Video Clip from Flatliners...

"Today is a good day to die."

Until we can feel what it's like

to lose someone near and dear to us...

as long as we are able

to keep death at an arm's distance,

we have nothing but an intellectual appreciation

for the resurrection.

I'm going to not play fair.

Children have been burying their parents for a long time.

It is nothing new.

This week, Wednesday,

at a homeowners association meeting

in a retirement village near Phoenix,

a former resident burst in

and began firing a handgun.

When that gun jammed and would no longer fire

he moved to the rifle he was carrying.

Before he could aim to fire

he was tackled by a resident of the community

and wrestled down.

The bullets he sent flying struck several residents,

leaving one person dead and several injured.

The person whose life was taken,

Nina Lynn,

is the mother of Dave Lynn,

a member of our church.

Dave and his family are in Phoenix.

Services will be tomorrow,

They will be back sometime this week

and will need us to be the church

and care for them.

It came so suddenly.

Parents have been burying children for a long time.

It is nothing new.

Leslie and Ted Dawdy

gave birth to a baby girl this last year.

They named her Boston.

The third child to the couple.

25 weeks into the pregnancy Leslie told Ted,

"Were in big trouble."

Leslie had a virulent infection;

the baby did too,

and after 12 hours in delivery, was born 1.6 pounds.

Leslie said,

"My knees buckled,

I knew she was not going to be ok."

The baby had severe hemorrhaging in her brain.

The nurses knew she wasn't going to make it.

After several days of agonizing

and trying to help this child,

after meeting with doctors and nurses

and the hospital chaplain,

the Dawdy's decided to take Boston off life support.

They also decided they wanted Ryan and Amanda,

Boston's brother and sister,

there,

present.

Boston was baptized and removed from the apparatus,

gently washed and dressed.

She lived six more hours,

in which her family was able to hold her,

love her...

And then, in silence,

she slipped away.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.
So many plans, so much anticipation,

gone.

Leslie talks about Ryan and Amanda... said,

"It will shape them from deep within.

They won't take things for granted.

Now I prize happy noise.

Before it was just noise.

I value my family.
I value our friends.
I see them all as gifts from God."

Now I believe we are ready to hear the gospel for today.

Read Mark 16:1-8

I am in need of repair in my life.

Actually it is my 67 Volvo Sport Coupe 1800s

that is in need of repair.

Just one part.

So I went searching...

I was on the NW side of town

to visit a man who is in the final stages of lung cancer

and as I came back

I stopped by several of the wrecking yards that sprawl

out east of the freeway north of Ruthrauff.

I was looking to find what I needed

among old bones.

It's always a little fascinating to look at wrecked cars

and think about the people who owned them.

At one time each of them was new,

the shining pride of a person with a bit of money.

It's always a little sad,

to wonder about lives

that were snuffed out

or changed radically in those cars...

and now they were here,

broken.

It is possible in a wrecking yard

to see inside cars...

because of the tearing away

of cloth and carpet used to cover things.

Because the cosmetic parts are removed.

I was amazed at how far someone went

to make their car look and drive normal....

ingenious uses of bailing wire and plywood and bondo

to cover over evidence of wear and aging.

I went looking for what I need

among the scrap of the past.

And, and...   and...

I remember one of the cars I saw was a Buick LeSabre....

which launched my mind...

and so I sat up on the fender

and remembered...

I had just moved to Iowa to start my formal training,

graduate schooling.

Was pastor to 3 small country churches.

One of them was out on a curvy paved road.

It used to be a town,

but now is a few houses and a church.

My second week there

I received a call that Carl Hardisty had died.

I drove out to the farm.

A beautiful farm just off the paved road,

on a curve with a lot of old oak trees

that had been there for a lot of years.

Hazel Hardisty became a widow suddenly

when Carl went out to check on things in the barn

and had a heart attack.

He was only sixty-seven

and had big plans.

He had done well in the recent hard years

and had bought out two flat-broke neighboring farmers.

Just the summer before

he had put up three new Butler storage units

for all the field corn he expected to harvest.

