It’s wonderful to be with you on this Easter morning, what’s not to love about this bright holiday in the height of springtime, new life all around us.
I wonder if you’ve noticed, as I have, that the parts of Easter you can simply buy in a store keep growing and growing. The Easter section at Kroger gets a bit bigger each year, with a more and more ways of packaging a peanut butter cup; the New York Times ran a story over the weekend about excessive Easter baskets; the picture was of three “Easter” baskets hung from the handlebars of new Easter bicycles. This is apparently the product of Etsy and Pinterest—those are websites where parents make each other “think” they should be doing things that really they shouldn’t.
An interesting one is the egg hunt; there are more of them all the time, and the egg hunt may be more Christian in origins than you realize. Martin Luther, the great leader of the Protestant Reformation, was no stranger to fun, and popularized the egg hunt. The men would go out and hide the eggs so the children could join the women in searching as they once did for the Risen Christ: a search for new life on Easter morning. I’m no enemy of any of this; I love watching my children search for their Easter baskets, I love the chocolate bunny I know is coming each year—you can keep the Peeps, thank you! And I love egg hunts, we have a great one here at Knox. The question is whether it becomes just another chance for greed and competition, or whether it leads us into the story of hope and new life that is as important these days as ever.
A lot of people think the best part of an egg hunt is the beginning; you know, when the kids are released and come flooding into the area, eager to go on the hunt. I think in a good community, the best part is actually the end. At the end of an egg hunt, there is always one or more children who went the wrong direction, or didn’t realize they were supposed to be in a hurry, or got more interested in checking out a flower or an insect along the way (there’s a sermon in each one of these approaches, by the way…) These children eventually find out that the hunt is over, and they have only a few eggs, and begin to cry. In a good community, this is when the best part happens. For this is when other children come and help. Seeing the tears and understanding immediately, they go over to the disappointed child and begin to put their eggs in her basket. And even though the hurt doesn’t go away instantly, and even though some of these helpful children were encouraged by their parents before making a move, this is the best part. For this is where children are learning about compassion and generosity and love, this is where they are learning how to live together in ways that, out there in the world, often get lost.
Let me tell you the best part about being a pastor: it is when you get to spend your working days seeing people of all ages, get their empty baskets filled with good things. You see regular broken lives find a way to heal. Often the situations are more serious than an egg hunt, and so the basket filling is important: sometimes through cancer, or addiction or depression, a person comes to terms with their brokenness, discovers their need for others, and escapes loneliness. Sometimes a grieving spouse or parent or child finds the first signs of hope following a great loss. Sometimes a mission volunteer gets disillusioned by the realities of poverty, but still decides to keep mentoring a child in need. In none of these situations does the hurt or the brokenness instantly disappear; but in a good community, in a Christian community, we make a discovery: faith is shaped not by a life free of struggle but by the recognition that even in our darkest hours, God loves us still; and life is possible, even in the face of death.
Christian communities are grounded in the story of Jesus, and the story of Jesus is that over and over again, people with empty baskets find hope. Consider for a moment the stories we know about Jesus. One is literally about the filling of baskets. Five thousand people gather in a field one day to hear Jesus teach them. When the day is done, someone discovers that no one has brought any food, save for a boy with 5 loaves and 2 fishes. But when Jesus multiplies these gifts by the love of God, the whole crowd is fed, and beyond that, 12 extra baskets overflow. The whole story is a metaphor for the way God provides through love, gives generously, offers us what we need when we do not believe there is enough.
Throughout Lent, in this community, we’ve told other stories, of how Jesus’ stories of love fills our baskets with good things. The parable of the Sower tells us God cares about justice and good life for everyone, and inspires us to surround every human life with good soil that helps people to thrive. The Prodigal Son is another story; a story of forgiveness, second chances, and letting go of our judgments so we can live with joy. The Good Samaritan is a story teaches us to be good neighbors, even when our neighbor may be our enemy.
All the stories of Jesus lead in the direction of another: the one we spoke of a week ago. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with a message of peace. It’s a protest against the violence and oppression of the Roman world; the people are so moved to see someone offer a vision of hope and peace that they begin waving palm branches in the air and laying their cloaks on the road to welcome a new kind of king.
It’s unbelievably beautiful to think about, this story of embracing God’s love as a real way of life. It’s hard though, to embrace Jesus’ message of love. It’s hard because the forces of hate and fear and death are so dominant in the world that surrounds us. So even though the crowd of people welcomed Jesus so lovingly to Jerusalem, just days later, they would turn on him and call for his death.
It seems inexplicable, but the signs were there all along. In his ministry, back in Galilee, Jesus warns his disciples again and again that his way of life is going to lead to his death. The religious authorities are perturbed when his living reveals their hypocrisy. The Romans fear that his critiques of the empire will lead to insurrection. Jesus’ message of love and peace is what everyone so desperately wants; it’s just that the world’s ways of violence and fear are so hard to escape.
