LOOKING BEYOND DEATH

A Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock

[Isaiah 765:17-25; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Luke 24:1-12]

Easter Sunday.  I am glad that we are together for such an important occasion because dealing with resurrection requires help!, which leads me to a question.  What are your expectations for this day?  Coming for this festival celebration, what are you looking for?

Recently, I overheard an ordained colleague’s off-handed comment that preaching on Easter Sunday is a lot like preaching at a wedding.  At a wedding, he observed, no one is actually listening to what is said because people’s attention is on other things!

If this is your state of mind this morning (and God knows that it is a struggle to push the state of the world and our nation aside – not to mention those things that shape our personal orbits) -- if on this Easter Sunday your attention wanders or your expectations are not met, rest assured that you’re in good company.  You are in good company because everyone that the Easter gospel mentions is similarly distracted and focused on expectations that actually need to be disappointed.

In the case of our Easter gospel cast of characters, all of them weren’t expecting what they found.  They weren’t expecting to see and hear what they encountered.  They weren’t expecting the risen Christ of God.  That resurrection morning came as a complete and utterly unexpected surprise to them all: Such a surprise that some found it too hard to believe.

Of course the followers of Jesus were distracted!  Their hopes had been shattered on the cross.  The one they had given their hearts to, the one they had put their trust in had gone the way of all life – life as humanity had come to expect life to be – namely, life defined by fear, violence, and death with small episodes of relief.  Expectations dashed and hearts broken, the question from the old torch singer, Peggy Lee, gnaws at the soul: “Is that all there is?”

“Is that all there is?”  “Now what do we do?”

What the men who had followed Jesus did was to run away.  They hid themselves.  The terrifying reality of power expressed in violence, with the sole purpose to control, was a punch to their guts.  Were they fools for believing and following?  At the realistic prospect of being next on their enemies’ hit list, it seems that in their confusion and panic, the men, the Twelve-minus-one, returned to the last, safe touchstone they had with Jesus.

They retreated to the Upper Room and hoped anxiously that in the process their cover had not been blown.  They, who in brighter days to come would be referred to as the “Apostles”, now hid themselves and locked the room’s door, as if that hinged piece of wood would keep them safe.  Their expectations were dominated by the terrorizing thought of “what’s next?”; and their eyes and ears focused on any disturbance that might bespeak of imminent danger.

For their part, the women who followed Jesus were in a different place, with a different set of expectations.  They did not run away; but rather they stood in silent vigil.  They watched their Lord’s suffocating death, the post-mortem awkwardness of removing his body from the nailed timbers, and finally his impromptu burial.  The women saw it all.  In their silent witness they watched and consciously marked this horrid finale because (unlike the men) the women intended to return.

They intended to return to the tomb for the purpose of offering the proper burial rights to the one they loved and the one in whom they had placed their hopes.  The women, who had been with Jesus from the beginning in Galilee, had (in the words of the old gospel song) come too far to let him go now.  But they, too, were distracted – understandably so.  They didn’t expect what was soon to unfold.  How could they?

So it was, early on the next day that the women, in fact, did return to Jesus’ burial site to tenderly perform the appropriate burial rites.  For them, such grief-stricken care for Jesus was the only available answer to the haunting question: “What’s next?”

Among their dashed expectations, the first one came through an omission.  What about the huge rock that sealed the cave-tomb?  How would they get into the tomb to tend to his body?  Their level of distraction overlooked this pressing practicality.  But as Luke so-matter-of-factly reports, as the women approached the burial site, “they found the stone rolled away from the tomb”.1  Imagine that!  What member of the “Department of Governmental Efficiency” overlooked that detail?  No matter: The shattering of their second expectation proved to be the tipping point.

Entering the tomb with their burial spices, again Luke dispassionately informs his readers: “they did not find the body.”  “Perplexed” is how Luke describes the women’s emotional response to this – maybe “freaked out” is more along the unvarnished lines.  “Whaaaat!?” we in our time might say.  Yet, no sooner than the fact that Jesus’ missing body registered with the women, two men dressed in “dazzling apparel” stood by them, at which point the dumbfounded women simply crumbled into a heap on the ground.  Overwhelmed, undoubtedly fearful, they buried their faces from – from what they had no way of expecting.

It was at that discombobulating moment – the one that trampled on all their expectations -- not to mention frightening them to death, it was then that one of the men “dressed in dazzling apparel” broke the frozen moment and soberly said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

Whatever expectation you had in coming to this Easter worship, in all compassion and love, I suggest to you the question about seeking the living among the dead is the Easter question that directs us to Easter’s true and joyful meaning.

