was rolled away on Easter morn. Now, if it seems already a bit of a stretch, well, it is. But I'm going to just ask you to go with me on faith here, as we travel a considerable distance from the Easter story in order to return to it later and, hopefully, see it in a new light.
So the story of this stone. (And I want to say to the children that you might want to pay attention to this story. I think there might be something in this for you, too.)
A few weeks ago, I found myself in the home of the President of the congregation. The Board of Trustees was having its annual retreat, welcoming new board members, setting priorities. As a way to get to know one another better, each of us was asked to bring an object to share. Not just any old thing, but an object that was important to us, that revealed something about our spiritual lives. About our religious journey. One member of the Board, Steve Marshall, brought this stone. What I want to do is reconstruct as best I can the conversation about this stone that we had with Steve that morning. (I've also interlaced into the account, I think, subsequent conversations that Steve and I have had about it.)
Steve began by telling us that he is a scientist -- a geologist, specifically. Someone who studies, stones. And as a scientist, he had always maintained a healthy skepticism when it came to matters religious. One day, many years ago, Steve was out in Montana, studying the rocks out there, looking for clues to the geologic history of the area.
He was down in a valley, surrounded by mountains, digging through a bunch of rocks, when he rolled away some stones and found this one. "Immediately," he said, "I knew I'd found something special." I knew it was special, he said, because the stone was smooth and polished. And there aren't a lot ways that stones get polished in nature. I knew it was special, he said, because it was a stone that wasn't native to the geology of the particular area. It had come from someplace else.
Now, Steve has a quiet way about him, but you could tell he was getting excited remembering the moment. So we asked, him, "Steve, what's so special about the stone?"
He sort of drew himself up in his chair and his eyes got bright and he said, "It's a gastrolith." What ensued was an awkward moment in which Steve had that expectant look of a high school science teacher who has just revealed something of great excitement to his students, who have all received that exiting news with a blank stare.
After a pause, someone carefully asked, "What's a gastrolith?"
Undeterred, Steve pushed forward: "A gastrolith," he explained, "is a stone found in the stomach of reptiles and some birds that aids in the digestion of their food. It's a little bit like the sand in a chicken's gizzard. It helps them break down the food."
Well, about that time I remember looking at the stone and thinking to myself, "That would've had to come from a pretty big chicken!"
Anticipating our next question, Steve continued. He held up the stone and said, "This stone came from the stomach of a dinosaur."
Well, now he had our attention. Now everyone wanted to learn more about this gastrolith.
"What kind of dinosaur, Steve?" "It's hard to know," he said. "A Brontasaurus, maybe. Probably a big dinosaur."
"How old is it?" another asked him.
"Well, the dinosaurs roamed the earth about 150 million years ago. So that's when it was in his stomach. But the stone itself," he said, "the stone is probably 300 million years old." The room was silent for a moment.
One board member said quietly, "Gee, that feels pretty close to eternity." Eventually someone asked, "What's the spiritual significance of the stone for you, Steve?"
"Well, when I discovered the stone," he said, "it really set me to thinking. It made me ask myself over and over again, 'what came before?' 'What came before the dinosaur? What came before the stone? It was as though the stone put me in touch with an immense mystery that kept receding further and further into the past. It was an awe-filled experience. It was a turning point in my spiritual journey."
Now, I'll bet a lot of us have had an experience similar to Steve's. A time when we unexpectedly bumped up against the mystery and the grandeur of creation. The mystery and the grandeur of life. And we were filled with the sense that we are a part of something so awesome, so large, so powerful, so beautiful. And we felt two things simultaneously. We felt small and insignificant up against this great mystery. Yet at the same time we felt ourselves strangely exulted and ennobled, because we experienced ourselves as a tiny PART of that great mystery. And therefore were heirs to its grandeur.
I remember that just after I graduated from college I moved to Portland, Oregon. I had never been out West before. I'd never seen, in person, the mountains of the West. And I moved to Portland, in part, to experience those mountains, because I had an intuitive sense that they had something to teach me. But I swear that for the first month that I lived in Portland, it was cloudy the entire time. I never saw the mountains. I had begun to forget that they were the reason I'd moved there in the first place. And then one day I woke up and finally the skies were clear. And as I was walking to work looking down at the sidewalk ahead of me, minding my own business, I happened to lift my eyes and see Mt. St. Helens for the first time. Looming like a celestial palace over the city. Her trademark flat top, a reminder of the volcanic power that dwelt within her that had torn the top 3000 feet of stone right off of her during her 1980 eruption. And right there on the sidewalk I felt that sense of wonder and awe. That sublime sense of being both insignificant and ennobled. Part of something infinitely larger than myself. Something so beautiful and so powerful that the only name I could give it that would even BEGIN to do it justice... was God.
