Sermon Easter Sunday
April 4, 2010
“Wonderful Yet Difficult” 
1 Corinthians 15: 19-26 and Luke 24: 1-12
 

 Let us pray.            

David Ruhe, the current minister of the Congregational Church where I was confirmed, tells a story about his seventh grade English teacher, Miss Zoe DeLorme.[1] In Greek the word “Zoe” means “life,” though certainly he didn’t know that then. But as he writes, it wouldn’t have surprised him and the other seventh grade boys -- they thought that the young Miss DeLorme was life itself. They would gaze at her longingly as she taught them the parts of speech, grammar rules, and proper sentence structure. Ruhe remembers Miss DeLorme vividly but not much of what she taught with one exception – the rule that one is never supposed to start a sentence with the conjunction “but.”

The only reason Ruhe remembers the “But” rule is because one day another classmate, Jeff, was reading a composition aloud in Miss DeLorme’s class and started one sentence with the forbidden “But” word. Miss DeLorme ever so gently corrected him. However, Jeff never heard the end of it from the other boys –“Hey Jeff, Miss Zoe hates your but[t]!” “Get your but[t] out of here, Jeff.” Certainly, takes me back to my sophisticated seventh grade school days.

Now what does this grammar lesson have to do with Easter?

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body.

 So starts the resurrection story we just heard read from Luke. I can only imagine Miss Delorme, ever so gently, correcting Luke for his improper grammar. “But” with all due respect to Miss Delorme and Strunk and White’s classic book, The Elements of Style, I think Churchill got it right when he said never let the rules of grammar get in the way of effectively and vividly conveying a point.  Nothing, I submit, is more appropriate to convey the meaning of Easter than the word “but”. It is precisely the right word to convey that Good Friday has come and gone but   Easter is an entirely new day.

On Good Friday it was business as usual. The establishment reigned. A good man -- because he was a threat to the religious and civil powers -- was arrested on trumped up charges, subjected to a sham trial and then crucified on a cross -- all done to ensure stability in the secular and the sacred worlds.  Compassion, kindness, fairness, justice and inclusiveness were rejected that day. The forces of evil prevailed. And what did most of Jesus' trusted disciples do on Good Friday? They scattered. Some hit the road and others hid out. “Don’t let me get caught? I could be arrested too?  I don’t know that man!” Certainly it was not their finest hour. At the end of the day on that Friday, Jesus was seen by even his closest followers as just another prophet neutralized by the powers that be. At best the stories of his life, teaching, ministry and unfair death would be retold for awhile by a small -- but likely dwindling group.  William Sloane Coffin described what happened on Good Friday this way

                        [Humanity] crucified the best among us
                        because we crucified the best in us.[2]

   But (and I use that word with all due respect to the rules of grammar) the wonderful truth is that we don’t live in a Good Friday world but in an Easter one. If the story of Jesus ended on Good Friday we won’t be here today – in this sanctuary. There would not be billions of people around the world gathering in places of worship everywhere.   But here we are with Christians around the world celebrating Easter. The darkness of Good Friday’s crucifixion was replaced with the glorious, shining truth of Easter that God’s love for us didn’t die but lives! 

However, as one person said during bible study this week the Easter resurrection story is hard to swallow. Of course that’s also what the disciples said initially as reported by Luke –

                        But these words seemed to them an idle tale,
                        and they did not believe them.  

Certainly many do find that story of the empty tomb and Jesus’ resurrection   hard to understand and difficult to accept. Yet, we shouldn’t gloss over the problematic parts of the Easter story and turn simply to the more comfortable rebirth metaphors associated  Easter -- symbolized by the flowering crocuses and daffodil bulbs of early spring.   

To understand the empty tomb and the resurrection, we need to understand a bit of biblical history. The details of the empty tomb do not appear until the writing of the gospels -- some decades after Paul wrote his letters and many decades after Jesus’ crucifixion. That is not to suggest that the reports of the empty tomb are not true, but rather that for the early church the empty tomb was not critical to their faith. What was critical after the crucifixion was the continuing presence of Jesus in the lives of those who followed him. Quite clearly, the empty tomb was not the basis of the faith of the founders of the church but the product of their faith. 

