“It is Darkest Before the Dawn”

John 20: 1-18

April 20, 2003

Easter Sunday

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

It happened ten years ago, but I am still haunted by what happened. Ten years ago, I was in my third year of seminary, finishing up my education. I was in Dallas for two years at Southern Methodist University, then I did my internship at the First United Methodist Church in Fordyce before returning to Dallas for a final year of study. I was in Fordyce for nine months. Sometime in early November, the phone rang in my office. I was pleased. I did not get many calls as the intern minister. On the other end of the line, was Walter E. Mischke, Jr. He was the senior pastor at my home church in Jackson, Tennessee. I knew Walter well. I worked for him at one time. I knew Walter was not the kind of man to call out of the blue to chitchat. That is what he tried to do, but all the while I suspected that there was a purpose to his call. Walter asked me how my seminary work had been going and how my internship was progressing. I asked him about some of the people in the church. I knew he was going to turn the conversation. I did not know when he would do it, but I listened when he said, “John, what are you doing the Sunday after Christmas?” I told them that I already had another preaching engagement. The Sunday after Christmas was one of the Sundays that I was scheduled to preach in Fordyce. By and large, associate pastors preach on the Sunday after Christmas. Before I was appointed here, I was an associate pastor at the First United Methodist Church, Little Rock. When I was an associate pastor, my associate pastor friends and I would joke and say that the Sunday after Christmas is designated as National Associate Pastor Sunday. This morning I am nervous because I have not preached an Easter sermon for five years. I had to turn Walter down. I knew that, but then I said something that haunted me for eleven months. I said, “Walter, I would be happy to come home to preach next Christmas.” Church, what was I thinking?

Do you know what it is like when you say that you will do something when that something is a year in advance? During the year, you do not think about it much. Then the year ahead of time sneaks up on you. That is what happened to me that Christmas season. I wrote what I thought was a pretty good sermon a few weeks before school dismissed for a two week break. Susie and I traveled home to Tennessee and had Christmas with our families. Our celebration was great and wonderful. Well, that is not exactly true. I was a nervous wreck. I had the sermon in my hand most of the time. All around me people were opening presents. Cameras were capturing the moments. And I had my head in my sermon notes. I cannot tell you one memory from that Christmas morning. When everyone else went to bed, I stayed up. I want you to know that I stayed up so long that I saw the sun come up. In other words, I did not sleep at all that night. I was a nervous wreck. I thought to myself, “What am I going to do?” I thought, “Verlene Humphreys will be in the congregation. She changed my diaper in the nursery. She is going to look up at me and only remember my dirty diaper. I thought about Ann and Ernest Lawrence. I knew that they would be there on that Sunday morning. You may remember me telling you that I once skipped Sunday School and went to Mr. Donut with my friends. There, getting a cup of coffee, were the Lawrences. I just knew that they would look at me in the pulpit and think, “What kind of a minister skips Sunday School?” By the way, I do not recommend skipping Sunday School to our youth group. Then my mother helped me. She said, “John, you know they televise our service now on the local cable station.” I thought, “What would happen, if come 10:45, I did not show up! I preached and I think that it was a pretty good sermon.

The reason I tell you that story this Easter morning is to tell you what happened around 5:15 that morning. I didn’t sleep at all, as I told you. At 5:15 I heard the familiar sound of a car coming up our street and the thud of the Jackson Sun hitting our driveway. I went outside. “Might as well read the paper”, I thought. I walked out our carport door and when I did, it was as dark as it could be. There was a streetlight or two shining, but by and large it was dark. Then, as I got to the end of the driveway, something happened. I know that this will sound crazy to you, but the sun began to rise in an instant. In one moment it was dark, in the other, light began to let it’s presence be known. It was the most gorgeous sight I have seen. I ran back into the house and grabbed a camera. There were about three or four lying, left over from Christmas morning. I took that picture of the sun rising and every year, during Holy Week, I pull it out and place it on my desk. It reminds me of the power of the sun rising and the power of the Son. You may know this, it is always darkest before the dawn.

Two thousand years ago, Mary made her way to a tomb. John begins his account of her going with these words, “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark¼” “While it was still dark, Mary made her way to the tomb.” To be honest with you, Mary was not expecting all that much. She had run out of time in preparing Jesus’s body on the preceding Friday. Her religious custom would not allow her to finish her work because the sun had set. So she was going back to do prepare the body of Jesus. She was not expecting much that morning. I do not think the disciples were expecting much. If they had been, they would have hidden in the bushes, and jumped out when Jesus rolled away the rock from the tomb. They would have screamed out, “All right! Yeah!” They were hiding all right, but not in the bushes. They were hiding in an upper room, fearful for their own lives. John says a lot when he says that it was still dark when Mary made her way to the tomb. Mary knew grief. She went there to prepare His body while it was still dark.

John’s gospel is full of powerful visual images. Matthew begins his gospel with genealogy and turns to the wise men. Luke has the shepherds hearing the news, and Mark, well, he moves at such a quick pace that he leaves out the birth story all together. John begins his gospel with these words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Those are powerful words. Then John writes, “...the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” You see, something happened back in Genesis in the third verse. If you look back in your Bibles, you will see it. God was creating the world. He was swept across waters, and then in the third line of Genesis, God created light and called it good.

