Gentle Reader,
I had the joy and privilege of preaching on Easter Sunday. This was, to date, the most fun I’ve ever had sharing a sermon. I asked for the Holy Spirit – no, actually, I begged the Holy Spirit – to fill me with God’s holy love for everyone listening. God did. It’s that simple. Below you’ll find the text of the sermon, but first you need to listen to this:
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I’ve been joking for several weeks now that this sermon would consist of one sentence: Christ was dead, Christ is alive, let’s party. And that’s true! This is THE day in the life of the Church. The literal, physical resurrection of Jesus Christ is EVERYTHING. Our acceptance of this event, the recognition that we needed this to happen in order to be set free from sin – which we all need to be freed from, because we are all selfish and won’t choose to obey or love God on our own – and to have relationship with God, that God has done all that is necessary for us to be forgiven and made new, that’s what makes us Christians. Without faith in the real life, real death, and real resurrection of Jesus, we’re something else. Miss one element and the whole thing falls apart.
I’ve also been wrestling with how to craft this sermon. How to approach it. What can I say that hasn’t been said thousands of times in thousands of better ways? I kept asking God that question. And the Holy Spirit said to me, not audibly, just quietly, in my mind, the Spirit said, “It’s not about you.” Well then. Sometimes God just has to kinda flick me on the forehead to remind me to get out of the way.
So today, it’s an old, old story. Of how a Savior came from glory. How he gave his life upon a cross to save a wretch like me. And you. It’s a story that doesn’t stop there. At the end of the long, cold, lonely winter of our souls, here comes the Son. The Son of God. Victorious over death and sin.
For those of you who are joining us for the first time today, and as a refresher for those of us who have been on this journey for the past ten weeks, we’ve been building a Road Trip Playlist. The goal of this series has been to give us songs, primarily found in the psalms, that point us back to God again and again as we travel uncertain roads. We’ve used popular music as a fun entry point into the text of Scripture. We’ve heard everything from classic rock to punk to disco to country. Songs that you just have to belt out when you’re on hour ten of the drive. And sometimes daily life feels like hour ten of the drive. We start to ask, “Are we there yet?” And so we need to be reminded of the reality that is God. Who God is and what God chooses to do for us because of God’s great grace and love. Not because we’re so amazing, but because God is. That is what carries us through those long stretches when the destination seems forever out of reach.
The musical themes that have tied this road trip playlist together are praise and fear – which is reverence, respect, awe – rightly given to God. This is our appropriate response to God. As our playlist comes to an end today, we find the crescendo. The song you play on repeat. The piece that the band must perform at the concert otherwise the audience will be disappointed and demand a refund. The melody that brings us to our knees in heart-swelling gratitude.
Here comes the Son!
But before that, before the guitar strums and the drums thump and the singer releases a note – silence. No movement. No breath. A darkness so heavy and thick that it’s almost physical. Touchable. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear.
The iron-tinged scent of blood.
Grave clothes.
The utterly lifeless body of Jesus, laid in a tomb that doesn’t belong to him.
The heavy rock covering the entrance.
Guards on either side.
Decay.
Destruction.
Death.
How is this heaviness relieved? How is this sorrow lifted? Let’s look at our text for this morning and find out!
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, those he redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south.– Luke 24:1-12 and Psalm 107:1-3 (NRSV)
This the word of God for all people at all times and in all places. Thanks be to God.
Luke happens to be my favorite Gospel account, because the author wants all the details. Except at certain points, when I want to know more, he just decides to get to it. Here, he keeps it simple. If you read the resurrection account in Matthew, there’s an earthquake and an angel moving the stone away. In Mark, the women who are on their way to the tomb wonder how they’re going to get inside to care for Jesus’ body. My man Luke has none of this. To be clear, that doesn’t mean that there was no earthquake or angel or logistical questions. Each Gospel author writes from a unique perspective and with a specific audience in mind. Luke is the only non-Jewish author in the entire Bible. He goes out of his way to show how Jesus is for everyone. How Jesus reaches out to and interacts with the powerless – women, children, the poor, the sick. Luke cares about communicating the nitty gritty.
