"HE HAS RISEN"

It was a solid, staid, old parish to which I was called just after the war, one that needed a bit of waking up here and there, and on our first Easter, we arranged to have the Sunrise Service begin with a fanfare by a quartet of trumpets sounding forth from the balcony. Well, the trumpeters were quite enthusiastic, and I must admit, quite loud; and, quite frankly, the innovation was not received with unanimous approval. In fact, one elderly lady in the congregation was quite vocal about it. She said: "I don’t mind some changes. After all, you have to expect that with a young, new pastor, but trumpets in the church on Easter, the very idea! That’s carrying things a bit too far." Well, bless her soul, like a lot of other pinch-mouthed Christians, she hadn’t read her Bible carefully enough to discover that the new pastor wasn’t being particularly original with the trumpet bit. A preacher by the name of Paul, you see, beat me to it by quite a few centuries. He put it this way: "For the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised; then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ " Trumpets - the sound of victory! And Paul concludes that glorious chapter, the 15th of his First Letter to the Corinthians, with these words: "Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

Quite a crowd that has gathered here this morning, isn’t it? Tell me, why did you all come? Why have we crowded, not only this, but every Christian church throughout the world? Why the throngs on Easter morning? No, don’t say it. I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t believe it. I’ve heard all of the cynical answers. I’ve heard all of the reasons that the skeptics and the critics of the church have given, and I don’t believe them. I’ve read all the cracks by the bright boys with the fast quip, and I’m not buying it for a minute. Do you want a revue? All right. You come out of social conformity. Coming to church on Easter is just like getting bagged on New Year’s Eve. It’s the thing to do. Everybody does it, and so you do it. Or perhaps you have come to see and be seen. Where else would you have such a wide audience for your new spring wardrobe? Or perhaps because it is spring. The weather isn’t good enough to play golf or have a picnic, and there doesn’t seem much else to do on a morning like this, and so you came to church. Or maybe you can’t really call yourself religious or a good member of the church, but you like to keep some connection, and a once a year visit to the church seems to sort of fill the bill in that regard. And to all of this I say: "Bunk! Rubbish! Unmitigated balderdash! I don’t believe it for a moment." Just twenty-six years ago this Easter, I had all of this nonsense debunked for me. It was Easter Sunday. Two days before, we had left the island of Iwo Jima. For thirty days, since we had landed on the beach of that island, we had lived with death - the sight of it, the sound of it, the scream of it, the stench of it. Death! For nearly a month, we had witnessed death in its most violent, its most sudden, its most futile, its most bloody, its most debasing ways. For days, we had collected bodies, we had burned bodies, we had carried bodies, we had buried bodies. And so we gathered for our Easter Service. It wasn’t in any lovely lily-bedecked sanctuary such as this. It was a smelly mess hall below decks aboard a transport ship. There were no lovely ladies in bright millinery. The dress was dirty dungarees. There was not fine choir with inspiring music. We sang the Easter hymns to the accompaniment of a squeaky, little, portable, reed organ. No one told anyone he had to come. There was no social custom or conformity about it. And yet, that mess hall was jam-packed with men. There wasn’t a square inch of space that wasn’t taken. There were many who didn’t get in, and we couldn’t go topside on deck, because we were riding out a typhoon, which made it even a little less like an Easter. I looked out on men with red-rimmed eyes, with beards, with bandages. All right, my wise skeptic. Why did they come? It was best put by a Marine after the Service, when he said: "Well, Padre, I guess after all that back there, we just had to come this morning, didn’t we?" And I’ll say that for all of us today: after all of that back there, we just had to come this morning. After another year on this bloody earth, we had to come. There was no alternative. We needed this desperately, this Easter celebration. Every day of this past year has been covered by a pall of death that has hung over it like a dark cloud. It seemed we could never escape. It was in the weekly box score of casualties from Vietnam, and even if we came out ahead in the totals for the week, we still couldn’t muster up much joy about it, because some wife, or some mother, or some son had lost a man whom they loved. Friend or enemy, which did it matter? It was death.