Something happened, though, between the third verse of Genesis and the gospel of John. My grandfather died twenty-three years ago. I can remember one night when it was dark in his house. The power had gone out in Conway on Ash Street. My grandfather lit a kerosene lamp and taught his youngest grandson a lesson. These were his words, “This light surrounds you. If you take a step, the light steps forward with you.” The light shines in darkness and darkness does not overcome it. What you need to know is that this is so powerfully so on Easter Sunday. John writes that Mary went to the tomb while it was dark. I think that you are supposed to see that wherever Jesus went, there is the possibility of a new life.We live in a different world today. We live in a world that seems dark a lot of the time. At times, we feel like we are in some kind of a hole and in the depths. You have experienced that. A preacher that I sometimes read tells of a port in Spain where there is a statue of Jesus. It is in the form of many of the statues of Jesus. In this one, his arms are extended as if to say, “Come to me all of you who are tired and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” But this statue is sunk below the waters. It is as if those who have died at sea can see Jesus’ hands beckoning them home. It is a great parable. The symbolism is powerful. In the beginning Jesus was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God, and here came Jesus down into the deep, down into the world, down into the muck, down into all that we experience, to give us new life. That is no more visible than during Holy Week, on a cross.

The Resurrection tells us that when you find yourself in a hole, and in the deep, that you do not have to stay there. That is the message of the Resurrection. There is a story that has been going around the preaching circuit for some years. You may have heard it. I do not know. But you haven’t heard it from me, so I am going to tell it this morning. Some years ago, a woman was cleaning her parakeet’s cage when she accidentally sucked her pet parakeet, Chippie, into her vacuum cleaner. Horrified at what she had done, she frantically ripped open the vacuum bag. She found Chippie in there, stunned and shaken, but still alive. Chippie was covered with dust and dirt, so the woman grabbed him, ran to the sink, turned on the faucet, and held him under the cold water to clean him off. Then she ran with Chippie to the bathroom, turned on the hair dryer, and held him in front of the hot air to dry him off. It was (to say the least) a traumatic morning for Chippie the parakeet. That is the kind of stories newspapers like, so they sent a reporter over. The reporter asked the woman, “How’s Chippie doing now?” She said this, “Well, Chippie doesn’t sing much anymore. He just sits and stares.”

I have seen people like that, haven’t you? I have been around people when that happened to them. Something happened in their lives. It was a terrible thing. I will not down play it. It was a horrible thing. It may have been something really rough. Now, they do not feel like singing. They cannot get past it. You can pick them out. They are not hard to find. They look like survivors or victims. Their life seems to say, “Life has been hard on me. Leave me alone. My life is over now.” Soren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, said that these people, look like typographical errors who refuse to be erased. They just sit and stare.

The Christian faith has something to say about that. The Christian faith says that you do not have to stay there. The cross says that you have been there, but the Christian faith says you do not have to stay there. The Resurrection above all else, above everything else, says to us that we can have a new life. I have created a new word in the Christian faith. I am penning it today, and copyrighting it tomorrow. I think that the word Resurrection and Cross ought to go together. It ought to be cross-resurrection, with a hyphen separating the two words. You cannot endure a cross, you can’t get through a hard time, without expecting a resurrection. Did you hear that? You can’t go through that hard time without expecting a resurrection. That is the reason that Paul the apostle can say, “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us, for nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing. Not even death.” But still we sit and we stare and we find ourselves in holes.

My favorite movie is “It’s A Wonderful Life” with George Bailey, who is played by Jimmy Stewart. George has a chance to see what his life would have been like if he had not been born. Near the end of the movie, George goes to the Bedford Fall Bridge. He cries and he stomps and he says, “I want to live again! I want to live again! Please, God, let me live again!” That is what the Resurrection gives you, a new life. A Savior who went to the depths for you, who knew pain and agony, but who today we celebrate.

There is a great story, perhaps it is a fable now. It is so popular that it made it into an episode of The West Wing. It is the story of a man who was walking along one day and fell into a hole. He had seen the hole before. He had side stepped it many times, but for some reason, today, he fell into it and could not get out of it. The hole was too deep; it’s walls were too steep. There was no way out. A man walked by and saw the other man down in the hole. He noticed him there, reached into his wallet, pulled out a twenty dollar bill and said, “I hope that this helps.” A preacher passed by. I do not like to paint pictures in a bad light. But, here you go. A preacher walked by, and saw the man in a hole. He realized that the man was a member of his church. So he threw a prayer down into that hole. Then his friend came by. His friend knew him; he saw him down in the hole. He called to him and then he jumped down to join his friend in the hole. The man who was there first said, “What are you doing. There is no way out of this hole!” His friend said, “I have been in this hole. I know the way out.” That is what Jesus did for us. And on this day, we celebrate it. There is a great country music song that I sometimes refer to on Easter Sundays. Here’s the line, “I’m gonna get a life, it’s what I’m gonna do. So starting now, you can have one too. Gonna get a life, it’s what I should have done, long time ago, before you wrecked this one.” Do not pay attention to the last line of the song. Listen to the first line of it, “I am gonna get a life.” That is what Easter is all about. Let us pray.

(Special thanks to Walter E. Mischke, Jr., who gave me the chance to preach at home. Special thanks to God who provided a wonderful sunrise on that same Sunday. Special thanks to Max Lucado and the story about Chippie. The story can be found in his book, In the Eye of the Storm, (page 11). Special thanks also to the writers of It’s a Wonderful Life and The West Wing for stories in this sermon. But most importantly, thanks is due to all of you who have the courage to begin again and who believe that new life is always possible. My prayers are with you).