So if Luke isn’t super detailed here, I think it’s because he knows that what we really need to know is that they did not find the body.
Jesus is not in that tomb.
Not in that tomb then, not in that tomb now.
Luke tells us that the first human witnesses of the resurrection – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and some unnamed others – are perplexed. I think this is an understatement. I mean, put yourself in their shoes. You are in deep grief. Jesus, who has been your teacher in a culture that didn’t give space to women to learn; Jesus, who has seen you, valued you, rescued you, spoke with you like you mattered to him; Jesus, who you maybe thought was going to lead a political revolution – he’s dead. The only purely innocent human in all of history, executed. You stood at the foot of the cross and watched him die. And it was no clean or straightforward death. He’s naked. Beaten beyond recognition. Suffocating as he hangs there. Enduring continual taunts and insults from the crowd. Humiliating, agonizing, in every way. The man who turned your world upside down in the best of ways…well it didn’t keep turning in the way you hoped it would. Imagine the shock of that. The bewilderment.
All you know to do now is to take care of his body. That’s what these women did in their culture. They would normally have embalmed Jesus immediately following his death, but they had to observe the Sabbath. A day of total rest. A day in which they could not escape their thoughts, their mourning, their confusion. It makes sense to me that they’re out on the road toward the tomb as soon as they can be. They need to do something.
Instead, they discover that Jesus has – again – done something for them.
This innocent One, he became sin as he hung upon the cross. He never did anything wrong or selfish, but he chose to be responsible for all the wrong, selfish things that each of us has done. He chose to sacrifice himself – for us. He chose to take the consequences of our refusal to obey and to love God.
Why?
Because he alone can build the bridge that spans the gap between God and us.
Because he is the essence and the definition of love.
We don’t know exactly what Jesus’ resurrection looked like. Was it a slow process? Did it happen in an instant? Did he need to stretch or crack his knuckles? Was his first breath easy or a gasp? I think maybe the first thing he did was smile and that smile filled the tomb with holy light. It’s just my thought, but that seems like something he would do.
Here’s what I know for sure: nobody had to come in and perform a ritual or pray a prayer in order for Jesus to be resurrected. He resurrected himself. Because Jesus is fully human, yes, and Jesus is fully God. Jesus has always existed and will always exist, the eternal and uncreated Son, persons of the Trinity, the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. He simply sat up and left the tomb.
And here is what is so interesting about that: Jesus didn’t need the rock to move. He didn’t need an angel to open the tomb. He didn’t have to perform a Jedi mind trick to roll the stone away. He didn’t have to kick his way out. The rock didn’t apologize for being in his way and then scooch on over. The tomb is open not because Jesus needed a way out but because the women needed to see that he is gone.
This is not a secret. This is not a magic trick. This is not a hallucination. This is salvation, and Jesus wants the world, starting with those women, to know it.
At first, they don’t get it. And can we really blame them? Would we have really responded any differently? You don’t go to visit a grave because you expect it to be unoccupied! A couple of angels arrive to jog their memories. Remember? Remember what Jesus said? Why are you wasting your time here in this cemetery?
They’re shaken out of their grief-stupor. Their sorrowful labor of love is turned in an instant into the first joyful declaration that “Christ is risen!”
The women run and tell the closest male friends of Jesus – they don’t get it either. They are consistently shown to be argumentative, disbelieving, and egotistical throughout Luke’s Gospel. Again, it’s tempting to judge them. They literally walked around with Jesus for three years and seemed to have learned nothing. And, yes, there’s some sexism at play here. Women’s testimony wasn’t worth much in their culture. But are we really any different? How long does it take for the truth to sink into our thick skulls? I’m grateful that we see them in their flawed humanity. Their example helps me to know that not only is God available to me, and to you, to give us what we need in order for us to live as God wants us to, but also that God is so very patient with us. God keeps on speaking and teaching and drawing us in until we have those God-enabled “lightbulb” moments.
