I Got Them Post-Resurrection Blues Again

Exodus 33.12-23

Luke 24.36-53

                                                                             

                                       I Got Them Post-Resurrection Blues Again

Second Sunday of Easter

            Feelings are notoriously difficult to put into words, aren’t they?  For example, we can explain why we’re happy – maybe we just got our IRS refund, or we had a great day with the family yesterday, or it’s finally feeling like Spring, or the Red Sox’ home opener is tomorrow and all things are possible, or maybe there’s not any particular reason for it, but we’re just happy.  But to try to explain what happiness feels like, what a good mood is, is a lot more difficult.  Is it the smile in my heart?  The feeling of lightness that lifts me up?  Does it qualify as sheer unadulterated happiness, quiet contentedness, ebullience, elation, ecstasy or euphoria?  How would you describe the feeling of happiness?  I think the only way we can convey that feeling is if the person we’re talking to has also felt the same way, and can identify with what we’re saying.

            The same goes for the flip side of happiness, that deep subjective feeling of melancholy or sadness that is sometimes called “the blues.”  People with real jobs talk about “the Monday morning blues,” though since Monday is my day off, I can’t imagine what they’re talking about.  But as it is with happiness, the blues are a tough feeling to explain or describe to somebody.  I mean, we all know what it means to be blue, to feel down in the dumps, to be bummed out, but what are the blues?  How do we describe them?  What makes us feel dispirited?  With April 15 mere days away, those of us who did not receive refunds probably don’t have to think too hard to be able to answer this question.  The blues are what you feel when that big family outing you’ve been planning suddenly falls through.  The blues are those stubborn piles of snow that just will not go away.  The blues are when you have to have your pet put to sleep.  The blues are when your partner in a business venture suddenly disappears, or when one of your closest friends dies.

            And if we can identify with either one of these last two examples, then we can understand how, when Jesus was suddenly gone from their company, and their lives, the disciples came down with a vigorous case of the blues.  Here was a small band of people with varying degrees of skills who coalesced around the one person who helped them discover the potential they had when they all worked together, who brought out the best in every one of them.  Not only were they good business partners, after a fashion, but they really enjoyed themselves when they were on the job together.  Jesus made them laugh, he made them think, he gave them work to do, and they achieved a real sense of satisfaction whenever they did the job right, and made him smile.  They certainly shared a good deal of affection for one another, and made lasting friends of people they would never have met had Jesus not brought them together in the first place.  It was a good group of people working together, doing good things for people all over the countryside.  And then, just as they were beginning to hit their stride as disciples, to understand the importance of their work and of Jesus’ deep and abiding love for all of them, he was gone.  Now that’s the blues.  There used to be a television commercial that said “It doesn’t get any better than this,” but for the disciples, I don’t think it was possible to get any worse.

            It might strike us, at first thought, that the flip side of the blues would be elation.  But if the blues are what follow after we’ve hit what seems to be our lowest point, consider what happens after we’ve reached our highest.  Not as we’ve reached our peak, but after - what comes in its wake.

            Several of you have told me you really liked the Children’s Message I gave a couple months ago when I brought our youth and some Scouts into the balcony and suggested we could all just sit up there for the rest of the service.  It’s a story that actually had its roots in a trip I took one summer of my college years, when some buddies and I went camping for a week in the White Mountains, and the highlight of the trip was going to be our climb up Mount Washington.  It was a drizzly morning, when the clouds were so low you couldn’t see even the first thousand of Mount Washington’s six thousand foot ascent.  And as we began our climb, you might say we were a little apprehensive, wet with the morning mist and wondering about the approachability, if not to say the existence, of the mountain peak none of us could see.  But up we trudged, and at about four thousand feet we finally broke through the cloud cover to a glorious, sunny vista, which, as a thoroughly inexperienced climber, I hadn’t even imagined.  Climbing closer to the top, we caught sight of other nearby peaks, not quite as tall, but each one poking its head through the clouds, offering a view that day unseen by the wet world below.  When we finally reached the pinnacle, we sat for a while, and rested, ate a leisurely lunch, cast our youthful self-satisfied sneers in the direction of those who drove to the top.  You’ve seen the bumper sticker that said, “This vehicle climbed to the top of Mount Washington?”  We wanted one that said “These legs climbed to the top of Mount Washington!”  We chatted with other climbers, and generally tried to put out of our minds the fact that we couldn’t really stay there; eventually, we had to descend.  You see, we knew what awaited us at the base of Mount Washington:  the same damp drizzly day we had left, our familiar and probably by now muddy campsite, the return to the everyday world we had left behind.  Sure, there were other mountains we intended to climb later that week, but none would be as majestic nor as satisfying as Washington, and each of us knew it.  So you can understand why our descent, when we finally undertook it, seemed to us a rather anticlimactic experience.  We had just climbed the highest peak in New England, and stood over six thousand feet closer to the sun.  Literally, it was all downhill from there.

            You’ve felt the same thing in the wake of the elaborate dinner party you’ve spent weeks preparing, or after that great trip to Disney World - who wants to go back to work when you’ve seen the enchanted kingdom?  It is inevitable, that whatever pinnacle we reach, whatever exaltation we’ve experienced, whatever comes in its immediate wake has to seem second rate, if even that.  It takes a while to escape the afterglow of such an experience, and as that interim time passes, anything else is simply blasé.  Mounts Liberty and Lincoln were spectacular in their own ways, but it took a few days’ distance from Washington for us to appreciate them.  After such intense and happy times, we tend to cope by simply going through the motions, trying to avoid the inevitable feeling of let-down.

