CHS Sermons

The Melrose Chapel
Luke 24:1-12 ● John 20:1-18

Several weeks ago Sr. Heléna Marie explained how both the Book of Lamentations and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion are tools for grieving. I chewed on that idea for the rest of Lent. In fact, when I was scheduled to preach on the fifth Sunday of Lent, I planned to explore anointing as a tool for grieving. I’m fascinated by the idea that the whole of Lent is something of a class in how to grieve effectively.

But Lent has ended and the time for grieving is over. Frankly, in spite of my fascination with the tools of grief, the long weeks of Lent have exhausted my store of hushed seriousness. Drab soup is fine for awhile, but enough is enough. I’m ready to stash the purple, pull out the stops and get over my own sad self.

Which is why I had to back up a few steps when I read both gospel possibilities for this Easter morning. The purple may have disappeared, but where are the bells and balloons? Where the sense of relief and joy that all our sorrow at the foot of the cross was unnecessary? Where the raised glasses and laughter and full amnesia of our sorrow?

What we have instead are the reactions and emotions you would expect upon discovering an empty tomb: sorrow, skepticism, anger, suspicion, surprise, suggestions of the unbelievable … but gladness and celebration? Not exactly.

I find it bizarre that I’ve observed Easter all my life, and until this year managed to completely miss this part of the Easter message, but maybe I’m in good company. I know we’ve already broken our alleluia fast and declared the resurrection to be a fait accompli. We already know how the Christian message turns out, but in our eagerness to live into the hope of the resurrection, it’s oh-so easy to pass by the empty tomb with little more than a casual, curious glance.

So take a few moments and transport yourself back to the circle of Jesus’ friends on that strange morning. Go with them on that slow, sad walk to the cemetery, expecting to pay appropriate respect to the body of your beloved friend and teacher. As far as you know, he was brutally put to death two days earlier. As far as you know, you will find his battered remains wrapped in swaddling, much as he came into the world over thirty years ago.

…

You arrive at the grave. But something is wrong. The stone sealing the tomb has been rolled to one side. Who did that, and why? You walk slowly forward. Someone has been here before you, and ugly scenarios race through your mind. Has his body been further desecrated by one of his many enemies? (How could anyone do such an unspeakable thing?) Or what if the body has been stolen? The whats, and whos and whys fly around inside your head, which now aches with dread as well as sadness.

You are among the few who are willing to walk forward and dare to step into the burial cave. What you see wasn’t even on your mental list of possibilities: the grave windings have been neatly folded and laid to one side. The body itself … is gone. For the first time since you saw that misplaced stone your mind goes blank. It is no longer able to put meaning to what your eyes see.

Just then you see a flash of light. Some movement. The sound of wind, blowing through trees that aren’t even there, carries the faint ringing of bells. Later, the others will have their own stories to tell of that moment. Everyone experienced something out of the ordinary — way outside of ordinary, in fact — but none of the accounts match.

Mary’s may be the most surreal, and certainly it is the most detailed. She claims to have seen two figures (angels, perhaps?) sitting inside the tomb, and she actually spoke with them. If that wasn’t fantastic enough, she says a third appearance called her by name, and then she recognized this one as Jesus himself.

Your friends have always been a bit stand-offish with Mary; she was too close to Jesus for their liking, and, being a Celt, was given to supernatural experiences of “thin places”. To be perfectly honest, they were jealous of her. You have always liked and trusted her, but even you don’t know what to make of her story.

…

Over two thousand years later we are still asking ourselves: what are we to make of this story?

An empty tomb “moment” begins with an opening — a passageway that appears where none should logically be. When faced with such an unanticipated gap, we are challenged to approach — and, if we dare, to pass through the opening into the unknown.

This is a moment of grace, yet we enter with trepidation; when we dare to cross the threshold, we risk entering a place where the unexpected is the norm, and where we may be seriously changed in the twinkling of an eye. An everyday trip up the mountain, a meeting in a locked second-floor room, an empty tomb … it begins with the benign appearance of normalcy but we soon lose our ability to hold on to what were once unshakable assumptions and beliefs.

Welcome to the world of fecund nothingness, the land of seamlessness and allurement, the zero-point field of liminal, numinous, wild creation, where time doesn’t quite exist and matter and energy can’t tell each other apart.

Transported into a quantum physics world that occupies the distance between sorrow and elation, we have nothing familiar with which to ground ourselves. Clothing shines so brightly we cannot look at it; people stroll through walls and walk on water; God talks in a voice everyone hears, and dead friends come back to life. Amazingly, this can happen to us, yet when it is over we twang back into ourselves and our lives as if nothing unusual happened. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.

Even though we are back in familiar territory, in chronos time and Euclidian space, we find ourselves nudged by little differences. A voice here. An idea there. And eventually we find ourselves exploring the very real possibility of resurrection.

So bring on the music. Ring the bells. Pop the Swedish oven pancake into the oven and let us rejoice!

For though we don’t know how it happened, we can’t explain it, and we may never figure out its full meaning, we have been to an empty tomb, and we’ve all been changed. It’s time to weave that mystical experience into the clothing of our human experience. It is time — to reckon with resurrection.