March 23, 2008 – Easter
Matthew 28:1-10
Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Blessed Easter morning to each and every one of you! May this day of new life bring new life to whatever needs resurrecting in you so that you become part of the Good News that fills this place and spills out into this world that God loves. May this world be changed for the better because of you, and because of God’s work of new life in you.
In various ways, this day is both an easy and a challenging one for us, you and me. It’s easy because what could be more pleasant than the colorful splendor of this sanctuary and, outside, the bright promise of a new season when we can get out there and fully engage life again after a Kansas winter that’s lasted far too long.
And it’s an easy day if we can manage to have it on our terms. We can relate to writer Anne LaMott who says, “I like the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the open tomb; [imagine that:] everlasting life and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.”
Well, chocolates aside; let’s focus on the empty tomb, because that’s where we find our challenge for this day. Most of us have been taught to see the focus of this day, Resurrection, as something that impacts us only after we die. The formula for this is remarkably straightforward: God raised Jesus from the dead, and those of us who believe in Jesus will experience the same rising into eternal life after we die. That’s fine and accurate, as far as it goes.
But if that’s the best we can manage to make of this day – that we’re headed for eternal life – if that’s the only thing we got all dressed up this morning to hear, then this world becomes simply God’s waiting room and human life becomes a process of thumbing through the same tired old magazines, trying our best to amuse ourselves with attractive distractions until we die.
But that’s not the abundant life Jesus came to show us; that’s not the Resurrection life God gives us. The Resurrection life God gives us isn’t simply about new life after death; it’s about new life before death. “Behold, I am about to do a new thing,” God says, and that new thing is you. That’s what the two Marys were beginning to discover when they arrived at the graveyard that morning.
The concept of resurrection would not have been unfamiliar to them, or to the disciples or anyone else who knew the Hebrew Scriptures, what we refer to as the Old Testament. In his book, When Jesus Came to Harvard, theologian Harvey Cox says that for the Jews of Jesus’ day and long before, resurrection was a readily accepted belief. But to them, resurrection did not refer primarily to eternal life; instead, it was a theological symbol expressing faith in God’s justice at the end of history.
Remember the old spiritual, Dem Bones? “The toe bone’s connected to the foot bone, the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone, the leg bone’s connected to the knee bone” – that imagery comes from a passage in the book of Ezekiel where the prophet looked out over a vast valley of dry, disconnected, lifeless bones. But when God got busy, those bones weren’t dry or disconnected for long; they took on skin, took on flesh, stood upright and God breathed into them the breath of life and there they were, alive again!
It’s important to note that they had died, not of natural causes but rather had fallen under the sword of oppression and cruelty. Now they stood up, every one of them a vivid announcement that God does not tolerate injustice, but rather that God’s justice will have the final word in this life. Cox points out that resurrection stories in the Hebrew Scriptures “did not spring up from a yearning for life after death, but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply has to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful.”
The two Marys at the graveyard that morning knew what had happened. They knew Jesus hadn’t simply died of old age; if he had, God bringing him back to life would have struck a blow at mortality. But no; they understood that he was executed for being a threat to the ruling authorities of the day. Restoring him to life was striking a blow at the corrupt worldly system that executed him.
That shines a different light on the Easter story, doesn’t it? Did you notice the soldiers at the tomb? They were standing guard, dispatched there by the Roman governor with the command to make the tomb “as secure as you can.” They gave it their best, sealing a massive stone against the mouth of the tomb and staying put themselves to make sure no grave robbers stole the body and lessened the impact of the message, which was stark and direct: “This is what happens when you challenge the powers of this world.”
But God had a different message, delivered by an angel in the midst of an earthquake. So much for homeland security in the 1st Century. The quake that terrified the guards and knocked them cold blasted an entirely new fault line down through human history. The angel rolled back the stone not to let Jesus out – he was already gone – but rather to let the women in, into that tomb whose emptiness held the explosive message that everything that Jesus had said was true!
While he was still with them he had helped them to imagine, to catch a glimpse, of a world that was very different from the one they were experiencing. A world that God intends, a world that is possible, now. A world in which the poor in spirit, those whose hearts are broken, those who show mercy, those who are beaten down turn out to be blessed by God. A world in which loving your enemy is just as essential and as life-giving as loving your neighbor. A world in which sick people are healed, children have enough to eat, soldiers don’t patrol the streets anywhere. A world in which rich people and poor people alike are in for the surprise of their lives, which is good news or bad news, depending. A world where fear is swallowed up by hope and despair is erased by confidence.
