The New England Church Pulpit New England Congregational Church UCC Aurora Illinois

Life is amazing at times. Sometimes amazingly difficult and sometimes amazingly joyous. At times we are reduced to swearing and at other times we are elevated to awe. Each day is an unknown journey that vacillates between dejected anger when things fall apart and stunned praise at the way things come together. And on Easter Sunday we realize that the tomb becomes a symbol of our power of survival.

In Yann Martel’s wonderful book Life of Pi (which I recommend to you), Piscine Patel is the young son of a zookeeper in India. He and his family are moving the zoo to Canada, when their ship sinks in a storm en route. Pi, as he prefers to be called, is pushed onto a lifeboat and as the ship sinks, along with his family and his heart, he realizes that he is all alone in the world. At the same time he realizes he is not alone in the lifeboat. Also on board are a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a 450 pound male Bengal tiger. The tiger, whom Pi has named Richard Parker, soon makes short work of the three animals, and Pi realizes that unless he is clever enough to outsmart Richard Parker, he will be next. His 227 days adrift at sea vacillate from intense sadness to amazement at both his bad and good fortune. And he realizes they are all wrapped up in one thing, namely Richard Parker.

At first he spends much time trying to figure out a way to get rid of Richard Parker before Richard Parker does away with him. Plan Number One is to push him off the lifeboat. But how does a skinny, 14-year-old boy get close enough to and find strength enough to push a ferocious, hungry 450 pound tiger over the side of a boat? Plan Number Two was unreasonable so he moved on to Plan Number Three which is to kill the tiger with the available materials on board, but that would be certain suicide because such primitive weapons would only wound the tiger at best, and he knows there’s nothing angrier than an injured animal. Plan Number Four was to choke him with a rope but considering his lack of strength and Plan Number Five was impractical. So Pi moves on to Plan Number Six which seems the most reasonable, and that is to outlast Richard Parker, so he spends his time finding ways to outsmart and outlive the tiger.

For days, every hour is spent plotting the demise of his nemesis when all of a sudden the light bulb goes on in his head, like the wheel attaching itself to a broken-down wagon, and Pi realizes the paradox of his situation: it is Richard Parker who is actually keeping him alive. The time he spends trying to appease the animal, catch enough fish and turtles to keep the tiger from salivating over a skinny boy for lunch, and finding clever ways to tame Richard Parker keeps his mind off his utterly hopeless situation of being in a small lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with little chance of being rescued. It was the irony of his situation that the one who scared him witless to start with was the very same who brought him peace, purpose, even wholeness. Pi realized that if the thing that kept him on his toes all the time, that prompted him to be clever and alert, that forced him to pay attention was not there, he would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. Pi realized that the will to live came from the very thing that was also his threat of death. The tiger pushed Pi to go on living. He hated him for it, and yet at the same time he was grateful. Without Richard Parker, Bengal tiger, Pi would not have survived to tell his story. So ultimately Plan Number Seven was to keep Richard Parker alive and to tame him.

Fear, Pi comes to realize, is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, not unlike a tiger in the lifeboat. And just when you are most hopeful, fear attacks reason and hope who are often poorly armed foot soldiers to do battle with fear.

Such it is the with the women who came to the tomb; they fled in fear. It is interesting that Mark ends his story in this way; his story of the life and death of Jesus concludes with no conclusion, simply the women fleeing the tomb because they were afraid. By so doing, Mark wants us to finish the story. He invites us to find in our fear both our death and our life, to discover the paradox that the tomb, like the tiger on the lifeboat, is both the threat of death and the very thing that gives us life.

“Resurrection, “ says Richard Holloway, “is the refusal to be imprisoned any longer by the fear of death. It is the determination to take the first step out of the tomb.” It may be a personal circumstance that immobilizes us, or a social evil that confronts us, or a system that oppresses us, or fear that threatens to undo our neat and tidy life. Whatever it is, we simply refuse to accept its power over us because resurrection calls us to action. (Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity)

And the paradox with resurrection is that it isn’t real until it is actualized. If we let the tigers and the tombs have their way with us, there is no resurrection. The resurrection of the bible is only as real as the transformation that occurs when we refuse to let evil control us. I can only believe in the resurrection of the bible because I see resurrections now, when I see stones rolled away that trap people in tombs.

In 1955 Rosa Parks rolled the stone away when she refused to go to the back of the bus, and it means a whole new life for African-Americans previously relegated to second-class citizenship. In 1969 the Stonewall Riot rolled away a stone that entombed gay and lesbian people bringing freedom and dignity for a group of people otherwise oppressed by society. In 1999 Anita Hatfield, disturbed by the sad waste of the lives of young men who had to live out their lives in the Preston Youth Facility near her home in Ione, CA, rolled the stone away singlehandedly by teaching rough and tough men of the street how to knit and sew. She taught them how to make blankets and booties and teddy bears for premature babies in hospitals. And caring for these babies they’ll never meet has changed their lives. She couldn’t take the boys out of prison, but she has helped take the prison out of the boys. The place of intended punishment has now become a place of transformation, an opportunity to tame the tiger inside and make something useful of their lives. Racial conflicts and gang rivalries fall away at her classroom door in the correctional facility. "Now they hurry through their science so they can do their knitting," says Hatfield. "It's like therapy," offers Dion Watts, 18, who is serving time for auto theft. This is what Jesus’s life was about, these are the risky adventures that brought life to others and death to himself because he knew that in fixing broken wagons there is hope, in learning how to tame the tigers of oppression and unfairness and evil there is life.

How does one tame the tigers of our lives that threaten to do us in? How does one cope with the death of a child, of the loss of a job when one has a family to support, bad news from the doctor, or an assortment of other living hells? The wheel of our broken wagon doesn’t always fix itself; Easter isn’t magic. How does one cope with going to work at a job you don’t like, or dealing with a family member who has an addiction, or the whirlwind of a schedule that has you trapped? Easter is a lot of hard work, learning to tame tigers and face tombs that imprison. Easter is the symbol of life’s paradox that the very thing that threatens us is the very thing that can transform us. Easter isn’t the happy chapter in our ongoing efforts to hold onto our dreams; it isn’t the next thing. It is the NEW thing that God gives.

Easter isn’t about recapturing what we’ve lost or about going back to the Garden of Eden. Easter proclaims that something radically new is born of our plight. Like the caterpillar, it isn’t about getting back the warm fuzzy coat that one is losing, but about giving it up to spin the cocoon-tomb that will transform into something entirely new and freeing. It isn’t about being rescued from tigers and tombs but embracing them as symbols of life.

The women left the tomb trembling and bewildered, afraid for what it meant. But what may be, may not be. And in our fear and trembling, in our angst and uncertainty is a God who makes all things new. Amen.

–Gary L. McCann

MARK 16.1-8

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’s body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you."

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.

TAO TE CHING
74

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren’t afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can’t achieve.

Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.
When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,
chances are that you’ll cut yourself.
(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Copyright © 2004 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved.

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