Made known to us

      

Luke 24:13-24

Maybe fifteen or so years ago, there was a psychological experiment floating around the internet, where there are two basketball teams playing, one in white and the other in black, and you are told to watch carefully and count their passes. So you do, and you see them run and jump and pass and throw and dribble and shoot, and you try to keep track of who’s ahead and who has the ball and what team is better than the other.  And when it’s over you’re asked – did you see the guy in the gorilla suit? And you think, the what?  
 
And then it shows you the scene again, and low and behold, right in the middle of it some dude dressed in a gorilla suit saunters across the whole court, just behind the players, and you were so wrapped up in trying to watch the game well that you missed it completely.  
 
That is what I imagine happening to these followers of Jesus- to all followers of Jesus.  We are so wrapped up in the game, whatever that may be, and it is so many things, so certain that we’re in it alone, or that we’ve got to figure it out, or that what really matters is the teams and whose side is winning, or trying so hard to keep our eye on the ball and our feet moving, that when the savior who has been through death with us and for us, and is now alive and calling us to life saunters through the scene- walking with us, engaging us in our own lives deeply and perceptively, we fail to recognize him, we don’t even see him.
 
Our scripture today picks up the very afternoon of Jesus’ resurrection, zooming in close two people walking, Cleopas, we’re told, and another. Based on a few different ancient historians from the early 100s, Cleopas is believed to be Joseph’s brother, so, Jesus’ Uncle Cleo.  According to the gospel John, Cleo’s wife, Jesus’ Aunt Mary, was standing by the cross with Jesus’ mother Mary when Jesus died.

So we meet up with Uncle Cleo and his companion –maybe it’s Aunt Mary, or one of Jesus’ cousins, or maybe another friend from the group of those who followed “The Way.” And they are on a long slow walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus, seven miles away. There is no rush, because, why bother?  When Jesus died the movement ended.
When who or what you loved, and believed in, and hoped for, and shaped your life around ends, grief descends, and it takes a beat to even believe life will go on. You’ve no idea how. Life gets small. It becomes about remembering to eat, needing to sleep, relearning to put one foot in front of the other, consciously breathing past the bruise in your chest that aches every time you inhale. 

So, I imagine them trudging along in grief, reeling from what has happened, unable to make sense of the strange rumors of his resurrection. The future gone.
Easter, we said, means the whole world has shifted, a new age has begun. But resurrection doesn't come to us sudden, sure and complete. Before becomes after!  Death becomes life! Old becomes new!  And it doesn’t come through our great faith – those early followers had basically none – or through our determination or effort or work to make it so – they didn’t have that either.

Resurrection leaks in through the ordinary moments of real life.  I love the gospel resurrection stories because the people in them are never doing anything dramatic.  They’re just trying to live their lives in a messed-up world where corruption and violence haven’t suddenly disappeared either. The things they do in all these stories are human things, honest things, wondering together, grieving, walking, talking, eating, offering hospitality, sharing lodging, sharing food.  It’s almost excruciatingly ordinary.

Jesus meets us in the normal, real moments of our regular real lives: walking along with us in our grief, inviting us to tell our story.  Sharing a meal, and there he is, suddenly hosting us a moment that just turned holy.

We most often recognize that something new is dawning not because it’s undeniable and grand, and fills us with total confidence and we know exactly what’s coming next, but because in the middle of the real right now, in times of unknown, loss and confusion, our hearts are strangely warmed.  Or for a brief moment, before it vanishes, our eyes are opened. Or in a deeply familiar movement, something stirs in us and we are nudged by the beyond, somehow God is right here with us.

Cleopas and Aunt Mary, or whoever, are all settled in for the night after spending all day with their visitor when they finally they recognize, this is Jesus they’d spent the day with. His gestures, his actions at the table, the reminiscent move awakens their perception, and they see he’s been with them this whole time. And then he vanishes. And when he vanishes, so do they. They grab their things and hit the road again, and rush all the way back in Jerusalem.

Deep night, the wee hours of morning, what does time matter now?  When they arrive, they join in with everyone there also still awake and already talking about their own encounters with the Risen Jesus.

