Easter
Sunday Year A 2014
Father Adam Trambley
April 20, 2014 St.John’s Sharon
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
The Lord is risen indeed!
Alleluia!
Today we gather to celebrate the great victory of our Lord
Jesus Christ over death and the grave.
We have a flourish of flowers, brass and timpani augmenting our organ,
and as much light, beauty, joy, music and color as we can muster. Yet even with all of this, we can barely begin
to describe the extent of what Jesus has done for us. The concept of the Son of God becoming flesh
and dwelling among us; emptying himself and becoming obedient unto death;
descending to the depths of hell to destroy death forever; then rising from the
dead, appearing to his disciples and going to sit at God’s right hand where he
has prepared a place for us in his heavenly kingdom; all of this is a bit more
than we can easily wrap our minds around.
To be free from fear and sin and death and to be reconciled to God as
his children is huge! The resurrection
does nothing less than changes our entire lives. Too often, though, instead of struggling to
live out the amazing implications of Easter, we seek to shrink God’s blessings
to what we can handle.
Our Easter gospel gives us a great example of how we
sometimes respond to God’s miraculous work.
Where God is opening up untold blessings, we see Mary Magdalene trying
to make everything fit her preconceptions.
Where God wants to give her an amazing gift, she tries to finish the
tasks she had set for herself earlier.
Early in the morning, Mary comes to the tomb and sees the
stone rolled away. Now we can understand
that her first thought might not have been, “Jesus is raised from the
dead.” Even if she heard him talk about
it at some point, that thought might still have been a leap. But she is looking to see the body of Jesus,
and she is not letting go until she finds it.
She runs to tell Peter and the beloved disciple that they took Jesus’
body away. Maybe they know something or
can find something out. But they run to
the tomb and see the burial clothes. They believe that something has happened. What exactly, they don’t know, but they’re
pretty sure that the local cemetery association grounds crew isn’t
responsible. Then Peter and the other
disciple return home, leaving Mary by herself.
Now Mary looks into the tomb, still seeking the body. Instead of seeing burial cloths in two piles,
she sees two angels. At this point, we
might expect her to realize that whatever is happening is bigger than she
thought, but she doesn’t. She is simply crying
that the body is gone. The angels ask
her why she is crying. They don’t tell
her not to be afraid – apparently she isn’t.
She’s just upset. Two heavenly
messengers ask her what’s wrong, and all she can talk about is not knowing
where they put the body.
Once she realizes that the angels don’t have an answer she
turns around and sees somebody. Standing
before her is the answer to of her questions.
On the surface, if she wants to see what has happened to the body of
Jesus, there it is. On a deeper level,
her initial desire to come to the tomb to connect with Jesus is also now
fulfilled. But she isn’t looking for
either of those answers to come in that way.
She is just trying to figure out who moved the body. So she decides the man in front of her might
be responsible. She thinks he is the
gardener, and asks him about the body.
Then, finally, Jesus breaks through. He calls her by name: “Mary.” Then, just as the sheep of the Good Shepherd
know his voice and recognize it, Mary Magdalene recognizes Jesus as he calls
her by name. He connects with her, tells
her that he is going to their heavenly Father, and commissions her to tell the
disciples, which she does. She
proclaims, “I have seen the Lord.”
Like Mary Magdalene, we sometimes refuse to pay attention
when God is sending us his blessings.
God wants lives of love, joy and peace for us. Jesus wants to enter into a profound personal
relationship with us. The Holy Spirit
wants to fill with his gifts for mission and ministry so that we can accept
God’s plan and purpose for our lives and build up the whole Body of
Christ. Jesus’ resurrection is meant to
come to us and put our lives back on the right path so that we live as citizens
of the Kingdom of God.
But sometimes we just poke around wondering where they put
the bodies.
To stop being distracted by our own plans and
preconceptions, we might ask ourselves three questions:
First, where in my life is something unexpected happening
that might be from God?
