Easter Sunday
Jeremiah 31:1-6
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 28:1-10
Easter is a fun time. Our families gather together. We participate in Easter Egg hunts. Some of us may even get a cute bunny for Easter. And of course there are all those Easter sweets. If you come to our living room you can find some special M&Ms in the shape of eggs. In warmer climates they look forward to lawns greening and tulips popping up. In our cooler climate we may still have snow on the ground, but the sun is shining more and more each day, and things just seem warmer.
The first Easter had none of this. On that first Easter day, Matthew tells us, the earth shook from an earthquake. Guards also shook and became ashen like dead men. An angel appeared like lightening. Two women named Mary trembled with both fear and joy, running all the way to tell their friends what they had seen and heard. They had seen Jesus! And he was alive!
This was the first Easter: a wild time, a surprising event, a happening beyond comprehension.
1. We Have Tamed Easter
But we have tamed Easter into a time for eating sweets and petting bunnies. We have put Easter back into the box. We have rounded up the wild stallions of the Holy Spirit and corralled them so they can be trained for the Easter Parade.
It was not always this way. Back in the early years of the Christian Church wild things happened. Jesus’ disciples went out to teach and preach, sacrificing their very lives in the process. Ordinary Christians stood in the middle of great arenas facing snarling lions. Theologians and missionaries struggled with great issues: Is Christianity meant only for people who are already part of the Hebrew tradition? What does it mean to call Jesus Son of God and Son of Man? To be a Christian was to live dangerously.
But then Christianity became legal and eventually it was to your economic and social benefit to be a Christian. Then if you were to have political power you had better be in the church. Instead of a dangerous, wild faith, Christianity became a tame, domesticated faith. Even up to our own day.
Mike Slaughter, pastor of the
“When I was a teenager, the last thing I wanted to be was a Christian, because Christians were the most tame and predictable and boring people I knew.”
He goes on to contend that we “train our children for tameness and sameness.”
“Tameness and sameness.” Are these the qualities we lift up as primary Christian virtues?
This is not the Resurrection faith. The Resurrection faith demands courage and imagination. The Resurrection faith cannot be bottled up or buttoned down. The Resurrection faith cannot be predicted any more than those basketball games we are watching with their number one seeds and number 15 seeds. In fact it can be predicted less.
No, we do not want to be like the woman who discovered Jesus at her doorstep. She was overjoyed and welcomed him into her home. The first two days were great, but on the third day she came back home to find some shady characters in her living room and homeless people sitting in the kitchen. The next day some of the dancers from south of town were there, and Jesus was mixing with all of them as if they were everything for him.
This was not right. It was nice to have Jesus there, but he disrupted everything. So the woman found a nice closet toward the back of the house. She lined it with expensive silk and asked Jesus to step in. Then she locked the door with a golden key, put some flowers and a candle in front, and bowed every time she went past the door.
2. Difficulty Dealing with Easter
Unfortunately this is what we have done with Easter. Jesus is really hard to deal with. In his life as a rule breaker, in his death as a heart breaker, and in his Resurrection as a stone breaker. Dealing with the Resurrection, especially, is not easy. It challenges our intellect. Dying we can understand. It happens every day. But Resurrection? It is really beyond our full comprehension.
Perhaps that is why each of the Gospel writers describes the Resurrection events in a bit of a different way. If you take the Gospel accounts and compare them you will see that different people come to the tomb and that different things happen there. But one fact is certain. None of the Gospel writers. ----- Not Matthew. Not Mark. Not Luke. Not John. ----- None of them describes what actually happened inside the tomb. It is too mysterious. It is beyond factual investigation. In fact Matthew renounces all speculative interest in attempting to describe the mystery of the Resurrection. It happens off stage, a matter of testimony and proclamation, not of empirical observation.
This is where both the Fundamentalists and the Rationalists of our day get into trouble. They want to intellectually nail down the Resurrection. They want it all explained ---- either accepting or rejecting it on the basis of ordinary, factual evidence. They have no tolerance for ambiguity. With such a mentality we try to explain the Resurrection and make it intellectually acceptable. Perhaps it cannot be “tamed” that way. Perhaps we need to let it “run wild.”
With such a mentality we are far different from the Gospel writers who seem to be able to live with mystery and ambiguity and simply proclaim with the eyes of faith that Christ is Risen. No the Resurrection cannot be tamed. Rather it must be proclaimed. It forces us out of the box just as the Risen Christ was forced out of the tomb and those two women were forced to a new understanding of what it meant to follow Jesus. There was a power there which we may also experience.
3. Easter Offers us a Taste of God’s Revolutionary, untamed Power
Today, I am told, if you go to
This is what Easter brings. Fireworks. Uproar. Flashes of light. Upheaval.
The first Easter brought an upheaval ------ in more than just an earthquake or a rolling stone. It brought an upheaval in lives. It untamed some pretty frightened people and made them bold witnesses. Think of Peter making his speech in our reading from Acts today. Think of Paul, boldly challenging the church authorities of his day to expand the reach of this new Christian movement to the pagans ---- those at one time deemed untouchable and unworthy. Think of the seer John on the
Those were wild times ---- all inspired by the revolutionary events that took place in a burial ground in
Back in the last century, one of the great intellects of Christianity, a man named C.S. Lewis talked and wrote about a God who is “untamable.” He told about a God who amazingly chooses to become incarnate to save the world. He showed his abiding faith in Christ, “who is not tamed by His creatures, but who surprises us with His endless grace.”
This surprising, untamed God called an intellectual atheist, a denier of the Resurrection, to become, perhaps the greatest apologist for Christianity in the English speaking world. C.S. Lewis. You will see one of his stories for children at the movies next Christmas. Narnia. Perhaps you are familiar with his The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
In our 21st Century I think of Jim Wallis, who describes himself as an evangelical social activist. It was my privilege to hear him speak over at
I even think of people and events closer to home. Just last week Karen received an invitation to help lead the next “Women’s Wild Weekend” at one of our church camps. A few years ago a friend of mine misunderstood and proclaimed that he would love to go to that “Wild Women’s Weekend.” Perhaps the women of our church are discovering what it means to be part of this untamed Resurrection. Better to be wild than mild.
On this Resurrection Day I do not have everything “nailed down.” I have not completely figured out what it means to live as one of God’s untamed Resurrection people. But I invite you to join me on the journey. As it says in your bulletin:
“No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”
I think Jesus would like that.