And suddenly Jesus himself appears among them, and still they think he’s a ghost.  It’s not until he asks for some food and they watch him chew and swallow this ordinary piece of broiled fish, like an ordinary person, that they feel comfortable enough to talk together with him, to begin to embrace the death of what was and start tentatively living into whatever this new resurrection way of being is going to be.
This story reminds us that quite apart from anything we do or don’t do, can or can’t accomplish, God is doing something.  God is bringing something new out of impossibility.  Hope from emptiness, a future from nothing, life from death: these are what only God can accomplish.

God does not save individual souls for some kind of after-life reward. God awakens people into the ongoing, unfolding salvation of us all. 
And when God does it, we don’t scramble to make it so. To live into resurrection, we do two things: First, at some point, we recognize and receive it.  And second, right away, we tell each other about it. 
Look, could this be God? Jesus is right here! Were not our hearts burning? Is a new thing beginning?  
 
This is how new life, and transformation, and being part of the world’s healing goes. 
You get glimpses. 
You get warm hearts and aha! moments, and flashes of realization that you’re not alone, and the occasional joy-terror that this is all way beyond you (and also, amazingly, includes you), and that’s about it. 

You don’t get ongoing, constant confirmation, or some kind of sure knowledge and security, or escape from suffering, and you don’t get tangible flesh and blood presence of Christ anymore –except you do, only now Christ is present in the bread and wine shared and complicated living and breathing human being right here next to you.
 
It’s all too much to handle alone, you’ve got to tell others what happened to you on the road, so you hoof it back to the community – wait until you hear what happened to me – bear this with me, hear me out, help me hold the enormity of this, and tell me if I’m crazy. Oh, and also, I believe you now too. And I want to hear your story again because it’s so much like- and so different from - mine.  How did the risen Jesus meet you?
 
And so on the other side of death a new era has begun, and something unstoppable is happening. And in their walking feet, and leaking sadness, and strained voices, and interpreting heads, and listening ears, and burning hearts, and hungry stomachs, and intuitive memory, and honest struggling, and gaping future torn wide open, they are being brought into the Body of Christ, they themselves are becoming the Body of Christ.  
 
Hope is now embodied in and through and between them and their ordinary lives in the world. The life of Christ now lives through them. It’s not theirs to make happen, God is doing this. Even their recognition or not is God’s work. Their eyes were kept from recognizing him, scripture says, their eyes were opened and they recognized him.

This is Church. We need to gather together, we need to hear the others tell how he appeared to this one or that one, in this way or that way, and to admit our own failure to recognize, so that we can help each other watch and be ready to respond when he comes to us, or at least able to say the next time we come together and he is made known to us in the breaking of the bread, Was not my heart burning within me yesterday, when I poured out my grief to a friend who really listened to me?  Or I had a quiet moment of stillness and gratitude? Did I not recognize the Lord’s own suffering when I prayed in anguish for all those human siblings being crushed under cruel power and uninhibited evil? Were not my own eyes opened to God right here when I watched the world through the eyes of my tiny grandson for whom every single thing in the world is new, and fascinating, and marvelous? Did I not hear Jesus’ voice in the voice of my next door neighbor as we worked outdoors alongside each other, or in the thick silence as I sat with my cousin in her paralyzing fear and worry?  And then we, who have been heard in our story, get to respond to you, in yours, The Lord has Risen Indeed!  And he has appeared to me, and to Kristen, and Andrew, and to Sue, and to Georgia, and to Ryan.
 
And then you or I are not walking alone with a heavy, anxious heart, or busting with new “I just have to share” joy and no one to listen.  We are carrying it here, to this community who is saying to back to us – we hear your prayers and lift them with you to God.  We’ve seen the Risen Lord, and we will help you watch for him. There is a bigger story, and we will watch for it together.
 
We are the Body of Christ. 
Jesus is here in our midst, made known to us in the breaking of the bread, and because of that, we get to recognize from time to time, like the dawn of a new morning, that he is walking alongside us out there on the journey too.  We carry within us the age that is coming, so we live into what will be. It’s hard to see and it’s harder to trust, so we have each other to help watch for and live into what is already unfolding right here. 
 
