As for you...

 On Tuesday I sent my son an Easter basket, and inside was an Apple AirTag for his luggage. But how fun, I thought, to activate it now, name it “Owen’s Easter Basket,” and watch it travel across the country all week to him!  

At first this was fun. It’s in Toledo! It’s crossing into Pennsylvania! But then it got bad. On Friday: why is it sitting in that building on the port of New Jersey it was supposed to have arrived?  On Saturday, why is it now at that address? Was it misdelivered? Is someone else eating his Cadbury egg?? 

And then the final hours yesterday afternoon were the worst. I watched Owen’s Easter Basket zigzag and crisscross his neighborhood, circling within a mile from him but bypassing his street again and again. And I couldn’t stop obsessively checking on it. This had become zero fun.

When the basket finally got to him I was exhausted. But I realized tracking that Easter basket was a familiar feeling. Checking in on its progress every three minutes was not unlike how I have been obsessively reading articles, refreshing my newsfeed, following every breaking story however small. Do I think watching it all so closely will change anything? Why do I keep choosing anxiety instead of presence?

I asked people the other night at Church Chat how they were doing, and we had some fun catching up on the various catchings up, but later one person commented on how it’s hard to answer that How are you? question these days when it feels like every minute there’s a new way our country seems to be falling apart or hurting someone, but I’m good I guess, they answered.

It is not easy to be a modern person in a complex world, with a window to it all in our pocket at all times. It’s easy to feel like the challenges of this time are uniquely bad, and of course they feel that way to us because they’re what we see and are experiencing. But in the scope of human history, we are no different than our human siblings. 

We’re all given a life filled with joy and connection and pain and suffering, in these miraculous, resilient bodies that are also really fragile and complicated, inside particular families and communities with their own blessings and curses, subject to whatever befalls the place and time we happened to be born in. All of us encounter evil, behold marvels, face deep struggles, taste delicious joy, and bear acute loneliness, and we do it all within whatever larger forces are at play in the world at the moment.  Life is hard, and death comes for us all. 

But by golly, I am going to keep tabs on it anyway. With all my monitoring of the world, now adding on a cross-country road-tripping Easter basket too, I don’t have the attention span for Easter.  I am too busy, and worried, and busy being worried.

 

Our Lent theme has been, Be Still and Know I am God

Did you ever play that nerdy grammar game where you emphasize different words in a sentence, and it changes the meaning?

Here is an example:

Let’s EAT, Grandma! Quit working on that puzzle and come to the table! 

LET’S eat, Grandma!  C’mon! Everybody else is already eating except us! 

Let’s eat GRANDMA!  a completely different meaning altogether.

BE still and know I am God – don’t perform stillness, actually just BE, like a baby, the very you-ness of you, unfiltered.

Be STILL and know I am God – quit hurrying, assessing, achieving and maneuvering, stop, and watch what happens next

Be still AND know I am God – don’t just sit there numb and disengaged, let your resistance go and be open to what wants to come out of the stillness 

Be still and KNOW I am God – really trust it, in-your-bones believe it

Be still and know I am God –not you, not anything else around you, not the long arm of the government or the deep voice of your shame, but ME, I am God. 

Be still and know I AM God – not I was God a long time ago in the bible days, or I will be God eventually in heaven after you die, but always right now this is true, in fact it’s my name, AMness; when everything else is trapped in time, I AM and AM and AM

Be still and know I am GOD – not a great idea for you to grasp, a message for you to spread, or a religious concept that needs your defending, but GOD, beyond you and without your say-so, the Divine Source of life and final authority over life and death

And there we have it, Isaiah’s message to the Israelites, living in exile and captivity for decades with no end in sight:

Do you not know this? Have you not heard? Who stretched out the heavens, and filled them with stars? All life comes from me and returns to me and in between, guess who holds all of it? ME. I am GOD. 

The leaders of this age? They’re barely planted in the ground before they’re ripped up by the next storm. But look up to the vastness of the sky - I am the architect of the cosmos.

 Sometimes you say God doesn’t care and God isn’t listening. Haven’t you heard? There is nothing I do not know! When you’re exhausted and afraid, turn to me, wait for me, I give strength to the powerless, you will mount up like an eagle and ride on the wind.

This is GOD we’re talking about. Be still and know it.

This God came into all of it with us. He came weak, and took on our suffering, our pride, our alienation and division, our whole power-hungry sinful structure that sees healing for the sick and freedom for the slaves and good news for the poor as a hostile threat to the order of things. And on Good Friday, we heard the terrible story told so gently and powerfully by so many of you: there is nothing Jesus did not inhabit with and for us—he was taunted and humiliated, he was tortured and executed. 

