MIRACLES DO HAPPEN

March 31, 2013, Easter Sunday

Luke 24: 1-12
Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York
Theme: Easter proclaims the truth that love and life, not hatred and death, have the
last word.

Almighty God, you transcend mortal imaginings; your truth lies on the far side of
the most articulate of words; your power overpowers our modest expectations.
Startle us this Easter Day. Surprise us with a word beyond any we could ever
imagine. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be
acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.
That towering 20th Century American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, confessed that
on Easter Sunday he made a point of attending a church where he could expect a
very short sermon, if there was any sermon at all. This meant that Niebuhr, a lowchurch Protestant, ended up at some high, liturgical church every Easter. It was
not that the man didnt value preaching in general. Rather, Niebuhr said that it was
simply true that no preacher could ever really be up to the task on Easter.
John Buchanan was the pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago for 26
years, which means that John preached 26 Easter sermons from that great pulpit.
In a recent essay, Buchanan confessed this: Tempting as it is to try, it is a waste of
time to attempt to explain the resurrection. Some things cannot be reduced to an
explanation and are greatly diminished in the process of trying. The [Easter] task
is offering an invitation to walk through the door into a new world where the
ultimate reality is not the death of all things: the ultimate reality is God and love
everlasting.
In this sermon, Im going to invite you to walk through the door into that new
world where the ultimate reality is God and love everlasting. Im going offer this
invitation by telling you three true stories about real people. I have the stories
from someone I trust, a friend and fellow pastor who shared these encounters with
-1* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

death and life, actual experiences that had unfolded in several different
congregations.
The first story is about Julie. She was the churchs Clerk of Session, and a woman
of deep faith. Julies pastor said that she taught him a great deal about faith before
she died. When Julie was first diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer, the church
held an impromptu prayer meeting. 300 people came to pray their hearts out. Her
name was on the list of every prayer chain.
In the sermon he preached at her memorial service, Julies minister said this: The
last thing she wanted me to tell you is that the same God who welcomes her in
mercy and restores her joy will also walk with you in the midst of the storm. The
harder part of faith is not believing in heaven and trusting that Julie is fine; the
harder part of faith is trusting that the same God who cares for Julie also cares for
you, and will not abandon you in your grief. Resurrection to new life and new joy
in this life will be ours as well. Her pastor then said that Julie had said to him just
before she died, Tom, please tell that to my boys.
The second story is about a woman named Ruth. Her minister named her a
grandmother type. He said that hed never had a conversation with her that she
didnt laugh about something. She giggled all the time. Ruth was one of those
people who just made you feel better. Her pastor said that he admired her greatly,
but admired her even more once he learned her story.
Ruth had been married to an avid sailor. Her husband had taught their boys to sail,
and they knew their way around the family boat by the time they were in middle
school. Their son Phillip had just graduated from college, and he and some
buddies took the boat and headed out to sea out into the Atlantic off Charleston,
South Carolina. The storm came out of nowhere. They never did find the boys.
Year later, her pastor confessing that he was at the time young and stupid
asked her this question, Ruth, you are so happy now; how did you ever get over
that? She just smiled and said, mothers dont get over that. But I learned
something when I was in the valley of the shadow. It took me a long time, but I
began to see that we all have sadness. Everyone knows the dark night; everyone
-2* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

knows heartbreak. I know what that is like Every day the sadness is waiting.
Just waiting. I dont know if it will come with the coffee or the paper or if it will
speak to me in the grocery story or attack me from the hymns in church or
penetrate my dreams. But every day I pray, God, dont let the sadness win. Let
me push back the sadness, not only in my life, but in the lives of everyone I
meet I am happy, she told him, but it is an act of defiance
One last real-life story, this one about a young man named Andrew. His pastor
unfolded Andrews story in an essay I recently read, a paper that he had written on
the same day he was writing the homily for young Andrews wedding. Andrew
was the son of the chair of the pulpit nominating committee that had called this
minister to his present church, so he knew the family well. He said that when he
had first met Andrew nearly a decade earlier, the boy was a smooth-skinned
teenager into the drama club at high school. Andrew graduated and went off to
college to study chemical engineering. Then one day Andrew got a headache. To
make a long and agonizing story short, he ended up having a brain tumor removed
by a specialist in a far-away hospital in California. Andrew took his illness to God
in prayer. He told God he expected a miracle. He felt small for the task, so he
asked his friends and parents friends to pray expectantly.
At his five-year check-up, just before the wedding, the doctors told Andrew that he
was cancer-free. He was cured. By this time, Andrew had gone on to do graduate
work at the University of North Carolina. He was doing research on how to
improve the delivery of chemo drugs to brain tumors.
Miracles do happen. But Im telling you these three real-life stories in order to
remind you that it was not only Andrew who got a miracle. Ruth, who lost her son
at sea, was herself an incarnate, living miracle a woman who lived joyfully in
spite of the deepest grief you could imagine. And Julie, whose funeral my minster
friend presided over, got a miracle. Julie received the gift of life eternal, a reality
she trusted with all her being even as she passed on her faith to her family.
The Easter mystery is, of course, just that a mystery. Listen again for the series
of adjectives and verbs that populate the story of the Resurrection that Ellsworth
read to us from Lukes Gospel. When the women went to the tomb and found it
-3* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

empty they were first perplexed. Then, a verse later, they were terrified.
They bowed their faces to the ground in awe. When they ran back into the city
to tell the male disciples the news, the men first thought that their words seemed
to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them at least until they saw
something for themselves. As I said at the beginning of this sermon, the Easter
mystery cannot be tidily explained by me any more than it could be explained that
first morning. It can only be proclaimed, just as it was on that first Easter.
Frankly, the truth is that Easter is often best sung, just as will be done following
this sermon of merest words.
I leave you with this. To be proclaimed in its fullness, the Easter truth must be
proclaimed in two directions into the future and into the present. First and most
familiar to us, Easter is indeed the promise that in some manner beyond mortal
ken, life does not end with death. Easter is the proclamation that the ultimate
reality is not death after all. Easter cries out that the final word is life life eternal.
Call this first word, the Easter word for the future.
But there is a second direction in which the Easter proclamation goes. Call this
second direction, the Easter word for right now. This is the hope for the present
for this world, for our lives in the here and now.
This second Easter word is the promise that because life, not death, reigns
supreme, our present lives really can be lived in joy and meaning, packed full of
life right now, no matter what.
This second Easter word is the promise that because love actually does win, our
present lives can be brilliant with love right now, no matter what.
Andrew is married and doing research on curing cancer. Julie is seated at the great
heavenly banquet. So is Philip who was lost at sea, and by now, his mom as well,
that contagiously joyful woman who triumphed past her grief. They all of them
walked through the valley of the shadow and stayed alive. They spread joy. They
gave love You call it what you want; I call it miraculous.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
-4* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

* The three stories in this sermon, as well as portions of the concluding observations in quotation
marks, are gleaned from a paper prepared for the 2013 Moveable Feast by Thomas Are, Senior
Minster of the Village Presbyterian Church in Prairie Village, Kansas.

-5* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.