Acts 6:1-7 • Mark 15:43-16:8
Glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Christ is Risen!
The Gospel reading today should be familiar. We read these verses from Mark chapter 16 in front of the closed doors of the temple on the night of the Resurrection.
The women have come, carrying fragrant myrrh oil to anoint the body of the Lord. But, to add insult to injury, the grave has been vandalized and body of their Lord is missing.
An angel appears and commands the women to go tell the disciples, and Peter in particular, the good news that they would meet the living Lord Jesus in Galilee. But according to Saint Mark, the women do not immediately obey the command. Instead they flee from the tomb: “for trembling and astonishment had come upon them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
We know they’ll overcome their fear and go tell the apostles. By afternoon, Luke and Cleopas on the road to Emmaus say, “Some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but did not find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive.”
But for now, the women are too shocked to act. We shouldn’t be too hard on them.
If you’ve been around Christianity at all for very long, you know we believe that the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead. You may or may not believe it to be true, but it’s a familiar thing that you can say and think.
That wasn’t a thing these women were equipped to think or say. The prophet Elijah and the Lord Jesus acted to raise a few people from death, and that was astonishing — but no one had ever died violently, and then just got better.
So if they had no hope or expectation that the Lord would be anything other than dead and buried behind a stone, why did they get up at zero dark thirty on the first day after the sabbath, and go to the tomb?
I think the answer has to do with that dumb popular saying that “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” Honestly, if you want to know the truth, I am not spiritual – I really don’t know what it means to be “spiritual.” Sounds kind of crystal-horoscope-reincarnation-mood-ring-psychedelic thing? I’m not spiritual – but I am struggling to become religious.
Before it had the modern meaning of believing certain things about God, the Latin word religio described the set of duties that a person owed to his family and his society. “Re-ligio” comes from root words that mean “binding-back.” It’s not at all about being so heavenly-minded that you’re no earthly good.
Religion, your daily actions, duties and choices, bind and connect you back to the safe and stable ground of reality, relationship, and community.
Religion – and its synonym piety – for the Greeks and Romans, was that whole bundle of daily, monthly, annual practices that make society and the world work. Along with paying taxes and obeying the law, a pious person naturally kept his family’s traditions and his people’s customs, practiced his trade, and practiced at least token sacrifice to his ancestors and household spirits, to the state and its gods. The network of patronage and mutual obligation was understood to include the living, and the dead, and the gods themselves.
No wonder this new cult of Christians were denounced as atheists. The Christians’ scandalous refusal to hold up their social obligation to sacrifice properly to the gods and emperors was a disruption to society, to relationships between people, and potentially a disruption between humans and the gods; naturally the Romans felt Christianity needed to be stamped out for the public good.
* * *
Some time ago I overheard a conversation between a friend and her brother, a recovering alcoholic.
She complained, “Making the bed is silly because you are just going to unmake it tonight.”
He answered, “I need this little routine. It’s good for me.”
To her, making the bed was an isolated, meaningless act. To him, it was one brick in something he was building. In his recovery program, he’d been challenged to re-situate his life in humility and to find knowledge of himself in daily practice. He’s not a believer in God, so his practice consisted of a number of simple, repeated acts and new habits to give his life rhythm, and to anchor each day in normal, human life. Each day that he makes his bed, brushes his teeth, does his reading, it grounds him a little more in the world inhabited by people who are not one drink away from destruction.
He’s not a believer in any religion, but in the original meaning of the word he’s becoming religious – and it’s bringing order to his soul.
Religion is about what your practice is making you into. It’s more powerful than the individual acts your religion consists of. No one drop of water, however fast-moving and abrasive, can cut through stone. But a river carves a canyon, one drop at a time. Each intentional act of ours makes us that much more of what we aim to be. And, of course, each unthinking act of ours conforms us a little more to the noise and dissolution of the world around us.
* * *
On Friday evening, Joseph and Nicodemus hastily washed and wrapped the body of the Lord, and placed it in the tomb Joseph had newly bought for his own family. With sundown would come the sabbath, when observant Jews couldn’t work. So they hurried, and before the sun set, they placed the wrapped, half-anointed body in the tomb and rolled the stone over the door.
Saturday, the second day of Christ’s death, began with Christ’s body only half-prepared and his disciples hiding in their homes behind locked doors for fear of arrest. On Saturday evening, at the end of the sabbath, began the third day of Christ’s death. Early in the morning, Mary Magdalene, Joanna and the other women got up before dawn to go finish the job of anointing and preparing Christ’s body properly.
They weren’t looking for a resurrection. “Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us?” Their early-morning mission was not motivated by any hope or faith. They went to anoint Christ’s dead body because that is what you do.
It needed doing. And the men were all hiding. So the women, the women who had stayed at the foot of the cross and never abandoned their Lord, they set out to do what duty demanded.
And it was when they undertook their religious obligation, without any believing on their part, that their encounter with Life began.
We know the verse that says we are saved by grace through faith. But most of the times when the New Testament talks about faith, you can read that as faithfulness.
A person who keeps his marriage vows is being faithful; if he commits adultery he is being unfaithful. The wonderworking, healing action of grace works in us when it encounters faithfulness in us.
How many times have we showed up for church out of habit, grudgingly, with complaints about the early hour… and then found by the end of the service that it has changed us?
Our dormant sense of awe and wonder did not fire up on demand. But the practical piety to which we’d trained ourselves put us in a place, and among a people, where we could be walked through our paces. We may not have experienced any glorious epiphany, but our religious practice took us outside our own self-pity and sleepwalking – into intentional action.
So I’m encouraged by the example of the myrrh-bearing women, who set about fulfilling the duty that piety demanded of them, without any hope or belief at all. It was simply their practice, and only their own integrity compelled them to fulfill their religious obligation.
That gives me hope and confidence that my daily practice, however unimpressive, can put me in a place where I can at times encounter God; that it can shape each of us by Grace into the divine likeness God plans for us; and that neither the action of God nor our own daily practice depends on the sense of devotion, spirituality, peace or fervor that we are able to bring to the act. Today’s Divine Liturgy does not depend on you or me to be full of a sense of love of God or fear of God; we have come to offer God the appointed prayers and hymns, and experience says he honors that obedience and meets us where we are, as we are.
By grace we’re saved, through faithfulness, and that’s the gift of God. Don’t sell religion short; daily practice is how we work out our salvation here and now. Like the myrrh-bearing women, when we show up, the Living God meets us.
To the glory of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Christ is risen!
