 Dr. Carl Price |
Good
News From a Graveyard
Sermon:
Scripture: |
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Graveyards are not very exciting places to visit. For the first nineteen years of my life, my primary acquaintance with graveyards was the one down the road from the one-room church that I grew up in. The narrow, horseshoe drive looped through it was clearly marked "IN" at one end and "OUT" at the other to lessen the chance of picking up additional occupants from fights over who would back up to let whom out. They battled erosion in the gully in the back by filling it with rusted cans, broken vases and withered flowers; and in those days, "perpetual care" pretty much meant every family trying to get the grass cut on their plot before Memorial Day. Much of that has changed now, and you need to understand that I am not belittling it as it was. My father, grandfather, grandmother, and my first wife are buried there and I have visited it with deep emotions many times. It is just that that was pretty much my early contact with graveyards. Then came the summer of 1951 while I was in training at Camp Pendleton in California, just prior to shipping over to Korea. I had a one day pass. It was the only free day I had during the time I was there. I don’t think they had car rentals readily available at the base in those days, but it would not have made much difference. I didn’t have the money to rent one. Most of my pay was being sent home to help my grandparents, so I was looking for most any way to just get away from the base for a day. Some distant relatives, whom I had never met, lived not too far away. My mother had written and told them that I was in their part of the world and they had said that they would be glad to have me visit them if I had any time away from the base. As I said, I had never met them, but most anything sounded better than cleaning my rifle or shining my shoes again, so I called them. They said they would pick me up at the gate and we would have most of the day and I would have dinner with them. I don’t remember what we had for dinner. I am sure it was an improvement over the mess hall. But what I do remember about that long-ago day is where they chose to take me for my one and only visit to California outside of Camp Pendleton. They took me to Forest Lawn Cemetery! Honest! Now, you need to understand that Forest Lawn is impressive! It was especially impressive 50 years ago to someone with my background in cemeteries. They didn’t even use the word "cemetery" there, much less graveyard—just "Forest Lawn." The idea of no tombstones or above-ground markers was new in the early fifties—just acres of trees and flowers and shrubs. That was in keeping with the idea of a "Lawn," I guess. It also made grounds keeping much easier. The music playing all over the place from the concealed speakers was a different touch, too. But it wasn’t very exciting to a nineteen year old. I remember wondering if they took me there because my mother had told them I was considering going into the ministry and they figured a cemetery was one of the places preachers had to spend some of their time—or if they thought a young Marine headed for Korea needed a reminder of his mortality or the comfort of the thought that there was such a pretty place to be laid to rest if you didn’t make it back standing up! At any rate, I think I could have had a more thrilling day in California! Graveyards are simply not very exciting places to visit and, by and large, people who visit them do so in sadness and in grief. You can be sure that this was the manner in which Mary Magdalene approached that garden tomb that first Easter morning. The Scriptures say it was a new tomb, one in which no one had ever been buried. That may sound a bit strange in an age accustomed to individual graves, but graves in Jesus’ time were often used for decades or even for centuries. They were more like what we call mausoleums, in that there was usually room for more than one body to be placed in one. Many of them had a small opening someplace into a separate area called an ossuary, where the bones from really old burials could be placed so that a more recent death could be accommodated. And the bones of family members who died elsewhere were often brought to one of those ancestral tombs, as the Bible tells us was done with the bones of Joseph 400 years after his death in Egypt. The phrase "gathered to his fathers" had a very literal meaning. But a new tomb does not make a graveyard a more attractive place to visit—any more than an increase in landscaping and a decrease in tombstones made Forest Lawn more appealing to a nineteen year old—and Mary went with her mind on the sad task of anointing the body, which they had not been able to do earlier because Jesus had died at the beginning of the Sabbath and you could not travel or do any work on the Sabbath. So Sunday morning was the first opportunity to do what would normally have been done on the day of death. Little wonder that Mary was startled—going to anoint a dead body and finding it missing is enough to startle anyone. But it was there amid the decaying bones of many centuries, with the events of the previous Friday still running through her mind, that Mary heard the words that have changed graveyards forever: "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here; but he has risen." Without the word from that first visit to a graveyard in Jerusalem, a Forest Lawn would never have been conceived. Pleasant music in a cemetery? Not hardly! But outlook