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Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019
Schenectady, New York
The traditions of Easter run deep in some of our families. Easter breakfast after a sunrise service was one of our traditions. We would sing at that service, and then again at the meal. I remember one of the first Easter hymns I learned in childhood. And I remember it oddly: “Low in the gravy lay Jesus my savior… “ What was Jesus doing low in gravy? But once my parents explained it, I loved that song, especially its dramatic second half: “Up from the grave he arose, with a mighty triumph o’er his foes. He arose the victor from the dark domain, and he lives forever with his saints to reign. He arose, he arose, hallelujah, Christ arose!”
We have all heard Easter interpreted many ways! My wife Lynn recently made me watch one of those videos on the internet—maybe you have seen it, it’s from Scotland. It features a little girl quizzing her father on why they give her so much chocolate on Easter when the rest of the time they inform her of how unhealthy candy is. Does Jesus love chocolate, Daddy? Bunnies don’t even make eggs. And are the Easter Bunny and Jesus friends?
You and I have heard the Easter story told from many angles. Sometimes it’s about buds and new life in the spring. New life following the long winter didn’t speak to me, really, till I moved to Rochester, New York, where one winter we had snow the first of the month every month, starting in October and continuing into April! I was ready for some buds. But there are other reads on Easter. For example, many years ago, I heard a preacher in a fur and jewelry-filled sanctuary in Pennsylvania interpret resurrection as being about the inevitable march of American progress. Something about resurrection being like a jet airplane rising up. I knew that time I had heard an idle tale. That preacher seemed to have missed the point altogether.
The resurrection of Jesus does have something to say to us today! It is NOT an idle tale. Much as we love chocolate, it isn’t about chocolate. And no, it is NOT an affirmation of the powerful, nor self-congratulations for the privileged, nor a testimonial to the inevitable march of human progress. There is something more powerful going on than jet planes.
Behind all the other takes on Easter, lies a deeper memory of an incomprehensible event, puzzling, scary, joyful, unexpected. It is a story of a handful of poor women stricken with grief, overcome with loss and despair, who early one morning went to a borrowed tomb to find their beloved teacher and friend. A contemporary translation tells the story in language that brings back the shock and wonder of their experience: Eugene Peterson puts it like this:
24 1-3 At the crack of dawn on Sunday, the women came to the tomb carrying the burial spices they had prepared. They found the entrance stone rolled back from the tomb, so they walked in. But once inside, they couldn’t find the body of the Master Jesus.
4-8 They were puzzled, wondering what to make of this. Then, out of nowhere it seemed, two men, light cascading over them, stood there. The women were awestruck and bowed down in worship. The men said, “Why are you looking for the Living One in a cemetery? He is not here, but raised up. Remember how he told you when you were still back in Galilee that he had to be handed over to sinners, be killed on a cross, and in three days rise up?” Then they remembered Jesus’ words.
(Eugene Peterson (The Message)
In great joy they made their way back to share good news…. Not surprisingly, the eleven still remaining apostles and others who received them thought it was… an idle tale. Well that’s the nice version. A more accurate rendition might be they thought it was “a pile of garbage.” But one, Simon Peter, did go running back to the tomb. And found the tomb empty, as they had said, grave clothes flung aside.
In the hours and days that followed, Jesus’ earliest followers began to have strange encounters with the risen Christ. He began showing up on the road, showing up when they gathered at the table, asking for a little food, showing them his hands and feet….
What does it all mean? Is it all an idle tale? Faith says the story means something far more than that! To start with it means that the promise of God to a people in captivity--the God of the exile, the God of the prisoner, the God of the condemned slave—that promise is more reliable than the data of persecution, crucifixion, even death itself.
For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime.
(From Isaiah 65 NRSV)
The story of those women at that tomb means that when we have utterly lost hope, when despair has won, we can still experience the resurrection God, even if we never understand it. It means that for the rest of our lives we call ourselves companions of Christ must also deal with their experience of a surprise ending.
Have you met the risen Jesus, or have you glimpsed an empty tomb and had your presumptions shattered, about what is and isn’t possible? It happened to me some years ago in a prison dormitory. I recollect being quite depressed, discouraged, one day about a week into a stay in the Montville Correctional facility in Connecticut where some friends and I were guests for a thirty-day sentence, following a nonviolent civil disobedience action. As I looked out through the bars, I had a great view. I could see through the heavy glass to the prison yard to the fence with razor wire to the man sitting on the back of a station wagon with reflector glasses and a loaded shotgun. Suddenly it was way too real. A dead end. I was trapped.
And then something happened! It was as though the bars were starting to melt. I felt God very close by. Jesus was very nearby. Right there. I came to understand that because of this power, the bars there were not the last word. I watched them melt away. I was utterly free. Once more, there was, within this soul, the courage to hope.
Truly I say to you: the risen Jesus visits jail cells—a lot. Right here in downtown Schenectady. The risen Christ shows up in war zones—a lot. I have also seen the risen Christ show up next to hospital beds; seen him in the eyes of the dying. The Risen One shows up when we are at our most challenged, sometimes when we are at our worst. The tomb door gets thrown open, more often, more often than we can imagine.
The experience of that empty tomb catches us up short, and we find ourselves compelled once more, challenged, dared, nay encouraged—given courage--to live in hope. Do we understand it? No. But we are convinced it has truth in it, love in it, redemption in it.
On Easter Sunday morning we proclaim that through the power of God, through the earth-shaking mind-bending reality of resurrection, Christ Jesus was raised from the dead. Our understanding, our limited understanding, of what is possible and realistic and doable has just been thrown out of God’s window, a stone rolled away as though it were nothing. Our fear of death, our assumptions about what it means to be defeated, our despair: all these have been rolled away.
In the light of Christ’s resurrection, you and I are freed up from our fears, our paralysis, our numbness and caution. We are freed up to live dangerously. Because we know, now, that the most important things cannot be taken from us. We are set free to meet Jesus all over again, in a fresh light. We can approach his teachings again, as though for the first time. We can be healed again, as though for the first time. We can start over, as human beings. We can dare to live on the strength of a new law—the law of love. The old things have passed away. God is doing a whole new thing.
Resurrection is the central experience, the essence of Christianity. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead and our encounters with this risen Jesus redefine our lives. This experience, at the heart of our faith, is what makes it possible to find the courage to hope. The grace to forgive. The vision to call forth love. It is not an idle tale.