Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

Isa. 65:17-25

John 20:1-18

04/17/22

Easter morning begins with a community in despair.  Those who had believed in Jesus, believed in his kingship had hoped, no, had assumed that Jesus would free them from Roman tyranny and rule.  The messiah-ship for most of the Israelites meant that God’s chosen people would no longer be oppressed.  They would come to fullness, own their own land, have their own place, be the honored, the privileged, the wealthy and full-lived people God had meant for them to be.  Instead, Jesus had not changed the political structure.  Instead, he had called the people to change themselves. Jesus had called them to stop raising themselves up as “chosen” above all other people. Jesus had called them to stop their oppression of those they would judge within their own community: Samaritans, widows, prostitutes, adulterers, tax collectors.  They had been hopeful when they heard of Jesus’ power and strength; they had been hopeful of a new life for themselves. Instead they had been called to make life better for those around them. And they had become angry. So angry that they killed him. Jesus died because of our sins, because of our sinful nature that could not stop hoping for better things for ourselves, that did not instead help

and love those less fortunate around us.

But as with all revenge, his death did not bring healing, it did not bring comfort.  They were still left without the things they had wanted.  They were still left stuck in a life that was hard and unfair.  And now they had guilt added to their disappointment and fear; guilt that they had killed this man who preached nothing but radical and all powerful love.

For those who still believed in Jesus, for those who still loved Jesus, the emptiness was even more profound.  For those in the community who had been outcasts, Jesus had brought a new way of living life, of seeing life.  Jesus had brought life for the least accepted in the community.  And for them, his death was just unfair.

Easter morning begins with this sense of despair.  And in the gospel of John, Mary Magdalene alone went to the tomb before the sun had even begun to rise.  Not a safe thing for a woman to do, even in those times.  But in her love, in her grief, in her need, she went to the tomb to do the rituals which were part of grieving in their society.  She went to remember, she went to mourn, she went to care for the body of the Lord she still loved.  But when she arrived, she found that the body was gone!  For her in that moment, the despair was deepened to a new level.  Even the body was gone.  There was nothing left for her, and nothing for her to do with her grief. 

For us too we experience these times of grief and despair when it seems like nothing could get any worse.  It is in that deepest place of sorrow that we begin Easter.

As I set about writing this sermon, I thought about how all of us here in this place have experience resurrection moments.  I don’t know a single person who has not experienced deep loss, tragedy, pain, death.  Starting from when we are young, we all go through times of loss, times of grief and tragedy, and even times of deep despair.  I was reading an article recently that said that 1/5 of every child in the United States experiences bullying in high school.  My guess is that it is a larger percentage earlier on.  The world is full of bullies.  The world is full of people who would crucify you if given the chance.  And so most of us have experienced persecution at one time or another, or loss, or just pain.  We have experienced death.  The death of our dreams, the death of our hopes, the death of our loved ones, the death of our beliefs or understandings about the world.  And I would add that most of us, then, have also experienced despair.  There have been times for all of us, I believe, when getting up in the morning to face a new day is hard, when any beauty in the world is elusive. 

And yet you persist.  You go on.  You face each day until Easter comes.  For most of us, I believe that Easter does not come suddenly like it did for Mary, for the disciples, for those who loved Jesus.  For them, Easter came a day and a half after his crucifixion.  He was killed on Friday night, and raised by Sunday morning.  For them, his resurrection was full, miraculous, amazing, and, also, overwhelming. 

For many of us, perhaps for most of us, the resurrections in our life do not happen like this.  They are a slow recovery.  They are a walk through grief that you only recognize as a resurrection when you awaken one day without the same heaviness, or when you look back and see how far you have come. 

They may come slowly, but they do come.  The message of the resurrection for us is a promise.  It is a promise that whatever we are feeling, experiencing, living through that is despair, that is an end, that is death; that there is life that will follow. It is a promise of resurrection that says no death, no death is to be feared for no death is the end.  Death does not have the last word.  As an Indian saying says, “All will be well in the end.  And if it is not well, it is not the end.”  That is the promise of the resurrection. 

The resurrection is also an invitation.  It is an invitation to hold on to hope, to hold on to that promise, no matter what you are living through at the moment.  No matter what you see that is terrible and tragic and deadly in the world, those things are not the end, that are not all there is.  God is the God of new life and it comes after every death.  That is the promise and that is the invitation to hope for all of us.

We are in a year of “hope” this year.  And so there are two things I would like us to do.  The first is that I want you to turn to your neighbor and share a resurrection story of your own.  Again, we all have them.  Share a story of a relationship that you thought was over that was resurrected and healed.  Or a divorce that ended with a new and better marriage.  Or a time of deep despair that broke into new life, into hope.  Share your own stories of resurrection, for those are the stories of hope that keep all of us going, that keep all of us remembering the truth of the resurrection.  I invite you do that now.

As Mary was weeping outside the tomb, angels appeared to her.  But she was lost in her sorrow, and could not recognize them as angels. And so Jesus himself came to her, “Why are you weeping?  Whom are you looking for?”  Still, in her grief, in the darkness of the early morning, in her despair, she did not, could not recognize him.  “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 

He responded by calling her name.  “Mary!”  Was all he said.  By calling her name, by seeing her, by loving her, he gave her the strength, the love, the courage to see and recognize him.  And in that moment, all of her despair became joy.

That promise of new life, that promise of joy, is there for us as well.  For us too, God is alive anew around us.  And when we cannot see it, when we are blinded by our grief, when we are overwhelmed with despair, when we are trapped in Good Friday; God calls us by name, loves us, and gives us the strength to look, to see, to believe in the unbelievable, and find ultimate joy in the very midst of our deepest despair.  As the passage in Isaiah tells us, those promises are huge.  “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind....no more shall the sound of weeping be heard.  No more shall there be in it a baby who lives only a few days or an old person who does not live out their whole life.... before they call I will answer.  The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”  All things will be new: this promise is for you.

And so, the second thing I want to do is to pass out stones of hope.  These are rocks that I want you to carry with you during Easter-tide to remind you, weekly and daily that death is not the end, that resurrection is the promise and that it is a promise for each of us. 

And finally, I want to end with a poem that I found written by Annie Johnson Flint:

Some of us stay at the cross,

some of us wait at the tomb,

Quickened and raised with Christ

yet lingering still in the gloom.

Some of us 'bide at the Passover feast

with Pentecost all unknown,

The triumphs of grace in the heavenly place

that our Lord has made His own.

If the Christ who died had stopped at the cross,

His work had been incomplete.

If the Christ who was buried had stayed in the tomb,

He had only known defeat,

But the way of the cross never stops at the cross

and the way of the tomb leads on

To victorious grace in the heavenly place

where the risen Lord has gone.

 

Don’t stay at the cross.  And don’t stay at the tomb.  Instead, step into the grace, and the promise of new life.  It is the promise of resurrection, here for each of us.  Thanks be to God!  Christ is Risen!  (He is Risen indeed!)  Amen.