*(Sorry to spoil this sermon for some of you, but I reckon this is one of the best and worst examples of theologically liberal preaching I’ve read for a long time. Hint: look for God in it. Rowland.)

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*April 8, 2007*

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*The Comfort of Reality*

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*By Harry T. Cook*

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/*Luke’s Easter Narrative*/

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It was about 7 a.m. on a very warm August 31, 1953, and I could hear my father calling upstairs to my sisters and me to come down for a family meeting. What he had to tell us was that our mother had died in the night after a horrendous battle with cancer. I was 14 at the time and not exactly clueless as to what the outcome of her sickness would be. So, while deeply saddened at the morning’s news, I was not unprepared for it. I cannot speak at this remove for what my sisters, then 11 and 7, had surmised.

Perhaps they had been taken in by the kindly intentioned but patronizing nostrums heaped upon us by helpful friends and relatives to the effect that “your mother will get better.” Any person not in denial could have looked upon my mother’s wasted body in the weeks before her death and have known different. But as it is so often with the human species, it seemed the better route to look at truth and call it falsehood, and at falsehood and call it truth.

Not satisfied with their attempt to lead us into believing that mother would somehow miraculously get better, some of the same friends and relatives, with our minister in the vanguard, bombarded us with assurances that mother was not really dead anyway, that she had gone home to be with Jesus, and we would see her again by and by. Either they really believed that stuff, or they were trying to make it easier on themselves in having to deal with three half-orphaned children.

It remained for our Aunt Marie, whom we affectionately called “Mamie,” to speak the truth to us. She told us that mother was dead and that her body would be buried up in the township cemetery and that we would have to live with the reality of never seeing her again. She told us further that she (Aunt Mamie) would love us for as long as */she /*lived and that she was sure our father would, too. And that was that.

Aunt Mamie had been raised a Catholic but had long since seen through the impossible illogic and injustice of its belief system. What she was, was a realist.

You would have to ask my sisters about their memories, but Aunt Mamie’s frank talk was the first and only thing that gave me comfort on that August 31. For once she didn’t cry. Aunt Mamie had tear glands that secreted at the drop of a cliché. But she looked us straight in the eye and, without a tear, said her piece. It made such sense, such common sense that I was able to go on to the tasks of the rest of the day, get through the gruesome funeral home rituals, the funeral itself and the burial two days later.

The following Tuesday, I boarded a bus that would take me to my first day as a high school freshman. I came to that experience chastened by the facts of life but strengthened by the realism imparted to me by my Aunt Mamie. I could now face geometry and Latin – their mysteries theretofore utterly unknown to me – with equanimity. If I could accept the tough reality that my mother was dead and I would never see her again, I could go on with the rest of what life would bring.

And that, my dear friends, is what the celebration of Easter is supposed to do for us: make us strong. The day is intimately associated with baptism – as it were a kind of splash of cold water in the face that gets one’s attention to a new set of facts.

The facts we’re concerned with today have to do with the courage to recover from sadness and disappointment and get on with one’s life. That courage does not come from without but from within – from within ourselves individually and collectively. That’s why we gather together on Easter as perhaps on no other occasion. We do that because we’re all we’ve got. That’s why after the shock and sadness of Good Friday, the disciples gathered back in their upper room. It was there they experienced what they went on to call the presence of their risen friend. They sensed it in each other.

My colleague and friend, Sherwin T. Wine, put it this way in a song he once wrote: /Where is my hope? My hope is in me, my hope is in me, and in you and in you. Where is my life? My life is in me, my life is in me and in you, and in you. Where is my truth? My truth is in me, my truth is in me, and in you and in you./

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.