Text — Mark 16:1-8

Easter is the traditional day for baptisms, because the meanings and symbols of Baptism and Easter are all tied up together.  It’s all about death and resurrection. We don’t actually push people underwater here in the sanctuary, but when we have baptisms out at Crystal Lake we do gently let people sink underwater to symbolize drowning, and then we raise them, resurrect them, into a new way of life.  Today, Samantha Lynn Truszkowski (who is about 5 months old) Abby Jane Heidorn (who is about 4 months old) will be baptized at the center of our Easter celebration.

Another metaphor associated with baptism comes from tree-grafting.  I know many of you are anxious to get out in your gardens if it ever stops snowing.  To get a more fruitful orchard, a common practice is to graft a branch from one tree onto another tree — one with a heartier root system.

So today, we are taking the tender, young lives of Samantha and Abby — 4 or 5 months old is about as fresh as you can get — and grafting them onto the life of the church with the idea that the church has a deeper, more nourishing, powerful root system than they can have on their own, or than their parents have on their own.  Of course, their parents have already been grafted on by their own baptism and membership in the church. 

The question is: What good will this baptism do for them?  How will it help them in the storms of life? 

In the Easter story we heard, the women are on their way to Jesus’ tomb.  And while they’re walking along, they ask themselves this question:  Who will roll away the stone for us?  In antiquity, tombs were often closed with a large stone disk, a very heavy one precisely so it couldn’t be moved easily. 

This morning, I want to give each of you a little time to think about what heavy stone you face in your life. What is the obstacle, or the dread, or emptiness, or immovable barrier, or heavy stone in your life that comes to mind?

While you’re thinking about that, I’ll say a little about two rather weighty stones we all have to deal with.  The first stone is the fear of failure.  This comes up especially in the first half of life. Notice that I said the fear of failure. Failing is something we all do.  It’s the price we pay for trying anything.  No one likes to fail.  But it’s the only way we get anywhere.  But the fear of failure is different.  A little fear is healthy, but too much fear of failure or rejection can be deadly.

We’re initiated into this fear early in life — not as early as 5 months, but soon enough.  Will I pass in school?  Will I be considered smart?  Will I be good enough to be a starter on the softball team?  Will my parents praise me? Will I have friends?  Will I be happy in love?  Will I make it?  Will I measure up? 

Abby and Samantha aren’t thinking these thoughts yet.  But soon, to use another Biblical metaphor involving a tree, they will see and eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, their eyes will be opened, and they will think such thoughts and feel such fears. 

Some of the heaviest stones we run into are addictions (from medicating our fears), obsessions (perhaps to distract us from pain or fears), family breakdowns, infidelity, divorce, debt, bankruptcy, losing your job, getting trapped in a job that drains the life out of you.  These touch all of us, and they all involve in some way the fear of failure, of not being good enough, of being left out, or left behind, or missing out on what could be.

By the time we’re at the half way point in life, we’ve failed a lot, so it loses some of its sting.  In the second half of life, the heavy stone that comes more into focus is the fact that we’re going to die.

Now, we can say that death is no big deal.  It, too, is just part of the way things are.  We all have to do it.  At least you can’t count death as another failure.  But it is a big deal.

Dealing with death, avoiding death, postponing death, preparing for death, trying to leave something worthwhile behind after death, preparing for what comes after death — this is what all human life, human culture, and religion, are about — not just Christianity.

Probably our major tool in dealing with death is denial.  I’m not about to die.  It’s a long way off.  So, we eat our fruits and vegetables, cut back on sugar, fat, and salt.  We work out.  We try to stay healthy, forever.  I recommend these practices, and we need a certain amount of denial. But denial has its cost. Denying the inevitability of sickness and death is also a way of taking health and life for granted.

We all dread a long, drawn out, painful, dying process for ourselves, but look what’s happening in the Terri Schiavo case.  She’s been unconscious, on a feeding tube, for 15 years. We’re not very good, as a society, at dealing with death.

But even more, we fear what death means.  Does the fact that we die mean that life is an exercise in futility?  Think of all the effort we put out, all our struggles, all our work to make the world a little better place — are these just sand castles we build on a beach, and then the waves wash them away without a trace?

Speaking of heavy stones, I can’t help but think here of the ancient Greek story about a man named Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned to a lifetime of rolling a large stone up a high hill, only to have it roll back down again, and then his job was to roll it back up, over and over — the ultimate exercise in futility. Is that how life is?

I don’t see life that way.  And the reason I don’t see it that way is because of the Christian faith, the root system that I was grafted onto as a very small child.

Samantha and Abby aren’t thinking about these things — yet.  But they will think about them.  We see the religious faith of children awakening powerfully around age 5 or 6 or 7. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that this is also when children start to think about failure and death. 

What greater gift could we possibly give to these two little girls — apart from just loving them  — than teaching them how to deal with all the heavy stones they too will have to face.

What is a heavy stone in your life?  Who will roll away the stone — for any of us? 

Life gives us hard work to do.  We fail in many ways.  But we don’t have to roll every stone by our own power.  But it’s not our job to do everything.  It’s not our job isn’t to make the world a perfect place — whatever that would be.  It’s not our job to make everyone around us happy all the time, including our parents and our spouses. 

Easter people, resurrection people, believe that all the heavy stones in our lives need to be seen in relation to the bigger picture and a higher power. The bigger picture is too big to really “see” in any finished or final way. But there is a big picture.  In the church, we call it the love of God.  We call it mercy, grace, eternal life, the great “I am.”

This is what Easter is about.  This is the faith that washes over us in baptism.  This is the faith we eat and drink in the Eucharist. The really big stones, the immovable ones, God will roll away. This is the gospel.  Blessed are all who hear it and believe.