Second, who might be acting as an angel with a message from
God for me?
Third, where might Jesus be calling my name?
First, where in my life is something unexpected happening
that might be from God? Mary didn’t find
the body, and assumed someone took it.
Too often when things happen in our lives that aren’t according to our
plans, we assume something is wrong. We
decide to blame somebody, even if it is an unknown “they”, for moving the body,
for delaying our schedule, for making us do something differently, or for making
us experience some inconvenience, unpleasantness, or even pain. We decide that if it isn’t our way, it must
be the wrong way.
But maybe God has another plan. Maybe Jesus wants to meet us on the road that
we weren’t planning to take. Maybe we
can only open ourselves up to God’s saving life when we can no longer fix
everything for ourselves according to our own master plan. Maybe the only way we will ever have our eyes
open enough to see the major changes for the better God is trying to make in
our lives is if we are forced to stop seeing things the way they have always
been. Maybe we will never accept the
power of the resurrection until we have had a real encounter with death.
Second, we ask who might be acting as an angel with a
message from God for me? For Mary, it
was a couple of guys in white hanging out in the tomb. Often for us, two types of people have
messages for us that we need to hear.
The first are people who tell us what we don’t want to hear. I’m not talking about mean people or people
who say untrue, nasty things. But we all
have people in our lives who may not have the best filters, or don’t worry
about social conventions, or have no need to be nice, and just say what they
think, speaking the truth from their own perspective as best they can. Sometimes these folks say things we need to
hear, usually when we don’t want to hear it.
The other type of people who may be sent from God are the random people
we encounter who saying something odd that sticks with us. The person we’ve never seen before in the
grocery line, the person who comes into the office once, or the person we’re
thrown together with in an elevator or other unexpected situation. When these folks speak to us, instead of
trying to get them to fit our own boxes, we can actually listen for anything
that might be a life-changing message.
Now don’t get me wrong – every homeless dude shouting through your open
window is not the Archangel Gabriel. But
when God is planning to do something totally unexpected in our lives, the
announcement is going to sound, well, unexpected.
Then finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to ask
where Jesus is calling my name? We may
think that we wouldn’t have any trouble hearing Jesus, especially if he is
calling us. But if we keep babbling
about bodies, we may not let him get a word in edgewise. If every situation brings to mind an long
list of ways the Almighty can exhaustively correct conditions to return them to
the way we want them, we won’t be listening.
If we are always spewing out our plans, our ideas, our needs, our wants,
our fears, our resentments, and any other stray thought that crosses our mind,
we will have a hard time letting Jesus stop before us, look lovingly into our
eyes and call our name. If we are
churning up our own insides so we don’t have to stop and listen to Jesus, we
are going to have an even harder time hearing him when he calls.
On the other hand, if we just stop every once in a while,
and listen, we might hear him. We might
recognize him at work in events that previously befuddled us. We might notice a quiet spot in the center of
our lives where he invites us to sit down while he calms the storms around
us. We might notice his voice in the
beauty of nature, in a piece of music we hear playing, or even, amazingly
enough, in the words of scripture or our Prayer Book. We are also bound to hear Jesus calling us by
name when we finally lay down because all seems lost to us, when we have put
aside all other hope, and when we give ourselves over quietly to the various
graves of our lives. In those moments,
Jesus Christ, who destroyed death once and for all, will call us forth from the
grave and into his eternal life. And his
eternal life starts right now. We are
given his power when he calls us to follow him through all our lives’ dark and
dead places right into the joyful light of his resurrection.
The dead are coming out of the tombs, the light of Christ is
shining into every dark place, and nothing is going to be the same again. Keep an eye out for those unexpected events
where God may be at work, in the unexpected people he is sending, and in the
profound moments he is calling us by name.
And then rejoice, for Christ has broken the chains of death and brought
us into his eternal life.
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
The Lord is risen indeed!
Alleluia!
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