Looking for Resurrection

Looking for Resurrection           The Dover Church
March 31, 2013 - Easter.                        Scripture: John 20:1-18

Looking for Resurrection. Following Jesus with our eyes wide open in curious expectation. Looking to see who God is bringing out of death into life right now. Where and how God's doing it, right now, and what the victory over death looks like, right now. Looking for resurrection. After Easter, that's what it's all about.
I didn't always look at life with post-Easter eyes. I thought resurrection was probably a historical event, a distant, dusty memory maybe misremembered which you just had to believe happened to Jesus, even though no one could ever really prove or disprove it...which is another way of saying resurrection wasn't very pertinent to me, let alone something I went around looking for...or living.
That all fell apart on me years ago now in, of all places, Brigham and Women's Hospital where I was doing a year of chaplaincy. Chaplaincy was both thrilling and terrifying; thrilling because this was important, life and death stuff, and terrifying because...well, this was life and death stuff and I felt like what I had to offer was inconsequential compared to what the medical team was doing; trivial when measured against what was at stake in these people's lives.
Some of the people I was visiting were going to die. Others were facing life changes they didn't want to face. What was I supposed to say? I hope you feel better soon? Put a whitewash on it? Pretend everything was OK? Pray for miraculous healing? Tell them to accept God's will? I didn't believe any of that myself.
"What can I honestly pray for people who are very sick or dying and don't want to be?" I asked my supervisor. "Max," she said, "you're not the physician or the psychiatrist. Nor are you the entertainer or the miracle worker. You go into these hospital rooms to help these people name something worth hoping for in their future, wherever they are with their diagnosis. You are there to help them see hope, whether that is a complete recovery, a new perspective on their changed circumstances, time for reconciliation with loved ones, or a good death. Everyone can imagine something hopeful, no matter how bad the place they are right now is."
And then a funny thing happened. When I started helping them name their hope, I started seeing it too. I saw a whole lot of hope, where before I had honestly been hopeless. I call it looking for resurrection and I've been doing it ever since. I came to The Dover Church looking for resurrection. I started having lunch with Dave and Jim looking for resurrection, but I didn't tell them that as I didn't want to freak them out. As we talked I heard them looking for resurrection too, looking for something meaningful to do as individuals and as a church, looking for something inspired by our faith to help others, looking for something that would transform us, our church, and a piece of the world, looking for something to open our children's eyes to life beyond the pretty homogenized horizons of Dover.
Eventually we found Haiti, specifically the St. Boniface Hospital at Fond des Blancs and their clinic in the hilltop village of Villa. I say we found Haiti but I believe Haiti found us too, both of us out there looking for resurrection and our paths crossed. We found others here in Dover: Barry, Camille, John, Beth, Christopher, Emily, Ben, Isabel, Ian. We found folks who gave generously. We found yet more in Haiti: Jack the Middlebury grad, Melinda the VA therapist from Tampa, Jack the plumber from Ipswich, Eric the carpenter from Boston, Betsy the spinal cord specialist from Buffalo, Taryn the nutritionist from Sharon, and Anita from the 1st Congregational Church of South Portland who ran the guesthouse. All of us looking for resurrection, even if we didn't think in those terms.
This is what I saw. Port-au-Prince: 2 years ago when we first went there after the earthquake, it looked like Berlin after the Second World War. Buildings in rubble. People living outdoors or in tent camps and picking through the rubble. Even though I am a looking for resurrection kind of guy, I saw hopelessness, despair, chaos, and futility. Two weeks ago, less rubble. Some new buildings. The collapsed presidential palace had been removed. And the tent camps were down from 1.5 million inhabitants to 150,000. When you're coming out of a tomb, every breath of fresh air is an improvement.
Getting from Port-au-Prince to Fond des Blancs should have been a 3 1/2 hour ride over unimproved roads. It took 6 hours. just getting out of Port-au-Prince Two took two hours, thanks to two school bus breakdowns which jammed up the road. A road work detour on the highway, which we sat three cars away while the police officer waved through traffic headed in the opposite direction took another 45 minutes. The bouncing and jolting we endured when we were moving was a pretty intense isometric workout.
