April 16, 2017 – Easter Day
© 2017 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon is available here.
Happy Easter to you! We’ve
been waiting forty days to say that, and it feels good. I am glad that you are
here this morning to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus
Christ. Many of you are wearing new Easter dresses or suits or ties. Some of
you have dusted off your seersucker jackets and linen trousers and white shoes.
Either way, you all look great. After church, I hope that you have a glorious
afternoon waiting on you—one filled with family and food. This morning,
however, I want to talk about what comes after that. What comes next—when the
brightness of Easter begins to fade?
For Seth and me and lots
of other clergy, tomorrow will be a day of rest and recovery. I’ll squeeze in a
nap and try to catch up on all the yard work I haven’t been doing lately. What
about you? It’s a school day. Many of you will go back to work. If you have had
family in town, your house might seem pretty quiet. You might be glad for the
rest, but you might miss the company as well. For some of us, the brightness of
today is just a momentary reprieve, and the challenges of ordinary life, which
we have set aside for this Easter feast, will come rushing back with renewed
vengeance. Others of us will carry the joy of the resurrection with us for the
fifty days of the Easter season and maybe even beyond that, but then what? Will
this Easter—this discovery of the empty tomb—make a lasting difference in our
life, or will it come and go just like a tray of mama’s deviled eggs?
Have you ever known
someone who was in such a funk that he or she just couldn’t shake it off even
when everyone and everything all around them was doing great? Have you ever
felt like that? A loved one dies, and we spend months and months stuck in an
impenetrable fog of grief. We get burned in a relationship, and we build a wall
around our heart so high and so thick that even when love comes knocking we
fail to recognize it. An unexpected election result causes us to question the
character of the American electorate to the point where we can no longer see
the good in one another. Do you ever feel, as I heard in a recent sermon, that
“we are dwelling not in an era of blossoming life, but rather [subsisting]
within an age of death?”[1]
In other words, do you ever feel like we need more than a baked ham and Cadbury
Creme Eggs and plastic grass and chocolate bunnies? Do you ever feel like we
need more than Easter? Do you ever feel like we need a resurrection moment that
can make a lasting difference in our lives? To me, it seems like we need the
resurrection now more than ever, but how will we find that resurrection moment?
The resurrection story
that we read today in John’s gospel account speaks words of lasting hope that
have the power to shatter even our deepest despair, and they come not with the
discovery of an empty tomb but in an encounter with the risen Jesus. Some may
find the story of the resurrection hard to believe, but I think that the
disbelief that runs through today’s gospel lesson is far more unbelievable than
the walking, talking, breathing, risen Jesus.
On the first day of the
week, while it was still dark, one of Jesus’ closest followers, Mary Magdalene,
came to the tomb, and, when she saw that the stone had been rolled away, what
did she run to tell the disciples? “They have taken the Lord of out the tomb,
and we do not know where they have laid him.” Not, “Our Lord has risen just as
he promised!” Nor, “The stone is rolled away from his tomb. Could he be raised just
as he told us?” But, “They have taken his lifeless body and put it somewhere
else.” For months, Jesus had been telling his followers that on the third day
he would rise again, but, when Mary Magdalene saw the stone rolled away, she
panicked and feared the worst.
Maybe it’s because she
didn’t look inside, we might think to ourselves, but, when Peter and the other
disciple got there and looked in and saw the linen wrappings lying there but no
body with them, their conclusion was no clearer. John tells us that the other
disciple believed, but what did he believe? Not that Jesus had been raised,
for, in the very next sentence, John tells us that they did not yet understand
the scripture that he must rise from the dead. It seems most likely that these
disciples believed what Mary had told them—that Jesus was gone. So they left
and went back to their homes, carrying with them their grief and loss, which
had now been compounded by their master’s missing body.
After the disciples left,
Mary stood weeping by the tomb. This time it was her turn to look in, and when
she stooped down to peer into the tomb, she saw two angels, clothed in white,
sitting where Jesus’ body had been laid. “Woman, why are you weeping?” they
asked her. And, if you thought that two angels surely would trigger in her mind
that something supernatural was going on, you’d be wrong because she answered,
“They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
Talk about blinding grief! Then, when she turned around, she saw Jesus,
standing in front of her. Jesus himself spoke to Mary and said the same thing:
“Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” But she was still not
able to see the miracle even though it was standing right before her eyes. Supposing
him to be the gardener, she replied to him in utter agony, “Sir, if you have
carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away and
give him another burial.” Something had to give. Finally, unwilling to let this
fog of despair linger any longer, Jesus cut right through it and said, “Mary!”
And, in that instant, everything changed.
“Rabbouni!” she said to
him, seeing for the first time that he had indeed been raised from the dead.
With that one word—her name—spoken by the one who knew her best, the only one
who could call her out of her grief, the risen Jesus brought her from the
shadows of despair into the light of the resurrection. And she would never be
the same again. “Go to my brothers,” Jesus told her, “and say to them, ‘I am
ascending to my Father and your father, to my God and your God.’” And Mary
Magdalene raced away from the tomb as fast as she could to find the disciples
and say to them, “I have seen the Lord!”
What does it take for us
to live in the light of the resurrection? What does it take for us to leave the
darkness of doubt and grief and woundedness and despair behind and experience
the transformation that the resurrection brings? The terrible thing about
despair is that it creeps in slowly, and, before we know it, it takes over our
life and changes everything we know from light to dark, from hope to fear, from
life to death. It gives us not a set of “alternative facts” but, worse, an alternative
truth so that, even when signs of new possibility are all around us, we are
unable to see them for what they are. Our despondency rewrites those signs of
hope, changing them into another defeat waiting to happen. But it doesn’t have
to be that way.
The resurrection is not
something we experience when we die. It is a gift to the living—to those who
have met the risen Jesus and believe in him and follow him as the one who has
the power to bring light and life to even the darkest places. In him, the defeat
of the cross becomes God’s greatest victory. Those who witness the miracle of
Easter, in whose hearts the light of the resurrection lives on, know that there
is nothing that could ever take God’s saving, redeeming love away from them.
But how do we find that victory? How do we meet the risen Lord? It’s not by
putting together all of the pieces of the Christian faith until you come up
with a believable whole. We discover the resurrection when we hear Jesus call our
name. Today, this miracle is for you. This morning, it is your name that Jesus
is calling. Can you hear him speaking your name?
Live in the light of the
resurrection. Hear Jesus speaking to you. See him show you that God has the
power to take even your darkest troubles and open up within them the possibility
for new life. Do not dwell in the shadow of despair any longer. Do not leave
the empty tomb this morning without encountering the risen Jesus. He is the one
who has the power to give you life. He is here with us, and he is calling your
name. See him. Believe in him. And carry the unbreakable light of the
resurrection with you in your heart every day for the rest of your life.
[1] J.
Seth Olson, “Good Friday,” 14 April 2017.
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