Here’s one of my favorite stories from Brethren history, a story that doesn’t get much airtime these days:

In 1762, a teenager named Catherine Hummer, one of the first Brethren in America and the daughter of one of the ministers at the White Oak congregation in Pennsylvania, started seeing visions of angels. She said that she looked into heaven and saw people who were baptized after they had died. The visions would have been controversial enough, but once she saw them, Catherine Hummer started PREACHING about them. In church. A teenage girl in 1762, preaching. In church. 

Her preaching caused a HUGE controversy. Some people were upset that a young woman was given the privilege of preaching. Some people were convinced that her visions were not actually from God and might be harmful to the congregations (because, of course, Catherine’s preaching was powerful, and she was invited to preach all over the place). Others heard her preaching, her visions, and seem to have had visions of angels themselves. To add to the controversy, Catherine’s visions only happened when she was alone or when she was with her doctor – a young man named Sebastian Keller, who was married but whose wife had joined a sort of sectarian movement – maybe a cult – at the Ephrata Cloister. Scandalous.

Catherine’s father, the minister, defended her, as did other ministers. Tension and dissent grew among the Brethren. The next year, in 1763, the gathered body took up the question at their big Annual Meeting. Should Catherine be allowed to continue preaching about these visions? The group was divided, but their position was, ultimately, not to pronounce a decision on whether or not her visions were valid. Instead, the gathered body made a pronouncement regarding the disunity that was raging in the wake of those visions.

“…we felt constrained not to criticize or judge this strange happening,” they said, “but rather urge everyone to a God-like impartiality and patience.”

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine any one of our current disagreements or debates about this or that issue ending with this kind of admonishment?

The Meeting’s statement went on:

“We advise, out of brotherly love, that on both sides all judgements and harsh expressions might be entirely laid down, though we do not have the same opinion of that noted occurrence, so that those who do not esteem it, should not despise those who expect to derive some use and benefit from it.”

And, by all accounts, this is what happened. The controversy ended. Things went so still that Catherine Hummer and her story were all but lost to history – we don’t even know her dates of birth or death.

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I love this story because of its improbability. I cannot imagine a body – inside or outside the church – with the conviction and authority to say, in this day and age: “we feel constrained not to criticize or judge this strange happening, but to urge everyone to a God-like impartiality and patience.” Maybe you run in circles more generous or gracious than I do, but can you imagine anything like this happening in any of the scenes of conflict today? In a church meeting? In the Tennessee state legislature? At a Durham City Council meeting? In the US Congress? At a court hearing?

When Brethren history gets told, today, we mostly focus on the conflicts that led to division. Just like the timeline of world history is measured from war to war, church history is marked from conflict to conflict. But that’s not the only way to tell the story of who we are and how we came to be. In fact, telling the story by hanging it on war, conflict and division leads us to EXPECT more war, conflict and division. What if, instead, we learned to tell the story of history as one of resolution to resolution? What if we told the stories of commitment, patience, and movements toward justice, instead?

I suspect that we would understand ourselves and the world around us very, very differently.

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Here’s a question for you: why did the women show up at the tomb early on the morning of the third day after Jesus was crucified? What have you been taught?

Yes – they were bringing spices to anoint Jesus’ dead body, right? That’s how the story goes, when we mash up all four gospels into a single narrative. And Mark and Luke DO give us that detail – the women come to the tomb to complete their responsibility in the burial practices. But Matthew tells the story differently: the women are empty-handed. They have not come to deal with a dead body. They come, he tells us, to SEE the TOMB. As Matthew tells it, the women are not there to act out of their grief and loss. They have not come armed against death. Matthew says they came to see about the tomb. To inspect it, to check it against what they remember Jesus teaching them.

Because Jesus had been preparing all his friends for this moment. In Matthew’s gospel, he tells them over and over that he “must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering… and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” Three times, as he’s traveling and preaching and healing with his followers and friends, Jesus tells them that this is how it will go. Yes, he says, I will be killed. And on the third day, I will be raised. This wasn’t a casual, one-off revelation that Jesus let slip in the course of conversation: he told them, intentionally, three times over that this is how things would go down.

So, when Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James (who, by the way, was probably also the mother of Jesus) to “to see” the tomb, they are not rubber-necking, and they are not dutifully marching to prepare a dead body for burial. Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of God REMEMBERED what Jesus had been telling them all along. They were listening. They comprehended what Jesus was telling them, and they remembered it. And, more than that: they BELIEVED HIM.

Believed him so much that they would show up at the appointed hour, expecting resurrection.

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I hadn’t noticed this detail of Catherine Hummer’s story until I was studying this morning’s Easter text: Catherine saw angels, which is exactly what the women who arrived at Jesus’ tomb as day was dawning on the third day after his death saw. Matthew tells us that there was a great earthquake, and an angel of the Lord appeared and rolled back the stone that was sealing up the tomb. His appearance, we learn, was like lightning. A vision of an angel, who opened up the empty tomb: that’s how the resurrection is revealed. And the women, who remembered and believed Jesus’ promise that he would be raised, who showed up expecting that to be true, get commissioned as the first to proclaim the good news. And, as they run to tell everyone else that Jesus was not lying, that what he promised had indeed come to pass, that what they remembered was what happened, they also became the first to encounter the risen lord, who tells them not to be afraid, but to go and tell everyone else.

I wonder how much attention the people who got upset by Catherine Hummer’s visions and Catherine Hummer’s preaching had paid to these stories of the resurrection, where it’s the women who encounter angels at the tomb, where it’s the women who become the first preachers of resurrection. I wonder what those angry folks remembered about Jesus’ story. And I wonder if they would have reacted differently if this was the story that they heard preached on Easter Sunday morning.

Walter Brueggemann once wrote that “memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.” What we choose to remember shapes how we behave. Remembering Jesus’ teaching of rising on the third day shaped the women’s choice to show up that morning and see what happened. Remembering biblical stories of women seeing visions of angels could have changed the way people reacted to Catherine Hummer’s experience. Remembering the story of the church’s final response – to withhold judgement and urge patience – might change the way we participate in our own conflicts, today.

What would our lives look like if we refused the narrative that insists we organize our worldview around despair? What choices would we make if we remembered that resurrection is not only possible but already here? How would we live if we walked around expecting dead things to be raised into new life? 

Living lives shaped by resurrection might mean that we find ways to live without judgement when strange things happen. It might mean that we we willingly show up at tombs expecting something surprising and new to take place. It might mean that we submit ourselves to the fear and great joy that come with living in the depths of the unknown, choosing to believe – even when it is extremely unclear how things will end up, even when we might be almost certain that they’ll go badly, even when all the signs point to death, destruction and despair – choosing to believe that even this is part of the world that has already been redeemed, already been made new, already been transformed into something good and full of grace. 

Resurrection isn’t just a promise of new life after we die a physical; it is a powerful testimony that everything – every wound, every rupture, every loss, every grief, every impossible situation, up to and even including the murder of God himself – can be and, in fact, already is being transformed. What would happen if we walked around expecting THAT?