  And so I suggest that seeking to discover who rolled away stone, why the tomb was empty or how the post-Good Friday appearances of Jesus could have occurred is not the right inquiry. Not only would this be impossible given the information available, but even more it would miss the point of Easter. William Sloane Coffin said it best    

[T]he resurrection cannot be proved, [but] it can be known, experienced, and it can be trusted. Faith … is not believing without proof; it’s trusting without reservation. The resurrection faith             is a willingness – on the basis of all we have heard, all that we have observed, all that we have thought deeply about and experienced at a level far deeper than the mind ever

comprehends – … to risk our lives on the conviction that while we human beings kill God’s love we can never keep it dead and buried.[3] 

                        X                        X                        X

 As I listened to my friend Lee Pezet read the passion narrative on Friday afternoon here in the sanctuary, I thought about Peter -- the disciple who understood Jesus better than any other.  He was with Jesus every step from Galilee to Jerusalem. And then when things get tough -- at the time of the arrest and the trial --Peter denied Jesus three times in Pilate’s courtyard. Fear and self-interest won out and he turned his back on the one he had followed through thick and thin -- the one he loved. Peter is so utterly human – putting his worst foot forward. 

I wondered what Peter thought on that Friday night and Saturday. I am sure he was overwhelmed with guilt. We don’t know exactly where he was. Was he off hiding to avoid arrest? Was he thinking about the end of this amazing ministry, his journey back to Galilee, and his return to fishing? And yet he doesn’t leave Jerusalem immediately. For on Easter morning the women find him and tell him what they have seen. But it’s not the description of the empty tomb or even seeing it and the discarded linen that move Peter; it is remembering Jesus words to the disciples that he and his love of them would live on and conquer death.  And Peter’s life is changed forever by that never ending love. He doesn’t go back to Galilee but from that Easter day forward he never wavers in building the church, one step at a time, even when those steps lead to his own death. 

I submit that for us too the details of the empty tomb, and the absent body, should be of less importance. Their implausibility is certainly not a reason to reject Easter. It is a mystery --unexplainable -- to be sure. And yet there is much in life which is mysterious, yet transforming. There is the story of the minister meeting with a bride to be and asking her to explain why she loves her fiancé. After stumbling around for several minutes, she simply says, “because I do”. Love is something we experience, feel and believe in, though we cannot always explain it. And we certainly know that love is transforming.

Easter is most powerfully known -- note I said “known” not proven -- in the power of the Easter event to transform.  A wise commentator once said, “Easter … begins in mystery and it ends, like all high things, in a great courage.”[4] Such was the case for Peter.

In the aftermath of the resurrection – in the continued light of Christ’s love shining in our world -- lives have been transformed. It is that eternal, living love which kept alive learning in the Christian monasteries during the dark ages. It is that living love that led St. Francis of Assisi to challenge the power, wealth and tyranny of the civil and religious establishment of the Middle Ages. It is that living love that led a woman, Mother Teresa, to love and care for the poorest, sickest and most shunned in India. It is that living love that gave strength to a man, Martin Luther King, Jr., to demand that all of God’s children, white and black, be treated equally and with dignity. It is that living love that empowers ordinary folks to feed and care for the homeless, to speak out against genocide, to preserve this God-given environment and inspires so many other known and unknown acts of love and courage.  Because that love did not die on Good Friday but was resurrected and continues to live -- our lives have been changed.

What is the essential truth of Easter?  That this is not a Good Friday world! God lovingly forgives and grants those who crucified him, those who abandoned him and us all a new start every day. The glorious message of Easter is that “there is more mercy in God than [there] is sin in us.”[5] One of the gifts of Easter is that we live life always as forgiven sinners. With each dawn we are -- through the grace revealed yet again this Easter morning -- given a chance at a new life.

                        We can’t prove Easter happened. But we can experience it and live it. There are to be sure Good Fridays in all of our lives, but Good Friday is not the last word.  Easter is. Love is victorious over power and life is victorious over death. Christ is risen, Hallelujah! The light of God’s eternal love overcomes the darkness and offers us each day the opportunity, not to change our circumstances, but ourselves -- not simply to improve but to be transformed.[6] Hallelujah, Christ is risen.  Christ is risen, indeed.    Thanks be to God.