“What is there to Sing About?”

Luke 24:1-12 and I Corinthians 15:50-58

April 4, 2010 + Easter Sunday

Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ

400 Glenwood Drive

Chattanooga, Tennessee 37404

Every public place is a potential theatre, with some of the most unusual dramas taking place in the most unusual theatres. A few years ago I was walking through the crowded aisles of a large department store the week before Easter. I was an earshot away from girls’ dresses sizes 4-7 where a mini-drama was in progress. Let me set the scene for you: picture one angry mother, one stubborn six-year-old girl, one bewildered father, one bored older brother, and one very weary saleslady wondering what it would take to get transferred to house wares. As dramas go, it was rather one-sided. Most of the lines went to the mother. “What’s wrong with this dress? This is what you said you wanted. It’s the right size, the right color, the right price. It doesn’t have a belt. It doesn’t have a collar. It doesn’t have pleats or frills. This Sunday is Easter and you’re going to wear this dress to church!” The little girl’s line was shorter but more dramatic: “No!” That’s all she said. “No!” To which her mother responded: “You’re not going to win. There’s no way you’re going to win.” As I moved away, I saw the mother dragging her daughter toward a fitting room.

There’s nothing like a little pre-Easter power struggle to get everyone in the mood for church. Death and six-year olds are vanquished on Easter, as are reluctant teenagers and every-Sunday-but-Easter golfers. So what else is new? “Power-struggling” is the name of one of life’s most important games. What’s more, I found the mother’s words strangely prophetic for all of us. She was right, you know. As far as this life is concerned we’re not going to win. There’s no way we’re going to win. Time will take its toll. Death will have its way with us. And here and there along the road of life, people, places and problems will all take a bite out of us. When good Rabbi Kushner pondered why bad things happen to good people, a rabbi friend of mine responded, “So what else is new?”

Over fifteen centuries ago, St. Augustine in one of his famous sermons describes a physician leaning over the bed of a sick man. The physician raises himself and solemnly pronounces, “He will die. He will not recover from this.” But a fine preacher of our own day, William Willimon, suggests that Augustine’s physician could go one step further. The same physician might also lean over the crib on the first day of a newborn infant’s life and say, “She will die. She will not recover from this.”

The message is simple: life itself is a terminal disease. Every day, no matter how we may deny it, every day in spite of the beauty of blooming trees and lovely lilies, every day we move closer to the end of our journey. All our greatest triumphs and deepest tragedies are momentary. There is no way we’re going to win.

Well, there’s a happy thought for a lovely Easter morning! We didn’t come to church to hear that. By the way, I thought of something this past week. Do you realize how few jokes there are about being alive? But I have heard hundreds of jokes about death. Just this past week I received the current issue of my college’s alumni magazine. One of the articles told the moving story of how one graduate is struggling with cancer. She has found, as did Norman Cousins years ago (“Anatomy of an Illness,” 1979), that laughter is a very effective medicine when we are dealing with a serious illness. The article included some of the jokes about death she has been collecting. Have you heard this one?

Two elderly retirees were gabbing about the prospect of death over their coffee one morning. “If you could listen to the mourners as they stood by your casket,” asked one of them, “what would you hope to hear them say?”

“Oh,” said one of the codgers, “I’d like to hear them saying I was a kind, loving man who was always good to children. What would you like to hear them saying?”

“That’s easy,” said his friend. I like to hear someone yell” ‘Look – he’s moving!”

Whistling in the dark, wouldn’t you say? What is there ultimately to laugh about? For that matter, even on Easter, what is there to sing about? Like those women who came early Easter morning to the tomb, some of us have lost family and friends since last Easter. And some of us have suffered other losses that hurt a great deal. We have lost health, jobs, savings, opportunities, special relationships. And beyond our own personal losses we have agonized over wars and senseless violence that never seem to end and natural disasters that devastate and destroy countries and lives. What is there to sing about?

Again, listen to William Willimon (“Now We Can Sing?,” in the March 23, 2010 issue of “The Christian Century”):

“On two mission trips to Haiti with undergrads, there was widespread agreement that the most disarming thing about the country was the laughter of children, along with their raucous singing. How dare they sing when their life expectancy is so horribly short? Was their laughter an escapist respite from the unmitigated tragedy of their lives, or a smart rebuke to our assumption that their lives were trapped in tragedy?

As darkness fell upon Port-au-Prince after the earth heaved that January night, people danced in the streets and sang hymns. On CNN, Anderson Cooper was incredulous.”

Why were those people singing? I’ll tell you why. Because they are Christian people. They believe, perhaps more than some of us may, that tragedy and death do not have the final word. As the words of the old spiritual that gets sung in the midst of troubling times remind us – “It’s Good Friday, but Sunday’s comin’”

That’s what Natalie Sleeth was trying to tell us in the powerful hymn we sang a few minutes ago, a hymn she completed just as her beloved husband was dying:

“In our end is our beginning; in our time, infinity;

In our doubt, there is believing; in our life, eternity.

In our death, a resurrection; at the last, a victory,

Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”

Or listen to the Apostle Paul: “. . . thanks be to God, who gives   us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (I Corinthians 15:57)

Or in the immortal words of Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.”

So, mother of that defiant six-year-old, regardless of what dress she wore on Easter, I have to tell you she is going to win, she really is. And so are all the Haitian children and all the other precious children of the world. And so are you and so am I and so are all God’s people. This Easter “It’s déjà vu all over again!”, and that is worth singing about, because Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed!

Amen.