The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
April 28th, 2019
Easter II (C): Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 150; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31
66 million years ago the Earth was struck by a meteor the size of Mt. Everest. It was traveling about 67,000 miles per hour and hit just off the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico where there now sits a crater that is over 100 miles wide. It’s impact sent 25 trillion metric tons of debris into the air, some of it escaping the gravitational pull of the Earth and floating all the way to Mars and the moons of Saturn. The debris that didn’t escape fell back to earth, super-heating on the way down such that it was literally raining fire, setting 70% of the world’s forests ablaze. Computer models estimate that the energy released was more than a billion Hiroshima bombs. 
The collision sent shock waves through the earth’s crust-creating undulating earthquakes and turning the ground into a trampoline. Winds at the impact site were upwards of 600 mph and were accompanied by sonic booms louder than anything ever heard on earth before. Tsunamis twice as tall as the empire state building tore inland hundreds of miles and volcanoes were sent into overdrive. But the damage was only just beginning. The dust from the impact and the soot from the fires prevented sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface for years. Starved of sun, plant life—both on land and in the oceans—shut down, causing the collapse of almost all major food chains and reducing the amount of oxygen in the air to almost nothing. After the fires died down, the Earth was plunged into a nuclear winter. Scientists estimate, that over the next thousand years about seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct including, most famously, the dinosaurs who had ruled the earth for over 150 million years. In total more than 99.9 percent of all the living organisms on the Earth died. Those not killed by the impact and resulting catastrophes either starved or were poisoned by the toxic water and air, because when the meteor struck it released a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, a billion tons of carbon monoxide and ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds into the atmosphere. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as acid rain. And the release of those powerful greenhouse gasses meant that when the sun finally did poke through the clouds the earth went from deep freeze to global oven. In short, 66 million years ago life on Earth almost came to an abrupt end. For hundreds, maybe even a thousand years after the impact the only living things to be found were algae and fungus, maybe some ferns, a very few minor reptiles and mammals, and some lucky marine creatures.[1] Earth was a post-apocalyptic wasteland. According to paleontologist and author of the recent best-seller, “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs,” Steve Brusatte, “It was the worst day in the history of our planet.”[2]
I was reading about the devastation of the meteor hitting our planet a few weeks ago as we were making our way through a different sort of devastation, one more spiritual than biological. But they feel to me, not unrelated. You would be hard pressed to argue against the claim that the day the meteor hit was the worst day in the history of our planet, given the Armageddon I just described. But one could might say that a certain Friday around 33 AD also could lay claim to the title. When Jesus suffered and died on the cross and broke our understanding of what and who God is it left a spiritual wasteland in the hearts of those who knew and loved him. It may not have been the biological catastrophe the meteor was (though we do hear of the rocks splitting open, and darkness covering the whole land) but on a psycho-spiritual level the impact of that stone sealing up the tomb may have been just as intense: God, dead. In a way, both the meteor and the cross brought about an existential crisis in the purest sense of that term: in one the very existence of life on this planet was in crisis; in the other the very existence of God was in crisis. No matter the implement, the impact is similar: Death, devastation, non-existence seemed to rule the day.
And yet…and yet…here we are. Somehow, out of that charred and barren wasteland of a planet the minor forms of life that survived eventually, over millions of years, evolved into the abundance of life we see all around us; in the forests and grasslands, the seas and oceans slowly, very, very slowly, life triumphed in the face of complete destruction. And over those millions of years, somehow, we evolved into us: creatures with brains big enough to dream and think and wonder and learn and love. Likewise, somehow, out of that lifeless tomb, life emerged, and over thousands of years of social and cultural evolution, the Gospel of faith, hope and love rose up from the barren wasteland of that grief-stricken room where the disciples had huddled in fear and spread out into the streets of Jerusalem and eventually across our planet.
It’s normal when contemplating the Resurrection to get stuck on this question of “How”? How did it happen? How could that even happen? And frankly, that’s my same question when contemplating the immensity of the destruction wrought by that meteor: How is it even possible life came back from all that? But while “how?” is a tempting question, with elusive answers (which means it can be a hang up for many) I wonder if a more fruitful question to ask is “Why?” Why life? Why come back? Why exist? After such unimaginable and utter devastation why not just stay dead? After the meteor hit, why didn’t we just turn into Mars or some other planet inhospitable to life? After such a torturous death, why didn’t Jesus just go straight to God and be done with the humanity that had treated him so horribly?
And my answer to that question, the question of “Why?” is that it seems to me the force that animates our universe and courses through our planet—on both the biological and spiritual level—is a force of being, a force for existence, a force of life. It can’t not be. That force of life is (what I call) God. And where it flexes it muscles, that’s Resurrection. So while it may seem like apples and oranges to compare a meteor and the cross of Christ, I see that same exact life force, that same force of being, that same insistence of existence that brought our planet back from almost complete devastation, condensed into these resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ: in the garden, in the upper room, on the seashore. The plants and trees and eventually the animals and insects could not just stay dead, they were wired for life. In the same way, Jesus can’t stay dead. He just keeps showing up and insists we see him, thrusts his wounded hands and side into our face and says, “Look: life!” That’s his message every time: Life! Life cannot be stopped. Whether its biological life or spiritual life, is a difference in form, not in substance. It doesn’t matter if you were pierced by a meteor or a spear, because the truth is you can wipe out almost every living thing from the face of the earth and life will still find a way; you can roll a rock in front of the tomb and life will still find a way; you can lock the door and huddle in fear and life will still find a way. Life is insistent. And it is victorious.
In the past couple weeks I have had the priestly privilege of anointing two parishioners shortly before they died. I know Mother Elizabeth Marie and Mother Joyce would agree with me that it is one of the great honors of the priesthood that we get to be with people in that holy time of transition, that liminal space between this world and the next. Because in those moments near death, when our biological existence is ending, when that force of life that propelled us onward since birth seems to be petering out, it can be hard to remember, or to believe, that that same life force is actually just transforming, evolving we might say, into a different form. That our spiritual existence which is just as real but maybe not just as familiar as our flesh and blood existence, continues. So I am always glad to be able to be a bedside reminder of the good news, the great news that we celebrate today and throughout this Easter Season: that through our creation, our evolution, our baptism, we are inheritors and exhibitors of that same great force of life that is both biological and spiritual. Because our God, the creator of the heavens and the Earth, the Alpha and the Omega, is a God who IS, and who was, and who is to be; a God of being; a God of life. So rejoice and be glad because the life that dwells in you will not be denied. It cannot be stopped. Whether it’s a mountain sized meteor or a boulder in front of a tomb the insistence of existence, which is the heartbeat of this universe, goes on.
[1] Much of this summary is informed by the article, “The Day the Dinosaurs Died” which appeared in the April 8th 2019 edition of The New Yorker Magazine (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died)
[2] Brusatte, Steve. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, William Morrow Publishers, New York, NY, 2018, p. 309.