Creating Resurrection

“Early in the morning on the first day of the week,
while it was still dark, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb.
 She saw that the stone had been rolled away.”
—John 20:1

“Why should Easter matter to you,” a friend asked me earlier this week.  “You don’t believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead, do you?  Unitarian Universalists don’t usually believe that kind of thing.”

He was wrong.  I do believe that people can rise from the dead.  I’ve seen it happen. 

Kathryn was a big woman, and when Kathryn sat behind her desk, she became an imposing first impression.  When anyone opened the door to the office, it was Kathryn’s face they first saw.  I’d never before seen a human being look so . . . nasty.  Every inch of her seemed to be at war with the world.  She would scowl at you, her eyes cutting like sharpened switchblades, her mouth tightening like the hole into hell itself.  Kathryn was an office temp.  We figured we could just wait her mood out for the short term.  But on the Monday of her second week, I opened the door and walked into the office.  Kathryn looked up and greeted me: “Drop dead!” she said.

I’d had enough.  I wanted her gone.  I picked up the phone to call personnel to have her fired.  But then, I heard a voice.  “Stop,” it commanded.  It was . . . my boss.  “Firing someone is final,” she said, “it is the last resort.  What else have you tried?  What else can you do?”

So began a secret six-week campaign.  We called it: “Operation Kathryn Kindness”

Each time we interacted with her, we ignored her antagonisms.  We just offered her a big smile, kind words, a few compliments, a long lunch hour so she could go shopping, a flower or candy bar snuck onto her desk.  We started to ask her about herself and her life.  She told us how she’d been fired with no notice after working for the same company for twenty-three years.  She told us how her boss had given her the news, handed her an empty box for her personal things, and then just walked away.  She told us how she had stood there crying.  She told us she was so scared without a real job that she thought she was going to die. 

Within a month of our kindness campaign, Kathryn had become a different person.  She walked into work with a smile.  She became friendly with the downstairs staff.  She laughed, and her eyes sparkled.  When she finally left for a new permanent job, everyone in the building got together and threw a big party for her.  After some food and dancing, Kathryn turned off the music and handed us a gift.  It was a handmade wall hanging. “This is what I found here,” she said.  On it, she had put one word: “Life!”

Is it silly to talk about resurrection?  Do we actually believe that someone could be revived after being shut away in a tomb?  Do we actually believe that someone who was dead could live again?

Long ago, the Hebrew Scriptures tell us, Moses called his people to rise up from the death camps of Egypt.  Long again, the story tells us, Moses and the Israelites passed over from the death of enslavement to a life of freedom.  Long ago, the Israelites heard their awesome God proclaim: “ See, I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)

Sometimes we cannot choose the circumstances of our lives.  Sometimes it seems as if life just happens to us.  Sometimes it seems as if life just happens around us.  And much of that happening is hard.  Oh, it can be so hard.  But there is an amazing gift within each one of us.  And that gift is our choice.  We can accept death.  Or, we choose resurrection. We can choose life!

But we can’t do it alone.  We aren’t meant to do it alone.  We need one another.  We need the hand of a friend.  We need the hand of a family member.  Sometimes, we need the hand of a helping professional.  And for some of us, we need the hand of the Holy, the hand of a higher power, the hand of God.  We all need someone to recall us to our best selves again. 

Teacher and writer Jack Kornfield tells this story:

Once on a train from Washington to Philadelphia, I found myself seated next an African-American man [who ran] a rehabilitation program for juvenile offenders.  Most of the youths he worked with were gang members who had committed homicide.

One fourteen-year-old boy in his program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang.  At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing.  After the verdict was announced, she stood up slowly and stared directly at him and stated, “I’m going to kill you.”  Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile facility.

After the first year the mother of the slain child went to visit his killer.  He had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor he’d had.  For a time they talked, and when she left she gave him some cigarettes.  Then she started step by step to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts.  Near the end of his three-year sentence she asked him what he would be doing when he got out.  He was confused, so she offered to help set him up with a job at a friend’s company.  Then she inquired about where he would live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home.

For eight months he lived there, ate her food, and worked at the job.  Then one evening she called him into the living room.  She sat down opposite him and waited.  Then she started, “Do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you?”  “I sure do,” he replied.  “I’ll never forget the moment.”

“I said I was going to kill you.  And, I did.” She went on: “I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth.  I wanted him to die.  That’s why I started to visit you and bring you things.  That’s why I got you the job and let you live here in my house.  That’s how I set about changing you.  And that old boy, he’s gone.  So now I want to ask you, since my son is gone, and that killer is gone, if you’ll stay here.  I’ve got room, and I’d like to adopt you if you let me.”  And she became the mother of her son’s killer, the mother he never had.”   (Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, p.235-6)

Dead men can walk again. 
Dead spirits can rise once more. 

As the Ancient One proclaims: “See, I have set before you life and death.  Choose life!”

May it be so.  Shalom.  Blessed Be. Amen.

© Copyright 2006 Rev. Tim Kutzmark