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Welcome to Hillsboro United Methodist Church! If you are searching for deeper meaning in your life that includes lasting relationships, spiritual growth and service to the world you have come to the right place. We offer a safe place in which to ponder important life questions within an atmosphere of support. Our hearts, our minds and our doors are open. We hope that as you visit with us that you will find a place to call home.
Sermon - April 4th, 2010
Finding Life in Death
Rev. Gwen Drake
Luke 24:1-12
Prayer of Preparation: We give thanks, O God of sacred stories, for the witness of your word today. Through Scripture you challenge our assumptions, increase our awareness, nurture our imaginations, and touch our feelings. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
Happy Resurrection Day! May the news of Christ’s risenness touch the dead spots in your heart and bring them back to life! May you become part of the good news that flows forth from this place today. May you be springs of living water in all the dry places on this messed up, parched earth. May the fresh life that God has given you spill over to freshen all the lives that touch yours—at home, work, school, your neighborhood, and everywhere. May you be Easter people, this day and forever more!
Easter is a tough preaching gig! More than once I have said to Laura, my office manager, could we cancel Easter this year? Bill French sent me a clever story recently about a pastor who had his congregation sit in silence for his sermon. I emailed him back and said, I’m still wondering what to preach on Easter—how do you think a silent sermon will go over at Hillsboro United Methodist Church? I mentioned to the Rev. Bill Hays when he was telling me how uninspired he was feeling about his Maundy Thursday service…me, too, I said….only it’s Easter! What is new about Easter this year? I emailed Bill Hays my Tenebrae service. I didn’t get his Easter sermon, though.
Actually I wonder about myself sometimes. I would rather preach about the Passion of Jesus, than the resurrection. I would rather do a funeral service than a wedding service. They are easier for me. We are all familiar with death and suffering and bad news. It’s the real stuff of life—death is. Resurrection is difficult! Many of us Christians are more content to think of resurrection as something that happens after we die. Our belief sounds something like this: God raised Jesus from the dead and took him to heaven. Because we believe in Jesus, God will do the same thing for us.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with believing that. But is that the best we can do? Is Easter about thanking God for what will happen when our lives are over? If it is, then don’t you think that our faith is a faith that cares less for life than the afterlife. In a Religion 101 college class, a student told her professor, “I love studying other religions because they have so much in them about how to live. This is different than my religion, Christianity, which is about going to heaven when you die.” (Barbara Brown Taylor).
Harvey Cox, a theologian, taught a class at Harvard called, “Jesus and the Moral Life.” Only he left the resurrection off his syllabus. His reason was because resurrection “stood on the borderline between the historical and the mystical” and he had a wide variety of students and religious traditions in his class. In other words, he surmised only the faithful saw the risen Christ, and not even all of them. Faith was a prerequisite to the resurrection, and not all of his students had it. So Professor Cox ended his class with the crucifixion.
The class grew and grew in popularity until it had to be moved to a theatre usually reserved for rock concerts. His students challenged him, both Christian and non-Christians. Why did he leave out the resurrection story? After all it was the climax of the story and the part that made Jesus different than Moses and Muhammad and the Buddha. Harvey Cox listened to his students and realized that the closest parallels his students had to the resurrection was the stories of Dracula or the Terminator. So he changed his syllabus to include the resurrection and started his research.
What he discovered surprised him. He found in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, was the stories of raising the dead were not about immortality at all. They were about God’s justice. Harvey Cox wrote in his book, When Jesus Came to Harvard, “They [the stories] did not spring up from a yearning for life after death but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply [has] to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful.” Cox said to simply restore a dead person to life was to strike a blow at mortality. However, to restore a crucified man to life was to strike a blow at the system that executed him.
This changes the way todays story reads—or it doesn’t. If you don’t want God to get mixed up with politics, then it doesn’t change what resurrection means. Because what I’m talking about is politics. Cox is right about the Hebrew Bible—the Bible Jesus grew up on. He is also right about what resurrection meant in Jesus’ own time. It was a political message that struck the Apostle Paul with blinding force on the road to Damascus. (You will be hearing more about Paul on the road to Damascas in a couple of weeks.) For God to bring the crucified Jesus back to life meant that God’s reign was very near. And if God’s reign was very near, then the reign of the callous and the powerful was very over, in truth if not in fact. For anyone who could read the sign, an empty tomb was the signal that God’s justice was on the move—on earth!
So, of course the women were scared when they saw the stone rolled away and the tomb empty, and dazzling men inside instead of a dead body. They had come to conduct a funeral, not a revolution. They had come to grieve, not to organize. Even if they weren’t up on first century messianic theology, they knew they had lost more than their beloved friend. They had also lost their best hope for a new kind of life on earth.
