Based on Acts 10:37-43, Colossians 3:1-4, John 20:11-18
Alleluia! Hallelujah! Two words, one Greek and one Hebrew which both mean “Praise the Lord”! Let’s say them together as loudly as you can… It is Easter Sunday, it is Resurrection Day, it is a day where we come together to celebrate God’s great act of love which released us from our slavery to sin and death. It is a day to shout for joy and raise our praises to the God who imagined that life could come from the dust of the earth, and that life could return to Jesus who was crucified, died and was buried for three days! Yes, it is a day of great joy…but it is also a day that, if we’re being totally honest, revolves around something absolutely incomprehensible. How do we make sense of the mystery and miracle of the Resurrection?
I honestly hope that you didn’t come here expecting me to be able to explain the Resurrection in a way that makes rational sense – if you did, then you will leave disappointed. Before you tune me out, let me further say that while the Resurrection is incomprehensible to our limited minds, it teaches something vitally important and true about Almighty God. Because the truth about following the God of our understanding is that all the sensible things I or any other religious professional might have to say about God are rendered nonsense by the truth that Jesus stepped up out of the grave. Folks, the tomb is empty, and I think that’s what you came to hear me proclaim today. Further, I believe you came to hear me proclaim that the beating heart of our faith is a longing for a God who cannot be contained or explained; can be experienced but never adequately described - a God whose victory over death continues to redefine and reanimate lives 2000 years later. Amen?!
These last six weeks I have led the people of this church in an exercise of imagination. We have been imagining together what it means for us that God breathed life into the dust of the earth and created us, that God forgave the sin of the first Adam by giving us the second Adam, Jesus. What it means for our lives and our world that we can imagine following and trusting God with our lives, living out life-giving hope in God, accessing the wisdom of God to guide our lives, and living empowered and guided by God’s Holy Spirit. One week ago, we imagined Jesus’ triumph and pain, on Thursday we imagined living as part of God’s salvation history, while on Friday we imagined the death of God.
Today, we get to imagine together what it means for us that death could not hold Jesus in the grave. That is what our scripture readings help us to do. John’s Gospel tells the story of that first Easter morning. The tomb was open, Jesus’ body was not inside and the cloth coverings around his body were still there. Mary Magdalene stood weeping outside the tomb and looked again inside. There she saw two angels who asked her why she was crying. She turned from them and saw a man she didn’t recognize until he spoke to her. The Risen Christ told her to go to the Disciples and tell them he was going before them to Galilee to ascend back to the Father. Can you imagine what Mary experienced in the depth of her grief to hear and see her Lord and Savior?
In our other readings Peter is telling some God-fearing gentiles about how Jesus was raised from the dead and how Peter and the other Disciples ate and spoke with him. How the Risen Christ had told them to go and preach the good news of his resurrection to all people. The writer of the letter to the believers in Colossae reminds us that since we are Easter people, people of the Resurrection, we are to set our hearts and minds on the things of heaven and not on worldly things. In fact, in verses just beyond our reading for today, we are instructed to “put to death whatever belongs to our earthly” natures. Can you imagine what our lives would be like if we did that?
How do we not only imagine living in the world as Easter People – as people who are redefined and reanimated through what God’s love did on that first Easter morning, but put that into practice? Pastor and spiritual writer Barbara Brown Taylor observes how resurrection needs to become more than just a lovely little holiday we participate in once each year. We need to incarnate it – that is, we need to live daily our resurrection reality. She writes, “…I have decided that incarnation is less a doctrine than a practice, which Jesus did not come to do once and for all but to show any who were willing how God’s word might become flesh in their own lives too. ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ ‘Give to everyone who begs from you.’ ‘Consider the lilies, how they grow.’ ‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.’
In sayings like these, Jesus gave his followers teachings they could embody. He taught them to take other people’s bodies as seriously as they took their own. He taught them to trust the revelatory power of lilies, vines, branches, sheep, falling stars and birds of the air, among many other things. He taught them to see God in the world the same way he did - in the way creation worked, in the way people acted - and while some of his examples were negative ones (‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?’), he still spoke with full conviction that they could learn about God’s realm by attending to their own physical lives on earth.
To practice incarnation is to discover a pedagogy that is as old as the Gospels. Why else did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper? With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he did not give them things to think about when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do, specific ways of being in their bodies together, that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around. After he was gone, they would still have God’s word, but that word was going to need some new flesh….”
That is what it means to imagine resurrection and live as Easter people. We are the people who are commanded to put the teachings of Jesus to work in our lives and out into our world. We are the people who have the ability to proclaim God’s incomprehensible yet Almighty “Yes!” when our mortality tries to pronounce it’s meager “no” in our lives and our world. When we live as resurrected people then we stop fixating on the grave and hold fast to the resurrection instead. We get focused on the heavenly and put the worldly on the back burner where it belongs.
Martyred Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “Christ did not come into this world so that we might understand him, but that we might cling to him in order to be caught up in the immense and ongoing event of resurrection.” Resurrection is a truth that can change you if you let it. Living as Easter people can make it easier to forgive, knowing that eternity is far too long to bear a grudge. You can choose live lives that are a bit more relaxed because God has given you eternity. You can choose to live your life punctuated by small acts of generosity like listening to wounded souls tell their stories as many times as they need to or letting harried young parents and elders go before you in line at the grocery store, DMV, Costco, etc.
You may also find yourselves going deeper in your relationships with people, letting down your psychological defenses and armor, because you do not need them anymore. God has won every battle for you. Death has been defeated. God wants you to stop struggling in order to live abundantly in the world God created for you – a life reimagined and empowered through the Resurrection of the Christ. This is how Easter people take their first tentative step toward heaven on earth, not by dying, but by imagining that today each of our lives have begun!
How do we comprehend the incomprehensibility of the Resurrection? We begin by imagining that it is true, that Jesus did step up out of the grave. Then we do the same by living our lives abundantly by dying to the worldly cares and strivings that keep us sealed in our tombs; abundant lives animated and empowered by a God whose almighty love conquered death. Alleluia, Hallelujah, Amen and amen!