can be almost everything. I like the story of the kid who was asked to say grace at the morning meal. He prayed, "Thank you, God, for our food and for this beautiful day." When he looked up from his "Amen," he found the family glaring at him. It was NOT a beautiful day. It was damp and cold and miserable—sort of like Michigan often is this time of year. His mother said, "What do you mean, ‘this beautiful day’?" His father said, "Son, you should not pray insincerely, just to say the words." His brother said, "What a jerk! Trying to be smart!" As he reached for the jelly, the little guy replied, "You can’t judge a day by its weather." I love it! The lad was perceptive beyond his years. You reach a time in life when the gift of a day is enough in itself. Sunshine is a bonus. It is all a matter of perspective. Perspective changes graveyards, too. Ever since Mary’s visit that first Easter, graveyards speak of new life as well as lives lost. Understand that I am not pushing for Forest Lawn to be the first choice on your only visit to California. I had another opportunity to visit California for a free day when I was there for a conference of large church pastors a few years ago. I rented a car and drove up to see the Canyon of the Kings in Sequoia National Park. But graveyards no longer have to mean only sadness and grief. The Good News of the Resurrection was first heard in a graveyard. There is a parable here, as well as a record. It is often in some place of death that the Word of God is heard most clearly. Understand me now. I am not only talking about physical death or actual cemetery visits. I am talking about the fact that it is often when we are confronted with the heartache times of life that some clearer word from God comes through to us. We go there expecting death and there comes to us a word of life. There are some lessons in Mary’s experience on that Easter morning. Note that Mary did not recognize Jesus when she first saw him. Some have been puzzled by that; some have suggested that this tells us that the body of the Risen Christ was different than the body of the Jesus that Mary and the disciples had known. Perhaps so, but we need not go to such lengths to explain what happened here. Who goes to a cemetery expecting to see the deceased wandering around? Remember, Mary had not had twenty centuries of the Easter Story to prepare her for that morning. A man was telling me about being away from home one Easter and discussing with his wife where they would go to church that Sunday. His wife replied, "Whichever one is singing ‘Christ the Lord is Risen Today!’" When you don’t know anything else about a church, that is probably as good a criteria as any, so he made a few phone calls to find out. At least you know there will be a great message in the hymn. But Mary had not heard a great congregation sing that hymn; she had never seen Jeffrey Hunter play in King of Kings; she had never been to a sunrise service! So don’t judge Mary as somehow lacking something because she was slow to recognize her Lord. And it is no insult to say that Mary mistook the Christ for a gardener. The gardener was simply the most logical person to be in the graveyard at that time of the day. In our lives, too, a word of resurrection may come to us through someone that we take at first to be some common folk. The "gardeners" in our lives may be parents or children, friends or a pastor or a teacher or even a stranger, but through their words the message of the risen Christ may come to us. Mary was weeping and one often does not see too clearly through tears. We can be so weighted down in our despair that we cannot take our thoughts off the fact that we are in a graveyard. Our grief, our disappointments, our tragedies are real, but they are not the last word. From the doorway of the tomb there comes a message that can turn our lives around. We may need to wipe our eyes and clear the mists away; we may need to question the quick assumptions about who it is who speaks to us; we may need to recognize that life goes on when we thought that life was over; but the word is there for us: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" Somewhere, several years ago now, I read an account of the funeral service of Winston Churchill. Recently, I came across a similar story concerning the funeral of Lord Montgomery, the great English general. I don’t know whether the incident is true of both or if the story has been attributed incorrectly to one of them, but the story goes like this. At the conclusion of the committal service at the burial site in one of England’s great cathedrals, a bugler sounded "Taps" from some far corner. Some have heard that bugle call on such occasions and commented on what a sad sound it is. Having heard it at nighttime at Boy Scout camps, calling weary kids to rest, it has never sounded quite that way to me. Besides, we learned the words:
At this service, however, after the notes of the bugle had died away, as the people stood waiting in a moment of silence as people almost invariably do in such moments, almost ready to begin to walk away, from far up in the heights of the bell tower, as if coming almost from some other world, a second bugle sounded "Reveille"—the wake-up call. Christians are a people who have heard the call of the second bugle. We have learned that good news can come to God’s people anywhere—and this morning we remember that it came first and strongest and most enduringly from a graveyard. Thanks be to God.
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