The village of Fond des Blancs reminded me at first of pictures of Appalachia during the depression: poor people living in shacks without electricity, running water, telephones, or paved roads. But then I saw the vibrant open air market which had grown up because of the hospital which was driving the local economy. The hospital itself was impressive: clean, well staffed with enthusiastic professionals, providing good care to many thousands of local residents for free. The spinal cord clinic was amazing. Before this clinic, people disabled by spinal cord injuries had just died. Now I was playing basketball with some guys, watching a young VA physical therapist on her vacation from Tampa work other guys out on weights, saying hello to other guys playing dominos on an accessible pick nick table. I met Richard from Marlboro, whose full time job was to write grant proposals to keep everything funded. In short, resurrection was bursting out all over the place in Fond des Blanc.
Then there was Villa, the little mountaintop village where the St. Boniface satellite clinic we are supporting is located. It's hard to quickly paint a picture of Villa, but let's just say it is about as far from Dover in just about every way you can imagine. 90 minutes from Fond des Blancs in low 4 wheel drive bouncing up tough roads, up, up, up, the road maintained by a Mennonite guy who comes by with a grader twice a year, fording a river twice, passing houses made of palm fronds, everyone a subsistence farmer with hand tools, lots of charcoal burning going on, which means deforestation and erosion, and from the ridge lines and hilltops we crossed, you can see the beautiful Caribbean far below in the distance.
When we pulled up to the old clinic, now condemned because of the earth quake, there are two UNICEF tents out front: one is the clinic, the other the lab. Hot inside, we open the flaps and meet with the staff: two doctors, two nurses, four volunteer community health workers. Where everyone lives hand to mouth, these guys volunteered! They're all spotless and ironed compared to us, professionals who care deeply for the 60,000 people who lived in their catchment area. They are the line between health and chronic illness for the local residents, the line between life and death against overwhelming odds. When asked what their greatest achievement was, they said, "only fifteen people died of cholera here during the outbreak and there is no cholera here now." This at a time when people are still dying daily throughout the country, often within 6 hours of the first symptoms. Talk about Resurrection!
And finally, there were soccer balls. We brought six as soccer is the sport in Haiti and few people can afford a ball. We gave out five in Villa, but saved one...just in case. After Villa, we drove down to the beach to go for a swim. It was beautiful. Some of us swam while others walked off down the beach exploring. When we came out and dried off, five local boys came out of the jungle and started playing soccer with a beat up old tennis ball. It had lost its green felt cover, it was that well used. We walked over and made a game of it...well, played a game of it. The boys had the upper hand. Jim went back to the ambulance for that sixth ball and the boys' eyes just lit up. We played with the regulation ball until Dave Melville explained to them, "whoever scores the next goal gets to keep the ball." Now Dave had been giving up a lot of goals, but I think he actually tried to make the boys work for it...to no avail. Their first shot slow rolled past Dave to howls of exultation. Just then the explorers came back with coconuts as well as a guy with a machete to open them, so we celebrated our loss and the boys' gain...but the boys just wanted us to keep playing. I stood there, eating fresh coconut, laughing with friends old and new, watching the sunlight play on the breaking waves, hills and palm trees, fishing boats in the distance, and thought to myself, "it might look like a soccer ball back in Dover, but from where I'm standing right now it sure looks a lot like resurrection."
We are funding the clinic in Villa for $52,000 a year. That sounds like a lot of money, but it's really a tea spoon of froth off of the latte of our lives here in Dover when you think about the thousands of people who are being given the chance to live healthy lives by that clinic. The bags of basic medical supplies we brought. The 40 children whose education we are paying for through honey sales and the quarters and dimes of our Sunday School students. The five soccer balls in Villa. That one last soccer ball being joyfully kicked around on the beach as we walked back to our ride. The new friendships. The lives of the seven of us who went this time, the four others who went last time, and the dozens who will go in the future.
We can chose which side of Easter we want to live on. We can be cynical, pessimist, apathetic, sit in the pews and go on home, and the story will remain dusty and this will be just another Easter sermon, "Nice try, Max, but we've heard it all before." Or we can get up because he got up. Because he got up we gotta get up and go looking for resurrection. Because he lives, we gotta live resurrection. It's happening everywhere. Christ is risen.