With every breath we take, someone is dying somewhere in the world. Why don’t we get used to it? Psychologists tell us that a child at the age of six becomes aware of death. The naturalist tells us that it’s just a normal part of life. He says it, but he doesn’t believe it, and neither do we. To coin the terrible contradiction - we live with death. And so we have come to celebrate the resurrection. This is the normal thing to do! We need to see the Risen Christ standing before us. What would you have me do this morning? Build some kind of a solid, skilled, scholarly statement and documentation for the resurrection of Jesus Christ? You wouldn’t want that, even if I could. Your presence here is proof enough of that resurrection. I remember asking a young widow if there was anything in particular that she wanted me to include in the Service for her husband. She said: "No, just go out there and tell me again that this isn’t the end of everything." That’s what we all want to know this morning. There’s something else we need to know. Paul says it: "We are risen with Christ now. We have eternal life now." Today, that’s what we want verified. A layman friend of mine was describing the dullness of his own pastor’s sermons. He said: "He has the unique ability to make twenty minutes seem like an eternity." Well, in a sense, that is what I’m supposed to do this morning. In a few, brief minutes, I’m supposed to make you feel like you are living eternal life. That’s that you want, but life as we live it is so small, so futile, so restricted, so provincial, it seems we’re forever beating our heads against the walls that surround us. We know so much, and yet, we know so little about the world because we’re confined to such a small place. We’re like the woman whose brother during World War II was sent to the continent down under. He decided to stay there and live. One day she was going to the zoo, and she was standing in front of the kangaroo cage. She read the sign: "Native of Australia." "Good heavens!" she gasped, "my brother married one of them." Little lives that never get beyond little surroundings in a little place. They don’t seem very eternal, do they?

"Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?" [Mark 16:3]

This is a wonderful life except for the stone of death staring us in the face. There are other stones. Each man seems to have his own stone weighing on his chest, or around his neck. It is always too heavy for us to handle alone. We are entombed except for outside help. We are already in our graves unless God brings us back to life better than ever.

Guideposts for February, 1964, tells the story of miners trapped by an underwater lake draining into their pit.

I had just gone back into No. 1 room when it happened. Over the rattle of machinery I heard Frank Scarbro's yell. "Larry! Boys! Come on! There's water in here!"

It roared out of No. 3 room in what seemed like a solid wall, knocking down support timbers, tearing up huge slabs of slate.

"Up here," Frank’s voice called again. "There’s a high ground here." I crawled toward him. Six of us gathered there. That meant that four men were missing. We waded out to the edge of the tunnel, shouting to the missing men above the roar, shining our lamps in every direction. Nothing. We struggled back to the higher ground and sat there close to one another, wet, scared, cold to the bone, listening to the torrent pound past. For two hours it rushed by, never slacking, never falling, filling up the worked-out areas below us, then rising to seal off the mouth of the room where we sat.

"Looks like we're going to be here for a while, men," John Moore said, and I’m sure that more than one of us had the temptation to say, "Maybe forever." But we didn’t say it - not aloud anyway. We set about instead to make as safe a place for ourselves as we could.

Blackdamp was one of the main dangers we faced. Blackdamp is the deadly odorless gas of the mines, and it can get you down before you know it’s there. In a corner we found a roll of brattice cloth - treated burlap - and used it to barricade ourselves against possible blackdamp. With the water still roaring past in the tunnel, we made a tent of the brattice cloth and crawled inside.

Now we took stock of our food supply. Two lunch pails had been saved. There were a few sandwiches, four or five candy bars and some cake. That wouldn’t last long among six men. But the chances were the water would get us before we got very hungry.

And then I remembered the story of Daniel. The day before, Sunday, after church, I’d had the strongest feeling that God was telling me to read the Bible, just to let it fall open at random. So I’d done it, and where should it open but to the story of how God brought Daniel out of the lion’s den.

"Listen, fellows," I said. "Listen to what God told me just yesterday." I couldn’t remember the exact words, I said, but they had to do with the way God ‘delivereth and rescueth and worketh ... wonders in heaven and in earth.’ [Daniel 6:27] "I think we ought to ask for a wonder in the earth," I said. And in that dark hole, we asked that the water stop rising.

But it didn’t stop. Every hour or so someone would crawl out of the tent and go down to the water line. But the message was always the same. "It’s over the last mark on the timber."

At the end of about 13 hours the water stopped its furious charge. We figured that the underground lake or whatever it was that we had tapped into, was finally drained. But still the water rose. Everyone was praying now - even men who’d never prayed before - but it seemed that the harder we prayed the faster that water crept up on us.

