March 27, 2005 - Easter Matthew 28:1-10
God is Still Shouting
A few years ago I was given a computerized version of a “Murphy's Law Calendar.” Murphy, as you know, is the one who first coined the dictum, "If anything can go wrong, it will." Every morning I could boot up and there would be a variation of that saying to help me start the day. I can't do that any longer, because in fitting irony or self-fulfilling prophecy, that program crashed. But it was fun while it lasted. I still remember some of its wisdom—
--Nothing is as easy as it looks.
--Nothing is so bad it can't get worse.
--The other line always moves faster.
--If you change lines, the one you just left will start to move faster than the one you are now in.
--The longer you wait in line, the greater the likelihood that you are standing in the wrong line.
--In order to get a loan, you must first prove you don't need it.
--An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears this is true.
--It will always rain on your day off, unless you are sick.
--The impact of a sermon is inversely proportional to its length.
You get the idea. There was one for each day of the year, and this footnote: "Murphy was an optimist." This is all a lot of fun, and these sayings are no doubt the result of painful human experience, which we cope with through laughter. And Easter is a day for laughter, but it is laughter born out of joy, and from discovering that ultimately, Murphy was wrong. The world is not ruled by caprice or vengeance, or by malevolent forces, but by a loving God, who brings good out of evil, and life out of death. Easter is the Still Speaking God's answer to Murphy!
Of course you can't properly celebrate Easter without first remembering Good Friday, the day that everything that could go wrong, did! The carpenter of Nazareth, an itinerant preacher and healer, who cast visions of God’s new realm, had been betrayed by one of his own, taken captive by the Romans and put to one of the most horrible deaths imaginable. His body was placed in a borrowed grave. His disciples crept away in fear and despair and went into hiding. It was over. Or so it seemed. But remember what it says on our banner outside: “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” Good Friday, extending into Holy Saturday, was a very big comma.
For then came Sunday. Of course we don’t know for certain what the historical details are, because each Gospel gives a slightly different story. In Matthew’s version which we heard this morning, two women, Mary Magdalene, one of his closest and most faithful followers, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, went to the tomb at dawn, not to anoint Jesus’ body as in the other Gospels, but simply to keep their vigil. They didn’t expect to enter the tomb and see a body, because not only was the entrance blocked by a large stone, it was also guarded, presumably to keep anyone from stealing the corpse, and faking a resurrection. But as they arrived, there was a great earthquake. And then a dazzling angel rolled away the stone guarding the entrance, sat down, shocking the guards into a catatonic state, and delivered earthshaking news: “Don’t be afraid, for I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen...Come and see...and then go quickly and tell the others that he will meet you in Galilee.” And so they ran off to tell the others the good news. Other versions tell it differently, disagreeing on the details. In one version, the women tell no one. In another, they try, but are disbelieved. And if you read the earliest account of the risen Christ, it comes from Paul, who doesn’t even have an empty tomb, but who believed in resurrection because he had encountered the risen Christ in his own life and was transformed. But the point is the same in all of the accounts: Jesus Christ is alive! Death could not hold the essence of who he was. The radical love he came to proclaim could not be destroyed! And ever since we have not lived in a Good Friday world, but in an Easter world. Of course we still have our Good Fridays--things can and do go wrong; we still face agony, defeat, and death. But this is not the permanent condition of human existence. God is still speaking, even shouting! And while an exclamation point would seem to be the proper punctuation for the Good News of Easter, maybe we need a new mark, a combination comma and exclamation point – an excla-comma. For the resurrection is not the end of things, it doesn’t take us out of this world to some other heavenly realm; rather, we, like the disciples, are directed back to Galilee, into the midst of this world, where life – transformed life – goes on!
We need to take that proclamation to heart, as so much around us would seem to say that we still live in a Good Friday world. It's like a story I first heard from William Sloan Coffin. Two old codgers went hunting for moose in the forests of Maine. They enlisted a bush pilot to drop them off in a small seaplane, and as he left them on the shore of the lake he reminded them, "Like I said, I'll be back in three days. Good luck! But remember, this is a small plane---there's room for the two of you and ONE moose!"
When, three days later, the pilot returned and taxied to the shore, he was irritated to see between the two old boys, standing proudly with their rifles, not one but TWO moose, huge ones at that. "Look," he said, "I told you -- the two of you and ONE moose!"
The old timers looked at each other in surprise and answered, "Funny, the fellah last year didn't complain!"
The fear of competition proving greater than all other fears, the pilot relented. Grumbling, he helped them pile both moose into the little plane, and the two old timers lay on top of them. The plane took forever to get off the lake, barely cleared the trees on the far shore, and about a quarter of a mile further on, clipped a high pine and crashed, sending pieces of its wings and moose antlers in all directions. Finally, one of the old codgers came to, pulled his head out of the moss, spied his companion a short way off, and asked, "Where are we?"