To his credit, Peter has at least a dimly lit bulb moment. He has to go check this out. I’m pretty sure that for his whole life he’d had trouble sitting still. We see him jumping out of boats and cutting off people’s ears and he just has to do and see things himself. Over in the Gospel of John, the author tells us that “another disciple,” aka, John, also ran to the tomb with Peter, and totally beat him there (which is objectively funny). They take a look around. Sure enough, Jesus isn’t there.
They’re amazed. Yet another understatement on Luke’s part. Nobody has ever resurrected themselves! Nobody will ever do so again!
The author of the letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus “appeared once…to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself…offered once, to bear the sins of many” (9:26, 28). The problem that humans introduced into the world way back in Genesis 3 by doing what we wanted to do instead of trusting in God, a problem that we could never hope to fix, has been forever solved by the willing sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The work of salvation is complete. The deep bass line that began with the angel Gabriel telling Mary that she would give birth to the Messiah got louder and louder throughout Jesus’ life. The thud and the thunder of his step, his words, his heart intersected with and transformed the discordant sin-and-separation song everyone had been singing to that point. When he took his final breath upon the cross, it seemed as though the beat had been silenced. Satan rejoiced. Jesus’ political enemies clapped their hands. But it was only a pause. Tension builds as the orchestra and choir wait for the beat to drop once more.
And it does.
Christ is risen!
The resurrection clarifies things for us. As Jesus defeats sin and death, we are forced to truly reckon with the fact that we need death and sin to be defeated. And that we can’t defeat them on our own. Some of us here today may be trying so hard to ignore that. But we are all desperate for a Champion, someone who will enter the dark arena on our behalf. Face down what we can’t. Destroy what we can’t. Pull us up out of the muck and mire of our own making. Get the chains off us. Set us free.
His name is Jesus Christ.
He is King of Kings and Lord of Lords!
Here comes the Son!
This is our song!
Theologian Dr. Tom Noble writes that “Christian faith is not believing in a fairy tale. It is not facile optimism flying against reality. …the joy of Easter is not avoiding reality; it is facing up to it. We know that the powers of hell are at work in our present world where evil is so prevalent. But – he is risen!” Evil is not more powerful than good. Light is not overcome by darkness. It is by the present, active power and grace of Jesus Christ that we are able to continue on through any trouble, knowing that he is with us and is shaping us into the people we were always meant to be. And that he will one day bring us home – face to face with God
I don’t know what you’ve come in here with today. What burdens or questions. Or joys and gratitude. Maybe a mix of both. You might have known Jesus for what seems like forever and today really is a day of celebration for you. You might not know Jesus at all. Maybe you’re here today because your parents made you come. Or you feel obligated, because it’s Easter.
What I do know is that the Spirit of the Living God drew each of us here today, because God loves us and wants us, whether we’ve been living in the reality of our utter dependence upon the Only Champion or not.
That word “only” there is key. All religions are not equal. All roads don’t lead to God. It is only through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that we can be in relationship with God. It is only when we say, as a response of love to the God who is Love, “Christ is Lord; forgive me Lord!” that we are swept into the cleansing embrace of God.
Are you addicted? Selfish? Angry? Lost? Convinced that a political figure will make everything right? Afraid? Lonely? Jesus will set you free! Maybe not in the way you expect or on the timetable you’d like, but he will. Every time. You just have to admit your need. You just have to ask. You just have to take the gift of holy freedom that Jesus holds out to you. In that moment you begin the road trip of a lifetime.
Have you been set free? Are you at peace? Are you found? Do you love others? Have you let go of thinking any other human can fix it or you? Are you redeemed from trouble? Jesus did that! Praise him for it today! Let the redeemed of the Lord say so!
Hallelujah! It is finished! See the grave? No body in it!
Here comes the Son!
GRACE AND PEACE ALONG THE WAY,
MARIE
Image Courtesy of Bruno van der Kraan