March 23, 2008 - Resurrection as peace and promise - Frank Alton

Jeremiah 31:1-6; Matthew 28:1-10

So did you notice how quickly Easter arrived this year? I read in the newspaper lately that Easter can only ever come one day earlier than it has this year. I didn’t really need the newspaper to tell me that. When Ash Wednesday comes on February 6, church staff doesn’t have much time to slouch after Christmas.

The wide range of dates for Easter offers a great symbol for the way life usually works out. As Christians we celebrate Holy Week & Easter as a central part of Jesus’ story. Christians believe Jesus revealed God to us more clearly than anyone else ever has. We also believe Jesus revealed a way of being human that is worthy of imitation. The fact that Jesus was executed, and then raised to life becomes the center piece of a new way of looking at all of life.

Life is full of little deaths and resurrections. Losing a job, losing a home – whether to eviction or foreclosure, losing a loved one, losing a court case, losing a relationship – these are just some of the little deaths we face constantly. Resurrection doesn’t always come into our life experience when we want it. We can’t make it happen simply by wanting it, or whenever we think we need it. Resurrection is something God does. The good news is both that God can make resurrection happen, and that God is good so God does make resurrection happen. The bad news is that both its timing and the form it takes are out of our control. I know some of you who wish that weren’t the case, or at least that God would hurry up.

But the real challenge is to recognize and respond to signs of new life when they do show up. We often fail to notice when new life has already arrived. Not everyone in the Gospel story recognized the risen Jesus. Today’s Gospel passage gives us some clues about how to recognize the resurrected Jesus. Maybe if we can learn how to recognize Jesus’ resurrection we can get some handles on all the other signs of new life we need to see as well.

When the day began, the main “event” had already happened. Jesus had already been raised when the curtain comes up on the Easter story. What the Gospel stories show us is how people reacted to what they saw. In Matthew’s version, the soldiers guarding the tomb saw an angel who rolled back the stone. They reacted with fear. The angel didn’t even address them. Then there were the women who had come to anoint Jesus’ body for burial. The angel did speak to them: “Don’t be afraid; Jesus isn’t here; for he has been raised. Come & see, then go tell his disciples he has been raised from the dead and is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.”

Matthew then tells us that the women left quickly with fear & great joy, & ran to tell Jesus’ disciples. They acted on the word they received. As soon as they did Jesus interrupted their journey, revealed himself to them and they recognized him. They stopped to worship him, and then Jesus repeated in more personal terms the message of the angel: “Don’t be afraid; go tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” We then learn that the 11disciples who had been hiding in fear also responded to the word they heard – in this case through the women. They went to the mountain in Galilee where they were instructed to go, and there they saw Jesus.

The disciples finally stopped wallowing in the past and acted in hope. Every single one of them had failed to grasp the significance of what was going on. Until they received the word of hope from the women that if they went to Galilee they would see Jesus they remained locked in fear and hiding. But hearing an instruction that made sense in a strange sort of way lifted them out of their funk and they acted. Acting in hope, or acting on an instruction by Jesus, is exactly what people who were healed throughout the gospels did. A bleeding woman risked the wrath of her community by acting in hope that an iterant healer named Jesus might finally heal her. The man born blind acted on Jesus’ instruction to go and wash off the mud Jesus had applied to his eyes & returned seeing. The paralytic and his friends acted in hope by making a hole in the roof to gain access to Jesus.

According to Matthew’s Gospel, action always accompanies the recognition that resurrection & new life are happening. We have to stop clinging to a dead past and act on a possible future. That is not always easy. The past often looks better than the future. The new life itself doesn’t require our action; but recognizing it does. Our action doesn’t bring about resurrection – that is still in God’s hands – but it does seem to be a necessary part of our recognizing it.

But is there really any other way to view life & death? In fact, there is. We can see it in terms of survival. If we believe life is good, but don’t believe in resurrection, then our best option is to cling to the life we have to make it last as long as possible. If survival is the name of the game, risk is to be avoided at all costs. If we’re honest we will admit that sometimes all of us allow the survival mode to take over our thinking. Who hasn’t clung to something of the past beyond the moment when the time had come to let go? Who hasn’t resisted some change that will affect our life in ways we can’t fully determine? Who hasn’t felt the fear of losing a home, a job, a financial cushion, wondering how those losses will be restored? Especially in these times of economic uncertainty, increasing violence, political change & a war that is draining our best resources, it’s tempting to focus on survival.

I am always encouraged when the Immanuel community gathers to tell stories about their lives. Each time, people bear testimony to God’s faithfulness in bringing new life, even in the midst of the worst circumstances. Last Thursday evening at our Maundy Thursday service each dramatic story was followed by an equally or more dramatic story. Yet each account of pain was accompanied by an acknowledgement of God’s faithfulness – through the Immanuel community, through family members, or through some other event or person that was recognized as God’s intervention.

This past week Barack Obama gave a speech about racism in America that many have called historic. I hope all of you have listened to it. Mr. Obama spoke some painful truth to the nation, something that many political advisors to presidential candidates would have called political suicide. The question remains how the nation will respond. The front page of this morning’s LA Times featured an article entitled, “Talking about race…um, you first.” What that fails to recognize is that Mr. Obama already went first. Wouldn’t it be great if people of faith – people who believe in resurrection – went next? We have every reason to take the first step in talking about race, because we believe in the Reign of God, the New Creation, in which people of all races, economic and educational levels, sexual orientations, nationality, migratory status, age and gender we have equal voice. Do we dare join the women at the empty tomb – in our personal, community and public lives? That is the invitation to us on this Easter morn.