And this meal we are about to share forms us for the age to come, when there is no more hunger and full community, when the belonging of all to God and one another is complete. The church is just the ordinary people absurdly awaiting and brazenly proclaiming with our lives that the love from which we all came and for which we are all made, is where it is all heading too, so we will live that way right now. 
 
 So let us then, the gathered Body of Christ, invite the host to the table set before us, and see what happens next.
 
Amen.

What Easter is About

 

Luke 24:1-12 A few days ago, for the first time in 50 years, some astronauts left earth to travel to the moon. At one point on their journey, they will be on the far side of the moon. If all goes well, for nearly an hour they will be completely out of view of earth, out of communication range, in the cold darkness of the universe all alone, the furthest away any human being has ever been, with no way to connect with any person in the world. If I leave my cell phone at home when I’m heading to the grocery store, I will turn around and go back for it. What must it feel like to be beyond the reach of all that makes us human – other people, communication, the very earth itself?  For astronauts who leave the earth, something really interesting happens with a really boring name, called the “overview effect.” We’re told that seeing the world from outside of it can overwhelm a person with a sense of what the earth as homereally means, where all people are together, and everything is connected, and it’s visibly clear that the divisions and boundary lines we live with are all made up. The beauty of the whole thing can feel, dare I say, earth-shaking.   The Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart describes it this way, You realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you. All of history and music and poetry and art and war and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games — all of it on that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize that that perspective has — that you’ve changed. That there’s something new there. That relationship is no longer what it was. Easter can be kind of fraught. It’s both this not-at-all-religious day of egg hunts, chocolate bunnies and maybe ham, and a highly-religious day, where we say and sing a bunch of things most of us don’t entirely believe, and some things we probably shouldn’t.  We’re confronted with death right at the center of our faith, and the ugly story of the cross which carries with it so much baggage, and has been so misunderstood and misappropriated that some Christians have tried to sidestep it, preferring not to talk about things like sin and salvation, until the one week a year the cross is impossible to avoid, and then uncomfortably recite the words and sing the songs, for the sake of tradition and for the larger commitment to loving God and neighbor and trying to live a good life in a world that seems not to care much about any of that anymore, but all the while trying not to linger too long on the messy details at the heart of the narrative. And yet. This is the heart of the narrative. Our whole story hinges right here.  Christmas is easier to swallow – babies are cute, and angels are cool, and there’s less problematic imagery in Christmas hymns than Easter songs, and as scratchy and uncomfortable as hay may be, being swaddled in a manger is WAY cozier than being nailed to a cross.   But the cross and the manger are together in the story that starts with God coming in alongside us to be with and for us, taking on completely everything it means to be human, not just the cute and cozy parts. If we’re honest, being human is largely uncomfortable and confusing, and there is so much suffering involved, and to cap it all off, there is no bypassing that, no matter what, we are all going to die. That is what Jesus comes to share when he’s placed in the manger.  The cross is where Jesus takes on all the world’s evil and horror, injustice, and pain, when he was murdered by those in power—some greedy, some insecure, some hypocrites—and most everyone else who just went along with it. “Jesus died for our sin.” is what we generally say about that. But, wow, that’s a loaded sentence, and people hear it different ways. Since the ‘s’ word gets used a lot today it might be helpful to define it. Human beings were made in God’s image to love one another and this earth-home we’ve been put on. Sin is when that true order of things is violated. Whenever we degrade someone’s humanity or act against our belonging to God and all others, that's sin.  And the helpful thing about the Christian story is that it says aloud that even when we try our best to love other people or ourselves, or be the good we want to see in the world, very often we are the greedy, insecure hypocrites. And that collectively, sometimes humans are lovely, but often, we can be awful. Most likely we will keep hurting each other and ourselves and harming the planet, and if the future is all up to us things are not looking great.  All our fear and dread, all our worry about our country, or our kids, or our jobs, or our health, or brutal, needless wars, or people being crushed under the boots of the powerful or cast aside as worthless, the cross says: it is as bad as you think it is, and it’s ok to call it that.  And, as bad as it is, as bad as it gets, as bad as it might ever be, we are not alone in this. God came in alongside us and took on all of it with us and for us, all the way to the cross. Jesus died for our sin. God is notwatching us from a distance.  