You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!
The following is every preacher’s late
winter angst, as initially recorded by Reformed Church pastor Louis Lotz: It
begins around mid-February: Palms begin to sweat. Lips grow thin and straight as a mail slot as
you peek ahead in your calendar. There it is staring up at you from the
page—the queen of Christian festivals, the holy day of holy days, Easter.
Your heart begins to thump like a
tom-tom. "A sermon," you whisper through clenched teeth. "I'll
need an Easter sermon. What will I talk about?"
You feel the fear spreading inside of
you like weeds. You recall the taunting indictment of Swiss theologian Markus
Barth, son of the famous Biblical scholar, Karl Barth: "Who has ever heard
a good Easter sermon?"
Yikes!
Your heart begins to flutter wildly, but you do not allow yourself to
hyperventilate, not quite yet. It is way
too early in the process. Instead you say to yourself, "I could talk
about….no, I did that last year.”
However, upon reflection, the thought
crosses your mind that maybe – just maybe – nobody who came last year would
remember what you said anyway.
However, you
take a deep breath and banish that temptation, pulling yourself back from the
ethical abyss of preaching the same sermon twice – yours or, worse, someone
else’s.
You get up from your desk and pace restlessly
around the room. You worry about the unbelief that hides in your flock, and in
your own heart. You try to calm yourself: "Whoa, girl. Steady. Get a
grip."
You tell yourself that Easter is just
another Sunday. And a voice from within replies: "Right. And the Grand
Canyon is just a hole in Arizona."
"I could do a first-person
sermon!" you assure yourself. “I'll
view the resurrection through the eyes of. . ." But then you remember.
"No, I'm no good at first-person sermons.
I have a tendency to panic without a manuscript or at least notes. Anyway, people will think I'm copying that
show-off minister down the street. Where does he get all those costumes,
anyhow?"
And yet, here I am, preaching my 10th
Easter sermon in this small church with its big heart and telling all of you
once more the ancient story, the story that causes some of you to make this
place your church home, the story that causes others of you to darken these
doors only once or twice a year, but darken them none-the-less.
The story begins with women. According to the Gospel of Luke, there are two
Mary’s and a Joanna, and they making their way at that in-between hour when
night is ending and day is beginning, making their way through the graveyard
garden to the tomb while hauling baskets of sweet spices and embalming
herbs. The story begins with their
broken hearts and despair. It begins
like a funeral. It begins like an ending
because that is what the women knew it was.
As Baptist pastor Rich Vincent reminds
us: The women knew “what we all know too
well – dead people remain dead. Therefore, we shouldn’t suppose that the women
were going to the tomb saying to themselves, ‘Well, we’ve got the spices in
case he’s still dead, but let’s hope he’s alive again.'
They have come because they need to
prepare his corpse for proper burial.
While they are at it, they will also pay their last respects to their
beloved teacher – fiery prophet and compassionate healer that he was.
Because all of you have likely heard
this story many more times than I have preached about it, you know already that
the women find the tomb, and, in place of the boulder that should have sealed
it shut, instead there is a gaping hole into the darkness.
What you might not know is that
Luke tells the story differently from other Gospel writers. In the Gospel of Matthew, for instance, an
earthquake rocks the world, announcing the resurrection. In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene
actually runs into a resurrected Jesus and thinks he is the cemetery
gardener. In the Gospel of Mark, an
angel has been perched on the grave clothes for presumably quite some time,
awaiting the arrival of the women so he can proclaim the Easter message. And in the Gospel of Peter (a later narrative
that did not make it into the New Testament), Jesus and two angels stride out
of the tomb, bigger than life because their heads reach all the way to heaven
and beyond. Following them is a talking
cross (I’m serious!).
However, in the account in the Gospel
of Luke that we read this morning, there is only a gaping hole in the
darkness. There is only emptiness – and
a choice for the women to make.
They can challenge the darkness. They can go into the emptiness. Or they can turn around and go home. And who would blame them if they decided on
the latter? Dark tombs that are no
longer sealed where not yet embalmed dead people have been laid would be really
creepy.
The two Mary’s and one Joanna must have
been scared silly, but they chose to set aside their fear and their not knowing
what they were getting into, and they ventured into the darkness. And it is only when they made that choice to
go inside the tomb, to take on death and emptiness that the men in dazzling
white suddenly appeared out of nowhere, admonishing the three of them not to
look for the living among the dead.
Not knowing what to make of it all, the
women hightailed it back to the house where the eleven remaining disciples were
just now wiping the sleep out of their eyes.
Andrew had a pot of coffee ready, and Bartholomew was heating the water
for tea.
Words laced in terror and perplexity
tumbled out of the mouths of the women.
In return, the men did a lot of eyebrow raising and eye rolling before
one of them blurted out, “Leiros!”
That’s Greek for garbage, bull, or in its more vulgar
form…Beep….expletive deleted.
This is the only time in the New
Testament that this particular locker room word is used. As Baptist pastor Angela Yarber wrote, “Leiros
was the word you shout when you stub your toe or when someone pulled their
donkey in front of yours in heavy traffic without using a turn signal. If
someone shared an experience with you that wasn’t credible, wasn’t believable,
was too far from the truth, you called ‘bull leiros’.”
