“Resurrection Right Now”

John 20:1-18

Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009

 

Dave Russell, First Baptist Church of Ames, Iowa USA

 

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If you are visiting with us here this morning, or if maybe you haven’t been here for while, I would like to tell you that what you see here is ordinary for this church – this is a typical Sunday.

 

I would like to tell you that, but I would be lying.  This is not a typical Sunday.  This is not just another week.  This is Easter.  We had a great breakfast.  The choir worked up several pieces for today.  Some of us are dressed up a little more than usual.   The crowd is larger than your average Sunday.  There is something in the air, and I’m talking about something more than the fragrance of Easter lilies.  This is not an ordinary day.

 

But then, there is nothing ordinary about Easter.  Jesus is crucified and buried and in the tomb for three days, and then is raised from the dead.  This is about as far from ordinary as you can get.

 

What is ordinary, what is typical, is death.  Everything that lives dies.  Life is transitory.  We are finite beings and have our limits.  Jesus dead in the tomb – that is ordinary.  Jesus alive after being dead – not ordinary at all.

 

St. Augustine said that our lives are like when a man is sick and near death, and friends look at him in his deathbed and say, “He is dying, he won’t get over this.”  So it could be said of us on the first day of our lives, as we lie in the crib, “She is dying, she won’t get over this.”  We are all dying.

 

Oh, we don’t like to talk about it, and this is not considered polite conversation on Easter morning, or any morning, really.  And the fact that we don’t want to talk about death just shows how much in denial we all are.  We want to ignore death, and if we do talk about it, we talk as though we can defy it.

 

Flip on the TV and you will find advertisements for “age-defying” makeup.  Cosmetic surgery and botox are popular because they make us appear younger, as if we are winning the battle.  There used to be those commercials - I don’t remember who they were for, Revlon or Maybelline or Cover Girl or somebody - where they would have a mother and daughter together and the mother would look as young as the daughter because they used a certain beauty product.  Well, usually you could tell which one was the mother, but they did look to be fairly close in age.  But this only goes so far.  They didn’t do ads with a grandmother and granddaughter together.  They didn’t do ads with a great-grandmother and great-granddaughter together.  You can only do so much with hair and beauty products, and even then, we are just tinkering with outer appearances.  This doesn’t really make a person younger.  We can try and hide aging, but it doesn’t stave off death.  When you are ill and go to the hospital, they don’t treat you with Grecian formula.

 

Commercials call these products “age-defying,” and then we have that phrase, “death-defying.”  You can go to the circus and see the acrobats on the high-wire act, performing death-defying feats.  There is this image of taking on death and winning that we find appealing.  It may be appealing, but it isn’t real.    In a sense, every time we wake up in the morning, every time we get in our car and drive to school or work or church on a Sunday morning, we are defying death.  We can get away with it for awhile, but not indefinitely.  Evel Knievel used to perform death-defying feats on his motorcycle, but he couldn’t defy death forever.  We all know how the story is going to end.

 

The disciples knew.  Peter knew.  John knew.  Mary knew.  Jesus had been arrested and taken away, just after their Passover meal together on Thursday night.  He had been beaten, he had been mocked, he had been tried in a rush trial.  He had been sentenced to death as an enemy of the state, a traitor, an insurrectionist.  He had been crucified on a cross, dying an agonizing death. 

 

Dan Brown's novel, The DaVinci Code, was a New York Times bestseller made into a blockbuster movie.  Like many of you, I read the book and enjoyed the movie.  Mary Magdalene is central to the plot.  At the center of the story is the contention that for 2000 years, the Church has prevented the world from finding out that Jesus had been married to, and had children with, Mary Magdalene.

 

Well, this certainly would be a startling thing to discover.  What would it be like to do genealogy and discover that you are a direct descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene?  But here is the thing about The DaVinci Code: it is based on the notion that if Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had children, it would destroy the faith because it would prove that Jesus was human.