His companion replied, "Oh, about a hundred yards farther than last year!"
When I read the news each morning, I am tempted to wonder how far we've come. We've spent billions of dollars fighting wars in the last two years, and we are probably no safer. We still tend to solve our differences by killing one another.
Our country ranks 22nd in child poverty, 49th in literacy, we import more food than we export, and there are some 18,000 deaths a years attributed to the lack of health insurance. Congress apparently does not have time to take up each case individually. Our souls are still troubled. It is discouraging.
We claim to value life in America, but we don't have much time for resurrections. But I guess you could say that the religious leaders and theologians and the politicians of Jesus' day didn't either. The Sadducees refused to believe in a resurrection at all. And when others saw one happen before their very eyes, as in the case of Lazarus, they conspired to kill him, and put him right back in the tomb where he belonged.
The disciples weren’t too sure about it either. They scattered like chaff in the wind before Jesus died, and had no idea that he might reappear.
Were the technology available, it's a safe bet that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea would not have permitted a resurrection to take place either, but would have instead brought Jesus down off the cross as soon as possible, stuck a few IV's in his veins, hydrated him with a saline solution, put him on life support, until all options could be considered.
Even as we gather on Easter Sunday, we're ambivalent about resurrection. Most of us live as though Jesus were still in the tomb — where, we might add — he belongs. A resurrected Jesus can be a nuisance sometimes, inconvenient and demanding. Because if he is alive, however you want to define that, if he is a living presence inside us, inside this community of faith, his body, then we have to take seriously his contention that love is better than hate, that forgiveness is better than revenge, that caring is better than apathy, and that life is redeemed when people love and forgive and care. We have to recognize his face even in the face of our enemy, in the marginalized and those who are different. We have to meet him where we live, in our Galilee!
As Coffin said once, "We can be optimists only by centuries, by decades we have to be pessimists." But consider this: the opposite of hope is not pessimism, it is despair. We need to take the long view, the faithful view, the hopeful view, and remember that if Jesus himself saw fit to return to this world that crucified him, rose and returned to those who gave him little cause for hope, the who are we to complain and give up hope? If Christ rose and returned to this world, then this world is our primary concern. And we go on and care and love and forgive because we live in an Easter world.
Hope allows that there is much to be pessimistic about, at least realistic, and acknowledges that there will be Good Fridays. But there is also Easter. Love will not be put down forever. And God is still shouting through it all!
Twenty-five years ago this week, Archbishop Oscar Romero was gunned down as he celebrated mass in San Salvador. Earlier he had said, “If I am killed, I will rise again among the Salvadoran people.” He has, and El Salvador is a very different place than it was. And now there are signs of hope in the Middle East. Like the trees about to blossom, there are signs of hope in this world all around, if we but look. [Note: Westmorelander Phil Davison has written a book about this – Things Might Go Right: Prospects for Peace and a Better Life in an Age of Globalization and Specialization.]
Easter says finally that there is hope even beyond this life. Life is changed, not ended. As it happened to Jesus, so it will be with us, for in the end, Easter is not so much about Jesus’ resurrection as it is our own!
Recently I heard the story from a Campus Minister of the student who on her religious preference card indicated that she was a Frisbeeterian. Asked what that is, she said a Frisbeeterian believes that when you die your soul goes up on the roof...and no one can get it down!
We may not know what lies beyond the grave, but we do know who is beyond the grave. Death is certainly not the worst thing that can happen, as we are reminded by the tragic and ironic case in Florida – I hope every one of us has our “living will” in order – Death is a part of life, but it too is only a comma, not a period, more like a birth canal than a tomb, more like an horizon than an abyss.
Those who live in the despair of a Good Friday World, whether Frisbeeterians or followers of Murphy's Laws, or hostages of the Grim Reaper, do not believe there is anything beyond the horizon. But as people of faith, as Easter people, we are call to trust God, to celebrate life in all its fulness, to embrace the love that is stronger than death.
John Alfred Brashear was one of the great scientists of the last century, a man of hope who struggled to transform his life from its beginnings in poverty, a man of learning who labored to overcome the ignorance of closed minds, and who was still able to love God and celebrate the mysteries of God's universe. In the back of his home was a small hill to which he and his wife would walk each evening to study the stars. The two of them were eventually buried on that hill beneath the simple inscription, "We have loved the stars too much to fear the night!" And that too is what it means to live in an Easter world--to love God and the world God made, and not give into despair or fear or the power of death, but live in hope.
The angel met Mary Magdalene at the tomb early that first Easter morning and said, He is not here, he is risen, go and tell the others he is going ahead of you to Galilee, and there you will see him. In the same way, the Risen Christ meets you and me, in the tombs of our fear and despair and pessimism and gloom, and calls us out. Be done with despair, for I give you a new world. I am risen, and you can be too! I am risen, and I give to you the life that is abundant and eternal! Now, what will you do with it?