            I used to think there was a deep theological or liturgical meaning to the term “Low Sunday,” an occasion which occurs twice a year: the Sunday after Christmas, and the Sunday after Easter.  But I have come to discover there is nothing theological about it - the “low” in “Low Sunday” simply refers to church attendance on those days, the levels of interest and of effort in getting ready for church the Sunday after Christmas and the Sunday after Easter.  And in a way it’s understandable, because it follows the pattern of so much else in life.  After the seven week preparation of Lent, the activities of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, sunrise Service and Easter morning, a lot of fine church-going people have hit their peak, and a case of those notorious post-resurrection blues tends to settle in.  After all, what could be more exhilarating than the victory over death of one of our own, Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary?  What could possibly surpass the resurrection for good news?  Once we have been to the pinnacle, seen the glory of Easter morning, heard the inspired hymns and anthems, inhaled the fragrance of the lilies, experienced the resuscitating word of the risen Christ and shouted our Alleluias in the midst of so many of our brothers and sisters we haven’t seen in quite some time, any other Sunday morning is bound to seem a little humdrum by comparison.  And I’ll confess right now that when I got to the office Tuesday morning, my first day back at work after Easter, I kind of puttered around, cleaning up the accumulated papers on my desk, catching up on a little reading, but not quite ready yet to move beyond the aura of a busy but immensely satisfying Holy Week.

            Of course, part of the reason for this might also have something to do with our own expectations.  Do we as a congregation find ourselves suffering a kind of let down, a benign case of the blues, because we know we can’t expect the Hallelujahs and the bulging balconies and a friendly game of connect-the-dots every week of the year?  In its own way, every Sunday is a “little Easter,” but maybe after the Big One we figure we’ve seen everything there is to see, so we may as well pack in and sleep in for a week or two.

            But we are here, aren’t we.  There are all kinds of remedies for the blues, but one of the best is simply meeting life straight on, and letting each day bring what it wants to bring.  With four different resurrection stories in the Bible telling us about what Jesus did on Easter and beyond, I think it is revealing to consider what Jesus did not do after the resurrection.  For example, he did not gather the downcast disciples into the Upper Room and give them a pep talk:  “Don’t worry Peter, skies are always darkest before the dawn.  And remember, James, into every life a little rain must fall.”  Don’t you just love advice like that?  It is a terrific way of saying something without saying anything at all.  But Jesus wasn’t known to waste people’s time with meaningless words.  Nor did he indulge the disciples’ self-pity:  “Go ahead, Bartholomew, tell me how you’re really feeling deep down inside - you’ll feel better if you get it all out.”  And notice that he doesn’t dodge the issue with an anecdote:  “You know, the same thing happened to my old uncle Zechariah, cut down in his prime by a Roman chariot - you’ll get over it too - eventually.”

            No, Jesus’ cure for the blues at the end of Luke takes seriously his disciples’ spiritual and emotional sense of despond.  First he let them see that he was for real.  He wasn’t an apparition, a product of collective wishful thinking.  The disciples were not deluding themselves that, well, yes, in some undefinable and ineffable way, Jesus is always present.  No, there is nothing ineffable about a fish, which is what Jesus ate in their midst.  They needed to know Jesus was there and was real, and he assured them of that.

            But he knew they needed more than reassurance, so Jesus gave them something to do.  Remember when Moses asked God for a little reassurance, God promised that the divine presence would be with him?  This wasn’t a kind of presence you could see, and Moses knew it, and God knew it, so God proved it by doing great things through Moses.  Food appeared as if from out of nowhere; water was drained from a rock; a company of thousands was sustained through a barren desert.  God worked through Moses.  Jesus worked, and works, through his disciples both then and now.  “Repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in my name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.  You are the witnesses of these things.”  The disciples have a job to do.  Jesus intends for us to keep busy, and by the fruit of our work his presence is known.

            What do you and I find when we descend from the mountaintop experience of Easter?  We find the Hernandez trial and the Tsarnaev trial.  We find a video of a police officer killing an unarmed black man, and a video of a black man shooting a police officer in the face.  We come back down into a world that cries out for justice and mercy; and so what do we do?  How are we living into this week that starts off with the so-called “Low Sunday?”  Like the disciples before us, we get busy doing the work by which the presence of God can be known.  And so this morning we are setting up to house homeless families in our church home for another week.  On Friday we will sit with the kids & staff at Recovery High School.  On Saturday night we will invite the community over for supper.  And on Tuesday and Wednesday nights we meet with the boards and committees that make so much of this happen.  We come down from the mountain.  Life goes on, and in the bright light of our mission and ministry the blue fog of despond gradually evaporates.

            Even though Easter is past, there is still a lot of work to be done in God’s world:  the work of justice, the work of prayer, the work of feeding and sheltering and loving...  The disciples didn’t wait around until they were in the mood to go out and do something for God, and they didn’t just move around in their old comfortable circle of friends.  In fact we know that a lot of their work was as decidedly uncomfortable as it was discomforting.  But it was work – it was hard work – it was good work:  it was just what the doctor ordered.  When we find ourselves singing the blues, we should look around and find ourselves something to do instead, because there’s a lot of good to be done out there, and Easter reminds us that we are among the best-equipped to do it.

            Let us pray.