Sermon preached at the Chapel of Hope, Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan and at All Saints International Congregation, Nagoya, Japan for Easter Sunday based on the Mark 16: 1-8
She checks her social media around 10 times a day. Twitter and Facebook are her main sites, but she also looks at Google for news. Since the start of the pandemic, her habit has increased significantly. “I’m a doom-scroller,” she admits to the Healthline website. Yes, this 26-year-old speech therapist confesses that she has a problem. Doom-scrolling is the act of endlessly scrolling down news apps, Twitter, and social media, reading all the news. “The pandemic has exacerbated these habits in many ways,” says a New York psychologist, “including the fact that there is no shortage of doomsday news.” [1]
If doom-scrolling is part of your daily routine, you are not alone. Did you know that in an average day, a person now scrolls through 22.7 meters (74.5 feet) on their smartphones? Twitter use has jumped 24 percent since the start of the pandemic last year, and Facebook is up 27 percent.
The problem with this scrolling habit is that it can lead to higher stress. We think that keeping up with the latest will lessen our anxiety, but it increases it. Doom-scrolling is an “unsatisfying addiction,” says one clinical psychologist. Instead of making us feel safer, it raises our level of fear, anxiety, and stress.
So, does this sound familiar? Wanting to stay informed, we end up being sucked into doom and gloom, maybe even spiraling into despair. We are not the first to experience this phenomenon just consider the three women who visited the tomb on Easter morning.
Mark tells us that when the Sabbath was over, “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint [Jesus]. And early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb” (16:1-2).
What were they feeling, however? Their Rabbi had been killed in a humiliating death by asphyxiation on a cross. From there his body had been transported and then laid in a cave-like tomb, and a large stone had been rolled against the door. As they were walking along, Mark tells us that they had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” (v. 3). There was the anxiety about how they would remove the stone for the ritual observance of burial, certainly however we also know they were feeling a combination of grief over the death of Jesus, as well as stress about the future, what his death by a combination of religious and political conspiracy meant for their community and own personal lives.
But when they arrived, “they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back” (v. 4). Now I am going to do a play on words, but I think it is helpful: their doom-scrolling was met by an act of stone-rolling. Finally, some good news! Or is it?
Not only was the stone rolled back and the tomb empty they were further startled for as “they entered the tomb,” but “they” also “saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed” (v. 5). The man said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised” (v. 6). Their doom-scrolling had them focusing them on bad news, their current situation and all that had led up to this day, but the words of the young man gave them reason to hope.
But then the man ordered them to go “tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you” (v. 7). The young man changed their focus from doom and gloom to a new possibility and direction. He promised them that Jesus was going ahead of them, and that they would see him in Galilee.
No wonder that the women fled the tomb, filled with a mix of terror and amazement and no wonder Mark adds these words. The women were unable to follow through with the command, “they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (v. 8).
What was true for them can also be true for us. I do not know your personal habits regarding social media specifically and internet use including email in general. However, I sense all of us know that we can for example turn off Twitter, no longer review posts on Facebook, we can avoid our email, TV and radio but escaping doom and gloom is not that straightforward. Experts say that the solution to doom-scrolling is to break out of the “vicious cycle of negativity.”
That for me is a glimmer of the complex Easter message for the women and for us for although we appreciate those positive messages, hope is hard to come by. Certainly, we have the hope through the good news of Easter in that God has acted in our lives to break the cycle of our broken patterns of sinfulness. Sin can be full of intention. We know exactly what we are doing when we capitulate to temptation and embrace the distortion as if it is acceptable. Yet, sin is so inescapably a part of being human that it is even baked into the very fabric of who we are.
But the message of hope is complex. The women did not go to the tomb looking for hope. They were searching for a place to grieve. They wanted to be left alone in despair. “Our brains are crazy,” writes Tyler Tervooren in HuffPost. “Every day they lie to us about how terrible things are or how bad they’re going to be, but when we finally ignore the fear [we] realize everything’s pretty much okay, the world will keep turning, and we’re going to survive.”
Yes, the world will keep turning, but Easter is more than a straightforward message to stop doom-scrolling. It also includes the terrifying prospect that God called these women to return to the same world that crucified Jesus with a dangerous gift: hope in the power of God, the unending reservoir of forgiveness and an abundance of love. We are invited in this message of hope not only to see that the stone has been rolled back, to believe that Jesus has been raised, but as well as focus on the future where our risen Lord is ahead of us and waiting for us.
The women were so afraid of the real stone that they never dreamed that God would take action to roll it away. The other disciples were so afraid they could not even venture out of the room. Their brains were processing how terrible things were by adding to how bad things were going to be. But then God replaced their doom-scrolling with stone-rolling into a journey of hope with the empty tomb as the first step. Dr. Esau McCaulley, assistant professor of New Testament put it this way in a recent article in the New York Times: “As we leave the tombs of quarantine, a return to normal would be a disaster unless we recognize that we are going back to a world desperately in need of healing.”[2]
Fifty-three years ago, today, on April 4th, 1968, the non-violent activist for justice, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Out of that deep despair, British pastor Brian Wren wrote a new hymn for that Easter Sunday which was 10 days after the assassination. “Christ Is Alive!” was written by Wren to acknowledge this terrible loss while also proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus. “Christ is alive!” he wrote. “Let Christians sing. The cross stands empty to the sky. Let streets and homes with praises ring. Love, drowned in death, shall never die.” Yes, a terrible crime had been committed. An awful injustice had been done. But now the cross was empty, and love would never die.
The hymn makes clear that the resurrection is not stuck in history, but a reality for every time. The risen Christ, says Brian Wren, is “saving, healing, here and now, and touching every place and time.” Jesus encounters human suffering whenever it is experienced. In the face of today’s racism and violence, Jesus “suffers still, yet loves the more.” The hymn then ends with the good news of “justice, love and praise.”[3]
Jesus is not dead in the tomb. Instead, this journey of hope means that Christ is found ahead of us with those who act with justice, love, and praise. So certainly, let us look up instead of down at our screens and open our eyes, and see that Jesus is alive and well. Doom-scrolling traps us in a vicious cycle of negativity that fuels our anxiety, but the first step of Easter is the empty tomb. This is what Jesus was doing by moving ahead of his disciples to Galilee, and what he is doing by going ahead of us today. The stone has been rolled away and our Lord is calling us forward. Christ is Risen, He is risen indeed. Alleluia! Amen.
[1] Curley, Christopher. “‘Doomscrolling’ During COVID-19: What It Does to You and How You Can Avoid It.” Healthline, July 26, 2020, www.healthline.com.
[2] Opinion | The Unsettling Power of Easter - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[3] Hawn, C. Michael. “History of Hymns: Pastor writes Easter hymn for a time of great turmoil.” Discipleship Ministries: The United Methodist Church, May 21, 2013, www.umcdiscipleship.org.