Sermons

Encountering Jesus: Resurrection

Easter

John Wilkinson                               Third Presbyterian Church  March 27, 2005                             Matthew 28:1-10

Though the basic elements of the narrative are the same, each gospel version tells the Easter story slightly differently. Matthew’s gospel includes an earthquake to announce the arrival of an angel. This was such a dramatic moment that the guards at the tomb fainted away. No kidding! But Matthew also includes another moment, an intriguing variation. But not just yet.

You will remember that the two Mary’s go to the tomb, ostensibly to tend to the body, though Matthew does not specifically say that. And then our earthquake, an angelic appearance to roll the stone away, and a couple of trembling and fainting guards. The women must have been trembling too, or something like that, for the angel comforts them.

That seems to be the angel’s primary job description, by the way – reassurance. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Easy enough for an angel to say. But the women are rightly scared, so the angel attempts a little calming reassurance. In fact, the entire Easter story is reported by our angelic friend: “…the angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, “He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.”

Quick and simple explanation followed by marching orders. Come and see…go and tell.

The accounting itself is absent all the details we would want to hear in our scientific, skeptical world. And it is fine that we are scientific and skeptical. What we get, however, is a vocation. Come and see…go and tell.

We could never guess what was going on in the minds of the two women, except something like every human emotion imaginable. But there is no time for pondering – when an angel tells you to do something, you do it, or at least I would plan to. So they left quickly, scared to death and joyous beyond joy.

And then it happens. It would be as a chance meeting in the organic food section at Wegman’s, or finding yourself seated near someone you know at the airport. Except that it is not. It is more than a chance meeting. It is an encounter of the proportions of resurrection itself. “Suddenly, Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings.’”

The sudden, impromptu nature of this encounter makes it no accident. It is how we meet Jesus. More so, it is how Jesus meets us. We would not expect it. We would not deserve it. We would not think we need it. But here he is, denying death and the ways of death. Here he is, inviting us into something radically new and radically different. Here he is, calling us to live as love demands, to live lives as God would intend us to live, to live as free and forgiven people, to live in service to a world that cries out for good news.

Here he is. And here we are.

If you are visiting us today, we welcome you. I am grateful that we have found each other. And if, somehow, there is something in you, some still, small voice seeking a place to live out your faith, to ask important questions and to serve beyond your self, I would invite you into our community. We do not have brass and glorious flowers and the Hallelujah Chorus every week, but it’s not bad, and we do seek to live this story that has been handed down to us of God’s love. So join us.

And if you have been coming here for a long time, well, it’s nice to see you, too. This day is for visitors, friends, newtimers, old-timers, believers, seekers, all of us. Because what it does is make everything new, and sets us on a new path, a path of light and life, that re-defines and reforms, forever, who we are and how we will live our lives.

The church is many things, but at its heart, we are an Easter community, a resurrection community, comprised of resurrection people. We gather here not because we have everything figured out, but because we have figured out that there is something about this story, and that without it, we would be incomplete, and that with it, we are more than complete.

That does not mean that there will not be questions. There will be and there should be. These questions are trumpeted on magazine covers even this week: “How Jesus became Christ” and “Why did Christ die?” They are the right questions to ask, and they, in point of fact, are the questions the church and the world have been asking now for two millennia.

The most profound questions are the ones that ask who we are and who Jesus is, for us and for the world, and how those questions and their always-evolving answers are interwoven. But here we are to ask them, together, and we will be forever changed, and the world will be forever changed, all because Jesus passes us on the way to the living of our days, and re-directs us right here, right now, and always.

Though the culture would place its bet on Christmas, this day, and the events of this past week leading up to this day, form the basis for our faith. The gospels were written backwards, from Easter to Christmas, because the events of Holy Week, Palm Sunday to Easter morning and the tragic events in between, define the faith.

And now we continue to write the story of resurrection. That the stone was rolled away, that the tomb was empty, that Jesus appeared to the two women – there would be no Easter without the story. This is not simply 2000-year 20/20 hindsight, but a trajectory of the story itself. The real point of Easter is how it is lived out, in the lives of the original witnesses and in the lives of every successive generation of witnesses, including us, you and me. That resurrection matters is the given; how resurrection matters is the extraordinary invitation we have been given, and the extraordinary journey we undertake.

So, how? It is somewhat of a cliché that sermons should have three points, but this one will. I am hopeful to identify three ways that an encounter with the risen Christ will transform.

First, as each of us encounters Christ, we will be transformed, each of us. Though never private, and certainly never individualistic, this Easter faith is personal, and it comes to individuals in as many ways as there are of us. The story seems to underscore that point. Throughout the season of Lent, we have been rehearsing the series of encounters Jesus had with individuals – an unnamed Samaritan woman, a man born blind, Mary and Martha, Lazarus. And now Jesus comes to Mary Magdalene.

Jesus comes not to a generic person, nor to a generic institution, but to each of us, to you and me. We each have different needs, different journeys, different strengths and weaknesses. We each would have a different encounter with Jesus, as unique as we are. People who are labeled more theologically conservative or evangelical than I speak often of their “walk with Christ.” I do not want us to lose that language, or more so, to lose that possibility. Jesus comes to each one of us, knows our hurts, our celebrations.