Hazel told me he was into improving things...

always getting ready to add a few acres,

lease a bigger combine,

or drain the wet spot

that never yielded what it should.

He was a good farmer,

and usually a lucky one.

Carl's plan was to

sell out to some agribusiness

and move to Florida when he was seventy.

When I arrived

there was a rush of tears.

Then she dried her eyes,

looked squarely at me,

and said,

"He always had a plan for everything."

She hiccuped a little laugh and added,

"But not for this."

She shed more tears

and asked me whether I thought

she should still go to Florida

or stay on the farm.

I told her not to decide anything important

for a few months.

As I climbed into my car,

I saw looming through the salt-smeared windshield

Carl's three shiny new Butler storage units.

I thought of the story in Luke's Gospel

about the rich man

whose land brought forth plentifully

and who built bigger barns

and sat back in self-satisfaction

and said to his soul,

"Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years;
take your ease, eat, drink, be merry"

(i.e., buy a condo in Fort Lauderdale).

But then God says (as He still often does),

"Fool! This night your soul is required of you;
and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" (Luke 12:13-21)

Well, in this case,

they were all going to be Hazel's,

who could have cared less.

She had been to Florida

and thought that it was too hot

and even flatter than Iowa.

She never really wanted to move,

but Carl had always planned on it.

Thursday night of that week

I was struck down with the flu:

the shakes, headache, sore throat, and worse...

every preacher's dreaded plague--

laryngitis.

By Friday noon I could only croak monosyllables,

like "Vicks."

It was as though Divine Wisdom had foreknowledge

(even before I had the knowledge)

of what I was going to say on Sunday

and decided to strike me dumb.

There was only one thing to do,

unfortunately,

and that was to call on the only spare preacher

in a radius of fifty miles

who would climb into a pulpit on such short notice:

the Rev. Lex Ardent.

He is a retired clergyman

who spent his working days as an evangelist

on what was left of the old Sawdust Trail,

the tent meeting preaching circuit

that is the ancestor of television ministry.

His church is called the

Apostolic Church of the Divine Christ in God,

which broke off from a splinter group of a sect

whose name includes all the same words

somehow arranged in a different sequence.

I knew Lex because

he showed up at the house to greet me

when I moved in,

and offered his services.

He moved here when he retired six years before

to live with his son, Reg.

Lex's theology had been strongly influenced

by the woollier and more wild-eyed of the Old Testament prophets

and their thundering against idolatry, corruption,

and all sins of the flesh.

From this point in the Bible,

Lex's religious thinking did a graceless leap over the Gospels

and landed squarely in the Book of Revelation.

I came to discover that Lex only preaches one sermon.

He had gotten away with this

over his forty-five year career in itinerant evangelism

because he had been forever moving

from one tent meeting to the next.

If the Sawdust Trail happened to

bring him back to the same town again,

Lex believed that

a person who heard his sermon a second time,

he could assume that it had not worked the first time

and they could well stand to hear it again.

Lex's lone sermon was about the Rapture,

that mysterious doctrine

beloved by those of an apocalyptic spirit.

This doctrine says that

at the Second Coming of Christ,

all true and faithful followers

(liberally numbered at 144,000)

will be plucked live and whole

from wherever they happen to be

at that unexpected moment

and whisked into the Kingdom.

Kind of a salvation on the grading curve.

On the rear of his rusty blue Buick LeSabre,

Lex had a bumper sticker that says:

IN CASE OF RAPTURE, DRIVER WILL DISAPPEAR.

That bumper sticker is the core of Lex's theology

and pretty much the whole point of his sermon.

In the sermon,

Lex paints a dozen verbal pictures

of people gathered together in various places,

from which one of them--

always only one --

would suddenly and without warning disappear:

People are waiting in line at the supermarket,

and all of the sudden

the checkout girl is gone--

the Rapture!

Kids sitting in school and,

without a hint of what is to come--

a seventh grader in the second row

vanishes--

the Rapture!

Folks are shopping at Sears and

suddenly the guy standing in the auto parts line

is simply gone,

leaving behind him

the two brand-new radial tires

he'll no longer be needing--

the Rapture!

