Sunday of the Resurrection
Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011
Acts 10:34-43 * Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24* Acts 10:34-43*
John 20:1-18
Rev. David M. McNair
During the ominous days of Holy Week this past week, as I prepared this Easter sermon, I found myself drawn to what I have come to refer to as my outside office. It’s the trail and sitting benches up behind the church that runs along the ridge overlooking the mountains and cow pastures. Everywhere I look there in my outside office – everywhere we look outside — there are signs of new birth, new life. This is reason enough for Easter to be placed in springtime – at least it is spring for us Northern Hemisphere dwellers. Spring is the season when God and nature conspire to help us believe. On this Day of the Resurrection we join with poet e.e. cummings in singing an Easter song:
i thank you God for this most amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes.
Easter is God’s Yes to the world! Everything this day says Yes.
Yes to the birds singing and building a nest in the birdhouse outside the sanctuary window. Yes to the newborn calves next door. Yes to the dogwoods, trilliums, Mountain magnolias, and bleeding hearts. Yes to the Dutchman’s britches, May apples, Solomon’s seals, and azaleas bursting in red and fuchsia. Yes to the love and joy that are woven into our lives. Yes to God!
For some, of course, the resurrection is not easy to believe. They may identify with the little boy who went to church for the first time – and it was Easter. When he came home, his parents asked him what he had learned. He replied: “Aliens came from outer space, lived on earth for a while, and then left. God is one of those aliens and after death we go in a space ship to live with God.” His parents looked at each other incredulously and asked him: “Are you sure that’s what they told you?” “No” he replied, “But you would never believe what they said.”(1)
When it comes to the resurrection, I know some just are not so sure. It isn’t that they write it off, it’s just that they don’t really know what to make of it. For many people, including Christians, Easter seems more like a fairy tale or wishful thinking. A wise theologian once said that he believed that many people in the church would actually be more comfortable with Holy Saturday than Easter Sunday. They can believe in a good man now lying in a tomb, but they can’t really trust that a dead man is now alive and making a difference in the world around them.
After all, life doesn’t really look like an exuberant Yes a lot of the time. We only have to hear the news headlines to wonder if Yes is the right word for us. In many places today it seems more like Good Friday than Easter. If Easter is real, we need to be able to proclaim its YES even in the midst of a broken world.
With all the pomp and flowers and Alleluias of this day it’s easy to forget that Easter Sunday did not begin with a resounding Yes. The four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John give different accounts of what happened but they all capture a sense of darkness, confusion and disbelief on Easter morning. The events of Easter happened in half light. The disciples could not, at first, see clearly the good news of Easter. They suspected theft was involved with the empty tomb and the gospel writers were honest enough to tell us about it. John says that one of the two disciples who saw the empty tomb believed, while the other seemed to reserve his opinion until they had more evidence. Mark simply ends his account of the resurrection by saying that after the women discovered that the body of Jesus was gone, “they were afraid.” Period. End of story.
In Luke’s account, the women ran to report to the disciples that they had found the tomb empty and that an angel had told them the Lord had risen from the dead. The verse that follows, which our lectionary omits (probably out of embarrassment) goes like this: “But these words seemed to [the disciples] an idle tale and they did not believe them.” A contemporary translation of the Greek might read, “What have these women been smoking?”
It’s okay to admit that we have a hard time with the story of Easter Day. Remember, we are exhorted by our faith to tell the truth and told that the truth will set us free. It is an extraordinary truth that some of you are here today not necessarily because you believe the women’s story — anymore than the disciples did— but because you so deeply and longingly and perhaps even desperately want to believe. And that is enough. Wanting to believe is enough. For through this desire our hearts may be opened to a new way to living that will save us from despair— for Easter Day is not just about Jesus, it is also about us. Easter brings hope in the face of our desolation. It says that because our Lord lives, we also live — and not just for now — but forever.
But it takes more than an ancient story of a miraculous happening to open our eyes and free our hearts from that shroud of suspicion with which we defend ourselves — just as it took more for the disciples. They doubted when they heard the story of the women; they had to encounter the Risen Christ themselves. And so do we.
The angel said to the women, “Why seek the living among the dead?” No one is going to find Jesus in the tomb anymore. He is risen. Now he is to be found in the world.
John tells us Mary Magdalene saw Jesus in the garden, and, at first, believed him to be the gardener. Luke says two of his followers walked with him on the road to Emmaus. Both Luke and John tell us Jesus appeared to his frightened disciples in a closed room; and John says days later the disciples had breakfast with him on the beach.
The point of the Easter story is that Jesus is with us. And not only in moments of joy and beauty, or the new birth we see outside our door in the springtime, but also in places that ache with grief and despair and war and natural disaster — like Japan, Haiti, Afghanistan and Eastern North Carolina; like Madison Manor and Mission Hospital and Buncombe Correctional Center. Perhaps Christ is especially to be found in those parts of our own lives that seem to us to be unredeemable, impossible to overcome; waiting outside tombs of death that are sealed tight. Easter says there is nothing our Lord cannot overcome for our sake; nothing he cannot redeem, not even death. God intends to do for the whole world what was done for Jesus on that first Easter morning.
Easter is God’s Yes to the world — though a bright, exuberant Yes may be too grand an affirmation for a world as shrouded and ambiguous as ours. The Rev. Samuel Lloyd, the dean of the Washington Cathedral, writes of the great theologian Karl Barth who reminds us of another way. He says that the Good News of God in Christ has written on every page of our lives the word, “Nevertheless.” In a world of human freedom, terrible things can and do happen. But they are never the last word. There is always God’s “Nevertheless.”
The people of Israel were imprisoned as slaves in Egypt. Nevertheless, God led them to freedom in the Promised Land. A lame man had lain thirty years by the pool of Siloam. Nevertheless, Jesus healed him and gave him new life. Jesus came calling people to trust God and to forgive and love each other with an inclusive, all-embracing love. And he was executed for threatening the unjust systems of political and religious authorities. Nevertheless, God brought him back to life. Mary Magdalene, Peter, and all the other disciples were plunged into despair by their leaders’ death. Nevertheless, the Risen Christ appeared to them. And they were transformed from frightened, timid followers into bold faith-filled witnesses of Good news that spread to the ends of the earth.
Haven’t we too experienced something of God’s Nevertheless?
Our world is filled with dead-ends, sealed tombs, that have been miraculously broken open. Because Christ is raised from the dead, all bets are off. Easter declares that the God who created heaven and earth is capable of new creation, taking the broken pieces and closed tombs of our lives and world and making them somehow new.
This Easter morning says that Christ is among us. He’s here in the company surrounding you – in his body of the Church. He’s here feeding us with the bread and wine of his risen life. He will be in our homes this afternoon and our work tomorrow opening doors, inviting us to risk and to love.
Watch, my friends, for the stirrings of our Risen Lord Christ, here, and everywhere writing Nevertheless over every dead end in our lives and world. You see, he is not dead; he is risen. Alleluia!
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