And so they did – ten of
them, at least. All except for Peter –
who maybe, just maybe - even after all the times he had messed up and fallen
short and misread situation after situation – maybe, just maybe, Peter still
harbored a glimmer of hope. Instead of
snickering, Peter went running to the tomb, and, without hesitation, he ran
right into the darkness. He embraced the
emptiness, and he found the grave clothes.
If he had been looking
for an earthquake – or a gardener – or a couple of angels – or even for a
bigger than life Jesus and a talking cross, he would have been deeply
disappointed. Just like if you came here
this morning seeking a rational explanation for an experience of faith - or a
new thread of logic that would make you believe beyond the shadow of a doubt – or an assurance that you will live forever, you will be deeply
disappointed as well. We are seekers in
this church. We do not have all the
answers, but we are looking into the darkness, into the emptiness, together. We are living in a fear-filled world
together, in community.
In this version of the
ancient story, there is no body, no savior, no sign of a person who has been
resurrected. There is only darkness and
emptiness beckoning to us – and an admonition not to seek the living among the
dead.
A man and his five-year old son were
driving past a cemetery and noticed a large pile of dirt next to a freshly dug
grave when the little boy said, “Look, Dad, one got out!”
As a man was driving his children to
church on Easter Sunday, he was trying to explain that Easter was when we
celebrate Jesus’ raising from the dead. From the back seat, his three-year-old
piped up, "Will He be in church today?"
A Sunday school teacher asked each
member of her class to write one sentence on “What Easter Means to Me.” One
pupil wrote: “Egg salad sandwiches for the next two weeks!”
I do not know what Easter
means to you. I do not know if it is a
sincere statement of faith or fodder for a laughable joke, or, as Episcopal
priest Rick Morley notes, a “nice little hopey-springy
cute-bunny-loving pastel-wardrobe-opportunity (where you will) play the game
and sing the hymns (and) see the Resurrection of Jesus as a metaphor at best,
or at worst a cute little myth.”
I do not know what coming here on Easter means to
you. I do not know if it is what your
spouse insists upon or what is required before going out to brunch. I do not know if it is a habit or if you hope
that the preacher will say something – anything – that moves your heart.
But I do know that all of
us, in one way or another, have been staring into the emptiness recently, into
the darkness, just like the two Mary’s and one Joanna did over 2000 years ago:
Over 30 people killed and hundreds injured in the Brussels terrorist attack; a
presidential candidate who proposes a ban on immigrant Muslims; financial
worries that just will not quit; aging parents; troubled teens – and the list
goes on.
Is all this
depressing? You bet, but it was equally depressing
for the women tiptoeing through the morning dew and peeking into the gaping
dark hole of the tomb opening on that first Easter as well – depressing until
they made their choice, until they chose to walk into the darkness, into the
fear, into the not knowing what they were getting into. It was when they walked into the emptiness
that they once again found hope.
When everything
around you looks dark and forbidding, when the world seems like a gaping hole
but you walk into it anyway, surely that is resurrection faith. As Church of Scotland pastor, Roddy Hamilton,
noted, “When you find yourself in the void of an empty
tomb, faith calls us to do now what the disciples did then: believe into the
void by recalling all that Jesus had said of himself and trust that it is true.
Resurrection is surely that kind of
faith: to find yourself in the emptiness of suffering, or grief, or pain, or
loneliness and believe (that) the justice, the life, the hope, the healing
Jesus spoke of is still true. When you believe into the empty tomb, by trusting
what Jesus had said about love, then there is the birth of new life. Everything
becomes possible again, and death isn’t the end of things.
I like the story in Luke (Hamilton
continues) for the very reason (that) there is no body to find, just a set of
amazed disciples who began to believe again, who found themselves in the void
and chose to believe that (humanity is) about life and not death, (that) what
Jesus said hasn’t died but is still true. Justice is still true, hope is still
here, healing is still possible, life is still present.
The faith that Luke speaks through, of
Peter standing in the empty tomb and in that void choosing to believe
everything Jesus spoke of, without seeing a risen saviour, is living (the)
resurrection.” What happened on that
first Easter morning is not about whether we are going to heaven. It is not about whether we will live forever.
It is about God saying no to all the
evil in the world and saying yes to the power of justice and hope and healing
and life, this life. Resurrection faith
is about transformation – of oneself and of the world. It is about possibility, about what can
happen in the present and the future, not what has happened in the past.
And so, if you are looking to leave
with something that has made being here worthwhile on this Easter morning, do
not leave with images of angels and earthquakes and rationality gone to the
dogs. Leave with Hamilton’s words etched
onto your heart: “Justice is still true,
hope is still here, healing is still possible, life is still present.”
Then go forth and, as best as you are
able, with the help of God, live your life that way – because that is the
essence of the Easter message (Christ is risen!) and because you can trust that
you will be following the Risen Christ out of the darkness and into the light
of a new world you will help to birth (Christ is risen indeed!), and because,
well, because you should not seek the living among the dead. Alleluia and Amen.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine
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