March 23, 2008: From Disciples To Apostles
Matthew 28:1-10, Jeremiah 31:1-6, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Eileen Parfrey - Springwater Presbyterian Church

I had never thought of Easter in this way before, but this comes from a poem by Elizabeth Rooney, my aunt's spiritual director. The poem is called "Conqueror":

Sometime,
I'd like to meet the angel who
Not only rolled away the stone
But sat upon it too.

He demonstrated once for all
That death's inferior,
By placing on the tomb's dread stone
His heavenly posterior.

God's last laugh, enacted by a rump! The crucifixion punctuated so decisively as to seem almost un-pious in its hilarity. Imperial Rome does its worst by the religious insurrectionist, imposing a particularly humiliating and excruciating death. Jerusalem's rich and powerful out-think his followers with a detachment of soldiers to hinder any amateurish grave-robbing gesture. And an angel punctuates all of this by the meticulous placement of his tookus on the rock that was supposed to be the final word.

Put this way, I just had to laugh. The result of that sit was that a group of passive followers became "sent." That's what the words mean. A disciple is a follower, an apostle is "one who is sent." The group that followed Jesus around the countryside, hanging on his every word, responding to his every directive, suddenly found themselves on their own, asked to do the best they could with what they had where they were at. Just like one of the saints of my childhood in the Baptist church where I grew up.

Burma was a good wife. Not that I ever knew her as a wife, of course, because her husband, Howard, when I was a baby. But you knew she had been a good wife, because she was a "good" whatever she was called to be. She and Howard taught the adult Sunday School-he the men, she the women. She'd planned to be a foreign missionary when love and marriage intervened, so Burma was the moving force behind the Women's Missionary Society. When missionaries came home on furlough, it was her house that became their temporary home. During the war, when other women worked in munitions factories, Burma volunteered at the Gideon Society's warehouse, packing pocket Testaments to send with the troops. She and Howard were raising three wonderful boys when there was suddenly a fourth, just after the war. The three oldest were my mother's age, the youngest was closer to mine. When he was still in grade school and the older boys already out of high school, Howard was brutally killed in a work-related accident, and Burma was left to raise the boy alone.

Burma had been married during the Depression and never worked outside the home. Her only work "experience" was in renting out rooms at the top of their three-story house and packing lunch for the boarders. Howard's death was her personal Good Friday. It could have ended useful life for the woman who had always been his partner, his sidekick, the one who supported his ideas and activities. He had been the lead Sunday School teacher; she had taught his lessons to the women. Without his leading as "head of household" in all matters spiritual and practical, she was dead in the water. But Burma found a calling, a way to support herself and that youngest boy. In the days before licensing, she became what today would be called an adult foster care home, providing all the care herself, 24/7. She wasn't a nurse, but she knew what to do because she had cared for her own parents in their final illnesses. For Burma, it was the equivalent of the angel putting its behind on the stone that was supposed to keep Jesus' body in the tomb.

What she did never brought Howard back. He was always dead after that gruesome accident at the foundry. But as far as Burma was concerned, her work became resurrection. She continued to do what the two of them had always done together. She opened their home in hospitality to the lonely, the sick, the ones with no other place to go. Missionaries still stayed with her, as if she were their personal "home mission board." The men and women's Sunday School classes merged, with Burma writing the lessons as well as teaching them. Her lessons were less scholarly than his, but they were more practical. The people who lived their last days in her care found a companion to accompany them right up to the gates of heaven, she was that sensitive to the spiritual process of leaving the earth. Maybe because her Savior was so immediately present to her, or maybe because of her stories and her faith, but, her patients lost their fears as they lost their ability to live.

Burma's life was lived in the context of Jesus' last week. She said everyone has Good Fridays. Hers was Howard's sudden and dreadful death. But her Good Friday was interspersed with a constant series of Easters, little here-and-now resurrections, that made her fairly burble "hallelujah" and "yes, Lord" all through Wednesday night prayer meetings. The daily-ness of her decision to go where she was sent was fed by her consciousness of those little Easters. Little Easters everywhere! The thrill of a single chicken stretching to feed extra guests for Sunday dinner. The delight of violets filling the side yard again this year. The person celebrating a year of sobriety. The blessing of the new family announcing their coming baby. It wasn't that Burma didn't see the Good Fridays, it's just that Easter is so much more powerful. She knew the unwelcome deaths-of beloved people and things and ways of being. But she also knew some deaths were necessary-bad habits, addictions, the drive for power or prestige or possession. Good Friday will embrace them. But then comes Easter.

It was the pattern of resurrection after those deaths, pointing it out to others and experiencing it herself, that made Burma a participant in Christ's resurrection. And as she participated in Christ's resurrection, Burma was no longer a follower. She was sent. Raising that fourth boy alone, caring for those sick and dying people, offering hospitality to exhausted missionaries, praying with her church community every Wednesday night. Sent. What gifts she had, the "little" she had to offer, she offered in love, whether it was kindness to the meter reader who sat down to rest his feet or rocking babies in the church nursery. Her love returned to her and transformed others. Hospitality. Worship. Building community. Her Easters were contagious. She lived a particular message: after Good Friday-Easter. Death is not the final word. Her life was like the angel's sit-down punctuation. Not big and flamboyant, just the final "No" to death, the "sit" that says, life goes on.

Elizabeth Rooney again on resurrection:

Now is the shining fabric of our day
Torn open, flung apart,
Rent wide by Love.
Never again
The tight, enclosing sky,
The blue bowl,
Or the star-illumined tent.
We are laid open to infinity,
For Easter Love
Has burst His tomb and ours.
Now nothing shelters us
From God's desire-
Not flesh, not sky,
Not stars, not even sin.
Now Glory waits
So He can enter in.
Now does the dance begin.