So the death of Jesus means something. But Easter is not really about the cross, it’s about the empty tomb on the other side of it. And that changes everything permanently. It’s worth noting, that when the tomb was found empty, even the people who most closely followed Jesus didn’t suddenly think the whole world had changed or even believe at first that he had risen. They didn’t magically feel compelled to live in a different way. They were stunned, and afraid, and accused each other of lying. In fact, Mark’s gospel has three endings because people were uncomfortable leaving it alone at the most ancient version, which is, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” The most toward faith these first resurrection witnesses can muster is amazement. There is no great epiphany or belief, and definitely no celebration. They simply didn’t know what to make of it. How could such a thing be? It’s not until the living Jesus encounters them that they see things for what they are: Everything has changed. The relationship is no longer what it was. There is no going back. The resurrection means that the pain we suffer and inflict, that horrors we witness or ignore, the damage done by and to us, the powers that dominate and oppress – all these things, in other words, sin and death is not the final word over the human community or this beloved planet.   This world belonged to God already, but when God came into it alongside us, heaven and nature sang. And when Jesus died our death, no longer can anything separate us from love. And when he did not stay dead, the end of the story is decided – life, not death, is what prevails. The relationship between humanity and God, this world and God, has been settled once and for all. The final word is love. Love is where it’s all headed and love is all that will remain.  You and I are not arbitrarily born, making our way by ourselves through a complicated world, doing our best while things around us crumble and decay, and hopefully we have more moments of happiness and sadness, hopefully we dodge the big suffering, and hopefully we manage not to hurt others too badly along the way. And then one day we die anyway, and in a generation—or two if we’re lucky—we disappear completely from living memory and that’s the sum of it.  No. We are made for love, each one of us unique, every person part of the fabric of all things held together in love. We are bound to all others who are also here to love, in a world made for love, living inside time, which is made for love. And we participate in God’s loving and healing of the earth and its people, occasionally in extraordinary, supernatural ways that may leave us amazed, but mostly in the absolute ordinary stuff of life: conversations, tears, laughter, listening, play, rest, work, tending the earth and neighboring our neighbors. The living Jesus is right here, every day, doing this through us and for us. And when our time on this little blue and white ball come to an end, this bond of love that holds us to God and all others still does not break.  If we’re willing to let it, Easter can be offer us the ‘overview effect.’ The little window through which we glimpse the big picture of what the earth as home really means, filling us with gratitude and wonder for the bigger reality we often forget or can’t see when we’re living within all the turmoil and conflicts of our made-up divisions and boundary lines. But we can’t do that to ourselves any more than we can shoot ourselves into space to see the world from the outside, or decide to never sin again.   Resurrection doesn’t mean anything until the living Jesus encounters us. What we can do is show up in our lives, however messy or hard, uncomfortable or confusing things may be, because this is where Jesus is now too. But even if we are not showing up in our lives, even if we’ve cut off communication completely, turned our back on what makes us human, and find ourselves somehow in the farthest cold reaches of loneliness, not one of us is ever beyond the love or grasp of God. There is nowhere we can go, nothing we can do, that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Jesus pursues us, has gone to death and back for us already, and will never stop inviting us deeply into our own lives. The Holy Spirit will never stop giving us specific opportunities to live in God’s love with and for the people here with us. God is persistent, and our defenses may not be as strong as we think they are. And besides that, God can bring healing or hope through us when we don’t even know it’s happening, and even seems to delight in doing so.  We don’t get to exempt ourselves from God’s love. But when we are open, when we assume a stance of least resistance to what we cannot make happen, when we surrender to being found, or freed, or forgiven, how much more joyful life becomes to know our lives are participating in redemption and hope! Mystery invites wonder, the stranger is sibling, and love meets us in the depths of our suffering. “The power that raised Jesus from the grave now works in us”, freeing our hearts to live in God’s grace, helping us love our neighbors, ask for help when we need it, apologize when we’re wrong, forgive when it’s impossible, join together to oppose evil, daily participate in the good God is always pouring into the world, take in the beauty, live awake to the love that holds us all, and die without fear. Christ is risen, everything has changed and there is no going back. Amen.

