Sermon Easter Sunday

Easter Year A 042411
Matthew 28:1-10
Resurrection
By Rich Gamble

This is the biggest day in the Christian year. This is the day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus as told in today’s Gospel reading. Easter Week is the most fearful and hopeful week of the Christian Calendar. It is the time in which we face the heart of the gospel message in all its capacity to shatter our complacency.

For some this day is the Christian version of the ancient rites of Spring. The name Easter is believed to derive from a goddess of fertility. Ancient cultures often celebrated the renewal of life. Bunnies and eggs are fertility symbols after all, and everywhere you go today you are sure to see bunnies and eggs. For some then this time is about the ancient rhythms of the seasons and the ancient rhythms of birth and death and rebirth.

For some this is the day to celebrate the victory of Jesus over sin and death. For them believing that Jesus literally rose from the dead is central to obtaining the grace that will save their souls from eternal damnation. For them you have to believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus to consider yourself Christian. Many believe this, both those who do believe in the literal resurrection and those who believe that they cannot be Christian because they cannot believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus.

But there are other ways to understand the Easter story. One way is to say that this story is a parable. To say that it is a parable doesn’t deny the claims of those who need to see the event literally. It simply says to them: ok if you want to believe that, that’s fine but what does the story mean? And to those who don’t believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus you can still say ok fine but what does this story mean to you? You don’t have to believe in the literal historicity of a parable to get at its meaning. We don’t need to know whether the good Samaritan actually existed to make the story a source of truth and meaning.

So what does the story of the resurrection mean? Well it means very little if you don’t know the whole story, because this isn’t the story of the resurrection of Joe Shmoe. It isn’t the story of the new flowers springing out of the ashes, it isn’t the story of endless cycles of procreation. This is the story of the life and death and resurrection of one particular person: Jesus son of Mary of Nazareth.

Jesus who showed that sharing the love of God was about standing up for the outcasts by standing against those who profited from an unjust system.

Jesus came to Jerusalem to stand unarmed and unsupported in radical opposition to the combined power of the Roman Empire and his own religious leaders. But more than that he stood against the foundation of their power: fear, greed, violence, and prejudice. In doing so he challenged the fundamental assumptions upon which human civilization is built. It would be like someone running for office and standing against the values of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and the American people.

In standing up for the love of God for those at the bottom of the social, political and economic order, Jesus earned the wrath of the people who had the power of death on their side.

Jesus did not use the power of death, it was not in him to do so. He used God’s non-violent power of life. Jesus knew that would happen when he went to center of power with his denunciations of that power. His death was as inevitable as any who openly stand in unarmed opposition to brutal tyrants. He didn’t need any mystical powers to foresee and try to prepare his followers for the inevitable. But knowing that arrest, humiliation and death awaited him didn’t deter him. He marched into Jerusalem and boldly spoke up and acted up and kept pushing his truth forward until he could push no farther.

Nailed to a cross, the slow, humiliating painful death suffered by those who questioned the authority of Rome, his journey ended. He died as he lived, embracing outcasts, forgiving enemies. It was an old story in Jesus day: the inevitable victory of violence.

Jesus’ death on a cross wasn’t a unique occurrence. The tragedy is found in its commonality with the experience of so much of humanity. Keep your head down and endure the abuse or stand in opposition and get much worse. And even those of us who are narcotized by the lies of our leaders to believe that those who suffer deserve their fate, even when seek to hide inside the canned laughter of sitcoms, or the acquisition of more unnecessary possession, or drugs, or in the endless preparation of our children to more successfully compete, even then, we know somewhere in the back of our minds that the suffering of others grinds away at our souls.

On Friday last, Good Friday, we paused for just a little while to let the suffering in. In facing the death of Jesus we face the fearful sadness and loss that sits at the heart of our civilization. Vulnerable people are exploited and those who speak up are shouted down or beaten down and the suffering goes on. The myth of the Powers that Be is that nothing changes, abandonment of the vulnerable and escape is the only alternative.

So Jesus died. And if the story ended there, then we would say oh well, another good guy bites the dust, another opponent of empire crucified. In Jesus’ day thousands shared the fate of the cross. But the story does not end there. The women, the ones who did not abandon Jesus when times got tough, went to the tomb to prepare the body. But there was no body, an absence instead of a corpse. There is instead a mysterious man in white who tells them that Jesus has been raised from the dead.

