John 20:1-18 "Creasters"

         Winter here in Maine is that season of snow, sleet, ice, freezing rain, and cold punctuated just enough by occasional tantalizingly warm temperatures that when the snow, sleet, ice, freezing rain, and most of all the cold inevitably returns, it seems more bone-chilling than ever.  Winter here in Maine is also that season bookended by the two most highly attended celebrations in the church year – Christmas and Easter.  In fact, that bookend effect is the basis for the word “chreasters”, a term reserved for those folks who attend worship only on those festival holidays. 

         But Christmas and Easter are so different.  It is really quite amazing that the two holidays would draw a “chreaster” crowd. Presbyterian theologian Frederick Buechner describes the former (Christmas) as having a colorful cast of characters in addition to the three principals (Mary, Joseph, and the baby).  We find rustic shepherds, mystical magi, a heavenly choir, a kind-hearted innkeeper, a mysterious star.  Even the animals have carved out their special role in the story. 

        We know every detail of the narrative of Jesus’ birth like the back of our hand – and its Hallmark-created sweetness cries out for old familiar carols to be sung from November on and children’s pageants to be performed and candles to lighten our living rooms and brighten our days and Christmas letters and cards to be sent in order to reconnect us to our former lives.  Christmas is a big production. 

         But Easter?  Well, Hallmark has been hands off when it comes to the Biblical basis of the story.  But then, come to think of it, the Bible story itself is short on details.  The Gospels are not very clear at all about what happened.  Whatever went on, it was all in the dark in the pre-dawn hours.  It was carried out in silence – or, at best, in whispers.

         The stone had been rolled aside.  The writers seem to agree on that as they do on Mary Magdalene being among the first to arrive at the tomb.  But only Matthew speaks of an earthquake after the sun came up.  The Gospel writers cannot even agree on who greeted the first responders or what exactly was said.  Was it one white-clad figure or two?  Were he, she, or they in the tomb or sitting outside? And what about Jesus himself?  Did he hang around in the garden or meet up with his friends on the road or slip into an upper room in Jerusalem?  What did he say?  What did he do?  So many questions are left unanswered, and contradictions abound – leaving us with more confusion than our little rational minds can stand.

         Compared to Christmas, Easter is a pretty minor production with a lot of major holes. I mean - try setting a children’s pageant in a graveyard and coming up with a costume for a rock – let alone someone excited to take that part.

         Besides, there are simply no songs to sing for weeks on end or candles blazing in our windows or Easter letters sent in order to reconnect us to our former lives. Not that we have not tried to beef up the day a bit with sales on fashionable dresses for Easter brunch at Target and Old Navy, Easter egg hunts, chocolate bunnies, and marshmallow chickens. 

         But it has really been all for not.  As Buechner observes, “It's not really even much of a story when you come right down to it, and that is of course the power of it. It doesn't have the ring of great drama. It has the ring of truth.  If the Gospel writers had wanted to tell it in a way to convince the world that Jesus indeed rose from the dead, they would presumably have done it with all the skill and fanfare they could muster. Here there is no skill, no fanfare. They seem to be telling it simply the way it was. The narrative is as fragmented, shadowy, incomplete as life itself. When it comes to just what happened, there can be no certainty. That something unimaginable happened, there can be no doubt.”

         In the Gospel writer of John’s account, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb alone.  Can you picture it?  Mary walking among the dead in a cemetery in the dark? 

         Of course, it makes perfect sense that it was in the dark.  After all, her whole world was in the dark – and, as far as she was concerned, probably always would be going forward.  You see, she had been there – looking on – and had seen Jesus give up his life with a groan that bespoke the strange combination of despair and relief that accompanied his pain-filled and shameful passing. 

         She had watched, stunned, as his body was taken down from the cross and carried to the tomb. She had heard the stone being heaved in front of it and the grunts of the men doing the heaving, thereby sealing off the corpse from the all the malice and resentment and vitriol that had finally claimed it. 

         And now – in the dark – Mary saw that the rock had been rolled away.  One would have thought that she might have yelled, “He is risen!”  After all, that is what Jesus said would happen. 

         However, she did not even peek into the tomb.  She thought she knew what had occurred.  Since the tomb was clearly empty, the body must have been stolen.  It had been her greatest fear all along, and so she ran to tell Peter who engaged in a footrace with another disciple:  Helter skelter to the garden they ran. 

         The other disciple got there first and saw the grave clothes neatly folded in the corner.  The Gospel writer tells us that he believed – though we are left to wonder just what he believed.        Perhaps he believed that Mary was right.  Yup: this tomb is empty.  After all, he did not pump his arms in jubilation and declare, “He is risen indeed.”  He and Peter simply scratched their heads and went back home for breakfast and a second cup of coffee.

        Mary, however, hung around weeping.  And it was through her tears that she saw first the angels who could not figure out why she was carrying on so – and then the gardener.  At least, she thought it was the gardener.  It sure looked like the gardener. 