Who We Are and How We Know

 

 Esther (Bible Story Summary in bulletin here)

Who are we? What makes us who we are? How do we know who we are and not forget?  These are big questions, and the answers matter.

Right now our country is in the midst of these question on a large scale, which we saw played out this weekend in striking contrast of parade and protest, violence and voices, and at the moment, all eyes are on Minnesota at the moment as we reckon with political assassination – something that seemed like an ‘them, over there’ thing until it because an ‘us, here’ thing yesterday.  Is that who we are now?

I attended two funerals this weekend, and funerals also try to answer these questions.  Most funerals wrestle pretty directly with our two big questions, Who is this God and what is God up to? And what is a good life and how do we live it?  This weekend I heard that God is love, and Jesus came to share this life with us and overcome death, so that the separation of death we suffer now will not have the final word. And I heard stories of two very different lives, both lived well, lives woven into other lives with love, and lived for something bigger than themselves.  

How do we know who we are? How do we figure out what is God up to? What makes a life good, and how do we live well? These are not solo questions. We do not ask them alone. Faith is not an independent, self-directed thing. Neither is identity. We do not decide on our own who we will be. We get to explore and become, alongside people who see us and reflect back to us who they see us becoming, and encourage us in our exploring. We are always in context. 

To understand our context we use stories. The stories told at funerals and around the tables afterwards, describing scenes and moments, show us who people are, wonders what makes them that way, and so probe against the question of what a lifetime is for, and how to live it well. Stories tell us where we came from, and reveal how people before us navigated their lives. Stories help us to know who we are.

Reading the story of Esther on Purim grounds the Jewish people in their identity and context. Here was a time when they could’ve all been exterminated, and instead they were delivered. Here is another story of a Jewish person living in the royal court of their oppressors, like Daniel in Babylon, and Moses raised up by the Egyptian princess, and Joseph in Egypt before him.  Here is the story of a young woman whose courage to speak up saved her entire people throughout the whole empire. But she did not have that courage all on her own.  She said to Mordecai, “Have all the Jews pray and fast for me for three days, then I will go speak to the king, even though by doing so I may die.”

But instead of dying for approaching the king without permission, Esther’s request was heard, and the people were saved, and Haman was destroyed instead.  Mordecai himself announced the day of Purim should be celebrated, and so it still is.  

In telling it again and again, year after year, Haman becomes the representative of all anti-semites, and Esther is the paragon of courage. The story tells of this scattered and weak people, who by the hand of God, outlasted the Persian empire that almost wiped them out, and the Babylonian and Assyrian and Egyptian empires before that, and the Roman and Greek empires after it.  You come from somewhere! It says. You belong to something! Telling it again and again together, with food and ritual and songs and symbols and sounds and sharing with others and giving to the poor, helps to ground them in the truth of who they are and keep practicing who they are called to be. And it helps them watch for where God might be calling them to act now. Because in the book of Esther, God is not front and center. The people have to wrestle, and discern, and choose, and act, without some of the flashier directness God uses in other parts of scripture. So, it feels like the kind of discernment we modern people have to do too, when we hear Mordecai wonder if God might have allowed Esther to be in her position “for such a time as this.” And this ancient scroll drops that phrase into words the first time in human history. “For such a time as this” is the kind of line that blows open our imaginations, yanks us from our self-defined ruts and the constraints of what is – and propels us into the possibility that we’re actually living in a broader story, not dictated solely by what we can see, a cosmic timelessness that lands in time at certain points and calls us to respond.

In a little while we will gather at the communion table and we will hear the words of Jesus – the very words Jesus spoke over 2000 years ago, when he invited his disciples and so invites us all these centuries later – to come to this table, and share this bread and this cup – that this is his body and blood shared for us, his very life given for our life, drawing us into life that will not end.

How do we know who we are? How do we figure out what is God up to? What makes a life good, and how do we live well? 

Do this in remembrance of me, Jesus says. Come back to who we are together. You are not alone and apart. You are part of me and joined together as a people claimed for God’s way and defined by God’s love.  