Then, in darker tones

sharpened over the years to a sinister edge,

Lex would describe a church service:

worshipers gathered on a Sunday morning,

and only ONE of them is "Raptured,"

actually hinting that the one

may not have been the preacher.

Lex is a master:

he launches his sermon slowly and quietly

and then climbs gradually into sermonic frenzy.

It is, of course,

designed to scare the bejabbers

out of his listeners,

most of whom

on brief self-evaluation

count themselves among

"Those Left Behind,"

as Lex names them.

When Lex preached his sermon this Sunday,

I was there,

being too ill and mute to preach myself;

but not sick enough to stay home in bed.

The day found Lex in fine form.

As he preached,

he wandered away from the pulpit,

waved his hands about,

and pointed theatrically in the direction of the ceiling.

He has no need for notes after all these years.

Lex worked slowly into his great crescendo,

jabbing at the heavens with both index fingers,

painting pictures of lukewarm Sunday-only Christians

with disappointed looks on their faces

as they watched the few and the true

swept up in the Rapture.

All of this was a great novelty

to the politely attentive congregation

of United Methodists,

who rarely let themselves

get swept up in anything.

After twenty-five minutes of this,

Lex ended his sermon by slicing the air with his fingers,

closing his eyes,

and fairly shouting,

"Thank God, thank God,

thank God that it is not too late

for anyone in this room!"

When he sat down,

he looked exhausted.

Sweat was pouring down his temples.

('Course, he was wearing a suit in mid-summer...)

He pulled out a handkerchief

and mopped his brow.

Then he closed his eyes,

threw his head back,

and stretched his legs out in front of him.

His tongue wagged out of his mouth.

I thought he had died

and almost went over to take his pulse.

Lex had told me

he liked the sermon to be the last thing

in the service,

except for a closing hymn.

He pretty much struggled to his feet to sing it,

pushing himself up from the big mahogany preacher's chair.

His eyes were still half closed,

as though he had not yet descended

from his preaching high.

Lex had picked the hymn

"Come, Lord, and Tarry Not."

It was not a familiar hymn,

so most of the sound was coming from the direction of the choir:

The choir,

eight ladies and one gentleman,

recesses out of the church

during the closing hymn.

If they were to exit out the center aisle,

they'd find themselves going out the front doors

and into 100 degree weather.

So they leave the choir loft,

which is up front on the left,

march across the back of the chancel

behind the communion table

and out the rear door,

down the steps and into the basement,

and head straight for

the coffee pot and brownies.

This is a direct but narrow path

with one hazard --

a wooden heating grate in the floor

directly behind the big oak communion table.

The grate measures two and a half feet square.

It is made of pine

and is just set in the hole in the floor

that opens to the heating duct below.

The duct bends at a right angle

about three feet down

before continuing on to the old hot-air furnace.

Evelyn Bowers,

a soprano,

was new to the choir.

She is a small woman

and gives herself another three inches of height

by wearing those spiked high-heeled shoes

that faded from fashion twenty years ago.

As she passed over the heating grate

that Sunday morning,

her right heel went into one of the little square holes

and lodged there tight.

The processing choir,

hymnbooks in front of their faces and open,

slowed as Evelyn tugged to free her foot.

I guess the shoes were old and tight.
Her shoe stayed on

and the heel didn't break off.

On her third and mighty pull,

Evelyn lifted the whole grate

(which wasn't so heavy)

right out of the duct and moved on,

trooper that she is,

walking as if she'd been shot in the leg

but was trying not to notice.

She said later that

she didn't want to cause a distraction.

Right behind her was Elsie Johnson,

who,

to put it kindly,

does not have a keen awareness

of her immediate environment.

She can see all right;

she just never seems to notice things.

I turned to see

if Lex had noticed Evelyn plowing along,

determined to make it to the rear door

as if nothing at all had happened.

He looked over to watch

just as Elsie Johnson stepped

right where the grate wasn't.

She gave a little squealing "Whoop!"

and just disappeared from sight

behind the communion table.

