Easter Sunday. Rooke Chapel. 4/21/19
Luke 24: 1-12
Christ is Risen!
We gather this morning to proclaim and celebrate the resurrection.
And we gather with our eyes open.
There is no Resurrection without death in our tradition
and there is no celebration without mourning in our lives.
Most notably this morning,
with the people of Sri Lanka in the wake of violence there.
We gather unable and unwilling to turn our eyes from such tragedies,
and our hearts break,
as they should.
and yet we are unwilling to allow them to be the last word.
We gather to proclaim life and love,
amidst the reality of violence and death
This is the story of Easter,
and it is alive and well in our midst,
and as needed as ever.
And it is good to be together.
Let us open our ears afresh to the story.
There’s an apocryphal story out there,
About Ernest Hemmingway,
Sitting at a bar with a bunch of his writing buddies.
And he bets them
that he could write an excellent story,
in fewer than 10 words.
foolishly, they take the bet,
And he wrote, on a cocktail napkin:
“For sale, baby shoes, never used.”
And he went home with the 10 dollars.
Now, there’s little evidence that this actually happened,
Or that he actually wrote those words,
But it works, somehow,
Given Hemmingway’s writing style and mythos.
And this story has spawned a genre,
Of 6-word memoirs and tales,
Which are cataloged variously on websites,
And in printed texts.
And of which Pseudo-Hemmingway’s is still clearly the best.
But with all due respect,
I think the best 6 word story ever told,
Actually belongs to Mary Magdalene,
Joanna, Mary the Mother of James (I call her MJ)
and the other women who show up at the tomb,
in Luke’s Gospel:
Jesus is risen from the dead.
We imagine these women:
Hustling back,
To tell Jesus’ 11 closest (male) friends the good news.
They burst in, a little breathless,
And say simply,
“Jesus is risen from the dead.”
Now, you will often hear Christians say,
That Jesus was abandoned,
By his people and his closest followers,
In the midst of his betrayal, arrest, and execution,
Which is only true,
If you don’t think women are important.
Because they were there.
And the Gospel writers think they were important,
And Jesus thinks they’re important,
And they are the first to proclaim this 6 word story:
Jesus is risen from the dead.
And the response is…underwhelming.
“What?” the 11, say,
“The body’s gone?”
“No. He is risen from the dead.
The tomb was empty.”
Empty?
Well two men in dazzling clothes spoke to us.
Dazzling clothes?
they respond, the details already starting to get fuzzy.
“Angels. Men. Dazzling clothes.
You’re missing the point. Jesus is risen from the dead.”
“But how can that be?”
They must have responded.
If we can’t trust that dead people stay dead,
Then what can we trust?
Tired, grieved, and scared.
Eventually the men came to the conclusion,
That these were merely “idle tales.”
Which is a rather a generous translation,
For what they say,
“Liros”
from which we get the word “delirious.”
The 6 word story can’t be explained,
Or rationalized, or defended.
There’s no embellishment,
No detail,
That could be added to the story that would be enough
to convince the 11 that this were true.
They just knew it was,
And that the world was somehow different,
And that they had to tell someone.
eventually, it’s enough, somehow,
to get Peter up,
And off to see the empty tomb for himself.
Were it not for him and them and these 6 words,
We would be here this morning.
so we should note,
That if you’ve a little difficulty believing this,
You are in good company.
No one,
Expects this.
And no one, in our scripture, believes it at first.
No one shouts “Hallelujah! I knew it!”
Instead they are skeptical,
And afraid.
and dismissive.
And of course they were.
It is literally unbelievable.
It upends the thing about life that seems most,
And most universally true.
And, as Pastor David Lose says,
If you don’t find resurrection at least a little hard to believe,
You might not be taking it very seriously.
Luke’s Gospel leaves us with an empty tomb
And skeptical disciples.
The last word of the oldest versions of the oldest Gospel – Mark,
Is “afraid.”
As in: ‘They went out and fled from the tomb,
For terror and amazement had seized them and they said nothing to anyone
For they were afraid.’
In John’s Gospel, Jesus appears to his disciples through a door,
Which is locked,
Because they are afraid.
This is not a tidy story,
And few are joyful at its first hearing.