Our identity is not our own. We are in Christ. That means that we have died his death and been raised into his life, and this life that cannot die is what defines us.  Sin says we are apart and against, we must earn our belonging and we can refuse others’ theirs, we have to hide in shame when we mess up and strive to make our life valuable on our own, but we are dead to sin. All need for fear and self-protection has died with Christ.  All our losses and pain are not ours alone to hold, we are held together by God in the hands and hearts of other people. Christ’s complete belonging to God and all others is given to us. That is who we are. Beloved Children of God, each one of us uniquely made and directly called to participate in and share God’s love. And we come from a community of those who’ve died and been risen to freedom and hope.  This identity is unshakable and secure, because God decides it is so. 

But sin is loud and fear’s voice is persuasive. We forget who we are. So when we come to this table, it is like sitting down to eat with all those gone before, and all those right now around the whole world who are also in this community of the died and risen One, whose lives are part of Jesus’ life, and who live as a people claimed for God’s way and defined by God’s love.  

Then we do what Jesus told us to do at this table, but we also retell the story. We remember how it began, and this remembering together and practicing together, helps us remember and practice being who we are right now, with courage and hope, and helps us look forward to the day when what we are practicing for becomes the full reality forever.  

Today we prayed a blessing on our high school graduates. As they keep asking the questions that human lives are shaped around, How do I know who I am? How do I figure out what is God up to? What makes a life good, and how do I live well? Their immediate context will change but their larger context remains the same. The somewhere and someone they come from is not just their families and friends, it’s us, but not only the little LNPC us here and now, the big us. They come from a story that reaches back to the beginning of time and forward beyond time, a story shared in ritual and rhythms, in relationships and in remembering. They come from Esther, and Joseph, and Ruth, and Samuel, and Jacob, and Hagar, and Moses, and Mary and Joseph, and all the followers of Jesus who had no clue what they were doing but followed anyway and God took care of them and invited them to join in what God was up to anyway. They come from these stories practiced in candlelit Christmas eves, and finding Easter Hallelujahs and being served communion by the person next to you, and most importantly, praying and being prayed for. Watching other people struggle with suffering and sadness, and holding them up to God.  Knowing other people are holding you up to God because they’ve literally sung “God in your loving mercy hear our prayer” about something you just named aloud. 

When Esther was faced with something impossible, something terrifying, with huge consequences – it could maybe save her whole people? Or she could maybe die? – she said, ask everyone to pray for me, and I will do it.  

When you belong to the people of God, you are not alone. The people of God are people of prayer, people who help each other remember it is God who saves, and it is God who acts, and it is we who join in, we who get to be part of the action and the saving that God is doing. These people are here in this room, and these people are everywhere. Your community is vast.

We live short lives inside a long story. Empires rise and empires fall, but God is constant. This is our context.  The people we love live their good lives and then die, and we miss them, and then we tell stories to help us know who they were, and know who we are because of them, and help us figure out what makes a good life and how we might live, and watch for what God is up to in all of this. And their life goes on beyond what we remember and so we remember that ours will too.  

As we bump along our own lives, mostly doing our best and making it up as we go, we are held in a web of story, and prayer, and remembering, and retelling. That is how we keep bravely asking the human questions, and this is how our identity is shaped and held. 

Who we are is the people who’ve died to death and been raised to life, who practice being available to God and letting God’s love and healing come through us. And in the cosmic timelessness of Jesus Christ, our lives are always for such a time as this. 

Amen.

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.

Resurrection Unresolved

Mark 16:1-8

Happy Easter!

Once a year we like to make a super big deal out of resurrection, even though none of our gospel accounts show us anything about it. What they do show is an empty tomb, mostly, and a bunch of disciples who do a pretty terrible job of getting even close to as excited as we are on Easter Sunday. 

The words Matthew, Mark, Luke and John use for the initial reactions of those first told of the resurrection are: “alarmed,” “trembling and bewildered,” “afraid,” “disbelieving”, “terrified,” “doubting,” “startled and frightened,” “wondering,” and “it sounded to them like nonsense.”  Not a single “Hallelujah!” among them!

