Resurrection of Our Lord/Easter Day

March 23, 2008

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew. (Matthew 28:1-10)

After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Easter! Why do we do this every year? Why, do you think? It’s a lot of work, you know. It’s a lot of fuss, a lot of effort, a lot of planning, a lot of preparation. Why do we do it every year? Celebrating Easter is an act of remembering; remembering.

Listen to this quote from Mark Twain in his advanced years:

"I am grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so that I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it."

It’s interesting that he calls the loss of memory going to pieces; going to pieces.

There is something about remembering—remembering; remembering those people, places and events that constitute who we are that makes us whole again. The act of remembering, the ability to remember, puts us together and keeps us together. It takes our fragmented lives and gives them a sense of wholeness.

Life has a way of tearing people to pieces. I can’t help today thinking about Abigail Taylor and her family. Abigail, as I’m sure all of us are aware, is the six-year-old Edina girl who was injured, as it turns out fatally, nine months ago in a swimming pool in Minneapolis. In that accident, she was literally dismembered. She was disemboweled. And just as she was physically torn apart in that accident, in a no less real way was everyone who loved her. The Taylor family, and their friends, and friends of Abigail, are in pieces today, shattered, disconnected, undone, dismembered.

I’m sure we all feel some kind of connection with them, on the level of their pain. The pain we ourselves have experienced in our lives awakens when we hear that story, and we connect with them in spirit, if not in some more tangible way. This is how compassion works. Compassion literally means to suffer together. What could we do for them, we wonder. We can remember them in prayer. Remembering is healing for those who are in pieces.

Easter is sometimes used by Christians as a way to avoid experiencing the agony of death. Some well-meaning Christian will no doubt say to the Taylor family, “Well, you know, Abigail is in a better place.” But will that help? Will that heal anything? Isn’t it nothing more than the inability to enter into the agony of what has happened? Isn’t that a preemptive leap into getting over it?

But Easter is not a leap over anything. It is a reemergence from having gone under; a descent to the very bottom of betrayal, disappointment, malice, murder, and despair; a reemergence from death to life.

We order our Easter flowers from a florist just down the street, and with a phone call they just appear, just like that. But flowers don’t just appear, do they? They arise from the dirt. They arise from dirt that is enriched and made life giving by manure and decomposing organic material, from the bodies of formerly living things. These flowers are literally arisen from the dead.

Easter is not a stand-alone holiday. The entire festival is four days long, from Thursday all the way to today, Sunday. It begins with mournful Maundy Thursday, and that sorrowful Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. It includes the brutal reality of Good Friday, the mockery, the taunting, the suffering, the dying, and proceeds to a new beginning on Easter Sunday.

But Sunday doesn’t erase Friday. A death in the family is not erased by a subsequent birth; a crime is not erased by a just sentence; a war is not negated by a peace treaty. Both death and new life are part of the experience. This is what Easter is about. Christ is not only present in life but also in death.

Have you ever had the opportunity to travel through Belgium, through the Belgian countryside? Years ago, I did. It’s a lovely and lush countryside. But it also includes unnatural contours placed there by the gashing and the bombing and the fighting of World War II, for it was there that some of the heaviest armored battles took place during the war. Blood poured out in gallons, torn bodies were buried, the land was laid waste. And I know that some of you present were there. The scars remain. The land remains oddly twisted, though nature is gradually reclaiming and covering and renewing itself. But the human scars remain as well. Some of them are physical, some of them are emotional, and some of them are passed on to others, though they won’t ever fully understand why. But these, too, are absorbed in the larger work of renewal and the healing power of love.

We remember Easter, we remember Christ’s resurrection, in order to heal. Our scars are real; our losses are real—unbearable perhaps; our death is real. Easter speaks to pain. The Risen Christ is salvation, not in the sense of escape, but in the sense of salve—which is the root word for “salvation”—salve applied to a wound so that it might begin to heal.

Easter is a time to name the death we feel, the painful memories we live with, the love we never received, the hitting we endured, the loneliness we feel, the illness we are facing, the short amount of time we have left; and to let our story be informed by the story of Christ’s death and resurrection, so that we don’t despair, so that we can be of good courage, because new life is always, always, always possible; more than possible. New life is always promised.

But our pains are not worthless. In our pains, we connect to the pain of others, people we don’t even know—the ones without food, the ones without shelter, those who are trapped in war, those who are violated and misused, those who are despised. Pain is the language of compassion. Those who know it understand each other.

Easter doesn’t make it all better, nor does it make us forget. Easter is not a narcotic for the soul. Easter is, instead, an invitation to life, into the fullness of life that no tomb can contain. It’s an invitation to be not afraid, neither of death nor of life.

I am taken by the picture of Mary gripping the feet of Jesus when he appeared to her. I imagine that she gripped him hard. Her heart had been broken in the last two days. Her beloved friend was abused before her eyes. And she watched the life pour of him, while lesser man mocked and derided him. She was granted an appearance of the Risen Christ, and she gripped his feet for all she was worth. And I imagine she felt in her hands and through her body not the old Jesus, but the newly arisen Jesus, who had passed through death into a different quality of life. I imagine she felt all of it—his sorrow, his pain, his abandonment, his death, and his new life—all at once. To feel that all at once would be, I suspect, to feel the fullness of life in Christ; pain, sorrow, and unspeakable joy all at once.

The life of God encompasses death and life and everything in between, the whole world and everything in it. And the resurrection of Christ commends that entire world, all of it, everyone and everything in it, to us as followers. Nothing is left out; nothing is rejected; nothing is beyond redemption and the love of God in Christ. There’s no pit so deep that it is beneath the love of God. This, I think, is what Mary felt in her hands when she held those feet. The anguish of Christ, and the pain, the humiliation, and the death are all today, all eternal, lived out a million billion times in every sorrow known in every person, no matter how small. And so is the resurrection of Christ real today in every glimmer of new life and joy, every healing and experience of renewal, no matter how small.

Too long have we been under the illusion that the death and resurrection of Christ has to do with how things should be. There is no “should” attached to Easter. It rather gives us a hopeful, though very sober, vision of our world, God’s world. And it urges us to embrace it with all our hearts, to enter it with our whole body, fearlessly and lovingly, for God has promised eternal life. And eternal life is none other than this one, right here, right now. Love it, live it, embrace it. There is no other life than this one. Eternal life is not afterward. It’s this moment, this eternal moment. It is not a length of life; it’s a quality of life. Death can cut short a long life, as it did with Jesus. But death cannot destroy a full life, as it clearly could not with Jesus.

This is not a theory, it’s not a formula, it’s not a doctrine. It’s a picture. It’s an image for life. Life is fatal; love is fatal; there are wounds. The person who lives with great love must expect to suffer; but suffering ends. Love, however, does not. Resurrection is not a solution; it is a salve to apply to wounds.

God’s love lives, and today we remember this.

Amen.