Practicing Resurrection

“Practicing Resurrection” The Dover Church
April 25, 2010 –4th Sunday after Easter Scripture: Psalm 23, Acts 9:36-43
When I read the Bible, I seek truth, truth that I can touch and know, truth that I can live my life by. I seek a truth, a vision which draws me into life. I seek truth, which empowers and inspires me to strive on.
With that in mind, what are we to make of this morning’s lesson, the story of Peter restoring Tabitha to life, bringing her from death into life? Where is the truth in this story? Where is the truth we can touch and know? Where is the truth we can live our lives by? Where is the vision of something more to which we can inspire? Which will empower us to not just dream, but to do?
Maybe if I were a Biblical literalist, someone who believed that every word in the Bible was exactly and factually true, believing that Peter actually did what the story said he did wouldn’t be a big leap for me. But I am not a Biblical literalist. I do believe that some things in the Bible are factually true. I also find a lot of things confusing at first glance, but that doesn’t bother me. Why? Because I know that most of the confusion is just the efforts of ordinary people just like you and me to put the indescribable experience of the living God into words. As someone who tries to do just this every week in a sermon, I know just how confusing and difficult that can be. And finally, I know that many things in the Bible were meant metaphorically. They are invitations to engage with a larger truth, so see what we think of as reality with new eyes. Jesus himself taught in parables, stories which weren’t factually true but which brought the listener to a realization of some deeper truth.
When I come face to face with something confusing or perhaps metaphorical in the Bible, something I doubt the factual truth of, I do not abandon hope and write it off or try to ignore it. No. I take a step back and return to what I know about God, who God is and what God does. Then I return to the story and reread it in that light.
So what do we know about who God is and what God does? From the first pages of Genesis, through the Exodus, into Israel, and in the mouths of the prophets, our God is a God who brings something out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death. This is who God is. This is what God does. In Jesus, we see the exact same thing. In story after story in the Gospels, this is who God in Jesus Christ is. This is what God in Jesus Christ does. And in the Newer Testament stories of Paul’s churches and in The Acts of the Apostles, this is who God the Holy Spirit is. This is what God the Holy Spirit does. This is who we are to be as the church, believers in God, disciples of Jesus, filled and lead by the Holy Spirit. This is what we are to do: bring something out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death. Not us alone, but God in and through us.
With that in mind, I know this story of Peter and Tabitha is true, something I can know and touch, a vision to live into, something to empower and inspire me. Why? Because I had seen something brought out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death over and over again in the mission work of the churches I have been part of: shelter for homeless people, casseroles for women in Boston, dinners for elderly people in town, children taught to read, children taught about Jesus and how to pray, money given for Haiti, tsunami, earthquake and hurricane relief, scholarships established, animals bought for Heifer, Habitat for Humanity homes built, letters written to legislators, hospital or homebound people visited, prisoners visited, orphaned or impoverished children from Uganda to Arizona sponsored, all the stories we see every week in the mission inserts from UCC churches around the country.
The last two weeks have been powerful for me. I understand that Greg Mortenson has been to Dover to talk about his school building efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I finally got around to reading his books Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools. When I read his stories, I saw someone bringing something out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death. A lost and seriously ill mountain climber who made a promise to a village in Pakistan who cared for him, a promise to build a school for their kids. A promise that lead him to build over 130 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. A guy with no life ambition, no money, no training, no natural ability, limited organizational or time management skills, who just walked into places with hope and helped build just that, hope. A promise that brought together Christians and Muslims, Americans and former mujahedeen and Taliban, Muslims who saw each other as heretics, Sunnis, Shiites, Ismailis, liberal Americans with conservative Pakistani mullahs, school children in Dover and school less children in the Hindu Kush. A promise that survived heartbreaking loss, earthquake, war and violence and flourished. A promise that raised lots of money, sometimes in big chunks from wealthy donors and often in the form of pennies from children. A promise that brought building materials over insurmountable obstacles and put them in the hands of people who wanted a future for their children and their community. As I read page after page, my very soul was on fire with delight. Something like this is worth living a life around. Something like this is worth being the church about. This is exactly what God calls us to be and do, in Christian terms, practicing Resurrection: bringing something out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death.
In the final pages of Stones into Schools, Mortenson describes the lesson of the school built in the most remote part of Afghanistan which took him 11 years to see from promise to completion, a promise he himself made to a bunch of Kirghiz horsemen who rode over the mountains to find him and ask for his help, but a completion he was unable to be part of due to repeated personal setbacks and illness: “Thanks to what the Kirghiz managed to pull off, no citizen of Afghanistan can now look toward the High Pamir without pondering the legend of the ragged company of horsemen who rode over a chain of mountains in search of someone who could build them a school – and who winded up fulfilling the promise that they had been given by finishing that school with their own hands.
Today that legend is inscribed on the stones that were used to build the walls of the school, and as the water falls out of the sky and over those stones, the words of the legend are carried down from the mountains and into the fields and gardens and orchards of Afghanistan. And as the water and the words rush past, who can fail to turn to his neighbor and whisper, with humility and awe – if this is what the weakest, the least valued, the most neglected among us are capable of achieving, truly is there anything we cannot do?
Despite everything that has befallen us, do we not continue to hold the destiny of this shattered and magnificent nation, together with the future of all our children – girls and boys alike – in the palm of our hands?
And knowing all of this, is it not time to reclaim the things that have been taken from us?
The answer to those questions reveals the power that a legend can wield – and no one is haunted by this truth more profoundly or with greater anguish, perhaps, than those to whom the privileges of education and literacy have been denied.
If I could somehow have found a way to share the story of the tiny four-room schoolhouse that was nailed together upon the Roof of the World with my old mentor and friend, Haji Ali - a man who never learned to read or write, and who now lies in his grave under the apricot trees next to the barley fields of Korphe – I believe he would have nodded with approval.
He was a man who understood the virtue of small things” (pp. 378-79).



"So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection." — Wendell Berry (The Country of Marriage)