What is clear, though, that while personal, this resurrection news is never a private thing. Suzanne Guthrie writes that “in this world, you cannot cling to love. You cannot hold or hoard it. In a suffering world, there is no time to linger in the sacred moment. Instead, every love must transfigure into ever-widening circles of compassion. This love must go out into the ends of the earth with the message of hope.” (Christian Century, March 22, 2005, page 18)

And so, even as each of us encounters Jesus and is transformed, as the church encounters Christ, it will be transformed. This seems obvious, but it is not. A year-end magazine article noted the Top 10 religious stories of 2004. They were all – to a one – about conflict or decline. We know the issues. Belief turned into ideology. Lines drawn in the sand. Who’s in and who’s out. Litmus tests. And as much as we are saddened by all this, we must confess our complicity, and ask for mercy. And we must remind ourselves that it does not need to be this way.

Thomas Long tells the story of a church in the South Bronx. As part of their Holy Week observances, members of the church were invited to give testimony, a daunting notion for we Presbyterians. “I know he is alive,” each portion of the script began, to be followed by a moment of bearing witness to the truth of the resurrection by a member of the congregation. “I know he is alive,” a woman named Angie said, “because he is alive in me.” She then told a story of abuse and addiction, of being HIV-positive. She then responded to a welcome of a church, and bit-by-bit she rose from the grave of her life. “ I am now alive because Jesus Christ lives in me and through me,” she says. (Testimony, page 31)

That happened in a church. And it happens again and again, in ways great and small, in church. Little resurrections and big resurrections. Whoever we are, and whatever we carry, we bring to church. And we are transformed. It does not happen exclusively in a church, or this church, or that church. We are far from perfect. We are at best, as Paul wrote, a treasure in an earthen vessel. But we are a treasure nonetheless.

We nurture one another as we are nurtured, and then we nurture the world. We sing great songs and pray meaningful prayers, and then the music we sing and the prayers we pray spill out into the others parts of our lives, and spill out the doors of the church and down the steps and through the streets and fill the air and keep alive the rumor that God is alive and about the life-changing agenda of resurrection.

The church is not the only place that resurrection takes root and is given wing, but at our best, we are a place where glimpses of it do happen. And would we not pray for the day when the top 10 stories, the top 1000 stories, are about church renewal, and theological reconciliation, and lives transformed, and communities transformed, and unity celebrated.

Because if the church can be transformed by an encounter with the risen Christ, imagine the possibilities beyond our walls and out our doors. As the world encounters Christ, it will be transformed. It must be. This is not about conversion. That is a conversation for another time. Rather, it is about the rhythm of resurrection and the trajectory of this good news that we are called to share with all the world. Resurrection ethics and resurrection politics can be neither Democratic nor Republican, neither liberal nor conservative. For those of us who cling to the story of the rolled-away stone, labels like that need simply to fall away.

How we bring our resurrection faith to matters of the world will not always be clear and never be easy. It has not gone unnoticed that Terry Schiavo’s life will no doubt end in this holy season. Our polarized world has turned this into an ideological battle. What perspective can a resurrection ethic bring to this sad, conflicted story? Theologian Cynthia Rigby writes that “the resurrection communicates that bodies, and this world and day in which bodies live, matter to God.” (Presbyterian Outlook, March 21, 2005) That means that the Easter story is not meant for some distant future, but for the flesh and blood here and now.

As resurrection people, we will wrestle with end-of-life issues, and perhaps come down at different places. We will certainly come down at different places on the political issues. But we cannot say that resurrection does not matter here, or anywhere, or that our ethics cannot be informed by the claims we make this morning and the things that claim us. That would be true in Pinnellas Park, Florida, in the Vatican, in Baghdad, in Jerusalem, in Red Lake, Minnesota, in Washington, in Rochester.

Our resurrection ethic might even take us into conflict, perhaps, rather than away from it. It may make us uncomfortable. But transformed as we have been by the news of this morning, and claimed by a church that at its best moments would seek to live it out, we can do little else but be drawn into the complex, messy world in which Jesus lived and for which he died.

There will be no litmus tests. But there will be perspectives. We must be watchful and alert. We must be suspicious of power. And we must be faithful to the story and its witness.

On Thursday evening and Friday evening of this past week, we sang the powerful African-American spiritual “Were You There?” There are other verses to be sung, that we do not typically sing in the shadow of crucifixion. “Were you there when they rolled the stone away.” And “were you there when he rose up from the grave…were you there when he rose up from the grave. And then a long, drawn-out “Oh,” at times mournful and at times hopeful.

“Oh. Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when he rose up from the grave.” You were. We were. You are. We are. And sometimes it does cause us to tremble. It should.

That is the promise of this day, an encounter with the risen Christ, who will not allow us to rest very long this morning, but who calls us to resurrection possibilities beyond our wildest imaginations. Let us go quickly, then, and live this promise. Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed! Amen.