After death

                                  

Luke 23:48-24:12

Christ has risen [He has risen indeed!]

The congregation gathered in this room and online here together this Easter is radically different from the one who gathered the last time we celebrated Easter in this space.  Our toddlers have become full-on kids. New people have joined this community both here in Minnesota and from afar.  And also, in the last 20 months, 11 people from this congregation have died.  Eleven times in the past 20 months loved ones in this community have had to begin the work of grieving and letting go, while the also doing the things that must be done to move forward -- choosing a casket or urn, making service preparations, the mountains of paperwork.  Right now three families among us are in the midst of that work.  The secular liturgy of death is imposed on us in the hours and days when we are most raw and shaky.  And it was no different when Jesus died.
 
We’ve heard this Easter story so many times, in so many different ways. But today I want us to recognize how this story is set in the hours, and days, and weeks right after death.  When Jesus died, those who loved him had to grieve and let go, while navigating all the details and logistics that come with death. 
 
This work was done by a group of women.  These women were Jesus’ friends and disciples, followers, patrons of his ministry, who provided for Jesus and the rest of the disciples. Some of them left lives behind to follow him. (Mary Magdaline was freed from demons and became known as “apostle to the apostles.” Joanna was the wife of Herod’s chief steward).  They were there with funding and support, coordinating meals and places to stay, taking care of what needed doing, and here they are, still doing this work, even after Jesus has died. 
 
These women stayed at the cross and watched Jesus die, watched the crowds leave, watched the soldiers take down his body.  They were there when Christ’s body was given to Joseph of Arimathea, and they went to the tomb to observe how Jesus was laid there.  Then they went home to prepare the spices for the body, to do the work that comes with death.
 
And then the Sabbath day comes, and everyone stops. Because their identity first and foremost is as God’s own people, claimed by God and reminded of this identity every week when nothing they do on this earth, not even the work that comes with death, is bigger or more important than letting God return humanity to the true order of things.  Even the death of God-with-us does not stop God from being God, or us from being God’s children.  
 
When the Sabbath ends, the women resume their work, bringing the spices to the tomb, where they are met by terrifying strangers in glowing clothing telling them in a cheeky way that that Jesus is not dead, but alive.  
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
I have always loved this question. Because they were obviously not looking for the living, they were looking for the dead, and expecting him to be where they left him.  But he’s not where they left him. 
(Christ has risen! He has risen indeed!) 
 
And I think we often are not looking for the living Jesus either.  We’d like him to be where we left him too.  In our bibles, in our lessons and our examples. We want to keep Jesus entombed as an idea, inspiration or supporting argument to use for our own ends. As though by our own our own efforts and striving, our own personal transformation or social engagement, inspired by the idea of Christ, of course, we can somehow save the world or ourselves.

We are not looking for a living entity who confronts us, and calls us, and wreaks change in our lives, and draws us into loving the world, and meets us with new life on the other side of a thousand deaths.  
And some years, with this text, that is my sermon. Amen. 
(Christ has risen! He has risen indeed!)
 
But this year I want to stay with the women who are doing the work that comes with death. 
In a time when a woman was not able to be a legal witness in a trial, in all four gospels one or all of these women are who share the news of Christ’s resurrection.  God chooses them as witnesses to God’s act of saving the whole world. God’s word comes through their word.  
 
And even though the rest of the disciples are hiding, and confused, and wondering what comes next, they are all already being called in scripture “apostles,” that is, instead of “followers,” they are being referred to as “sent ones.” Resurrection has happened, and things are already different.  
 
When the women go to the rest of the disciples-turned-apostles and tell them what they have seen, our prudish translators of old have said they thought it ‘an idle tale.’  This is actually a dirty word in the Greek. I already thrilled our teens a few weeks ago by using a swear in a sermon, so I’ll just say, they swore. The apostles called total BS on this claim. Peter had to run and see the empty tomb for himself. And when he did, he came back amazed.  He came around to where the women had been led – knowing something had happened but not knowing what it meant or what comes next.
 
There is no moving forward yet in this part of the story. Nobody knows what resurrection means and certainly nobody is celebrating. Later in the day on the road to Emmaus, two of Jesus’ followers will confuse him for a fellow traveler whose words strangely warm their hearts. They will invite him to stay with them and when he breaks bread and their eyes will be opened and they will recognize him, and he’ll disappear.  Sometime in that same day or the next he’ll appear to his followers again in another place and they think he’s a ghost, and he will eat broiled fish in front of them as though to prove otherwise.  

All that to say, it takes while for resurrection to settle in, for them to receive it, recognize it, to let it begin reshaping their lives. And when you’re still reeling from death resurrection sounds like BS.
 
But Christ has risen (he has risen indeed!).  
Resurrection has happened. They’ve yet to get their heads around that, and so have we.  God has already liberated the world.  Jesus has already defeated death. The end of the story has already been written. The “long arc of the moral universe is already bent toward justice” (to paraphraise Martin Luther King, Jr.). Redemption is underway.  The world belongs to God. We are being called and sent into this reality, to be part of the salvation already unfolding. 
 
We want quick fixes, instant salvation, painless upgrading.  But resurrection is the permanent shift, the long game, the real reality, and it means death is necessarily part of it.  Our Easter invitation today is not to jump right in with confident faith and cheerful rejoicing, as though death does not happen, as though suffering isn’t right here and the world as we know it doesn’t keep ending.  

Instead, our guides today are these friends of Jesus, these women who didn’t hide from death and loss.  They themselves will be moved toward God’s future where hope shows up in no ways they can anticipate, and life comes out of everything that’s been lost. God does this. The way there is to stay in the discomfort of being present to the reality, just as it is, however it is, and whatever that means for us. 
 
We are a community being reshaped by death and resurrection, always, and now. The living Jesus Christ is among us, working salvation in us and through us.  So we will be honest and willing to stay with each other in the stuff of life and death where Jesus can meet us.  We will keep stopping and resting on purpose to remember God is God of the whole universe, holding everything, and that our lives are a response to this God.  We will keep witnessing to each other what we’ve experienced, because God’s word comes through our words.  And we will watch for the ways we are being sent, even if we don’t know yet what comes next.
 
Life is precarious just now, for this whole world, really, and for this community, indeed, as we do the work that comes with death.  In the shadow of death, life is precious, and joy comes as a gift and a surprise.  On Good Friday, the energy in this room was palpable.  As we gathered in our black clothing in our living rooms and in this somber sanctuary to once again tell the story of Jesus’ death, the contrast of mood was striking. I wish you could have stood in my place and seen all the grinning, giddy faces smiling back.  The gladness of being together is profound.  Our emotions are close to the surface.  In the midst of it all, we are awake to God and to each other in a particular and poignant way.  We will cry and we will laugh, and God will keep meeting us with new life right where we are, ready to receive resurrection. 

Christ has risen (He has risen indeed!) 
 
Amen.