 

So, I submit that maybe we’re a little removed from the whole story and invite us back to the whole resurrection thing today with fresh eyes.

 

First off, I’d like to point out that, knowing he’s going to rise from the dead, we don’t even pause to wonder why it took so long.  We just fill the Saturday of a Dead Savior with last minute Target runs for Easter tights, vacuuming the house, and preparing the ham for tomorrow, and don’t really give a single thought to the unsettlingly long delay between the death of Jesus and his resurrection. At the precipice of despair, when the worst thing ever has happened, it all just stops and stays for a while. 

 

In any world-altering project we competent humans undertake, this is the moment we would be all hands-on deck, nobody stopping, nobody sleeping, a beating heart of adrenaline-hyped project managers and bleary-eyed, caffeinated engineers making sure it all comes off as it’s meant to.  

But instead, God – and every single human in this story, made in the image of God - leaves the building and turns out the lights. They go home and crawl into bed and spend an entire day on purpose not doing it. Luther says Jesus sabbathed in the grave. Dead guy not in any hurry to get this show on the road.

 

We race to resurrection. We’d actually prefer to skip the death part completely, if possible. And if it must happen, let’s just dip our toe in and move on quickly. 

 

How strange it is, that in the wake of Jesus’s violent death, when all is utterly lost and darkness has triumphed unequivocally, the greatest drama of the cosmos grinds to a quiet halt. And another story takes center stage and demands precedence. Candles are lit, stories are told, prayers and naps and holding one another and reading alone and recalling the faithfulness of God and practicing the gratitude of belovedness are what happens.

 

Centuries later we know where this story is going, so we skip the pause and just boogie ourselves on to the celebrating. But while it’s easy for us non-stop, state of the art, capable modern creatures to miss that that the whole salvation story stopped at the most disastrous moment to remember God is God and we are not, uncooperative Mark makes jumping to victorious, joyful resurrection celebration super awkward.  

 

Because, after Jesus’ most faithful followers are told to spread the news of his resurrection, and then go meet the risen Jesus back where they began--in the ordinary places of life--Mark actually ends his whole gospel account with them backing slowly away from the weird stranger in the corpseless tomb, stumbling into the daylight, hiking up their skirts, and high tailing it out of there as fast as their legs can carry them, keeping mum about the whole crazy situation. 

 

This is such an uncomfortable ending that by the 3^rd century a short new ending was tacked on, and by the 5^thcentury an even longer one, where everyone did what they were supposed to and believed in the risen Lord, because people couldn’t bear the story stopping with the dissonant note left hanging in the air, just begging for someone to walk across the room and play the chord that resolves it.

So not only does the salvation story stop and stay a while at the worst part, like it’s not at all concerned about getting things sorted for us, but then Mark leaves the whole narrative of Jesus unresolved and unsettling. 

 

Let’s just say a fair-minded teacher would hesitate to give a passing grade to this project. The comments might say, “lacks clarity of purpose and audience, central idea not well presented, participants could show more effort, completely missing a conclusion, C-”. 

 

The truth is, in no universe, does what God is doing here make sense to our cause and effect, good guys/bad guys, earning and proving, comparing and competing, winning and losing sensibilities. In fact, we might say that God’s project upends all of that entirely.  

 

Here’s how we do Easter: a few typical options

Option 1: Easter is for later. It means we’re given an individual get-out-of-hell-free card, an eternal win on the uncompromising board game of life. So, if we play our cards correctly, we reap some well-earned rewards! (And we can help others get their cards too).  

Option 2: Easter makes us feel better. Jesus died and rose to calm the existential dread that meets us in the night, the voice that whispers we are not enough, that somehow, we’re failing at life. We’re honest enough to know we actually can’t do it on our own. And we hear Easter saying, You are enough.

Option 3: We’ve had it with all the gobbly-gook of religion and have washed our hands of it, except when we’re dragged to church by our smiling in-laws who are crossing their fingers that this time, we’ll change our mind and come back to faith.