So, once again, what did you expect in coming here to church on this Easter Sunday?

I wonder.  How many of us expected to hear something along the lines of: Jesus’ resurrection means that there really is life after death.  Or how many of us expect to encounter the familiar phrase that Jesus’ resurrection means that we go to heaven when we die?  Or as it has been said – by others and not in this space, Jesus’ resurrection proves his divinity.  None of these statements has anything to do with the triumph of this day.

If something along these lines is what is expected, don’t worry.  As I said, we are in the good company of all the followers of Jesus that the gospels mention.  And if we are to confront the reality and truth of Jesus’ resurrection, our puny expectations (like those of Jesus’ followers) – expectations of what life with God is like – those expectations must be disappointed and ultimately shattered, as well.

The people of the first Easter were puzzled by all this empty tomb stuff, just as people now are often puzzled.  For instance, Jews of the time did believe in “resurrection”.  They believed that at the fullness of time, God would give new embodiment to all the righteous ones – from the Patriarchs to Moses to the recent martyrs like the Maccabees.

No one in Jesus’ time (or the many in our own time) expected that one person would be killed and then God would raise that person to a new sort of bodily life on the other side of the grave, while everyone else would carry on as before.  Moreover, no one in the Jewish tradition – then or now -- expected the Messiah of God to be killed by his enemies.  What was expected then (and so often now) was that someone would rise up among the people with the promise of “fixing” things for us to make life all better.  To the extent that followers would gladly forfeit their integrity and freedom in a transaction with an “only I can fix it” figure seems always to have traction in the fearful human heart.

But, you see, all this is “seeking the living among the dead.”  For instance, if this resurrection were not real, if Luke (in this case) had made the Easter story up, he surely would have had the men immediately recognize what the empty tomb was about.  He would have written the narrative that saved Jesus’ Disciples from the reality of their actual embarrassment and describe the men as being the first to run to the tomb: Gold medal winners!  This is also the issue underneath the male disciples’ hesitation and dismissive tones over the women’s initial reporting about the empty tomb.  Remember that in that culture women had no legal credibility as witnesses!  If the Easter story were just another fairy tale, the narrative would also have had the male disciples (then and unfortunately even now) – the men cast as the models of faith, the ones championed to lead the church into a successful future.  (In this vein, what might it mean that the Patron Saint of our Diocese is Mary Magdelene?)

But all this is not the Easter story.  It is not what the experience of the first witnesses eventually – eventually --recognized.  Expectations notwithstanding, the story of Jesus’ resurrection is much larger, much more significant than that.

You see, we are so used to “seeking the living among the dead” that we run the risk of entirely missing the Easter point simply because it’s not what we expect, certainly not what we are used to.

The truth is that we are very familiar with – some might even say that we are addicted to – living our life as if we were driving a car by using the rearview mirror.  Yes, there are times when such a glance is called for, but the challenge and responsibility of mature driving (read, mature and faithful living) is to look forward, to what is ahead, being open to what is coming to us, to what is not bound by our expectations and where we have been.

One of the stunning aspects of Easter’s proclaimed, biblical reality is that God is coming to us from the future.  So it is not a matter of “Making America Great Again” or making the “Church Great Again”, as if the 1950’s were the point of reference which needs to be recaptured – if only the right people were in charge!  At the very best, that perspective is a matter of a narcotic form of nostalgia, one that allows us to ignore the truth that life then was not so great for those who are not like most of us here are.  But more significantly, much more significantly, our life is not among the dead but the living.  That’s Easter’s clarion, life-changing point.  Yet, precisely because Jesus’ resurrection so surprisingly overwhelms what we expect and defies our yearning for a vaccination against all our fears, we run the risk of missing its proclamation of what life with God is like and what it takes for mortals like us to begin to learn how to live Easter life now.

Why do you seek the living among the dead?

Rather than this day making great proclamations that make for interesting, self-contained bumper stickers, rather than the final answer, Easter Day is a beginning – the beginning that invites us to keep following Jesus into new life, redeemed life.  Jesus’ resurrection is the opening to that life -- in our midst, now.  We don’t have to die before we experience it.  We don’t have to escape this world in order to see and touch and taste God’s life now.  But we do need to be open to what surprises us beyond our expectations and beyond our presumptive plans.

This day marks the beginning – the beginning of changing our expectations, which means that this day is the beginning of what we look for, what we hear, and what we take into our hearts, not with the dead, but with the threads of eternity amidst what is passing away.  It’s the beginning of our weaving those threads of eternity in our midst into what will become new life’s whole cloth.

Thanks be to God.  Alleluia.  Amen.

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1. Luke 24:2