EasterA17—4/16/17
Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2,14-24; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18
Pr. Scott Kramer
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again!
This is the message of Easter morning. Death gives way to new life. Despair gives way to hope.
Forty days of Lent have led to this day. Forty days in which again and again God’s people have been invited to the task of repentance. We have been reminded that repentance is not about feeling weighed down by guilt for what we have or haven’t done with our lives. Instead, repentance means changing direction, “turning toward God,” that the memory of who we are and whose we are might be restored. In Holy Communion, we hear this invitation: Do this in remembrance of me.
And yet, as we hear again this morning, this movement toward resurrection is seldom easy nor is it immediate. In Matthew’s story, two disciples look into the tomb where they expected to see Jesus…and see nothing. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb. At first she sees nothing, then she sees two angels, and finally, Jesus himself. Mary sees what the others do not.
But seeing the living Christ and recognizing him are two different things! Jesus speaks to Mary and, supposing him to be the gardener, she says to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Supposing him to be the gardener?? How could she not recognize him? Keep in mind, in the weeks ahead we will hear more stories in which even Jesus’ best friends fail to recognize him.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again!
Christ has died. It’s this first part that trips me up, and maybe you, also, over and over again. Like those first disciples my reference for what Jesus looks like is the past. I remember my childhood, my teenage years, young adulthood and full adulthood. I remember what I was taught and what I believed about God. I remember what church was like…in the past. And I assume that my past experience defines what Jesus looks like today!
Those disciples at the tomb remembered what Jesus looked like, what his personality was like, but they…saw…nothing! Why? Because the God they knew…had died.
Dear friends, nothing has changed in 2000 years. The God I remember—the God you remember from the past—has died. Christ has died! How can we see the risen Christ, how can we see what God looks like today if we’re still expecting in 2017 to see the God we remember from years or decades ago?
I was at a worship service this past week called the Chrism Mass. It’s the annual gathering at St. Mark’s Cathedral of Lutheran and Episcopal clergy in our area to renew our ordination vows. Our bishop preached, and he said, “I don’t know what the church of the future will look like.” “But,” he said, “I’m pretty sure it won’t have a lot to do with bricks and mortar.” He continued, “I’m the father of four daughters between the ages of 28 and 34 and through them I have come to believe that in future decades Sunday morning worship will not be the primary gateway to faith in Jesus. It may instead be through service that people first experience the living Christ.”
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again!
Friends, this congregation was founded in 1946. The God of 1946 is dead! So is the God of 1950, 1960, 1970—(you see where this is going, right?)–1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and maybe even 2016! In every age God is faithful, powerfully present and powerfully at work. Our memory of God’s past faithfulness can be a powerful source of encouragement in the present, but we dare not look today for the God we remember because he is not here. Christ has died.
If that’s the final word, then there’s no point for us being here this Easter morning. But…
Christ is risen, and Christ will come again!
Near the end of the Easter story, Jesus calls Mary by name. “Mary!” It is then that she not only sees the risen Christ but recognizes him. And immediately she wants to embrace him, and not just to embrace him; to hang on to him. But Jesus says, “Do not hold to me!”
Mary’s very human response to recognizing the risen Christ plays out countless times in our own day. We let go of the past long enough to see something new, and when we find it and recognize in it the new thing that God is doing, that settles it. We hang on for dear life—to ideas, beliefs, habits, people—maybe even for a lifetime. But friends, the God you remember…is dead. Even if it’s from last year, the risen Christ is right here among us, calling us by name, longing for us recognize him again in unexpected ways, because…
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again!
So…how do we recognize the risen Christ? If he is constantly changing and defeating our attempts to put him into some kind of religious box, how do we recognize the Christ who comes to us again?
You already know the answer to that question! Wherever there is love, there is the risen Christ–and especially, where love has broken out of our comfortable ideas about God, beyond the borders of our groups and tribes. Wherever we find welcome to the outsider, justice and dignity for people who have been excluded and persecuted, food and shelter for the poor, wherever we find human beings who by our lives reflect the expansive and unconditional love of God, there we recognize the living Christ.
The Christ we find does not conform to ideas we’ve had in the past that keep God small. Likewise, when the future becomes the present the Christ who appears then will not be the Christ we recognize today. The risen Christ is always more than we imagine and probably more than we want. The risen Christ blows open our comfortable notions of a God who caters to our personal beliefs and self-interest.
In Matthew’s gospel, ch.22, Jesus says, “Have you not read what was said to you by God…that he is God not of the dead, but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it, they were astounded at his teaching. Dear friends, we are still astounded that God is not stuck in the past!
In the Easter story Luke tells, the mysterious strangers who appear at the empty tomb—some call them angels–ask Jesus’ disciples, Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Like those first disciples, we still give away way too much power to the dead (not just the physically dead, either). We give away far too much power to the past, failing to see the risen Christ right under our noses! Wherever we are weighed down by ceaseless grief and regret, or sentimental longing for the past, we give away far too much power and fail to see the living Christ.
Dear friends in Christ, the God we remember is dead. This is very bad news if we insist on holding on to that God, as Mary was tempted to do with Jesus. But the risen Christ says to us, as to her, “Do not hold on to me,” lest in the future we again fail to recognize the living Christ. Like Mary Magdalene Jesus’ disciples today are invited to turn and see and recognize the living Christ who is powerfully present and at work in our lives right now, wherever the expansive love of God is found! It is for this reason on this Easter morning that we confidently proclaim:
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Alleluia. AMEN!
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