 

But isn’t that what we believe?  Isn’t that the claim of Christian faith?  That Jesus really was born, really lived on this earth, really and truly experienced what it is to be human: pain and joy and hurt and loss and laughter and temptation and uncertainty and anticipation and happiness and fear and foreboding.  And death.  He really did experienced human life and he really did die.  If Jesus did not really live and really die as one of us, then Easter Sunday would have no real meaning.  Without a real death, there is no resurrection.  Without really living as a human being, there is no connection to us and no reason for Mary’s tears early that Sunday morning.

 

John begins his telling of the story by saying, “While it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb.”  That little phrase, “while it was still dark,” is packed with meaning – it refers not just to the sky, but to a spiritual and emotional darkness.  The one who filled Mary’s life with hope was now gone.  Dead.  And the darkness hung not only over Mary but over all of Jesus’ disciples.

 

Filled with grief, Mary went to his burial place.  Like many of us, she went to the grave of her loved one to remember and to grieve.  The tomb was a small cave in the rock.  A great stone was rolled in front of the tomb to seal it. 

 

Mary was not prepared for what she saw.  The stone had been moved.  It was almost more than she could bear.  Jesus had been beaten, humiliated, and finally crucified.  Mary could only watch helplessly.  And now, one last humiliation.  She was filled with fear and terror and heart-wrenching pain.

 

She ran to tell Peter and John.  Peter had not shown his face in public since Thursday.  He had denied Jesus and stayed far away from the cross.  But Mary did not know what else to do.  She ran and told Peter and John.

 

On hearing Mary’s report, they hurried back to the tomb.  John ran ahead.  He arrived and saw the stone moved away.  Then Peter caught up.  He went on inside.  He saw the linen burial wrappings rolled up.

 

The scripture says that John saw and believed, but we’re not sure exactly what he believed.  We are told that they did not yet understand the scripture, that Jesus would rise from the dead. 

 

Peter and John took in the scene and then went back home.  By now Mary was back at the tomb, but she stayed.  She wept.  Finally, she looked into the tomb, and saw two angels.  They asked why she was weeping, and Mary told them.  Someone had taken away her Lord, she said.  Someone had stolen the body.

 

Then she turned around and Jesus was there.  Only she did not recognize that it was him.  If you are not looking for someone, you won’t see them.  Jesus asked why she was crying.  Mary thought this must be the gardener.  “If you have taken the body, tell me where you have laid him.”  But then Jesus spoke her name.  “Mary.”  And she knew.  She knew.  He was alive!  It was Jesus! 

 

We have heard this so many times that it is hard to catch the joy of that moment.  Here we are, 2000 years later, still telling this wonderful story.  Except that is not such a surprise any more.  We know what is going to happen.  Year after year, Jesus is raised and comes out of that grave.  The story is so familiar that it loses some of its shock value.  We can’t feel the raw emotion, the incredible surge of amazement and joy and euphoria that Mary felt that morning.

 

In one survey I read about a few years ago, Easter came out as the “most boring holiday.”  Can you imagine that?  Well, if it is just about bunnies and chocolate eggs, then maybe.  But if we understand Easter to be about shocking, surprising, amazing, unbelievable, incomprehensible life after death, it would rate considerably higher than the “most boring holiday.”

 

Tom Long tells the story of Clint Tidwell, the pastor of a small-town church.  One of his blessings – and curses – is that the 80-year old owner and still active editor of the local newspaper is a member of his congregation.  The blessing part is that this veteran journalist considers Tidwell to be one of the finest homileticians around, and wishing the whole town to benefit from his wisdom, he frequently publishes a summary of the Sunday sermon in the Monday newspaper.  The curse part is that this well-meaning newspaperman is a bit on the eccentric side, and Tidwell is sometimes astonished to read the synopses of his sermons.  There is often an ocean of difference between what he said and what the editor heard.  This man owns the paper and nobody dares edit his columns, and so what shows up in the Monday paper is often a source of embarrassment to Tidwell.

 

The pastor’s deepest amazement, however, came not when the editor misunderstood the Sunday sermon; it came when he understood it all too clearly.  Early on the Monday morning after Easter, Tidwell went out in his bathrobe and slippers and padded out to get the paper at the end of the driveway.  As he approached it, he could see the headline in “second coming” sized type.  What had happened?  Had war broken out?  A cure for cancer discovered?  As he got close enough to read the headline, he was startled to read the words, ‘Tidwell Claims Jesus Christ Rose From The Dead.’

