Sermon for Easter 2011

Scriptures for today are here (we used the gospel from Matthew)

If you believe in Easter according to Walgreen’s, Easter is a festival celebrated in pastel colors. The shelves are filled with marshmallow Peeps in hues of pink and yellow, chocolate bunnies in rainbow foil, fluffy pink ducklings, peanut butter eggs beautifully wrapped in lavender, stuffed bunnies with big yellow bows, and so on. And – not that there’s anything wrong with that – but I think the reason for this explosion of cuteness is that we live in a world that has no idea what to do with Easter. We live in a world that believes in Good Friday, and believes that every story ends with Good Friday, with death. A Good Friday world has no idea what to think of the message of Easter, which proclaims life that comes out of death. So it trivializes it into a springtime festival, a feast of pastel colors.

But if you read the Bible, Easter is not a feast of pastel colors at all. Easter begins in darkness. Easter begins in disappointment that must have filled Jerusalem that day. Historians tell us that Jerusalem was a city of 40,000 people at the time of Jesus, but that at the Passover, the population swelled to 200,000 with Jews who came to Jerusalem to celebrate the great feast of freedom, the Passover feast remembering their deliverance from long-ago slavery in Egypt. But they arrived in Jerusalem each year to find it thronged with Roman soldiers, and realized that they were still slaves.

This Sunday morning, the first day after the Sabbath, would be the first day they could travel back home after the Passover – one more disappointing Passover. Imagine this teeming crowd of hopeful people, longing for freedom, hearing the stories of how God had led their ancestors to freedom so long ago, yet questioning whether God was still present for Israel. Picture them packing up that Sunday morning to head back to their disappointing, ordinary lives in Galilee and Bethany and Magdala and Cyrene and all the countries where Jewish people lived; thinking about the farms and the fishing boats and the shops waiting for them there; and sighing not only with the letdown of the end of a holiday, but also with disappointment that once more, the Romans had made short work of a would-be Messiah, the young Jesus of Nazareth who so many hoped would be a new Moses.

So all over Jerusalem, as that black sky lightened into gray, people began to wake up and sigh and pack up their few possessions to head back home to Galilee and other country places and pick up their normal, poverty-stricken lives.

For the disciples, rubbing their eyes from lack of sleep and beginning to stir in the darkness, surely this Sunday morning must have been the day when they started to wonder what they would do, when they went back to Galilee. Matthew, the tax collector, thought about his old job, remembering how Jesus had called him into a new way of life, knowing he could never return to cheating people. Simon the Zealot, formerly a revolutionary rebelling against Rome, yet called into discipleship with the Prince of Peace, wondered whether he could ever go back to his old rebel friends after his newfound friendship with tax collectors and sinners, yet he knew he could never forget his detour into preaching love instead of revolution. Peter and Andrew, James and John, thought about old Zebedee whom they had left behind in the fishing boat, wondered if Zebedee would welcome them home, tried to imagine what it would be like to fish for fish instead of fishing for people. Thomas, the practical one, knew that Friday’s traumatic death was nothing unusual or surprising: it was only what he expected, it ended a beloved story the way so many real-life stories end: in irrevocable, irreversible death, a Good Friday ending. All of them tried to understand what it would be like to be back home in Galilee, all wondered whether any of the dream of the last three years would stay with them, or whether it was all for nothing.

For Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, waking with red and puffy eyes from weeping until they could weep no more, where every time they closed their eyes the picture of their Lord’s death would fill their minds, the long dream was completely, irrevocably ended. Perhaps they were wondering too whether they would be welcomed at home after their time of living scandalously, traveling around with a band of men. As they woke and dressed and went out to slip through dark city streets just coming to life, they knew the bright, shining life they had built with their Master was gone. The hopes, the dreams, the vision of a new way to live, a new way to love – all over. And the world was back to normal: heartbreaking, infuriating, devastating normal; the kind of normal that knows that life is ruled by death, the end of every story. And all they could do, as the first gray light began to glow in the eastern Jerusalem sky, was to go to the tomb to weep some more before heading back home to Galilee.

But then, the earth shook. For the two Marys, arriving at the tomb looking for death, an angel appeared with news so astounding that they quivered with fear. Death cannot hold the Son of God down; death has given way to life. Not bunnies and flowers, not life that springs naturally out of the earth; not the kind of life you wear pastel colors for as you celebrate springtime. Not any kind of life we understand, but life that contradicts the most fundamental thing we know: that life always ends in death. Life that says that the Good Fridays of the world are never the end of the story.

