Sermon - Easter (4/12/2020)
Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
Mary Magdalene comes to the disciples to tell them good news: She has seen the Lord. She has heard his voice, calling her name, addressing her personally. She has a message from the Lord for the disciples, which she is careful to pass along. And down the centuries, the good news of Easter has been passed along from one person to another, from one generation to the next. The one who was crucified is alive and still present in the world.
It’s never easy to come here and tell this familiar story every year without falling back on clichés and standard formulas. You know the old story about some people flying over Iowa in a hot air balloon who got lost. They saw some people walking on the ground nearby, and as the balloon approached them they called down, “Where are we?” One of the people walking looked up and said, “You’re in a balloon, up in the sky.” And a gust of wind came and blew them away. One of the people in the balloon turned to the others and said, “You know, that guy was a Lutheran pastor.” “How do you know,” they asked. “Because what he said was completely true, and not helpful at all.”
Even if the good news announced by Mary Magdalene is completely true, is it helpful? Is it helpful, especially this Easter, when thousands are dying every day from an invisible virus that has completely upended all of our lives? Is it good news for someone who has lost their job, as so many have in the last few weeks? What does this information do for someone who is alone, separated from family and friends, fearful for their health and fearful of the future? And how does it help someone who can’t stay at home because they are homeless, or in a prison, or in a refugee camp fleeing war, or in a poor country with no ventilators? What good does it do to hear the news that once, a long time ago, someone who was dead came back to life?
I think part of the answer is about who it was who rose from the dead. In 1941, in the darker days of World War II, the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote about her slow process of coming to Christian faith. She wrote, “Even if Hitler died and rose again fifty times, I would not accept him as the Son of God.” But, she continued, there is something compelling about Jesus even without the resurrection. When Peter tells the story of the resurrection in today’s second reading from Acts, he doesn’t start with the miracle of just any dead person coming back to life. It’s the story of “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.”
The powers of this world, the powers of church and state, a corrupt religious establishment and an empire that ruled by fear and shocking violence, these powers that seem so powerful in our lives killed Jesus – and in killing Jesus, their mask fell off, and we saw clearly who those powers really are – the power of the devil, the power of the enemy of God, the power of death. And in raising Jesus from the dead, God shows us that these powers are not only evil, but weak, incapable of defeating God, doomed to failure.
This reversal is so stunning, so completely transformative of everything we thought we knew about power and death and evil and God, that we cannot immediately grasp all of its profound consequences, how if Jesus, this Jesus, is risen from the dead, then everything has changed. We see it in the gospel story this morning, how slow everyone is to grasp what has occurred. Peter and the other disciple look into the empty tomb, see the discarded graveclothes, scratch their heads, and go back home. Go back home? To do what? To go back to whatever they were doing before? Don’t they see that everything is different now?
Then Mary Magdalene finally gets up the courage to look into the tomb. And where the guys had just seen laundry, Mary sees angels. But then she turns away from the angels, to see Jesus, but without recognizing him. She thinks he is the gardener, she is still trying to find where the dead body of Jesus is, she still can’t imagine that the power of death isn’t as final as she thought it was. Until she hears her name: “Mary.” And even then, her first reaction is to grab onto Jesus and never let him go. Jesus tells her, No, Mary – remember, six feet! No, actually – what he tells he is don’t try to hold on to what you had before; everything is different now, the world has changed, you have changed, go tell everyone that the powers they think are in charge are finished, that God is making everything new.
The Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge, a great daughter of Virginia, likes to say that the gospel of Easter is not persuasive but disruptive. The New Testament never tries to prove that Jesus is risen from the dead with compelling evidence and irrefutable arguments. Instead, the Scriptures tell the story of people whose lives have been disrupted by God. People who were in thrall to the powers of corrupted religion and the impersonal machinery of empire, and who one day discovered that those powers are no match for the power of God, God who calls life and worlds into being out of nothing, God who unlocks prison doors from the outside and lets trapped people free, God who wakes the dead with a simple word, God who will not stop until all creation is made new, until every beloved child of God is free. People who can say: I have experienced the disruptive and transformative power of God for myself, let me tell you about it, do you see it too? That’s how Easter has always worked.
The first disciples on Easter Sunday could barely understand the depth of the disruption and transformation that God had brought about. We still, I think, have barely scratched the surface of what Easter means. It’s the work, not of hours or days, but of lifetimes and generations. To constantly discover how we are still in so many ways captured by powers that promote death and despair, how we are still willing to put up with injustice and inequality and discrimination and needless suffering because it’s just the way things are. And to see how we don’t have to accept any of it, we can live differently, how all of those powers have been unmasked and defeated by Jesus Christ, the true ruler of the universe, the one who was crucified and who lives and who calls us into life with him.
I don’t yet know all of what that means even for me, let alone for you, let alone for our life and work together as a congregation, let alone for the world. But I can’t imagine anything more helpful, anything we need more, especially right now, than to come to see how much of what we put up with in this world is just an empty promise of safety, when the living God is risen and present right now and setting us free to love one another without fear, to care for one another without needing to worry about ourselves, to discover joy and communion and peace even in the midst of suffering and isolation and conflict.
Like other liturgical congregations, here at Epiphany we will spend the next seven weeks trying to see better how the good news of Easter is disrupting and transforming and changing us. How we are casting off the graveclothes in which we have been wrapped for a long time, how we are being set free to be God’s living presence for one another, for our community here in Mount Vernon, for our world. I don’t know where we will be in seven weeks. So much has changed in the last month, so much that we could not have even begun to anticipate, and I’m not about to predict the future.
Maybe in seven weeks we’ll be meeting together again in person, and maybe we’ll still have to gather online. Maybe in seven weeks the worst of the virus will be behind us, and we will have buried our dead and resumed our lives, or maybe the virus will still be spreading unchecked. Maybe in seven weeks we will have learned to care better for one another and to value the least of these as God does, but maybe our country and our world will be even more divided and conflicted than before. I have no idea what the next seven weeks have in store for us, but I do know this: in seven weeks Jesus Christ will still be alive, in seven weeks Jesus Christ will still be the true Lord of the world, in seven weeks the powers of death and despair, no matter how strong they may seem, will still have been defeated, in seven weeks the good news will still be disrupting our lives and freeing the hearts of all people of faith to be the presence of the living God in a broken world.
I cannot think of anything more true, and I cannot imagine anything that will be more helpful, than this news. Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.