 

Here’s how God does Easter: 

Instead of rescuing some people out of it, God plunges right into it all, right alongside us all. Instead of backing our self-improvement projects, Jesus goes right for our sin – which is just a shorthand way of saying, whatever blocks us off from God and each other, whatever tells us we are not worthy of God’s love, or that we are but someone else is not, whatever breeds fear, isolation, self-centeredness and destruction – this is what Jesus takes on for us and brings to the cross.  There is nothing - no suffering, sorrow, or loss, no horror done to us, or by us, that Jesus does not carry us directly into the heart of God, even the final terrible divider, death itself. Jesus was defeated and broken by all that defeats and breaks us. He was dead and buried. It was all over. For a while. Except it wasn’t. Jesus rose from the dead, and the end of the story has been written: there is no death so great that life is not greater, no evil so powerful that love will not prevail. 

 

And perhaps this is a message not yet felt on Easter morning, but maybe tasted earlier, in the moment the sabbath began and they all turned back to the truth that God is God and we are not, and practiced trusting God even if they weren’t feeling it, because it’s what we do. And they waited. With God, and with one another, they waited to see what God would do next. Maybe in their waiting, they remembered whose story this all is. And then the next morning, a few of them reached empty tomb to put spices on Jesus’ body. And they forgot again. Because

here’s how the first followers of Jesus did Easter: 

alarm, terror, confusion, skepticism, trembling and bewilderment. The idea of Resurrection did nothing for them whatsoever. Being told about it just freaked them out.

 

Because resurrection is not an idea or belief. It’s what comes after death. It’s the new life that comes after what was, has died. It’s the hope that is born from a place of loss and despair. It’s when tragedy is shot through with overwhelming love and inexplicable peace, when patient grieving abates and washes away and something new and unexpected wakes up and yearns to be born in us. It’s when you find that fear’s hold on you has been broken and you are free.  It’s when you find yourself able to love, able to reach out and be with and for another despite all the risks of heartbreak or failure.  It’s life, life, life. 

He was dead. The tomb was empty.  Resurrection didn’t mean anything until Jesus met them later, alive. Then they too were resurrected. Back in the ordinary places of life he told them to follow him into, they found God bringing resurrection all over the place, and began their new life of trusting in what they could not make happen, waiting and watching for what God would do next, in them and through them.

 

Except Mark doesn’t show us that part. 

 

What God is doing is beyond our capacity to grasp. So maybe it’s helpful to us that Mark stops while it’s unresolved and people are freaking out and confused and keeping it real, because the story keeps going, and pretending to resolve what isn’t resolved doesn’t make the truth any less true: that God is relentlessly bringing life, life that death itself cannot stop. 

 

The story of the Living Christ is still going. God’s still writing it with the ink of our lives. Our job is not to jump to resolution and hide from the discomfort and dissonance, but to wait and watch. God is always here, always at work, always turning death, impossibility and nothingness toward life and love, always bringing resurrection, always inviting us to join in.

But there can be no resurrection without death. So we go to the places of death, and we wait.  Jesus came in to this life to be with and for us. When we are with and for each other, that is where we find the risen Lord.

 

If this Easter finds you in the darkness of despair, I invite you into the great surrendering pause of practicing trust even if you don’t feel it, that is, to wait and watch for what God will do next. Please allow some of us wait there with you.

 

If you come to this Easter ready to heed the call of the messenger in the tomb and join in resurrection, I invite you to back into your ordinary life. Jesus said to follow him there. That’s where he will be. Go into your week and wait and watch for what God will do next and be ready to respond.  

 

If you’re here today to make someone else happy and you think none of this applies to you, I’m sorry, it actually does. You are already loved and claimed by God, and your life is just as much a conduit of God’s love and justice, hope and healing, as the person sitting next to you. I invite you too, to wait and watch for what God will do next.

 

Resurrection happens!  

We’re invited to surrender into the story. To trust that Jesus is out there ahead of us in the completely ordinary places of our lives, and the utterly ordinary lives of everyone on this planet. And when we’re over our shock at the whole thing not going at all how we think it should, and ready to find him, that’s where we should look. That’s where we’ll find God bringing resurrection all over the place. So we will practice trusting in what we cannot make happen, remembering together whose story this really is, and waiting and watching for what God will do next, in us and through us. 

Christ has risen, Hallelujah!  

Amen.

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.