“Open Ended” — a fine sermon for Easter season

A sermon preached by the Rev. Leighton Lee in St Mark’s, Niagara on the Lake on Sunday, March 31, 2024

Mozart’s Great C Minor Mass is one of the iconic unfinished masterworks in the canon of Western music. Yet even though it’s unfinished, it’s oddly complete, too. So I was dubious when I was invited a few years ago to a Boston performance of a version which had been completed by the noted Harvard musicologist Robert Levin. I needn’t have been. Before the concert, Dr Levin gave a lecture in which he explained not only his rationale for finishing the mass, but also a description of how he did it by either fleshing out the fragmentary sketches Mozart left for the incomplete movements, or by using themes from a cantata Mozart composed at the same time as the mass. Even though his imagination and daring were breathtaking, Levin admittedly said that Mozart built in marble and he built in plywood. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t worthy. The New York Times called it, “A glorious, fully Mozartean vision of a complete Mass, most of it Mozart’s in one way or another, and the rest of it as inspired a guess as we’re likely to hear.”

Now, Levin’s effort is a fascinating musicological project. But it’s also a beguiling reflection on how we don’t like to have things unfinished. We want to know how the story ends. So how do we square this with this morning’s celebration which tells us that history—your history, my history—is still unfinished?

Which reminds me of something Harvey Cox, another noted Harvard scholar, once said: “History does not take place between the black noon of Good Friday and the bright dawn of Easter. It takes place, rather, between Easter Day and the Last Day.” At the open tomb we gain a vision of the eternal that gives us a new perspective on history. Pilate crucified Jesus and put a period after the deed. But God changed that period to a comma, for the story was to be continued when he raised Jesus from the dead.

This is why Mark’s account of the resurrection is an appropriate one because it’s anything but finished. It ends abruptly, in medias res. Why? Did he mean it to end like this? Was a page somehow lost? Or, since he was writing during the first persecution of Christians, did he suddenly have to get up from his writing table and flee for his life? Whatever happened, his gospel doesn’t have an end in the traditional sense and that says something important to you and me.

It says that Christ’s resurrection is an ongoing reality. I said a moment ago that our history—and not just our personal history, but our communal history, too—is unfinished. Which means that we must learn to live with ambiguity, and that can be unsettling. We often talk about “needing closure”: some definitive, unmistakable line drawn under this event or the other. And there’s no doubt that when it comes to all kinds of normal human situations, closure is important. But there’s nothing particularly normal—or human!—about the resurrection.

An ancient writer tried to give closure to Mark’s gospel, mind you, adding several verses describing Christ’s appearance to the Apostles, his sending them out into the world, and his Ascension. Clearly, he was as uncomfortable as we are with loose ends.

But a loose end is also something that simply hasn’t been tied off, a thread that is still to be woven into a larger pattern. Loose ends mean that there are new possibilities yet to come. Life, even resurrection life, is open ended: still happening, still evolving, still being revealed. So often we think of resurrection as being an open and shut case when it’s actually a shut and open case, an ongoing reality which you and I are part of.

And while this is an exciting prospect, it’s also frightening, for if things are always on the move, never finished, that perforce means that we will never be able to settle down, which, we’re told, is what we should be trying to do. Lots of people have accepted this as an unshakeable axiom. “I know where I stand,” they say. But standing hasn’t much to do with the angel’s statement that he is going before you into Galilee.

True, it can be hard to see the risen Christ clearly; he is sometimes too far along the path for that. But we can perceive powerful traces of his presence in the world, in the lives of those who have dared to walk out ahead of us and have discovered the joy of what it is to be truly alive to the possibilities that are within themselves—within life itself—and which are waiting to be explored. Or in the miracle of new life which in the spring bursts forth from the wintery earth brimming with beauty and vitality. Or in the courage people find even in the face of personal disappointments and bleak diagnoses.

In other words, resurrection is about constantly moving forward into a future where we the risen One is waiting to be encountered. But even more than this, it’s about discovering the ways we’re called to continue in the here-and-now the story that began in the garden with the empty tomb all those Easters ago. And, just as Robert Levin built in plywood and not marble, the resurrection lives we build now will be temporal and not eternal, we have enough fragments of Christ’s life to help us build something that’s worthy of the astonishing miracle we’re celebrate and anticipate today—if only we have the imagination and daring to do so.

And imagination and daring are what’s needed these days, living as we do in the darkness of the sepulcher, sealed in by the notion that nothing can ever—need ever—change. But if we have the courage to trust the voice that bids us take up the fragments of grace and glory that we have, and continue working and writing and weaving the resurrection story into our own, we don’t need be tentative or be frightened. All we need to do is walk out of the sepulcher’s darkness into the garden’s dazzling light which broke on this world early this morning all those years ago.

Write that Easter light into your lives, my dear friends. Have faith and keep on writing. Don’t let the story end—that is, of course, until it ends in the New Jerusalem and at the Supper of the Lamb. But that ending of course will be just the beginning—the beginning of the new life in Christ which will never end.

Italics mine KJG