And when he died, his beloved friends, family and followers were crushed with grief and disillusionment. For all intents and purposes, the world had ended. What more evil and hopelessness for humanity is there than for us to kill our God who came into this life alongside us to save us? There is no turning back from that. Darkness and evil prevailed. Death won. But it wasn’t really over. 

So here we arrive to our destination, Easter morning, to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord.  And it turns out if we shift the emphasis to different parts of story, we’ll hear different things, and all of it is good news. 

 

Our text begins with the words, “After the sabbath…”

which is to say, right in the midst of the greatest, most terrible drama humanity, the earth, the angels and the cosmos has ever witnessed, while the leaders kept scrambling to keep the power and shape the narrative, the followers of Christ, and as Martin Luther points out Jesus himself in the grave, stopped for the sabbath, the great interruption that puts us back in right relationship to God and each other. They paused it all to be still and know that God is God.  Jesus died, they held vigil, then everyone stopped to rest in the obedience of trusting God.  And then, “as the first day of the week was dawning,” the women returned to the work of grieving the dead. 

 

There is nothing so great, so important, so essential, that we cannot stop and rest in the obedience of trusting God. There is no evil or horror, no righteous errand, and no pressingly urgent obligation that demands so much of our constant, vigilant attention, that we are unavailable to our Creator, our fellow human beings, or the whispers of our own souls.  Did you create the sky and the ocean?  No you did not. When the flailing and the scrambling kick in, Be still and know I am God.

 

What about the words of the lightening-clothed angel, who comes down in an earthquake, slides back the enormous, sealed, stone, and takes a jaunty seat, while the military professionals with the boring gig of guarding a dead man, they shake like the earth itself with terror and became like the dead themselves? With a nod at their passed-out bodies the angel says, “But as for YOU, stop being afraid. I suppose you’re looking for Jesus who was killed? Well, he’s not here; he has already risen, just like he said he would. Come see for yourself then go quickly and tell his disciples Jesus will meet them back in Galilee. This is my message for you.” 

 

The powers that be are afraid. This is always true. In fear they hustle, and scramble, and never stop striving to keep power. Money is god, the weak don’t matter, this is the way of fear and sin, and human history has no shortage of stories where it appears that the wicked prevail, those who say otherwise will be silenced, and the dead do not live again. 

But do you not know? Have you not heard? God who rules the cosmos has broken down, torn open, and shaken apart the very foundations of everything. Death itself is overcome, and things are not what they seem. 

So as for YOU, quit being afraid. As for YOU, return to community and together go to the place where you last saw Jesus – because he will meet you again there. The places where the lost are found, and the least are most, and the wrong people are chosen, and the things that do last, like - love and hope and peace - happen, inexplicably, in weakness, and show up in suffering, and the most vulnerable people are the ones through whom the Spirit of the Most High moves, bringing healing and hope, drawing ordinary people into God’s salvation of the world.  As for You, stop being afraid. Go tell the rest of them to meet Jesus where he is already doing his thing.

 

And shifting the focus to just after that, how about when the scared and joyful Marys run right into the risen Lord who seems to be intercepting their mission, like he couldn’t wait one more second to see them? Our translation has him saying, “Greetings!” like he is delivering their mail or something, but in scripture, this word most often means, “Rejoice!”  So, Jesus throws out his arms and shouts “Rejoice!” and the women shriek and embrace him and fall at his feet weeping with incredulous joy at this glorious impossibility. Jesus pulls them up and repeats the same message the angel gave them, “Ok, now, don’t be afraid any longer. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them to go back to living their lives, and there they will see me.”

 

Right now, we could put the emphasis on any part of the sentence of life.  Things are either bad, or they’re good, because that’s always true. Always we could watch and obsess over every nuance of evil unfolding, and we could be available to our Creator, our fellow human beings, and the whispers of our own souls. Our lives are shaped by what we give our attention to. 

This is an invitation.

Christ has risen. 

The God who holds the cosmos brings new life out of death, love indestructible by hate, and hope born from despair - there nothing humans or evil can do that is greater than what God has done and will keep doing until it is complete.  

So as for us, may we quit being afraid, invite each other along, and go meet Jesus in our real lives, just as they are, in this beloved world, just as it is. 

And from time to time, no matter what else is happening around us, let’s be still and know who is God.

Amen.