Frederich Buechner (Secrets in the Dark) said it best:
The way the Gospel writers tell it… Jesus came back from death not in a blaze of glory, but more like a candle flame in the dark, flickering first in this place, then in that place, then in no place at all. If they had been making the whole thing up for the purpose of converting the world, presumably they would have described it more the way the book of Revelation describes how he will come back again at the end of time …
But that is not the way the Gospels tell it. They are not trying to describe it as convincingly as they can. They are trying to describe it as truthfully as they can. It was the most extraordinary thing they believed had ever happened, and yet they tell it so quietly that you have to lean close to be sure what they are telling. They tell it as softly as a secret, as something so precious, and holy, and fragile, and unbelievable, and true, that to tell it any other way would be somehow to dishonor it. To proclaim the resurrection the way they do, you would have to say it in whispers:
“Jesus is risen from the dead.”
We’ve heard it enough, most of us, that we might not blink.
But it is absurd and it is crazy,
And it changes everything.
C.S. Lewis once said, “I believe in [resurrection] as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
Have you ever had a small moment like that.
In which something amazing and illuminating happens,
And you walk outside and can’t help but think,
“Was the grass always this green?”
I couldn’t help but think about Dr. Katie Bouman,
And her team of astronomers and physicists and mathematicians,
As they viewed that first image of the black hole, last week.
The universe was ever like this,
But now we can see it,
Just a little more clearly.
Life, not death,
Is the thing which is most true, most real, most lasting.
“Christ is risen”
is not, I don’t think,
A statement about a past event.
But a statement about the way the world is.
Our translation this morning reads “He is not here, but has risen.”
Which is an accurate rendering,
But I think the old King James gets the spirit right,
“He is not here, but is risen”
It’s tempting to make this story about the past.
About something that happened.
That would have been reported in the local newspaper
But I don’t think the essential question is,
What, precisely, happened long ago?
Or do you believe, precisely, that Jesus’ body was resuscitated long ago?
But rather,
Where is Christ right now?
Or better yet, “How are we the Body of Christ, here and now,
In a world that desperately needs us?
Resurrection, it turns out,
Has consequences.
Easter didn’t happen then,
Easter is happening now.
And no explanation or argument will ever convince us it is true.
We must simply ask ourselves,
If we love the possibility that life overcomes death,
And that grace overcomes sin,
So much that we might live in that light.
And if we do love it,
It really does change everything.
And lest that seem like a platitude –
After all the phrase
“this changes everything”
Has been used to describe
everything from the iphone 4, to the 2015 Ford f150,
To Flonase Nasal Spray.
None of which –
With all due respect to seasonal allergy sufferers –
Actually changed everything.
Allow me to conclude with a brief thought,
On something specific that might already be changed,
And awaiting us.
We, who gather in this space on this campus,
we might reluctantly call “Christian Intellectuals.”
And we might hope,
that this means we are
a budding movement of people,
a public presence,
of those who wish to speak truth to power, thoughtfully.
and wish to witness to the power of grace in the universe,
as much with our lives as with our words.
And one of our foremost jobs,
Our most significant necessary changes.
as Christian Intellectuals,
is, as theologian Willie Jennings put it recently,
‘to confront the principality of fear.’
To confront and challenge the way,
that fear controls our discourse,
our actions,
our policies,
our communities.
Fear is economically and politically efficacious.
It makes us buy things we don’t need,
And support policies we don’t like.
But if there’s a single resounding message from our scripture,
It may very well be,
“don’t be afraid.”
The apostle Paul,
(who by the way – didn’t buy this resurrection stuff at first either)
Said it thusly (Romans 8):
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
This, my friends,
changes everything.
And the time has come,
for us to be publicly unafraid.
To refuse the narrative that we must fear,
fear those seeking refuge.
fear for the economy.
fear for our families and our 401ks.
and refuse all the insanity that comes with it.
Because nothing nothing nothing
can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Who is risen.
And this,
changes everything.
Angels and prophets,
And peter and paul
And Jesus all bring the same message.
Be not afraid,
for if God is with us, who can be against us?
And it is life, not death,
Love, not fear,
That must ground our living and our working
And even our dying.
So as the world bullies us with headlines,
of war terror and disease.
And economic indexes,
We say simply,
That we
carry with us,
an empty tomb.
And a story of 6 words.
Which we proclaim with our mouths,
and our songs,
our worship,
and our lives:
Jesus is risen from the dead.
Alleluia, and Amen.