Out of Emptiness…Everything
Someone once, during Holy Week, made a not-altogether-complimentary reference to “Lisa and her little hopes.”
I suppose hope is one of the central virtues and perhaps weaknesses not just, as it is sometimes said, of liberal theology in general, but of my own personal theology as well. I don’t ignore the long night that must precede the dawn or the gaping emptinesses that sometimes overtake us when previously whole lives are cracked. Indeed, two of the bedrock truths I live by are these: life is hard; there is cause for hope. Still, there is room for the occasional criticism that I or any of us, if we’re not careful, easily slip into unrealistic optimism, especially at this time of year–though I don’t believe religious liberals are any more susceptible to unrealistic optimism than followers of other faiths.
The rising temperatures, the profusion of azaleas followed by successive waves of flowering shrubs and trees, lilies blooming along boulevards, can make it hard for folks who don’t take the Bible literally not to reduce Easter to a simple celebration of the new life so abundant in spring, leaving aside all considerations of such troubling theological concepts as resurrection. When the earth seems to wake again, even in subtropical climes where the green and even some blooms never disappear entirely, something deep inside moves us to celebrate life. And we’re glad that Easter arrives just in time to give shape and form to our celebration, even if the traditional theology of the holiday doesn’t quite fit our beliefs. We may well be tempted to skip lightly over the death and rush on to rejoice in the miracles of rebirth.
The only wrong with that is that death is as much a part of life as rebirth. And we all know it. Any religion that ignores that fact will soon become meaningless. This year we’ve had plenty of reminders of the Good Fridays that always precede Easter: deaths in police custody; school shootings; the expulsion of two black legislators who dared speak out about school shootings and lack of gun control; the passage of SB 140 here in Georgia and similar bills across the country that endanger the lives of trans children and youth by denying them medical care; the wave of draconian anti-abortion measures that swept the land after Roe v Wade was overturned, new ones taking effect each week, it seems; don’t say gay bills and bathroom bills that put lives in peril from bullying. This winter and spring we’ve heard about and seen images of the destructive impact of atmospheric rivers and tornadoes. It is increasingly impossible to be aware of national and world events and believe that life is only hopeful, only abundant, only miraculous.
But we needn’t turn to news stories of natural disasters or devastations of human creation to know that life isn’t always and only an abundant source of hope and miracles. We know it from our own lives, and we learned it very young, from disappointments much bigger than empty Easter eggs. People we love have died or left us in other ways. People we trust have betrayed us. Illness and injury and violence have interrupted the lives we planned to live. Fire, theft, war, jobs that were taken from us, the cruelty, cynicism, and indifference of others and ourselves–all these have all stopped us in our tracks, reminded us forcefully that death and shadow abound in the world and in human hearts as surely as life and light.
Even those among us who have lived the most blessed of lives, with years full of love and opportunities realized and lucky breaks, have come, or will come, again and again to places, people, occasions, relationships wherein we expect to find the fullness of life–expect growth, vitality and possibility; expect color, fragrance and warmth–and discover instead only emptiness. When without warning, the worst we can imagine happens, and it (whatever it is) is even worse than the worst we had imagined. When all that had previously given worth to life has suddenly died, and not only died, but vanished as if it were never there. Leaving empty the space previously filled with joy, direction, service, companionship, laughter, debate, reminiscence, discovery, peace, love.
More often than any one of us can know, in more ways that one of us can comprehend, life is cold, cruel, barren. And yet stories abound telling another truth about life, stories about an empty tomb and a risen savior. Stories about a cup which must be emptied before it can be filled.
We may reject the idea of the bodily death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but through addiction, disease, deaths of loved ones, alienation, infertility, divorce, abuse, disaster, private failures known only to us, through all of these and more we have known the cold, lifelessness of an existence robbed of all generativity, the cessation of all within us that breathes through us and pulses us toward continued becoming. And through whatever kept us alive anyway–the love of a single loyal friend, the art and science of medicine, the steadfast rising of the sun, a still small voice within, the help of strangers–we have experienced nothing short of resurrection, of our spirits and indeed our very lives. Then the life we’ve come to know after such resurrections has been deeper, fuller, richer, at once more fragile and more resilient, than the life we lived before.
We may speculate about dogs or grave robbers removing Jesus’s body from the tomb–if we think about it at all. Still, we ourselves, like Mary Magdalene and the others, have flailed about in the emptiness of the tomb, searching for the brokenness that was laid there and sealed away–love, meaning, dreams, future. And eventually, sometimes after a long, long time, sometimes with the assistance of someone waiting outside the empty place, we begin to notice that the disappearance of what was there before has left room for something new. Out of the emptiness of the tomb, fledgling love, crystalline and potent meaning, astonishing dreams, boundless futures. It was the utter depth of Good Friday’s desolation that gave birth to the soaring triumph of Easter morning. It is the utter depth of Good Friday’s desolation that always gives birth to the soaring triumph of Easter morning, as long as we draw breath upon this earth.
It’s an amazing story, really, the Easter story, even putting aside the supernatural aspects of it. From the execution of a man who was an unlikely leader to begin with, and the disappearance of his physical body, grew a religion of hope that more than 2000 years later still offers believers the promise of life everlasting. Our own stories of drawing hope out of the emptiness of our personal tombs, wherever, whenever, however we find ourselves in them, are no less amazing. The Persian poet Rumi wrote, “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.” In our very being here today–on Zoom or in the church–triumphant survivors of the various ruins of our lives, we are the realization of that hope–treasures beyond worth, each one of us.
“Ours the cross, the grave, the skies,” we’ll sing in just a moment, not because we believe, most of us, that Jesus died and rose again that we might live. But because we have died, and resurrected by hope, drawing a new everything out of the emptiness, have lived again against all odds. What could be greater cause for celebration and praise? Let us sing again alleluia. Amen.