Lex dropped his jaw in a flabbergasted gape.

His eyes went wide,

his hymnbook slipped from his hand,

and then he shut his eyes tight:

THE RAPTURE!

Still in the grip of his sermonic euphoria,

he saw before his very eyes

the scene he had been putting into words

for forty-five years.

Elsie had been taken

and Lex was left behind!

This state of flabbergasted misapprehension

lasted for perhaps four seconds.

I am sure it was the longest four seconds

in Lex's life.

Then his look shifted from horror

to befuddlement

to immense relief.

He closed his eyes

and mouthed what was surely

a prayer of earnest thanksgiving

that the Apocalypse was delayed.

Elsie hadn't even fallen over,

but rather stepped square into the duct

and went down the three feet

to where it turns horizontal.

There wasn't a scratch on her,

and to this day,

I'm not sure that she's clear as to just what happened.

It happened so suddenly.

A dozen people ran to her rescue.

They fished her out

and dusted her off.

She's fine.

I thought about this

sitting on the LeSabre in the junkyard...

refreshing again my mental picture

of those four seconds in Lex's life --

it again became a great joy to me.

But I also realized that

I'm just as afraid of death as Lex.

I thought of Carl Hardisty,

who had put up three new Butler bins one day

and was gone the next.

I thought of Elsie

vanishing with a "Whoop!"

into the floor behind the communion table...

and thought of all the dear hearts

who have vanished just as suddenly from my sight:

I didn't find what I came looking for

in that junk yard.

A clock-watcher might say

I wasted about 90 minutes searching.

But maybe not.

Maybe I got what I needed...

I tell you all this...

About death coming suddenly to parents,

and death coming suddenly to children...

about disappearing through the floor...

and a man who was scared to death

he'd been left behind...

To get at our fear...

for that is the last word in this gospel,

the final verdict on the meaning of Easter

in the gospel of Mark --

afraid!

Mark says,

"So [the women] went out

and fled from the tomb,

for terror and amazement had seized them;

and they said nothing to anyone,

for they were afraid."

The other gospel writers,

Matthew, Luke and John

all end the story

of the resurrection

by telling more stories

of resurrection appearances,

of warm reunions, and joy.

Mark doesn't have any of that.

He says that,

even though the women were told to

"Go!" and to "Tell!"

by the man in white...

they didn't

because they were afraid.

Maybe Mark wants us

to think about the good news at Easter

as not only joyful, majestic, and glorious

but also as fearful...

something to be afraid of.

The women felt fear.

We all have various resources

for dealing with death

however it comes...

and our fear of it...

But I believe the fear

these women felt

lay even deeper than this.

If Jesus,

the one who was knocked off

by conspiring government and religious leaders...

the one who had been crushed

by the forces of evil...

if this Jesus was now raised,

vindicated by a mighty act of God

and raised to life,

if God had stepped in

and mightily reversed the whole march of time...

if God had rewritten human history

and placed life into the dead Jesus,

then the women knew enough to know that

everything in the world had been turned upside down

and nothing would ever be the same again.

Jesus had been raised

which means God has the last word...

For Nina Lynn...

for Boston Dawdy...

for Carl Hardisty...

for all those dears who slipped away suddenly...

For 18 high school kids in Columbine, Colorado...

one year ago last Friday...

God has the last word...

The facts of life and death

are turned on their head.

And the women,

and us,

finally,

have something to really fear...

Because God's absence is much easier to handle

than God's presence.

Here's the point of today...

the women came out to the tomb

thinking that the story had ended,

that it was all over.

To their surprise,

and even to their great fear,

they found that things were not over.

The last word had yet to be spoken.

And the last word was God's.

When you can be clear on that,

and content with that,

then you are ready

to become a spiritual being...

And I don't know how

you can possibly walk out of here

in the same way that you came in.

We're going to offer anointing today...

anointing is a mark...

it is to offer oneself

to be marked

and set apart

for God's use.

It is to say,

"I walk through my fear...

and offer my values,

my purpose,

my voice,

my life...

I offer myself

to be a vessel for God's use...

because the last word

belongs to God."