Are Bees Dead? (And What About God?)

Preaching on:
Mark 16:1–8

A few weeks ago, my four-year-old son Romey asked me, “Dad, are bees dead?” Romey’s been very curious about death recently and learning a lot. Romey, who loves gardening and the outdoors, hadn’t seen any bees all winter long and he was beginning to get worried. I put his mind at ease. I explained to him that some bees do die in winter, especially if it’s very cold, but if all the bees were dead, there wouldn’t be any more bees in spring. I told him that bees were just hibernating the winter away in their hives or in piles of leaves and in old dead logs waiting for the warm weather to wake back up.

On April 8, 1966, Time magazine published one of its most iconic and maybe infamous cover photos of all time. It was a first of its kind cover—just text; three red words on a black background asking a question: Is God Dead? It set off a firestorm of overwhelmingly negative responses. Letters poured in. Pulpits across the country thundered. Even Bob Dylan would criticize the cover in an article in a magazine the illustrious name of which I can’t say with kids in the room, but let’s just say there was a bunny on the cover and she sure wasn’t the Easter Bunny. Time magazine and its editors were labeled from all sides as atheists, communists, anti-American.

The article itself was far tamer than its headline suggested. It was all about the changing state of religion, religious sensibilities, and theology at a turning point in American history—the post-World-War-II religious revival had peaked, the Cold War and nuclear annihilation had seized the world and our apocalyptic imaginations, the Civil Rights movement had presented a new idea of the power of religion to transform society for the better, the war in Vietnam was beginning to cause serious unrest, the flower-power, psychedelic, hippie movement was in full swing, and a month earlier John Lennon of the Beatles had told the world, “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” In this moment, the article fairly evenhandedly laid out the questions that religion and faith were wrestling with. But people hated that cover, they hated the question it asked, and they hated anyone who would ask it.

Death of God theology, which is a real thing (it’s also called radical theology), was barely more than a footnote in the article, but one of the theologians referred to as a death of God proponent in the article, William Hamilton, was turned on by his community—he was driven with his family from his church and he was forced out of his job as a seminary professor. Something about this question, “Is God Dead?” made people feel vulnerable, anxious, and really angry.

Now one of the great ironies of this to me is that April 8, 1966, the day the cover was published, was Good Friday. I’m sure that was intentional. What day could be more appropriate to sit with this question than the day the of crucifixion, the day that Christians believe that God, in some sense, actually died. Even people who believe that God died were not ready to be asked the question, “Is God Dead?” which I find striking.

The reason I’m talking about Good Friday on Easter morning is because our understanding of the resurrection depends on our understanding of what happened on Good Friday. Just like we’re uncomfortable with questions like, “Did God die? Is God Dead?” We’re also uncomfortable with Good Friday—for good reason: It’s bloody, it’s violent, couldn’t God have found another way? Most Christians go straight from Palm Sunday to Easter skipping Holy Week and the crucifixion all together, skipping the possibility of being asked the uncomfortable questions.

For most of us, I think, we’re willing to admit that God is an occasionally hibernating God. Just like the bees, sometimes God seems to disappear, but God (for good reasons that we can’t fully understand) is just napping in a pile of leaves somewhere and will be back in due course. The nice thing about this kind of resurrection is that it’s just like spring: the blossoms on the cherry trees are same year after year, and when the bumblebees come back they act like bumblebees have always acted, and when the tulips come up from the ground, they come up exactly where you planted their bulbs. Spring is reassuring and predictable, and we can forgive an unchanging and predictable God for occasionally going dark on us.

And we prefer this hibernation faith to a resurrection faith that says that our God is a continually dying and rising God—our God has died, and our God has risen in a way that we barely recognize. Mary Magdalene, in John’s gospel, met the risen Jesus in the garden and didn’t even recognize him he was so alive and so transformed. Maybe Jesus was playing a joke, we think. Maybe he found the gardener’s hat and put it on to pull poor Mary’s leg. Maybe she just needs glasses. How different could he have been? He was just in there a couple days. Resurrection is a total transformation because death, first, is a total transformation.

Now I don’t agree with everything that radical theologians say. They say all kinds of different things. I disagree emphatically with some of it. But I deeply appreciate the kinds of questions that they ask. Essentially, what they’re asking us is: In a world even more radically changed than when that cover was published more than 50 Easters back, are some of our ideas about God, some of our images of God “stuck” in the ideas, images, and values of an earlier age, a by-gone culture. If we can’t let go of some of that stuff, if we can’t even be asked the questions without attacking those who ask them, how can we ever live fully into a resurrection faith?

Resurrection isn’t a destination. It’s not a one-time event. And its not just about Jesus. The Bible tells us that resurrection is the destiny of all who believe and it’s the destiny of all of creation. The resurrection is a new spiritual dimension and a continual process. It’s not everything that God was, continuing on. It’s everything that God is, now becoming. It’s everything we are, now becoming.

In the article, Is God Dead?, various people were asked about their images of God. One man from Philadelphia said that he sees God “a lot like he was explained to us as children:” an older man up in heaven who is just, but who gets angry at us. “I know this isn’t the true picture,” he said, “but it’s the only one I’ve got.” This man feels it. He feels that he’s stuck, but he’s afraid of betraying the image that was given to him as a child. He wants to grow his image of God, but he doesn’t know how to grow an image which he knows isn’t the true picture, and he doesn’t know how to let it go. He’s stuck. And God is stuck with him. Many people in his situation will stay stuck. Many people realizing the limits of the culture’s ideas about God will throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of religion and faith all together. What will you do?

I also was raised with this image of God: a nice man in heaven who made everything and controls everything and doesn’t change. In High School I had a couple of experiences that began to challenge this view. One of them was learning about evolution in my biology classes. I was totally fascinated by this process which was nothing like the creation story that had been told to me. In my fairly Evangelical youth group, we had a debate on Creationism vs. Evolution, and I was on the much smaller Team Evolution. I studied for this debate for weeks. I was so into it. I read like five books on evolution and made notes and I was ready to rumble. But I was, I must admit, uncomfortable. If evolution was true, what would that mean for God?

When I got home the night of the debate, feeling victorious despite the fact that my wise Evangelical youth pastor didn’t declare a winner, I realized that in the course of this experience, for me, the unchanging God who created an unchanging universe and mostly unchanging life exactly as it is 4,000 years ago in the book of Genesis was dead. But, thank God, my faith (probably because of that youth group and the opportunity to talk about evolution in it) was not dead!

I opened those books on evolution again that night in my room and marveled at the God who was now suddenly able to come to life in those pages—a God who was at the heart of a continual process of change that is growing the world—the universe. I experienced a resurrection that night. God was transformed before my eyes, and I was lucky I could still recognize her there growing, changing, randomly and yet with what appeared to me then as some sort of greater purpose that has not yet been completed. And it is still ongoing on the biggest and smallest scales.

You see, beloved, if we truly live into our resurrection faith, then we may at times feel like the women running from the tomb at the end of Mark’s Gospel, full of fear and awe for what is coming, afraid to say anything. But when we realize that God’s death and resurrection is the new way, the new image of what God is doing in our world and in our lives, we may discover God’s true, vibrant limitlessness. Is God Dead? I say, yes, God died on the cross. And now God is resurrecting, rising beyond our expectations, showing us the infinite potential in our lives and in our world. This Easter let’s celebrate the resurrection by committing ourselves to harnessing and guiding the power of radical change in our lives and in our world. We can’t stop change. But we don’t need to fear it, as long as we are willing to let God come back to life within it. That is a resurrection faith.