Closure is not a virtue

Sermon: Year B, Easter Day

Late last week, I attended the funeral of a young man. I had officiated at his wedding less than two years ago. 29 years old, inexplicably, his car swerved off the road as he was driving home from work, and, in an instant, he was killed. The large church where his service was held was filled with hundreds of people, a corporate witness to bewilderment. Every strained face reflected the same pressing desire – which was to find some way to make sense of this. No answers came.

What do you do when so much promise is extinguished with such implacable finality? He was at a time in life when all his expectations were ripening: richly talented, he was vibrant, smart, wonderfully engaging. Breathing was enough to elicit from him a ready smile. Yet now he was dead. His body was present, but he was gone. Other people spoke of their memories of him, but he was silenced. A vast congregation gathered around a single casket that carried the shattered remains of a life, stilled beyond recovery, and no amount of effort could breach the gap between the vitality he had so freely exuded and the immense absence of his repose.

Death is this stymieing closure. Just as closure is a form of dying, the shutting down and boxing up of life’s irrepressible hopes and dreams. It is the resignation that we mark, materially, when we carry a casket down the aisle, removing it from the midst of a grieving community, placing it, with unquestioned permanence, in the ground.

Though it is taken as wisdom, closure is not a virtue. It is a deep violation and wound. Yet, obviously, it’s the way of the world. Equally obviously, the demise it reflects is inevitable for all of us. Some say, then, that it must be natural, as if, in some significant way, this excused it. But, in proper measure, such closure as this is entirely offensive. It’s an offense against creation, the term we use when we contemplate the world not just in its facts but in its fullness, when, beyond the limited scope of our usual considerations, we examine the broader expanse of life and struggle to make a complete accounting of its wealth. Which is inestimable. For life is that which, in the world, overwhelms all the world’s boundaries. It overwhelms every mode by which we try to define it, whether by scrutiny or imagination. And this persistent excess is what creation means: that, no matter how assiduously we try, our lives can’t be circumscribed by any set of rules or cleanly ordered by laws. Something about us defies explanation. There is always more, something that agitates… infinitely, beyond the compass of every closed system, no matter how complex. This openness for surprise makes life thrilling and beautiful. In death, it becomes the chasm of our grief, that inexpressible distance between our being and our understanding.

On that first Easter morning, the women who went to the tomb were practicing closure. They went to honor a corpse. Nothing could have been more mundane, nothing more certain. They expected only what was utterly expectable, because death is the irrevocable end of all surprises. What could have been more ordinary?

What is astounding about Mark’s announcement of Jesus’ resurrection, what is supremely telling, is its sheer abruptness. It required only eight verses to tell, no more than that. “He has risen, he is not here; he is going before you:” this was the message. Mark included no theorizing, no information telling how or by what means this had happened. He made no bumbling attempts at smoothing the way to make resurrection seem somehow plausible. It is essential that we note this one thing: his Gospel ends with alarming succinctness. Ironically, it ends, after death, with surprise – a surprise of stupendous magnitude. For the most certain thing in the world had been upended.

Brazen testimony. In a world so devoted to explanation, this brevity looks like weakness. Truth, we like to say, demands more explicit description, more evidence, a clearer line of continuity. But Mark leaves us only with this: his last word is rupture, a profound break, the breaking of brokenness. The most inevitable thing known, has been shattered.

Nearly two thousand years of Christian observance has loosed the story from the text, much to our detriment. Easter has been thoroughly domesticated. Mark, however, never retreated from this supreme sense of dismay. The women at the tomb responded entirely in kind with the message. They fled, with fear, trembling, suffering an astonishment that they could neither quell nor reason away, because they realized that, suddenly, nothing in the world was sure any longer. Or, put another way, they had become witnesses to this singular truth, that with God nothing is impossible – even in regard to us and to all that we count indubitable and finally settled. Even the firmest work of our hands could be undone, and in that undoing it could, all the more, be redeemed. For the God who had created the mystery that is life had suddenly proved himself fully capable of re-creating another mystery no less real, which is life from death.

Jesus’ resurrection does not tell us anything about us. It doesn’t confirm something intrinsic to our human nature. Easter isn’t the celebration of our own immortality, as if this could be taken as a general rule, a law of nature, or a fact of the world. It isn’t any of these. In truth, it stands in opposition to them all. Indeed, the vast momentum of our time moves us, inexorably, toward closure. But Easter is God’s emphatic objection: it is God’s Yes exploding the No to which we so dutifully resign our selves and our lives. Definitively, by resurrection, he interjected a renewed openness where all was shut down. This is not merely the stuff of tradition, layered with the sediment of time and ritual. It is news every time it is spoken. It is always, in every instance, surprising and disturbing – but gloriously so, because in the light of God’s act, we are given the freedom to sing, even at the grave, not down into silence, but Alleluias ascending.

And if this is so, then nothing else is closed off either. All the old inevitabilities of our present time fall away, too, the dreary habits of endless reciprocity: meeting like with like, injury for injury, aggression with aggression, insult with penalty, offense with vengeance, threat with preemption. This world is too much with us. We feel strangely bound by it. But we have a counter-language, an array of divine terms that arise from a deeper and more humbling truth, afforded us by a voice not our own that addresses us, alarmingly. Easter opens the way, resiliently, to the constant possibility of greater realities: of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, generosity, abundance, and unwavering gratitude – even in the face of all the world’s despair. For even death no longer has any claim.

We are armed with many conceits in our enlightened age, and we have become nearly immune to surprise. It’s terribly easy to be immersed in smaller things, when the only voices that really count are our own. This makes for great danger and, ultimately, the isolation of sorrow compounded by sorrow. But today is a day of seismic interruption, of life disturbed by life, eternally, from which springs faith, hope, and love, inextinguishably. May that acclamation of resurrection move you to amazement, an amazement edging toward disquietude for all that is at stake. For then it is God’s voice that has been heard… singing, for us.

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