Where We Live

Easter Morning

Preached on March 31, 2013

Luke 24: 1-12

We can finally say Alleluia, again!  There’s this ancient church tradition that says that during Lent, you omit the word “Alleluia from all worship, because there is nothing to be happy about. 

Now is a joyful time!  I’ve already talked to a few people who have food in the ovens at home, preparing for some sort of dinner event later today.  A couple of the people who came to sunrise service did so because they wanted to get worship before they chained themselves to their stoves!

Some folks have decided that cooking is for the birds, and they’ve made reservations somewhere.

Some folks, like preachers, are going home and sleeping after church.

There is joy in Easter!  There are joyful things to be had; candy in baskets, deviled eggs; sales at Target (or Sears),

There is joy in Easter, but sometimes we forget what the root of that joy is.

There are folks who are not in church this morning.  Not everyone is Christian.  Some people are celebrating Passover this week.  Some are Muslim or Hindu, or something else, and some people worship at the church of St. Mattress. 

But they do all benefit from the holiday we have given our culture.  Our holiday is the reason for secular sales.  But let’s not celebrate Easter the way that the world participates in it.  At least lets not forget what it is we are really acknowledging in this holiday.

Easter is where we live.  This day, and the things we commemorate on this day, is the root of all it means to be Christian. 

If we do not have Easter; if we do not have the resurrection of Christ, then a very wise rabbi and teacher was killed as a political prisoner in Jerusalem by the Roman Empire, and thus endeth the story.  We’re done.

He is merely a son of God the way we are all Children, and that’s it.

It takes today to make this unique and special.  It takes Easter, it takes the Resurrection.  It takes the women who come to the tomb at daybreak, finds the tomb open and two strange men standing there, telling them that he is not there, and going back to the disciples and saying they would love to dress the body, but there’s no body there!

In one of the other Gospels, they find the body gone, and the rest of the women go away, and Mary Magdalene is left standing there crying to talk to the gardener.  He says, in a certain tone of voice, “Mary!”, and she realized that it’s Jesus. 

Notice, in all these stories, that the first people to give the announcement of the empty tomb, the first ones to proclaim the Gospel, as it were, are women.  They are the ones who bring the first message to the male disciples.

The message that they carried is the message we carry now.  Jesus was more than just a wise man who was killed as a political prisoner.  He was sent by God so that we may know God’s love.  The final proof we have that God loves us, is that Jesus was raised from the dead.  Death has no power over us.  You may not believe in heaven, but it is your choice to do so, but in our central core of belief, we are told it is there.  We can’t prove it scientifically, we can’t point to it in a telescope, or reach for it through time travel or quantum physics, but we know that death here on earth is not the end. 

And God has given us the power to overcome death.  We may not be as we were, but we know there is something after. 

This is the joy of Easter.  This is the promise of Easter.  This is why we do the things we do in this world, as Christians.  We follow more than just a wise man; we follow the Son of God, who was raised from the dead by God. 

This is why people dip Peeps in chocolate; this is why hams are baked, and kielbasa is smoked, and potatoes are scalloped; to show love in various ways.  We cannot show love by raising people from the dead, so we bake, we get up early, we dress our finest; we’re trying to express joy!

Christians have millions and millions of ways to show Christ’s love in the world.  And they are all based in the joy of this day, of Easter.  They are all based in the truth that Christ was given back to the world; Christ was not killed; Christ was resurrected! 

And so we can say again, Alleluia!      

 

 

 

 

Faithfulness

Maundy Thursday

Matthew 26:17-31

I realized something as I read the text for Maundy Thursday.  After the story of Jesus adapting their Passover meal into we call Eucharist or Communion, and after the foot washing, and then the garden, we hear nothing more about the disciples, except for Judas and Peter.  Everyone disappears. 

At one of the two churches that I serve, there is a Maundy Thursday service, but no Good Friday service.  And in thinking about this text in that good old Ignatian style (the spiritual practice of inserting oneself as a specific character into a biblical story, and imagining with all senses what you experience), it kind of pushed me to identify with the other disciples.  The ones who scattered when the soldiers showed up in the garden. 

They were even more faithless than Peter.  Peter may have denied the Son of God three times, but he showed up, at least.

Did they even know what was happening before Peter told them?  Maybe John, once, in the Gospel named after him, had a little bit of a clue, because he accompanied Mary to the cross.

If I was a fire and brimstone preacher, I would talk about how faithless we are when Jesus calls us. 

But I’m not. 

What I also notice, in the text, is that there are faithful disciples.  They are hardly ever mentioned, but I’d imagine that they were every place that their society would allow them.

The women.  They stood under the cross.  They might have been in the courtyard, they may have been in the garden.  But 2000 years ago, women were not always worth mentioning.  WE don’t know, therefore, where they were if they were a passive part of the crowd.

But when it came to Jesus’ crucifixion, they were standing right under Jesus, who, according to Adam Hamilton and others he attributes, was not hung high in the air, but was really only three feet or so off the ground.  Close enough to be touched.  To be heard.  To be seen. 

Jesus was NOT alone. 

I would expect, since the disciples were just folks the way we are, that they respond in the varied and different ways that we would when inserted into the same scenario.  Some of us would run away.  Some of us would care enough to follow, but be afraid of being associated, for fear of being killed, too.  And some of us would not even be noticed as they followed Jesus, because, after all, they were only property themselves, commodities to be traded for land and prestige. 

Times have changed, society has changed, its two thousand years later, and we are no longer in the Bronze Age.  Disciples can clearly be men or women, just as both can be pastors.  There is no reason to think differently about gender, only about gifts and graces.  But our responses as disciples remain as varied as they would have been then. 

On this night, Jesus said to his disciples “you are no longer my disciples, but you are now my friends.  This Passover meal, is not as a teacher and students, but as friends.  And he changed the meal they were celebrating.

He also washed their feet.  This was so shocking, because there was still an aura around him, that maybe even yet he would become the Messiah they still wanted, the military leader.  And he destroyed the last vestige of that, because a general does not wash the feet of a private.

But Jesus did. 

Our general, our leader, the person we are called to follow, to emulate, to do impressions of as best we can, said to them, I have come to serve you, now you must serve each other.

How do we serve each other?

How do we serve the wider world?

I’m sure we can all think of way, a way we’re not doing now.  Something that humbles us.

 I remember my father singing a song at a talent show once, “O Lord, It’s Hard to be Humble, When You’re Perfect in Every Way.”  But we believe that we are made perfect in love THROUGH humility. 

So what is that way we know we’re being called to serve, but are resistant to?  Perhaps it might even be to serve ourselves, to make ourselves stronger, to not spread ourselves so thin we serve no one and damage our spirits?

 How do we find a way to imitate Jesus?