Caesar had gotten the message too, only he saw it not as life-giving and liberating but as threatening. Caesar wears any number of faces and titles and nationalities – always has and always will in this world – from Rome’s policy of peace through violence to Jerusalem’s system of religious fear-mongering to any system then or now that maintains itself by stepping on the necks of people. So Caesar dispatched his soldiers to kill off the vision and silence the crazy and dangerous talk. Looked like it worked, too, that Friday. Jesus was dead. Now, the disciples figured, they were all dead. Back to business as usual.
But then, on the first day of the week, as dawn was breaking, the world began to heal.
Back to those guards at the graveyard, frozen in fear at the empty tomb. We can have some empathy for them. Chances are, there have been times in all our lives when we’ve been shaken to our core by the destruction of whatever it was at the time that made us feel secure and in control. The loss of that kind of security can feel like death itself. That’s why the message of the angel still sings today: “Do not be afraid.” Easter has come to us, has come for us, to announce that death does not have the last word.
The Resurrection showed the two Marys that it was true, what Jesus had said; that that reality that he called the Kingdom of God had already begun. It wasn’t fully here yet, not yet; but they’d be able to see it, to taste it, every time they or one of the other disciples acted as if it were real. New life before death. That was the job now, to act up and act it out. Because death may be beaten, but it’s not down for the count yet; Caesar’s grip on power may be weakening, but he hangs on.
Take courage, though, because there is coming a day when everything that damages human life will itself be destroyed, a day when everything that defies God will be burned up. Resurrection people live into that day.
Back in the early 1960s, as this country was embroiled in the Civil Rights struggle, the Ku Klux Klan was especially powerful. In Georgia, the Klan would regularly hold mass rallies just outside of Atlanta. They would burn a huge cross on the top of Stone Mountain, then travel by motorcade into the city where they would parade down Auburn Avenue, the main artery that ran through the African American community. They would march in full Klan regalia, ominous and deadly and secret inside those robes and hoods. You never knew who was inside those hoods, could be your boss, whoever. The stark and brutal message was crystal-clear: Don’t ever forget who’s in charge here. And the residents of Auburn Avenue would hurry inside their homes, lock their doors and shutter their windows until the Klan had passed.
In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and when its various pieces of legislation began to take effect, it became clear that the future would be very different.
And so it was that one evening the Klan again gathered on Stone Mountain and burned a gigantic cross, then drove into Atlanta for the march down Auburn Avenue. But this time the residents did not scurry inside and lock their doors and shutter their windows. Instead, they came out and stood on the sidewalks, and they laughed! They laughed and they pointed and they laughed some more!
And the Klan never marched down Auburn Avenue again.
When you know the future, it destabilizes the power that rules the present.
Resurrection showed the two Marys the future. Fortified by the shortest and best Easter sermon ever preached, “Do not be afraid,” spoken first by the angel and reinforced by the resurrected Jesus, they went off to gather up the other disciples and get busy living that future in the present. And in fact, that’s why you’re here this morning, as part of God’s future.
Here at Advent we typically have a number of worship guests every Sunday. On Easter we have quite a few more than usual. Here’s a word just for you. We invite you to come back. We do this every Sunday, you know. Oh, the decoration of the sanctuary and the music are all pronounced this morning, certainly, but the story and the promises are the same. Always will be.
So if this story intrigues you, if it captures your imagination or simply piques your curiosity, come back to hear it again. A colleague of mine suggests that the real reason we Christians gather for worship every seven days is because the story we share is so incredible and the promises that God makes through that story are so mind-boggling that we can’t believe this stuff for more than six days at a stretch, so we have to get together every Sunday to remind ourselves again who we really are, who God has made us to be, that we are Easter people, living God’s future in our present.
And what a future! The Resurrection of Jesus takes place as an act of justice in which God repudiates worldly power that opposes his own. That’s true. But the even greater truth is that the Resurrection of Jesus takes place as an act of unstoppable, unconditional, pure love, the love of the Father for the Son. It’s the same love that God has for you, personally. If you were the only person in the world, Christ would have died for you, and God would have raised him from the dead, for you. In that love lives the greatest power the world will ever know.
The resurrected Christ goes on ahead of you now, to wait for you – not in heaven, but in Galilee, which means Olathe, Overland Park, wherever your life is headed. He waits for you there, waiting to welcome you into his work of raising the dead to life. The power to do exactly that is in your hands, because you’re in God’s hands. It’s how God’s future lives in our present, through you. So find your way to your Galilee, and keep looking; because there you will see him, just like he promised.
Amen.