         But then he called her name – and it was at precisely that moment that she understood that she was not looking into the eyes of the underpaid illegal immigrant groundskeeper.  She was looking into the eyes of Jesus himself.  He was risen – but not like she ever dreamed he would be risen.  But, yes, he was risen.  He was risen indeed.  And so Mary hightailed it off to tell the others.  “I have seen the Lord.”

         That is the story you came here to listen to this morning.  But I do not know why you really came to church.  I do not know if it is out of habit – just what you do on any Sunday morning.  Or perhaps you are doing the “creaster” thing and marking the end of a long and arduous winter. 

         However, I do know that if you came here to buffer your chances of living forever or to figure out once and for all what happened that first Easter morning, well, you will not find what you are looking for in this church. You see, here we travel together – and invite all of you to travel with us - into the mystery of Easter, reflecting all the while on what Jesus taught, which was way more about this life than the next.  And as for providing you with rational answers, well, I can tell the story no better than the writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

         However, I do know that the empty tomb has – almost miraculously - retained its power and meaning - and that power and meaning has tumbled down through the ages for some 2000 plus years – all the way to us – and for one reason more important, I think, than all the others.  The story still keeps coming to us and is not forgotten and lost in the mists of time because of the life that preceded it.  If Jesus was not who he was and did not teach what he taught, the empty tomb would have been old news in a very short while.  A twitter feed lost in cyperspace.

         As UCC pastor Chris Moore wrote, “It is because of Jesus’ life that the resurrection has meaning. Jesus’ life…sets before us ethics on justice and inclusion, wisdom teachings about our interconnectedness and the example of living with passion and hope. It is (Jesus’ life) that invites us, some 20 centuries later, to imagine a different world than even the one we live in, with not only the assertion that God is love, but the trust that God is love…a trust so profoundly modeled for us by Jesus that he bet his life on it.”

         You see, Jesus embodied – incarnated - everything that God dreamed we as humans could be.  And God reaffirmed that dream on Easter with what has become its anchor image: the empty tomb. And so we who are Christians say confidently that on that day millennia ago, life overcame death.  We say that the empty tomb is proof that love lives.  We say, as theologian Marcus Borg noted, that on Easter, God said no to the powers of the world - from radical isolationism to rampant consumerism – and God said yes to the power of love, connectedness, inclusion, and ministering to the least of these. 

         As Presbyterian pastor Mary Jane Cornell wrote, “Back then, Jesus had dared (his followers) to imagine a different world, a world where masters wash servants' feet; and the winner is the one who comes in last, a world where the myth of scarcity was proven false by a 5,000-plate banquet served from the contents of a little boy's lunchbox with more leftovers than the Tupperware could contain.  A world where, instead of survival of the fittest, wolves and lambs were sitting side-by-side at the table, and homelessness was unheard of.”  The image of the empty tomb reminds us of the power of love. That is the message of resurrection.

         There was once a proper United Church of Christ woman who had a parrot for a pet.  The parrot’s name was Polly.  She was a really nice parrot – prim and pretty.  However, she had one problem, and it was a bad habit.  Whenever she met someone, she would screech, “Whoopie, Charlie, I’m a good time girl.”

         Polly kept embarrassing her owner until one day – you guessed it – the pastor came to call.  As soon as he walked in, that parrot shouted, “Whoopie, Charlie, I’m a good time girl.”  Needless to say, the pastor was rather shocked, and the woman was mortified. 

         I’m so sorry,” the owner said. 

         “I think I can help you,” the pastor replied.  “There’s an evangelical pastor down the road who keeps two parrots.  They are very pious and upstanding.  All they do all day is pray.”

         And so misbehaving Polly went to live with the two proper parrots that, sure enough, were praying when she arrived. As you would expect, Polly immediately screeched, “Whoopie, Charlie, I’m a good time girl.” 

         The two parrots stirred, and one, with its wing, nudged the other energetically.  “Hey, Luke, wake up.  We finally got what we’ve been praying for.”

         I do not know what your Easter prayers will be, but mine for you are that, like Mary, you will see that the tomb is empty and that there is no point in looking for the living among the dead. I pray that, like Mary, you will look into the eyes of the gardener, the Syrian refugee, the homeless, the lost, the lonely, the least of these. 

         And I pray that you will hear them whisper your name, for they are desperately whispering the names of all of us.  And I pray that you will turn to really look at them – look beyond the dirt under their fingernails, beyond their national origin and religious heritage, beyond the cardboard sign they hold up on the street corner – and see that who is really there is the Risen Christ.  If you do that, I am confident that you will finally understand that you will not find Jesus sitting in the front pew of the tombs that are so many of our churches today.

         I pray that you will understand more deeply– whether you are a “creaster” or a regular - that life has never been the same because of what happened in that cemetery and later in that garden. 

         I pray that you will trust that love does win and so will dare to work for justice and peace and fullness of life for everyone.  I pray that you will even see glimpses of that victory now and then, glimpses that will give you the great high hope you need to keep envisioning God’s future and the strength and courage it will take to keep walking toward it. But most of all, I pray that, like Mary Magdalene, you will never stop searching until you have found his face (Buechner) – over and over again.