And as the sun rose in the Easter sky, the angel told the women the earth-shaking news that we have all come to hear: Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!]

And when you hear this, when you realize that Good Friday is not the end of the story, when you understand that Easter Sunday follows Good Friday, life will never be normal again.

As the women rush back to tell the news to the other disciples, Jesus himself appeared. All the powers of evil that had descended on Jesus had done the worst they could possibly do, had overcome him, defeated him, killed him in wretched misery. Yet there he is: still bearing the marks of suffering in death, but transformed, alive, telling them to go home and meet him in Galilee.

Evil did not have last word, death did not have last word, the last word was God’s. And because God had the last word, and that Word was the flesh of Jesus, alive then as he will be for eternity, we know that all Jesus’ promises to us are true: the glorious promise that God will be with us always, to the end of the ages; the joyful promise of abundant life for us and for God’s whole creation; the radiant promise that you and I are forgiven and restored as children of God.

The Lord is Risen, and Jesus Christ is loose in our midst, and the whole world today is new. So we say, Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!] And 2,000 years later on Easter Sunday, we celebrate that triumph with flowers and bells and bright lights and beautiful clothes and beautiful soul-piercing music, and yes, pastel colors.

But here’s the question I always have: what happens when we go back to Galilee? You and I have ordinary lives, just like the disciples that Jesus told to go meet him in Galilee, we have our own fishing boats waiting for us, our computers and kitchens and schools and families and televisions, we have our normal joys and griefs, we have normal life waiting for us to take it up again as soon as Easter is over. And the question is, where in our own Galilees do we meet the risen Christ?

Because if Easter was just something that happened 2,000 years ago, a really happy event that we’re glad to remember, we can enjoy our bunnies and eggs, sing some beautiful hymns, and then go back to Galilee and forget about it till next year. But if Christ is on the loose, not just here in church on Easter, but in all the normal, everyday, Galilees of our lives, if Jesus Christ has really overcome the forces of evil and delivered us through our baptism into God’s new creation that starts today; if it’s really true that Good Friday is no longer end of the story; then that’s something that changes us inside out, irrevocably, not as a long and beautiful dream that we wake up from, but as a solid, tangible, observable presence in our lives.

And that, for me, is the whole point. It’s not just that Easter is the happy ending to a sad story that happened long ago. It’s not just that our grief at the death of a person we admire was followed by his appearance to those who loved him and the assurance that his love would not die. It’s not just that God’s love has power over death itself. It is all these things, but it is so much more.

Easter is the stunning, joyous, incomprehensible good news that Christ was not just someone who lived in the first century AD. Christ is someone who is alive here and now, in church, and yes, in Galilee. In a world that still believes Good Friday is the end of all our stories, Easter is here.

The Risen Christ is with us still, healing the sick, releasing the prisoners, opening the eyes of the blind, proclaiming good news to the poor. Shining the light of God into the darkest places of human life. Commanding us to love one another as he has loved us.

Christ is with us still, telling us to go to Galilee and we will see him there. Go back to our normal everyday lives, go back to our workplaces and our schools and our families, go back to the joy and sorrows of human life. Go back to every place that believes in Good Friday and announce Easter. Live as Easter people in a Good Friday world, live as those who know that love always triumphs over death, live as those who have learned that the kingdom of death does not have the final say in our world after all, that the final word is God’s, and God’s love wins.

And know that he is there, the Risen One who encounters us in ordinary Galilees. Because friends, Jesus Christ has breathed his life and spirit into us, and we are his.

And so to each one of us this Easter, Jesus says, celebrate the joyous life of the resurrection. Celebrate the life that cannot stay dead, celebrate the life so abundant that it comes bursting out of the tomb, celebrate the life of joy that is promised to each person here. And then go back to Galilee and find Jesus Christ waiting for you there. Let him fill your life with joy and peace, let him promise you healing and fullness and eternal life, let him bless every corner of your everyday, normal, Galilee life. Because with Jesus Christ alive and on the loose, our normal lives are transformed into resurrection life, and every promise God has ever made us is true.

And so once more, let us say together: Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!]