In memory of Martha
Let me share the story of the worst Easter sermon I have ever preached.
It was my third year as a pastor and, in the words of that country music song, I was old enough to know better, but still too young to care.
For the sermon, I had memorized a good portion of John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter” and was unduly proud of myself. This poem is filled with what certain parishioners, like Martha, referred to as “ten-dollar words” like dissolution, recurrent, remonstrance. Updike also makes a passing reference to Max Plank’s quanta. Heady stuff.
The upshot of my sermon was this line: Let us not mock God with metaphor. I preached that comparing Easter with the arrival of spring was mocking God. The meaning of the empty tomb is life from death, not the cycle of the seasons. Resurrection is not merely renewal! (Cue fist pounding on pulpit!)
I continue to believe this theological claim. And I still appreciate aspects of Updike’s grandiloquent poem. A preacher should not dumb down the importance of loving the Lord with all one’s mind.
Yet we hold such treasure, as the resurrection, in jars of clay (2 Corinthians 4:7). The truth of the message can be obscured by the messenger. In this case, I lectured from the pulpit. I talked down to the people.
Afterward I stood at the sanctuary door, still quite pleased with myself. Most folks smiled and wished me a Happy Easter. But Martha pressed my palm between her hands even longer than usual. She told me that, every spring, she looks forward to the return of the robins. And, on this very morning, a proud, orange-breasted fellow had landed on her back porch, looked right at her through the open window, and chirped four times. She thought the bird had said, “The Lord is risen.”
“Pastor,” she smiled. “I believe the bird.”
After my own worst Easter sermon, I heard one of the best.
She’s been dead for several years. Yet Martha returned to mind as I was preparing this Easter’s message for another congregation in another state and happened upon this quote from John James Audubon: “When the book and the bird disagree, believe the bird.”
Martha would not have suggested that we should call into the question the Good Book. Yet the Living Word can speak in other ways beside written words and through other creatures besides human beings. All nature sings… or, to quote another song, All God’s critters got a place in the choir. This is not a metaphor. On Easter and every other day, I believe that’ll preach.
