Last fall, one of our sister churches in Ridgefield, the Ridgebury Congregational Church, did a curious thing. 

They found a small, secluded spot in a grove of trees on the church grounds, did a little bit of landscaping, and set up a box on a pole with an “old, cream-colored rotary phone.”^[1]

Did anybody else grow up with one of those?  

My grandmother’s was teal on the way to blue or blue on the way to teal. This is a matter of some debate for me and my cousins.

Can you picture it? 

Those phones always came with a long cord, right? 

If memory serves, the cord was long enough for a teenager to walk the receiver entirely out of the kitchen and mostly out of earshot so they could lean against the wall and transact all the social business of the day, however long that took and however many calls it might require. 

The cord was long enough for someone actually cooking in the kitchen to be on the phone while they moved around the room.  (Remember this? [MG crooks an imaginary phone])

If that sounds familiar, rest assured, this old, cream-colored rotary phone was properly equipped with just such a cord.  

The only thing it didn’t have was an actual connection to a telephone line.  

It’s what they call a “’wind phone,’ a disconnected phone that people can use to have one-way conversations with their loved ones who have died.” 

As the pastor of the church explained, it offers a way to “have the conversations that you didn’t get to have – the good, the bad, and the ugly.” 

Apparently, these phones are all across the world.  

The first one was set up in Japan in 2010, and there is a website, mywindphone.com, that lists all the places in the U.S. where you can find one.  

They offer a creative response to some powerful needs: our need to grieve and our bewilderment about how we’re supposed to do that; our need to feel a connection that survives, at least in the heart; our need to say the words we need to say whenever we finally find those words and the courage to speak them, and to say them without a sense futility that those words have arrived too late.  

Too late for what? 

Too late for a little more understanding, if not forgiveness? 

Too late, maybe, for anything to be different, or for a new chapter to begin for any of us?  

The hope that Christians find on Easter Sunday can be difficult to explain, and those who don’t believe can find its claims naïve and baffling.

But you don’t need to be Christian to understand Holy Saturday – the day when Jesus was gone, and in the language of the Apostles’ Creed, “he descended into hell.”  

Grief gives any of us a good enough sense of that.

From my own experience of grief, it is a mystery to me how the women Mark describes in his gospel are putting one foot in front of the other, much less where they find the strength to go see and touch Jesus’ broken body. 

Yet when there is nothing else we can do, there is comfort and meaning in receiving those we love into the rituals of our people, especially in tender moments of farewell.  

As Joe says to Pip in Great Expectations, “Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together…Diwisions among such must come and must be met as they come.” 

Now that it has come, the women rise to meet this moment of division in the prescribed ways.  

They go to the tomb to undertake the practices of goodbye on behalf of all those who loved him.  

As they walk to the tomb, surely they are formulating their own personal final words to him, the ones they must speak now or forever hold. 

Except that, suddenly, it becomes clear that something has happened.  

Something.  

In the moment, it is hard to say just what. 

The stone has been rolled back, and someone who is not supposed to be there, is, and the body that is supposed to be there, isn’t.  

The other gospels come into the church’s life a bit later, and they describe the scene in far great detail—filling in the blanks, to some extent. 

In John’s understanding, Jesus himself appears.  

In Matthew and Luke, the arrival of the other disciples and their astonishment get extended treatment, so much so that the initial experience of the women can almost seem like a prologue.  

Not so, in Mark. 

His version focuses mostly on the women and their a-ha moment of discovery, rather than on the parts that come later, such as telling the others, or the whole group’s astonishment, or the later encounters with the risen Jesus. 

Actually, I really appreciate that about Mark.  

He seems to understand that faith is not some sort of obvious thing—that’s it’s not just a simple marshalling of the evidence, as if anyone who had been there would have had to become a disciple if they’d seen what was happening, because duh.  

The way he tells it, these disciples see what they see, but they don’t know what’s happening. 

Something internal has to happen so they do.  

Certainly, they don’t get (yet) that the inevitability of death has been overthrown. 

They don’t get (yet) that a new way of life is being established. 

They don’t get (yet) that for those who find new life in Jesus, the promise of God’s healing will forever seek to respond to the breakage of injustice and sin.  

These are all things that the church would learn to say about Easter and becauseof Easter.   

Instead, because Mark’s account leaves room for something internal that has to happen within each of us, it may come the closest to offering us actual Easter.

It makes space and trusts God to use it.  

Because these things aren’t obvious. 

How could they be?  

And yet, for every person who crosses paths with a wind phone in some random churchyard and rolls their eyes, there’s somebody else – somebody who notices that phone and greets it with a laugh of recognition.

Almost in a dream, they pick up that heavy, old-school receiver, dial a phone number they haven’t thought of in years, walk the full scope of that long cord, plotz down on the ground, and speak themselves into a measure of peace.

Something internal happens.  

Faith’s understanding is that God comes into that space. 

No wonder, then that some spark of hope, some recognition of enduring connection catches up with them and fills that moment.  

The whole thing could not be less obvious and yet more real…more utterly true.   

Easter is like that.  

It’s a story about how God comes into the space of a lonely tomb and fills it with the power of new beginnings.  

It reminds us that the cords that bind us to life and to one another may be invisible, but they are unbreakable and far more than just our partings, welded together.    

Easter challenges us to start acting accordingly, most directly by making space for God’s healing and peace to touch all people and all things.  

In the days that followed that first Easter, the women who had visited the tomb would be filled, reminded, and challenged, too. 

Their own new beginning took shape as they came to find their voices and their Lord.  

As we celebrate Easter again this morning, may the same be said of us.  

Amen.  

---

^[1] The quotations about the wind phone are all from Meg Dalton, “Connected By Love,” on the Connecticut Public Radio website, October 6, 2023.