 

Long wrote, “A red flush crept up Tidwell’s neck.  Yes, of course, he had claimed in yesterday’s sermon that Christ rose from the dead, but golly, was that headline news? … I mean, you’re supposed to say that on Easter, aren’t you, that Jesus rose from the dead, but that’s not like saying some person who died last week had risen from the grave, is it?”[1]

 

I guess that’s the question for all of us.  Does Jesus’ resurrection mean anything to us, here, today?  The Good News of the gospel is that by raising Jesus from the dead, God showed that the power of God is greater than the power of death.  Paul wrote that not even death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

Death does not have the final word.  And that is Good News, because we are surrounded by death.  Death doesn’t just come at the end of our lives, it comes little by little.  We die all kinds of deaths along the way.

 

I recently spoke to a friend who had to put his dog to sleep, and I could feel the pain.  Over the last week or so, I have had a call from a family in town facing eviction and two more asking about help paying rent.  I talked to someone who is dealing both with divorce and the loss of a job.  I know students who were turned down by grad schools and are rethinking their future.  A 47-year old friend underwent surgery this week to remove two masses near his kidneys, which are partially to completely calcified.  Last week I talked to another friend whose husband is on the verge of going into a nursing home and it is about the hardest thing she has ever had to deal with.

 

Another woman I know was diagnosed with a fairly serious health condition earlier in the year.  Her husband just lost his job, and she is busy getting in as many medical appointments as she can before her health insurance runs out at the end of the month.  I know many of you are dealing with grief - the loss of a child or a spouse or a parent or a sibling or a dear friend.  And I know that all of you can add more stories, both your own and those of others, matters large and small, onto this list of deaths that we face all the time. 

 

Easter is not just about Jesus’ resurrection and the promise of the resurrection of the dead by the power of God.  It is about that, to be sure, but the great resurrection that we celebrate today is the fulfillment of all the small resurrections we experience every day.  Every morning when we get up, it is a kind of resurrection, and when by God’s strength and the power of the Holy Spirit we confront all of these small deaths in life which are not small at all, and come out and find life on the other side, there is resurrection.

 

Katherine Pershey, a pastor in Redondo Beach, California, told of a couple that lost their adult son in an automobile accident.  They were a very close-knit family. The man’s parents and sister were overwhelmed with grief.  They lived in a Good Friday world for months: confused and angry, loving a person who no longer met them for Sunday worship and dinner once a week, and called every day between.  Shortly after the early December accident, the family was driving home from church in silence.

 

They all noticed it at the same time.  Someone had sawed off the cap of a lone pine tree that stood sentinel in a field near their house.  Clearly, someone had wanted a perfect Christmas tree without paying the local nursery, so they stole the top six feet of their neighbor’s tree.  The ruined tree hit a nerve with this family.  They were “tree people” to begin with, the kind of people who plant seedlings every Arbor Day and write polite notes to their congressmen to protest the destruction of rainforests.  But seeing that tree cut off early knocked the wind out of them.  It was a perfect symbol of their unbearable loss, and though they never talked about it, each of them took to taking the long way home to avoid facing this pine.

 

A couple seasons later, the three were on their way home from church again.  The mother missed the turnoff for their detour, and so as they turned the corner that would take them past the tree, an invisible shroud covered them, stirring up their grief.  But what they saw took their breath away.  The tree had healed.  When the father told this story, weeping, he made this motion with his hands, to illustrate: open hands, reaching to one another, until his fingertips touched.  The tree once again had a perfect, tapered crown.  And once again, it was a perfect symbol for the family.  For the first time since the accident, they felt hope in their hearts.  The mended tree held so much promise: the slow but sure restoration to life had begun.  They believed what they saw: every suffering, every life cut off short, would be healed.  Their grief wasn’t erased, but they were released to practice the resurrection promised through the Risen Lord.

 

Mary went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”  And that is our experience.  When we look for and practice resurrection, right here, right now, we see the Risen Lord at work among us.  Thanks be to God.  Alleluia!  Amen.