4/17
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| Croatian Easter Eggs...all natural dyes |
It's a sunny cool late afternoon when I preach an Easter sermon to my friends at Beverley Church, Brooklyn back in the US. Here's what I had to say:
Greetings to you from Berlin where I finally arrived after a long and arduous journey made all the more difficult by continuing Covid protocols. A Holy Saturday spent in Madrid along the way. And waking up this morning to find my grandchildren excitedly opening gifts left for them by the Easter Bunny. Following my daughter-in-law’s Croatian tradition, they make a nest for the Bunny filed with flowers and eggs that have been colored with onion skins and beets and leaves and turmeric..reds, blues, purple, yellow. Deep down, it’s all about new life, how spring rolls round again…despite all, even in the darkest time. It comes again. While we celebrate new life, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine are doing their best to resist the power of death and hold on to the life they have.
And so we turn again, as we do every year to the story of Easter, our Christian “origin” story if you like. Easter is what makes Jesus Jesus. As Marcus Borg said, Without Easter there would be no Jesus. He’d just be another one of the many first century Jews who lost their life resisting the empire.
We usually read the story from the Gospel of John. So this year I thought it would be fun to look at in Luke. What do we find there ?
The women come to take care of Jesus. Note ..all the men, all the men, took off at the crucifixion. Only the women stayed to the end. The men out of some combination of disappointment and fear were gone. They’re like well, that certainly didn’t work out.. According to John they even went back to their old work of fishing. But not the women.
These women, like so many before and after, don’t worry about those things, they put their heads down and take care of business.And the business to take care of is taking care of the body of someone they had loved, someone who was a friend. And so they go.
Imagine how they feel to find the stone rolled away, the body gone! While they are trying to figure this out, two must be, angels, appear. And they are terrified!. Mark actually ends his gospel there…they, the women, were afraid..and the two angels? They say the most important words, do not look for the living among the dead….and then the women remember everything he had told them. And they go to tell the disciples, the eleven (no more Judas) and the rest.
And what do our courageous men do? They refuse to believe the women. Say it’s just an idle tale. ( The Biblical Greek is actually more colorful…) Remember, in those days, women were not even allowed to be witnesses in court cases, because, you know, women….
The last scene of course, involves Peter. I love Peter, the guy with no impulse control, the guy with the big words, big statements, we’ll always follow you, all the way to the end…who winds up denying three times, scared to death, who me? Never knew the guy…But on the other hand, not worried about guilt, not worried about shame, he goes to see, he runs to go see…and comes away amazed…
So much more to come…but what to do with what we’ve got?
Don’t look for the living among the dead…Easter means they came to believe Jesus was alive. Get this….there’s no external way to prove it, right? No cell phone cameras on him as he gets up and walks away or whatever it as that happened. No instagram posts . No tik tok posts by the women. No articles in the local press about empty tombs and the disappearance of the body of an executed rabble rouser. The external world did not know and did not care.
I am going to go further and say that we know, not believe, we know this is true and truth is not bound by and is always so much more than facts. So how do we know this is true? At the simplest level, we know this is true because we are here and we too are witnesses.
Do not look for the living smog the dead.
Many cultures have their own way of measuring time…like for our Jewish friends celebrating Passover it’s 5782. For our Muslim friends celebrating Ramadan it is year 1443 AG, Anno Hegirae. And back in February the Asian year 4719 began. And yet the whole world measures time by this man. It’s what we used to call Anno Domini. Remember BC and AD? Well now it’s CE, the Common Era. So time itself testifies that Jesus is not to be found among the dead.
So what does that mean for us?
We know the power of death is strong. We have lived through two years of the pandemic now. Almost a million deaths in the US and almost 6 million world wide and it is still not over. My trip to Germany to visit my grandchildren was bounded and defined by shifting covid rules that almost kept from getting there. Nearly all of us have loved ones who have died during this pandemic. It may have permanently changed the way we live.
And if that were not enough, we have our awareness of the senseless war going on in Ukraine. I get evert angry with people trying to explain how we git here, trying to figure out whose fault this war is. It’s like I told my boys…history is always more complex than we think it is. There are no clean hands here. Especially ours. But wrong is still wrong. Invading another country is wrong. Bombing theatre, schools, and even maternity wards is WRONG. But how to stop it? That’s another issue.
The point is …we know too much of death. It is always around us. The death of loved ones. The end of relationships. A job. A home. And the worst of all…spiritual death …when we have lost the passion, the desire, even the will to live.
And it is all too easy to give in to , to hold on to death. Resurrection takes courage. Stepping into, accepting, embracing resurrection, not after you die, but now…that takes courage.
One of my favorite folksingers is the late Canadian Stan Rogers. He wrote a song about a sunken ship and the efforts of the sailors who love her to bring it back. Listen to the words of its final verse…
Rise again, rise again; though your heart it be broken
And life about to end
No matter what you've lost, be it a home, a love, a friend
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again
Rise again, rise again; though your heart it be broken
And life about to end
No matter what you've lost, be it a home, a love, a friend
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again
Don’t look for the living among the dead. Because Easter. Jesus lives and because he still lives he calls us to risk resurrection. To risk living. Holding on to death is easy. Be brave enough to risk your resurrection.
Alleluia. Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.
Luke 24: 1-12
1But on he first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. 6Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8Then they remembered his words, 9and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. 10Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. 11But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
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