But , I had a little problem to overcome. Because I had grown up with a pretty clear sense of God as a sort of law-giving father-figure. An anthropomorphic being. And what I was NOW experiencing as God was something much less-well-defined. Much more mysterious. Yet at the same time, something much bigger than any God I'd grown up learning about.
And so I began to read. And I discovered that, indeed, there were others who spoke of God less as a person and more as an immense mystery. I learned that the medieval monks used to chant about God, "O magnum mysterium." O great mystery. Uncomprehendable. Powerful. Awe-inspiring. I read modern theologians like the Jewish mystic Martin Buber and the German theologian Rudolph Otto who called God: "Mysterium Tremendum." (I'm not sure why they always use Latin. Maybe it adds to the aura of mystery.) Mysterium tremendum. Tremendous mystery. These folks formed a tradition that said that God is most fundamentally a mystery. An immeasurable mystery that inspires awe, praise, fear-even, and always more questions. It's a way of understanding God that always leads to more questions. And after that I grew to appreciate that God would remain a mystery. That all my questions wouldn't be answered. And that my life might be richer for being able to live in that mystery.
After he told us the story of the gastrolith, Steve passed it around our small group. And I watched people as they handled it. Each person received the stone with a certain reverence, no one could keep themselves from rubbing its smooth surface in their hands. As if it were a magic lamp on whose polished surface the answers to our questions might be revealed. It helps to touch it After the service, I want to invite the kids to come up front, if they want, and touch the stone that's been in the stomach of a dinosaur. (Yes! You adults can come, too!) I just know that word's going to get around that at the Unitarian Church on Easter Sunday, they didn't have an Easter Egg hunt for the kids, they had a gastrolith hunt!
OK, so what does this all have to do with Easter? What IS the relationship between THIS stone and the stone that was rolled away from the tomb on Easter morn? Let me try to bring this all home. The Easter story that I read to you this morning comes from the earliest manuscripts of the earliest gospel--Mark. Its different from all the other Gospels because of what it leaves out. It never neatly ties up the resurrection story. The disciples never see Jesus again and have him explain everything to them. In this, the earliest edition of the first gospel, the story is left shrouded in mystery. The women are told by some stranger that Jesus has risen, but they don't know what that means. They come expecting to embalm their dead friend's body. And when he's not there, the gospel says: "So the women went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." That's it. That's the end of the story.
When the stone was rolled away from the tomb on Easter morning, those who loved and followed Jesus were baptized into the mystery of God. They were plunged into uncertainty. They were left with questions. Questions they would grapple with for the rest of their lives. How can our friends, Jesus, have died, yet still feel so present to us? How can God be both absent and present? What does it all mean? These are the questions that gave their lives meaning.
Now, if you were to go home today and open up a copy of the Bible, you are likely to find a different ending to the Gospel of Mark. Because what happened is that someone wasn't satisfied with the story ending in its original form. And so later manuscripts of the same gospel were changed. All the explanatory stuff was added later. All the loose ends were tied up. The story was stripped of its mystery. God was stripped of God's mystery.
I want to close by saying two things. First, that this is the problem with too much of religion today. Everyone wants to take the mystery out of God. People want to make God literal and concrete. They want to pretend that we can know at every moment God's will. God's intent. God's laws and ways. And we've forgotten that God is -- first and foremost -- a great mystery. O Magnum Mysterium.
Secondly, many of us have walked away from God because we believed that the tidied up and certain version of God was the only god available for us to embrace. We were led to believe that our doubts and our uncertainties about the nature of the Holy were heretical. That a questioning faith was somehow a lesser faith. We were taught that doubt was the opposite of faith. But that's not true. The opposite of faith is not doubt. It's certainty. Faith is a trust that you feel even though you entertain doubts and questions. It's an abiding sense of the possibility of God amid the mystery of God. Faith wouldn't be faith without doubt and uncertainty.
And so, on this Easter morn, let me commend to you this God who is both known and unknown. Let us be assured that it is a valid religious calling to spend our lives amidst the mystery. Let us trust that such a religious life will indeed bear fruit and imbue our lives with richness and meaning and excitement. Let us look with the frightened women into the dark and empty tomb, and wonder. Let us rub the smooth stones of our earth and seek answers.
Let us live with the sense of hope and possibility that comes from never knowing what will be revealed when the stones are rolled away.
Amen.
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