When Jesus was alive, it had been possible for them to imagine a world in which children had enough to eat, sick people got well, and old people did not have to worry about who would care for them when they couldn’t care for themselves. When Jesus spoke, it had been possible to imagine a world in which women were worth talking to, lepers could retire the bells they wore to warn people they were close by, and people with nothing to eat could find themselves at a picnic for five thousand with a dozen baskets of food left over.
It had even been possible to imagine a world with no Romans in it—men patrolling the streets in their metal breastplates and pointy helmets, barking orders, demanding their taxes. If God was in charge, then God had a funny way of showing it. For all practical purposes, Caesar was Lord—keeping peace through military power, using fear to stay in control. Those who supported the imperial agenda had benefits, and the emperor’s rich food was very addictive.
So that day when Jesus showed up with food of his own—nothing fancy, some stale loaves of bread and dried fish—speaking of peace through justice, using love to yield control—well, people noticed. He was not armed like the other lord. He told people not to fear. The other lord wielded his power using fear. Yet, when Lord Jesus spoke, his word rang with such authority that demons fled, faint hearts were revived, and even those dead with fear sat up to take another look around.
This was such good news that there was no way to shut up about it. Jesus was the one they had been waiting for. Who could doubt it? They knew he was waiting for when the time was right, when he would act—decisively—to set things right in their world. He would send the conquerors home to beat their swords into plowshares. He would wipe away the tears from all faces. He would destroy the shroud that was cast over all peoples and swallow up death forever.
That was the hope. But this news got to Lord Caesar’s people and it was not good news to them. They wanted nothing to do with plowshares? They had not gotten where they were by putting their trust in farm tools. They had put their trust in swords. So they sent some people with swords to arrest this Lord Jesus—who didn’t have a sword, of course—and by the next afternoon he was dead. End of that.
When the women came to anoint his body, they weren’t just coming to mourn their dead friend. They were coming to mourn their dead hope. They were coming to bury the dead future he had helped them imagine, to lay to rest their dead vision of the way things might have been. Peace on earth? Dead. Justice for all? Dead. Limitless love? Are you insane? He’s dead. Story over. It’s all dead now.
The first clue the women had that the funeral wasn’t going to happen was the tomb stone was not where it was supposed to be. It was a dangerous place for the women to be seen, at the tomb of a folk hero executed by the state. If the Committee on Un-Roman Activities wanted to wipe out the rest of them, all they had to do was follow the women home. They may as well have been wearing a sign that said, “This way to the men folk.” But they weren’t that scared yet. They weren’t really scared until they ducked inside the tomb and saw the men in dazzling clothes.
“Why are you looking for the living among the dead,” they said. “He is not here, he is risen, like he told you.”
Now that was news, though I’m sure it wasn’t written about in the Imperial Times. Lord Caesar had failed to silence Lord Jesus. The crucified one has been raised. The dead one was not there. God’s hope is alive on earth. And they ran back to tell the disciples-- who didn’t believe them. After all, they knew how to behave in the face of death. You view the body, you seal the tomb, you go back to the house to eat fried chicken and green bean casserole that the neighbors brought. You accept that there is no going back and you get on with your life, diminished as it is. But when the tomb is empty and the body is gone? How do you get closure on something like that? They were scared, you see, for…they didn’t know how to behave in the face of death’s undoing.
They were scared, you see, for if he was risen from the dead then so were they. Lord Caesar could not go on governing by the same tired rules—might makes right, strike before you’re struck, watch your back and let others watch theirs. They did not have to live like that anymore. Death had lost its grip on them. They were going to be harder to control now that they knew what limited damage violence could do to God’s cause. They were scared, you see, for…they had never been fearless before, and all of a sudden there was nothing to hold them back.
And we are left free to decide what to do about it. Will the story go on? Or will it die? Where will we go? For the Lord Jesus has gone before us to all the real places on earth that we have come here from: where we bring up our children, earn our living, pay our taxes, send our young people off to war. That is where God has gone to raise the dead. That is where God has gone to keep the hope of justice alive. If we want to practice resurrection, finding life in death, then we need to go there too.
Because clearly we need more practice. Death may be defeated, but death hasn’t hit the ground yet. Lord Caesar may be gone, but his successors are far from out of business. This world is full of death. Open your eyes and you will see the weeping all around. That’s why we need to keep coming together. That’s why we sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today!” That’s why we break bread together regularly, to remind us of the Christ who died, the Christ who is risen, and the Christ who comes again, and again, and again. The good news this Easter morning is God’s hope is alive on earth. Though wounded, peace lives. Though killed, justice rises. Though buried, love goes ahead of us to all the places that we live; there we will see him, just as he told us.
Happy Resurrection Day! May the news of Christ’s risenness touch the dead spots in your heart and bring them back to life! May you become part of the good news that flows forth from this place today. May you be springs of living water in all the dry places on this messed up, parched earth. May the fresh life that God has given you spill over to freshen all the lives that touch yours—at home, work, school, your neighborhood, and everywhere you are. May you be Easter people, this day and forever more!
Amen.