Theological Truth: The Resurrection invites us into new way of living. How will we respond?
Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
“So they went out and fled from the tomb … for terror and amazement had
seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid … (dot dot
dot).” I added the “dot dot dot” because punctuation matters. Let me give you an example…
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and
fires two shots in the air.
“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. “I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” (from the back cover of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss)
Punctuation really does matter. It matters in church, too.
After adding some exclamation marks to today’s dismissal (Alleluia! Alleluia!), Rev. Cara told me about a seminary professor who steadfastly rejected the attempts of students to deviate from the ho-hum punctuation prescribed in the Prayer Book.
But it’s Easter for crying out loud! God has destroyed “the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations…He has swallowed up death forever!” Break out the exclamation marks! Christ has been raised from the dead! Death no longer has dominion over him or us! This logic-defying paradigm shift should shock us into exclamation points.
Punctuation does matter. The comedienne Gracie Allen knew it, but she was
concerned with a different punctuation mark. Gracie died decades before her husband, George Burns. After her death, George was sorting through her papers and found an envelope addressed to him. The note inside read, “George, never place a period where God places a comma.”
That’s not just good grammar advice, that’s the profound joy and eternal hope given to us through the Resurrection. Living in the light of the Resurrection means trusting God to put a life-saving comma in places where we assume there’s a period:
the death of a loved one, the betrayal of a friend or spouse, an estrangement from our child or sibling, the loss of a job or the ending of a career
Whenever hope is lost and despair sets in, Christ’s victory over death reminds us to put a comma, rather than a period. What seems impossible to us is not impossible with God. When we see no way, God provides a way. By Christ, and with Christ, and in Christ, life always follows death.
But Mark’s account of the Resurrection that we hear today isn’t characterized by either exclamation points or commas. Instead, there are the question marks that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome have: “Who will roll away the stone for us?” Upon their arrival, they are puzzled by the fact that it has already been rolled back. There’s also a decided lack of exclamation points. The mysterious, white-robed young man speaks with a nonchalant confidence born of familiarity with the power of God’s love, “Oh hey … you’re looking for Jesus, right, who was crucified? He’s been raised; he’s not here. See, that’s where he was.”
The ending of Mark’s resurrection story is punctuated differently, too. Rather than exclamation points or commas, the conclusion seems to have an ellipsis. Not in the sense that something was omitted… but in the way he creates a deliberate pause, an intentional “to be determined,” or “to be continued.” He says 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…” Dot. Dot. Dot. What happens next? This is more than good story-telling; it’s also effective listener engagement and strategic disciple formation.
Lutheran pastor Brian Stoffregen offers this understanding of Mark’s elliptical ending: “The [ending of the] Gospel of Mark is like some parables which leaves the conclusion [up] to the hearers. Does the barren fig tree bear fruit after the gardener spends a year caring for it (Luke 13:6-9)? Does the older brother join the party (Luke 15:11-32)? The unstated conclusion then poses the question to the hearers. ‘Will you bear fruit’ ‘Are you willing to join the party?’ Or, at the end of Mark, ‘Are you willing to go and tell others about Jesus being raised?’”
That’s the question and challenge posed by British writer Dorothy Sayer in a 1938 Easter letter in the London Times. “’And the third day He rose again’; what are we to make of that?” she writes, “One thing is certain: if he was God and nothing else, his immortality means nothing to us,” (because we expect God to be immortal) “[Also] if he was [hu]man and no more, his death is no more important than yours or mine. (Because we may not like it, but we expect humans to die), “But,” she continues, “if he really was both God and man, then when the [hu]man Jesus died, God died too, and when the God Jesus rose from the dead, man rose too, because they were one and the same person. In any case, those who saw the risen Christ remained persuaded that life was worth living and death a triviality.” (“The Greatest Drama Ever Staged Is the Official Creed of
Christendom,” appeared in the London Sunday Times two weeks before Easter 1938).
Dorothy Sayers reminds us that in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, God has destroyed death. Love wins. Life is worth living. Death is not to be feared.
With this Easter hope, our lives can be punctuated differently. We can honestly and boldly face the sin and suffering, losses and deaths of this world with a comma and the powerful little word “yet”.
I haven’t gotten over my grief, [comma] yet…
Bullying and oppression haven’t been eradicated, yet…
The poor haven’t been satisfied, yet…
Wars haven’t ceased, yet…
Justice isn’t flowing like a river, yet…
And like the women at the tomb, we can go out into the Galilees of our world exclaiming and rejoicing in the power of the Spirit; living lives characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22); and trusting that Jesus has gone ahead of us and there we will see him.
Punctuation does matter. Don’t put a period where God puts a comma. Break out those exclamation points! Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Sermon delivered Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton, Virginia.
