Flood.1997.Pendleton.HISTORY David K. Miller March 30, 1997 Easter Sunday Mark 16:1-8 The mud that accompanied the Great Flood of 1997 stayed behind even after the waters of chaos returned to safe limits within the orderly banks of the Licking River. Even now, almost a month later, the mud stubbornly sticks around. Despite all our efforts to shovel it out and haul it off, to push it away and get rid of it once and for all, it is still here. It's still on some of the boots belonging to my family members, lined up on our front porch: Papa Bear's boots, Mama Bear's boots, and Keifer Bear's boots (I'd better not call him "Baby Bear," or he will get me). It's still in my car; I decided the first day that I couldn't keep taking off and putting on my boots each time I got into my car. It stains the very alb that I wear for today's worship service. When it is wet, it is slick as glass, causing me to fall down and eat a bit of it. When it dries out, it blows around town like the Dust Bowl, and I taste it and breathe it. Sometimes I think it has been absorbed into my very soul. Composed of some unlucky up-river farmer's top soil and an unknown percentage of fecal matter, this stuff carries disease, breeds mold spores, and gets hard as a brick when it finally dries up completely. It symbolizes for me the very quintessence of all that is corrupt and nasty and fallen about God's creation. But, like those women who, according to one reading of today's Gospel, hesitantly and fearfully reported that Jesus' tomb was empty, I have a witness this morning. The mud on the lawn of St. Francis Xavier' Church has not yet been shoveled away. It's been packed down by people walking on it, but it's still at least three inches thick. That mud, as bad as it is, has been overcome, not by burly men with shovels, buckets, and wheelbarrows, but by single blades of grass, which have poked their heads up through that mud, just as God has designed. As bad as the crisis may be (and I think there are some pretty bad crises facing humanity today), God has designed the creation so that life has the edge over death, even when it is not readily apparent that such is the case. As bad as some scientists thiny in this regard), the last space shuttle mission brought back evidence that the earth is a self-regulating organism, that it is compensating for the warming by cooling itself naturally. God has designed the universe so that life has the edge over death. God has designed the universe so that life will flourish even in the most hostile of environments. Deep under the ocean's surface, where sunlight never reaches, from the crack caused by continents moving away from one another, there spews a constant eruption of superheated steam and the poisonous gases of sulfur and heavy metals. Combined with the incredible pressure of two miles of water overhead, these areas, known as black smokers, are as inhospitable as I can imagine. Yet, life exists there that could exist nowhere else in the universe, life that is based on intense pressure, darkness, incredible heat, and poison gases. God has designed the universe so that life has the edge over death. And in those situations where death seems to overtake life, God promises that this will not be the final word. When the mud covers the town, God promises that life has the edge over death. When things are so inhospitable that it seems that nothing good can come of it, God promises that lifene came to rescue him: not Elijah, not the angels, not even God's own self came to his aid. And so it was that he was dead, stone cold dead. But when it seemed that all was lost, even death couldn't hold God's Son. The small tree that is pushing up through the asphalt of my driveway is nature's way of saying, "No, I will not stay down." The grass pushing its way up through the mud is a proclamation that life has the edge over death. The life that has developed in the most inhospitable of environments give glory to God's design of life. And the suffering servant who was executed by the state, and who rose up out of the tomb to be ordained the Son of God, is God's own Word that life is not swallowed up in death, but that death is swallowed up in victory. He is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! David K. Miller dkmiller@one.net http://w3.one.net/~dkmiller Contributed by: harry miller Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1997