Year C,
Easter
March
31, 2013
The
Reverend Dr. Brent Was
Hallelujah! Christ
is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed!
Hallelujah!
It has been a deep Holy week, no? Thank you to everyone. It, like so many things is no more
complicated than showing up.
Sometimes I wish I, we could go through Holy Week without
remembering that Easter was coming. I
was sitting there on Holy Saturday, the day when Christ is gone, descended to
the dead, working on this sermon with Easter basket fixings in my office. Through the darkness of this week, we do know
what is coming. No matter what He
suffered, we know it was for a reason, that it was not futile, horrible yes,
tragic and unfortunate and unconscionable perhaps, but not futile. We, of course, expect the resurrection.
But that was not where Jesus and His
disciples were. For them, it was
tragically futile. It could not have
been worse, actually. All was lost.
Jesus was not only the practical and spiritual leader of the group, but He was
the Messiah, the anointed one of God, the Son of God, even. They had staked
their lives on Him, left their families, acted on faith… Then He was betrayed
by one of their own, taken away in the dark of night. His number 1, Peter, denied Him not once, not
twice, but three times. And He
died. Badly. Condemned by a mob, humiliated, beaten,
paraded through the streets and executed horribly by an army of
occupation. The apostles were scattered,
fleeing North towards Galilee. It was
terrible. It could not have been
worse. Well, it could not have been
worse until even His body was taken, desecrated, probably, right. That must have been her thought. “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not
know where they have laid him,” said Mary.
From where we sit, we know that that is not the end of the story; the
friends of Jesus did not know that. They
did not know about resurrection.
Resurrection is a complicated idea. It is not just new life springing from old,
new life springing from death.
Resurrection is not about spring flowers, as fabulous as spring flowers
are, a much as spring flowers do arise out of death, depending on your theology
of compost. Resurrection is being alive,
passing into death, then being alive again.
Maybe it is not being alive in the same way, but it is definitely about
an individual life that ends and then that same individual life
restarting. It is the same life being
reignited. That is what happened to
Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. He
passed through the doors of death and took away the sting of death; through the
darkest days the brightest of lights should not, could not, was not
extinguished, well, not for long, at least.
The hows and the whys of all of this, the theories and
theologies of atonement, we’re not talking about atonement today. I don’t know how or why it took the death of
an innocent young man to save us, but it did and we must be grateful. What I am more concerned with is this gift of
resurrection.
They were devastated.
They were terrified, fleeing, possibly expecting to be pursued. She, Mary, went to take care of the body and
even that was gone. But then the angels
came, and then another came, one she did not know, one she did not
recognize. In most of the appearance
stories, Jesus is unrecognizable at first. And then outside the tomb, He called
her, “Mary!” He called her by name and
she saw Him. “Do not hold onto me…go to
my brothers,” He said, “say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your
Father, to my God and your God.’” And
she did.
Resurrection is complicated. The bodily resurrection, the appearance
accounts across the gospels… these are hard to understand from our modern
perspective. All I know about
resurrection I know in faith. That is
the nature of it. The bodily
resurrection of Jesus Christ happened: I have faith that that it true. What I am less sure of is what form that the
resurrected Son of God has taken. Those
who knew him best, who knew Joseph and Mary’s son, they didn’t recognize Him a
day an a half after he died. How
recognizable could the body of Christ be to us thousands of years and more
thousands of miles away? Now that is a
good question.
I keep finding myself dwelling in the trauma of the
disciples. How lost they were,
devastated, vanquished by the principalities and powers of empire, of corrupt
religion and government, devastated simply by evil. How did resurrection happen there?
This concerns me because the way things are now. We face burgeoning poverty, an economy on
life support, wars and rumors of wars, the dysfunctional disaster that is our
Congress, salinized soils and desalinizing and acidifying oceans, the driest
quarter in history here following the worst droughts in history across this
continent last year, not to mention the super-storm that engulfed the East
coast and southern Thailand spending last spring under water. Where the disciples faced a relatively
microcosmic devastation of their community, we face a macrocosmic devastation
of the world. In this condition, how do
we recognize resurrection when it happens?
The disciples, they had it bad, don’t get me wrong, Pax Romana was peaceful only for the
citizens of Rome, never forget that.
Unforgettable suffering occurred under their Imperial sandals, and
ecologically, the Mediterranean basin was deforested and deserts encroached,
Rome collapsed in part because it outgrew its food-shed. And for the apostles, after the Acts were
recorded, everything went from bad to worse.
The Zealots pushed their lot with the Romans; and Israel, from the
Temple on down ceased to exist as it had in history. Their religion, society, civilization was
crushed, scattered; it was the original Diaspora. And this huddled, dysfunctional little group
of dissenters, religious and social dissenters who knew that God loved
everyone, in particular the least of these; who knew that God so loved the
world that God would, could dare to participate in it under terms we can
recognize, if not understand; who knew, who learned that death is not the only
end of all stories… they held together.
They more than held together, they lived joyfully even as the beasts of
the coliseum consumed them, they proclaimed the truth of Christ even as the
falsehoods of the world retrenched themselves against them; the light of Christ
burned in them even as they were martyred on the burning pyres of bigotry and
malice. How? Why?
What can we, we who face dark days now and ahead, what do we have to
learn from our ancestors and how? It is
all about resurrection.
The body of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ
persists. He lives. We inhabit Him. We are in Him in this very moment. We are that body. The resurrection of Jesus Christ persists in
this world in us, the Body of Christ, the community gathered as Christ’s
church. Yes, it manifests in our
sacramental heart, in the bread and wine that somehow, incomprehensibly change,
are mysteriously inhabited God in God’s self.
But more importantly, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior’s body, His being
was resurrected into forms barely recognizable as Him. That is the Church. The church is as far from perfect as any
human community, worse, largely, because we know better, or are supposed to
know better. We know better than to hate
because of difference, we know better than to judge others, to exclude anyone,
to idolize wealth and comfort and human achievement, we know better than to
deny truth revealed in the myriad ways truth is revealed in different times and
different places than our revelation of truth.
But despite the horror the church has caused, that it
causes, the resurrection of Jesus Christ continues in our hearts and minds, in
our bodies in this gathering of human beings.
How? All I can offer is the smug
shrug of an Anglican priest. I don’t
know. But the more I lean into the
practice of this religion, the practice of Christianity, the more I can imagine
what those disciples, what Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of our Lord, the
more I can imagine how and why they kept going on; how and why the scattered
disciples re-gathered and founded the church.
I can understand better how the desolating sacrilege unleashed by the
Romans on Israel strengthened the faithful remnant, how suffering tremendous
horror at the hands of an Imperial master laid the foundation of the Church on
bedrock. Jesus Christ was resurrected
with and for his faithful friends and with and for the rest of us. Jesus Christ was resurrected for us in the
church and for the whole world. Each
time we gather here in the mystery of this hour, each time we gather around the
table, gather to serve those who need us, gather to do the work that we have
been given to do, each time we do that, the resurrection is remembered, it is
reenacted, it happens again. And the harder it gets, the worse off you are, the
more you suffer and witness suffering, the more you are broken and witness
breaking, the more the darkness encroaches, the brighter the light and life of
our resurrected God shines into the world.
Life, death, and life again.
Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. Jesus Christ is the resurrection, and by the
grace of God, so are we. Christ is
Risen! Halleluiah! AMEN.
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