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Sermon - Easter Sunday (B) - 12th April 2009
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 8am
We came, some of us, the early risers, like the other early birds, Mary and Mary, before first light this morning to celebrate the feast of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, to watch the new day dawn and with it the new life that is the realisation of the long-held promises of God.
Every year, it is an extraordinary journey to struggle with the dark side of the world and the dark side of our innermost selves and arrive in the warmth and light of the new life in Christ.
As a teacher, I grapple constantly with the mindset of the young who want increasingly to find rational, scientific explanations to the miracles of the scriptures. Only last week, I had my Year Six students arguing ferociously between the various theories of how God parted the Red Sea for the Israelites as they took their liberty from the slavery of Egypt. How much more so do they want to understand the Resurrection. And we, too, tend to look in the wrong places for understanding.
In our desire to understand, we spend too long staring into the empty tomb and wondering what went on. Well, I am long past the point of wanting to know. For what kind of understanding will enable us to grasp the wisdom of God? Why can we not be happy with the deep, deep mysteries that are God’s and should remain so? For mysteries, like butterflies, are too fragile to pin down. When we do so, they will die.
We who stare into the tomb hear the voice of the angel echoing in Matthew, “He is not here.” Perhaps the angel means, in a polite angelic way, that we are looking in the wrong place. If you want the find the risen Lord, seek elsewhere. We stare so fixedly at the cocoon that we are in danger of missing the butterfly.
Mary, too, sought an explanation. “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him”. The reality of the Resurrection had not yet struck home and nor would it until he spoke, until she recognised that he had not been laid anywhere, but was there, present. It was an experience like no other. It was the realisation of life begun again, fired by the merest speaking of her name.
We can too easily underestimate the power of God speaking. At the beginning of time, the Creation happened because God spoke. And God said ‘let there be ...’ and it was so. Jesus, too, speaks. And things happen.
We like to imagine that the Resurrection is something that simply happened to Jesus, when it is as much something that happens to us. It is the way of God in the world. Ours is a resurrection faith, one that keeps us going through a lifetime’s cycle of dying and rising, of moving from one stage to another, from one change to another. The two constants in life, God and change.
No, for us to understand resurrection, we must meet it where we can grasp its meaning, which may be beyond our intelligence or cognition but it is not beyond our experience. For our encounters with the risen Christ are not unlike those of Mary and the other disciples. He speaks and we recognise, not always instantly, but there comes that dawning consciousness, like the rising sun on Easter Day, of his presence alongside us, with us, within us.
And it is often in the despair, the desperate God-forsakenness that Mary and the other followers must have felt after the awful doings of the Thursday and Friday. It is the constancy of God that we trust in such times.
I imagine that people, in these harder and straitened economic times, may return to the classic and tested values that many of us grew up with. Along with the lower hemlines and the home-cooked jams that will be rediscovered and resurrected in many places, I sense that we will find more looking again at God when all the self-important idols and temples we have created have crumbled before us.
Yes, when we have put to the test those things of dubious worth and of very temporal value, we shall turn again and find the God of resurrection standing at our side. And he will speak, as he has done day after day, and, finally we shall hear, recognise. The Resurrection happens to us, while Jesus, with unending patience, waits for us to respond; inviting faith, not demanding obedience.
It is one of the constant paradoxes in the Christian gospel. How often we find it at odds with the imperatives of the world. The Kingdom imperatives demand much of us, not least that there is plenty we must let die before the Kingdom comes. They are everywhere, these paradoxes. The King triumphant rides into Jerusalem, but the battle of Golgotha has not yet been fought, never mind won in the victory of the empty tomb.
And the paradox of that very victory is hard enough to grasp. In the death of death we find the light of life. Parker Palmer, that wonderful Quaker visionary, explores it in this way:
What we lose on the cross is not our lives but our burden of falsehood and illusion; what lies beyond the cross is the uplifting power of love. The paradox of the crucifixion is the death of the illusion that death is supreme; that pain kills illusion so truth can bring joy.
The way of the cross reminds us that despair and disillusionment are not dead ends but signs of impending resurrection. Losing our illusions is painful because they are the stuff we live by. But God is the great iconoclast, constantly smashing the idols on which we depend. Beyond illusion lies a fuller truth that can be glimpsed only as our falsehoods die. As we have the faith to live fully in the midst of these painful contradictions, we will experience resurrection and the transformation of our lives.
And there we have it. This day of resurrection is not a one-off event. It happens every Sunday, every day in the experience of those of us who would hear the risen Christ walking in the gardens of our daily lives and speaking our names, calling us by name. Yes, he does, not out of our own merit but in the grace of his love – pure gift.
St Paul recognises this. “Last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle... But by the grace of God I am what I am.”
And so say all of us! When we consider what marvellous use God has made of the most unworthy people in the narratives of the scriptures, David, Jonah, the unpalatable Amos, Peter, Saul of Tarsus and many more, there is a glimmer of hope for you and me.
And why? Because of the unfailing constancy of the One who remakes us each time we fail. This is why Jesus’ resurrection belongs to us, if we choose to be a part of it, if we recognise him when he speaks.
When the ancient people of God started hearing God’s promise of a messiah, they knew this would be the anointed one who would rescue them from the enemy, who would save them from destruction. What they didn’t recognise was that this messiah, this Jesus, came to rescue us from ourselves, from the enemy within.
Like Paul, we are who we are. We are wonderfully made and even more wonderfully remade in this Easter promise. So in spite of ourselves and because of God’s redeeming work, we can be free to do wonderful things. The victory is his; the spoils are ours.
Thanks be to God; let us sing and shout for joy.
From The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life. 2008.