And then someone said suddenly, "They think we're drowned."

Now it was in words, the thought we'd all been dodging. "They’re not hurrying, because there's no way anyone could be alive down here."

Nobody answered. All of us were thinking of the miner’s tradition that now alone stood between us and death: the tradition that says rescue operations continue until not only the living but the dead are recovered.

And all the while the water rose.

Three days passed. Four. The water was almost halfway up the room. What was keeping it from the pocket where we were?

At the end of the fourth day our food ran out. Some of the men found crusts tossed aside by miners days before and wolfed down those scraps.

We hunched closer to each other to keep out the cold, not moving much, to conserve energy. And the water rose.

It was on the seventh day that I suddenly wondered if word prayers were enough. In the Bible, men didn’t only say they believed, they acted like it. They went out and made bold, foolish, extravagant gestures to prove it.

I switched on my head lamp. "Boys," I said, "I’m going down to the water. Don’t worry about me."

I crawled out of the tent. The water was at the highest point yet, still and black in the yellow light of my lamp. Little specks of coal dust swam lazily on the surface, going nowhere.

"Lord," I said, "You’ve given us the Bible not as ancient history but as a pattern for now. Give me the faith, Jesus, to receive a real Bible miracle."

I ran over in my mind everything I remembered about how Elijah and Moses divided the waters. What would happen if I commanded the waters to recede? There in the darkness of that flooded mine, God gave me the faith to ask for a miracle. I hit the water. I smote it five times with a piece of old conveyer chain, spelling out the name "Jesus" and I ordered the floods to draw back.

Then I knelt down at the water’s edge. I waited for the waves I had created to die down, for the specks of coal dust to stop moving about.

It seemed to be taking too long. Why was it that the coal dust, instead of settling down, was now running together as it pulled by a little current? I picked out one speck and followed it. Could it be my imagination? No, that speck of dust was moving away from the water’s edge. I watched for a while, almost unbelieving. For that water - that water was drawing back.

When it had dropped far enough to remove all doubt, I went back and told the others. Then I promised God that when we were rescued I’d not do one thing before I stood up in His great Openness and gave thanks.

On the eighth day we heard drilling. The bit broke through the ceiling. But it was some hundred yards away from us, in the totally flooded tunnel. They’d take that as proof that no one in this section was alive.

The ninth day came and went. But we heard the sounds of pumping through the hold in the tunnel ceiling. By the tenth day we were too weak to do much but lie in the tent and rest.

And then, as it it were in a dream, suddenly there was a head lamp shining in through the bratice cloth, and a voice shouted, "Boys, you sure look good!"

It was night when they got us to the tunnel mouth. Even before we reached it, we smelled God’s good sweet air. They wanted us to stay on the stretchers, but we'd been waiting ten days to stand up straight. In the glare of floodlights I saw my father and brother standing among others. Before we let them put us in the ambulance, four of us joined hands and lifted our arms, and there in the floodlights we gave thanks unto the Lord, our Deliverer.

Of course, eventually we all must die. Had the miners drowned, they would have still been eligible to have their tombs emptied. Jesus would have been waiting for them as for our fathers. This is the big news. The story of the mine gives us a glimpse of large miracle waiting for us all at death.

Think of the stone of gravity pressing down upon earth’s chest. That stone has been rolled away and sent us flying into space. In a recent issue of Time, it was noted that the Apollo astronaut veterans have become changed men as a result of their "instant global consciousness."

Philosopher William Irwin Thompson, who perceives a growing sense of myth and mysticism in today’s technological society, mused over the astronauts’ "conversions" as he watched the ascent of Apollo 17. In space, Thompson says, the astronauts felt "their consciousness being transformed to behold God making all things new."

In a sense, argues Thompson, the astronauts underwent a kind of "temporal redemption," much like the one envisioned 34 years ago in C. S. Lewis’ theological space fantasy OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET. In Lewis’ novel the earth is the devil’s territory and the prison of fallen man, quarantined by the powers and dominations of the divine milieu around it. But those who escape the silent planet can recover their cosmic orientation. [Time, August 21, 1972]

Earth is not entombed in a stone of space. We are not limited to this atmosphere. This is a parable about death. The huge stone which so worried the women on their way to the tomb had already been rolled away. God does not weigh us down. He is the weight lifter.