Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. W. Matthew Broadbent

United Church of Christ Easter Sunday – 10:30 a.m.

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos, CA 94022 April 8, 2007

IS THIS ALL THERE IS

John 20:1-10

I recently heard the distinguished philosophers, Paul and Patricia Churchland, speak about the nature of “mind.” They ascribe to a reductionist view of the world that says all experience of the mind, including what we call transcendence and soul, can be reduced to biological functions of the brain. They look at brain research and conclude it is all a matter of biology. That is all there is.

Richard Dawkins makes the same claim in his book “The God Delusion.” He goes further to say that religion is not only a figment of our imagination, it is in fact, the promoter of the greatest evils perpetrated on the earth. Religion fuels wars, foments bigotry, and abuses children. “You can be an atheist,” he writes, “who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled.” And you know what? He is right.

A modern world no longer needs a supernatural creative intelligence to make sense of things. There is no need for a soul that lasts beyond the brief flicker of our life. We can do quite well on our own, thank you very much. We believe in the individual, the self-made, self-formed, person. I am responsible for my own being in the world. There is nothing that is real except what we can see, taste, and touch. The modern world is dedicated to the principal that there is no reality, nothing afoot, other than what we can see. To become a mature adult means to be the sort of person who is able to say, “Well, this is all there is. What you see is what you get. Either take it or leave it.”

Most of us, as we grow up, learn to take it rather than leave it. We take the world, asking only that we have the guts to take the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. What we see is what we get. And there is a certain dignity, a kind of courage to not whine, to not console ourselves with fairy tales, and to live on the basis of what appears before us is what it is. This is all there is. Live with it.

Every time reality is described in this way I hear Peggy Lee singing in the back of my mind, in her smoky, half-shnockered barroom voice, “Is that all there is my friend, then let’s keep dancing, and break out the booze and have ball.” And I want to go screaming into the night.

I don’t know about you, but I need something more – especially hope – in my life- that my life has meaning, value. I want to see more than the empty dark hole of death. I want to see – really see – I want to see something that does justice to the complexities of vision.

How do we see? And how do we come to know what is real?

You don’t have to live very long before you realize that what you see might not necessarily be what there is. The brain filters out so many of the visual impressions we see. What we see seems to be connected to some sort of template in the brain. When sensory images are fed in through the optic nerve the brain sorts through its collection of previously experienced images, makes matches, fits what we see into a pattern, and we are led to say, “There it is! That’s a tree.” Thus we are somewhat justified in saying, “If you have seen one tree, that enables you to see them all.”

And yet what does the brain do with things that don’t fit into previously experienced patterns? Macrina Weiderkehr, in her book “A Tree Full of Angels,” tells of a young girl, blind from birth who, who miraculously receives sight through a revolutionary new surgical technique. When her bandages were removed she was placed by a window and told she was looking at a tree. What do you see? “Oh,” she said, “Someone has hung bright lights in the branches.” Her brain had not adjusted foreground and background so that she saw light shining through as the dominant image, and the branches as background. “It looks like a tree full of angels.”

What if our seeing is sometimes limited by what we assume we’ll see, or have the courage to see? What if it is not so much a matter of “you get what you see,” but also a matter of “you see what you expect?”

Thus, Mary Magdalene appeared at the tomb of Jesus early Easter morning. When she saw that the huge stone at the door of the tomb had been rolled away, and that the tomb was empty, she immediately saw what had happened. Obviously someone had stolen the body of Jesus and she did not know where they had put him. Even when an angel appears and asks her why she is weeping, Mary still says that someone has stolen the body of Jesus.

It is not until Jesus himself appears to Mary and calls her by name that she begins to see. Even then, she at first thinks that the risen Christ is a gardener. Mary just can’t get out of her mind that she is at a cemetery, a place of death and loss. She can’t refocus her eyes, even when an angel - even when the risen Christ is standing in front of her.

I see humor in this scene. This is God’s little joke, like tapping Mary on the shoulder only to see turns the other way and not see anyone. I find no humor in the intellectual-reductionist models of the universe. Divine humor takes an appreciation of surprise and complexity, which is why I don’t find any humor in religious certainty, either.

Consider for a moment what prompts us to laugh. Martin Copenhaver (Journal for Preachers, Easter 2007). “Philosophers, psychologists, and literary theorists have all taken a stab at defining what makes something funny. Some have produced elaborate theories. Aristotle wrote at length about humor. Sigmund Freud wrote a whole book on the subject called Jokes and the Unconscious, which is a stiflingly humorless book, but it does contain what Freud called his favorite joke: A husband says to his wife: “Dear, if one of us should die, I think I will live in Paris.” That’s about as good as the book gets. Anyway, among all these great thinkers, and others who have addressed the subject of humor, there is no particular consensus on what makes something funny, no comprehensive theory that encompasses the variety of things that make us laugh. But there is at least one recurring theme: much humor is based on surprise, on the reversal of expectations.”

I live with that all the time. I have a dog, you see. His name is Willoughby and he is very smart. I took him to a talent agent one day and said, “You got to see this, my dog can talk. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll ask him a question: Willoughby, what do you call the thing on top of the house?” Willoughby said, “Roof!”

The talent agent asked me to leave, but I said, wait. “Willougby, what is the texture of sandpaper?” “Rough,” he said.

“Enough, get out of my office. You’re killing me.”

“Hold on. One more chance. You will be really impressed, I promise. “Willoughby, who is the greatest baseball player in history.” And Willoughby (I swear to you) said, “Ruth! Ruth!”

“That’s it. I’ve had enough!” And he threw us out the door. We stumbled down the steps. I frowned at Willoughby, and he looked up at me with those soulful, questioning eyes, and said, “Dimaggio?”

Surprise, you see, is the reversal of expectation, a sudden upending of the usual order of things. And this is the stock and trade of Jesus, the theme of much of the Bible, and what makes Easter such a kick – things aren’t what you expect.

Mary comes to the tomb to be bored to tears with the same old, same old story of death and despair only to be surprised by Life itself.

And how can I, a reasonably intelligent, modern person stand up here and proclaim a faith in resurrection when all the evidence is to the contrary? It is because of the evidence. Something shocked, surprised and empowered these women at the tomb and the disciples in hiding to come out of the closet and declare an amazing, absurd, and courageous faith in the great joke of the risen Christ. The late Joseph Campbell put it well when he said “[Humor] is a leap into the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.” And doesn’t that describe exactly what Easter is all about, “a leap into… the inexhaustible joy of life invincible.”

Is that all there is? I hope so.