Well at least that is how Mark’s Gospel tells the story. Matthew reads Mark’s gospel and thinks that he can do it one better. Like remakes of favorite movies the new director has his own spin on the story and Matthew has a much bigger special effects budget than Mark. Matthew has an angel descending from heaven, he has lightning and earthquakes and guards who are struck dumb. And he has a resurrected Jesus. Mark just had an empty tomb and the story of Jesus’ resurrection shared by the mysterious man in white.

But whether you like the big effects of Matthew or the subtlety of Mark the story is the same. The tomb was empty, the body gone, the story has a new and wholly unexpected ending. It is fitting that Easter week is seen in connection to the Passover story. In that story the oppressed slaves flee their masters and find themselves with the army rushing upon them and the sea an impenetrable barrier in front of them. Their slaughter is the inevitable end as are all such attempts to thwart the will of those with the power to hurt and destroy. But then the sea parts and a way is found where there was no way.

On Easter morning we celebrate that the tomb was not the end of the story of Jesus. Death is not the end of the story. A way is found where there was no way. The empty tomb was the beginning of the story of those followers who came to finally understand and emulate Jesus.

It is increasingly obvious that we have missed the essential meaning of this day. I say that because most of the people in this nation think of themselves as Christian and yet, we are mired in a culture of consumption and violence that is harming people in other nations, the planet, the poor and future generations. We have the largest disparity between rich and poor of any of the developed nations, we spend more on militarism than most of the rest of the world combined, we consume far more than our share of the world’s energy and natural resources. We have the largest prison population of any nation in the world. If the United States is an example of what Christianity is all about then Christianity is toxic to the health of this planet and its people.

There is another way of seeing this day and our faith. As Good Friday is our expression of our belief that God grieves and suffers with us. So Easter is our expression that our suffering need not be in vain. When we rise up against the voice of hopelessness that says that nothing we do will change anything; when we rise against the lies of those who laugh at our poverty or ignorance or powerlessness, when we fling our teaspoon of charity toward a desert of despair, our lives, our efforts, our dreams are not in vain.

The meaning of this story is not about what Jesus did for us so we can merrily exploit the planet and other people and still get to heaven. It is not about ancient celebrations of the seasons or earth’s fecundity. It is about a choice: to stand for life and against death or not; to stand with the exploited and against the exploiters or not. And the not can mean actively participating in violent systems or passively participating by standing by and saying nothing.

The meaning of Easter is that there is no meaning if there is no resurrected body and by that I mean us. If this story does not lead us to die to the hold of greed and violence over our lives, then Christ is not raised in us. If this story does not lead us to stand against the sins of poverty and oppression then Christ is not raised in us.

Life is stronger than death. Love is stronger than hate or fear or violence or greed. This is the joyous and scary message of Easter morning. Scary because if we are truly Easter people then we are called to stand up, speak up and act up in defense of the vulnerable. We are called to be that unexpected voice of hope. We are called to boldly march into problems that are too big for us with the clarity of knowing that the most important thing we have to offer is our willingness to offer what we have.

We are called to embrace the belief that a small aging church of struggling believers can change the world and then act accordingly.

Easter calls us to discard our dreams of escape and boldly stride into tombs of poverty, racism, homophobia, sexual abuse, and war with the utterly unrealistic belief that new life… resurrection is possible. The realism of accommodating ourselves to a world of cruelty and injustice dies for us when we can see the life beyond death in the love beyond life.

The meaning of that first Easter morning didn’t immediately sink in for the disciples. It usually doesn’t hit us all at once. It nudges us to empathize and not judge, to act and not look away, to take a step that leads inevitably to another.

Easter isn’t the end of the story any more than crossing the sea was the end of the story for those escaped slaves. Easter, if we dare to believe that resurrection is possible for humanity and the planet, is just the beginning of the story. To believe in the possibility of resurrection is to embrace being the bearer of the self-giving love that is the power of resurrection.

The stone is rolled away. The sea is parted before us. An impossible hope awaits.

Happy Easter!