So even among Jesus’ friends you see signs of people pulling away. Judas, one of his twelve closest disciples, will be the one to betray him. Peter, who had seemed the most eager of them all would deny knowing him three times. By the time Jesus hung on the Cross, his disciples would scatter. It seems inexplicable…except that all these folks I’m talking about… are human beings. And we all have enough experience with human beings to know that as great as our longing may be for grace, love, and hope…greed and power, fear and anxiety are ever present, and often pull us away from a life of love.
So the very same “crowd” that waves palm branches for Jesus on Sunday becomes the “mob” that shouts “crucify him!” on Friday. Somehow the very people who were swept up into real life through Jesus, are once again caught in death. And we, today’s followers of Jesus, we know that same human problem—the problem of wanting life, but being caught in death.
You know what it looks like to be caught in death right? Author Nancy Claire Pittman says, “It’s clinging to former visions of ourselves [our idealized histories] and our churches as if they might come back to life as long as we hold on to them. We grasp our loved ones too tightly, refusing to allow them to change, to become bigger, or smarter, or stronger. We choose to stay with what we know within our hearts to be dead, because it is safe…” (Pittman, “Feasting on the Word, Year C). Being caught in death means other things too. It means refusing help for that addiction or depression or stress, even though it is tearing you apart one day at a time. It means being trapped in that newsfeed that makes you so angry, but brings about no action in your life. It’s thinking that the violence and hatred all around you can only be met by violence and hatred of your own. All of these things are signs of death all around us; they kill us a little bit at a time.
And that’s kind of where the disciples are, after the Crucifixion…and then Sunday morning comes. On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James…head to the tomb. Thankfully these women disciples had been more faithful than the men, tearful at the foot of the Cross, waiting to find out what would be done with his body, and then preparing to anoint him as was their tradition. So they go to the tomb, taking the spices they have prepared. It is early, the sun barely beginning to give light to the landscape and at first they can barely see it, but it slowly comes into focus: the stone has been rolled away from the tomb. Going inside, deeply afraid, they find that the body of Jesus is missing, and their panic and terror increases all the more. When they turn to come out of the tomb, all of the sudden, out of the darkness…light! Two figures in dazzling clothes are there, angels they must be, with a message: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Why do you look for the living among the dead? “He is not here, but is risen.” And then they continue, “Remember how he told you, when he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again?” And the women pause, remembering…that of course that is what he had said. Jesus knew all along that the powers of death in the world were persistent and cunning, and yes, it sometime seems if they will win for a season. But Jesus knew he would rise again; that darkness would be overcome by the light and the ways of death by the life of God, and he is not here, he is risen. He has always been the living one, so “why do you look for the living among the dead?”
The women race to tell the other disciples…but they are so stuck in the ways of death that most of them are not yet ready to hear. But Peter, who was always a bit more impulsive than the others…Peter goes to the tomb…and Luke’s story says that “looking in, he saw the linen cloths lying by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.”
This is perhaps my favorite part of Luke’s Easter story, that Peter, the impulsive one, is amazed, but must go home to think about it. For consider who Peter was. Peter was the bold and impulsive one—the first one out of the boat to try walking on the water, the first one to say he would step up to lead the church. And yet Peter, who had promised Jesus to be his most faithful disciple, had just on Friday denied knowing Jesus not one but three times, to save his own skin. When he went out on Good Friday from that Temple courtyard and wept bitterly, he could only have felt like the world’s greatest disappointment, that the passion so alive in him had somehow died and would never live again. On Easter morning when the women come running back from the tomb to find the disciples, I see Peter, sort of hiding in the corner, the most ashamed of them all. And yet here is word that the tomb is empty and the Christ raised. Jesus is the Lord of forgiveness and grace, just as he always was, just as he said he would be, ready for his disciples to go and tell his story of love. And once Peter has seen it, impulsive Peter is so overcome that he must go home to think: what he will do now? In the face of this news of grace, this second chance, Who will he be?
My friend and mentor John Buchanan, once said this about Easter: “What is being addressed in us on Easter is that deep place in our souls where we decide who we will be, how we will live, whom we will trust. What transformed cowards into brave disciples, was the conviction that Jesus Christ was alive and therefore there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of anymore.” (Easter Sermon at Fourth PC Chicago, 2003)
Why do you look for the living among the dead? In this world where there is so much that pulls us toward the ways of death, so much blatant disregard for human dignity, so much violence and anger, the story of the Gospel is as important as ever. So why do you look for the living among the dead?
If Jesus has overcome death, what have we to fear—nothing! You can be courageous in the face of hopelessness, and compassionate in the face of callousness. You can be generous without reservation, and hope without limitation. You can live as if this world’s powers of death are here for but a season—for they are—and you can love as if love is the thing that lasts—for it is.
The pull toward the ways of death in this world are pervasive indeed, but Christ defeats death, and calls us to a new way of living. Jesus has gone ahead of us and will be there. Thanks be to God, he is Risen! Amen.