Any Other Day: Easter, 2017
John 20:1-18
Easter, 2017
So, yeah, it’s Easter again. Is
it time, or past time now, for annual baseball-related jokes about “opening
day”? Is it time, or past time now, for the traditional hymns and greetings of
this day? Is it time, or past time now, for one more Easter homily?
Followers of Jesus have been
marking this hallowed memory for close to 2,000 years. Preachers have been
preaching about it for almost that long, too. I’m a total newcomer, in those
terms, yet this is the 14th Easter in a row that I’ve stood before
the gathered faithful who come, today, to this and tens of thousands of other
churches seeking … well, seeking something.
Is it time, or past time now to
confess that we don’t really know why we are here.
I suspect, in truth, that we
have at least that much in common with those who went to the tomb on that first
Easter Sunday.
Why, after all, go to the tomb?
Why did they go? Why do any of us go to tombs, to cemeteries, to graveyards?
I posed that question to the
Facebook hive last week, on a whim, and received several dozen responses,
including:
To pay respects. To remember. To
tell stories.
To take rubbings of headstones.
To learn history.
To read poems written by
long-dead authors.
I was reminded by a childhood
friend that we used to visit the nearby cemetery to sled down its hillsides.
I’m sure that we must have been respectful. Other friends noted going to
cemeteries to run, or to have a picnic, or to teach kids to ride bikes. After
all, it’s quiet most of the time, and the traffic is light.
As an adult, I’ve visited
historic tombs to be inspired by the life memorialized.
One of my friends mentioned
going with her daughter to the grave of Emmett Till to pay homage and tell him
we are trying to do better.
I suppose there are all kinds of
reasons to go to the tomb; just as there are all kinds of reasons for walking
into a sanctuary on this, or any other day.
We come here to remember, to
share stories, to learn history, to read poems written by long-dead authors –
we call them the psalms and we read one of them most every Sunday morning. We
also come to play and laugh with friends. We come to break bread together. Sometimes
we come to be inspired and tell one another that we are trying to do better.
Mary probably came to the tomb
early on that first day of the week to lament, to pray, to remember, to be
alone with her grief. So soon after the horrifying loss of Jesus, many of the
other reasons people go to tombs probably didn’t apply. Yet. But one imagines
that her heart – and the hearts of Jesus’ friends and family – were already
preparing for the kind of grieving, remembering, story-telling, and eventual
moving on with lives of joy and sorrow, tears and laughter, that are the mark
of any other day.
There’s simply no way in the
world that Mary went to the tomb that morning expecting that the stream of “any
other days” into which she was already stepping had, in fact, already been
replaced by something new.
God has reached decisively into
the ordinary flow of time and history and disrupted it, changed its course,
carved a new one.
God does that. In fact, it seems
to be what God is most fond of. Reaching into the stream of history and
interrupting it – sending the waves crashing down a new course, carving out a
new stream, and thoroughly disrupting what those of us comfortably swimming in
the old stream thought we knew.
Most of the time history unfolds
according to recognizable rules of power – those with the power make the rules.
They also enforce the rules, and they punish those who break the rules and,
sometimes, even those who merely question the rules.
Jesus found himself at cross
purposes with those who wielded power, and then he found himself powerless on a
cross.
In Caesar’s empire that is
supposed to be the end of the story. In Caesar’s empire that is supposed to be
the way things are and they way they will remain. In Caesar’s empire this is
just any other day. In Caesar’s empire death rules and the cross is the
empire’s final word.
Until God says, “no, to all
that.” Until God reaches into history and changes the very flow of time. Until
God says, “yes” to something new.
Our most fervent prayer today
should be for God to reach into history in our moment and shift the flow of
time once again. For the flow of any other days has become the flow of the
River Styx pulling us all toward despair with no sign of hope, toward terror
with no sign of love, toward death with no promise of resurrection.
Tens of thousands of churches
are full today, but our collective voice offers a timid and tepid “alleluia”
against the devastatingly loud death machine of the culture of empire. Do I
paint too dark a picture? I really don’t think so. After all, American leaders
decided Maundy Thursday was any other day, and a fine day to drop the largest
non-nuclear weapon ever deployed in battle. They did so with no apparent regard
for or attention to the voice of the community remembering the love commandment
from which that holy day draws its name.
Who knows what atrocities this
day will bring? All I do know is that no matter how many people show up to
worship the risen Christ in churches around the world today, the death machine
will roll along like any other day.
Are we squirming yet?
“Hey, wait just a minute, there,
David. I may not know exactly what I’m looking for today, but this sure isn’t
it!” I trust you’re thinking something along those lines at this point … that’s
sure where I was as I wrote this on Good Friday.
And, to be honest, it is my
level-best guess at what Mary was feeling as she went to the tomb. Jesus was
not the only one executed on that Friday, and Rome would go right on executing
others – rebels, criminals, those unlucky enough to get on the wrong side of
power. It was, after all, just another day.
And then she went to the tomb.
And then she experienced something completely unexpected and utterly
unexplainable.
And you know what? It changed
nothing … and it changed everything. Whatever the historical reality of the event
of resurrection, the experience of the Christ of faith was a tiny, local,
deeply personal one. Rome didn’t fall because of it. Corrupt religious
practices didn’t reform overnight. Soldiers didn’t drop swords, join hands, and
sing “we are the world.” Kendal Jenner didn’t pull out a Pepsi and stop state
violence.
Nothing changed. Nevertheless, nothing was the
same.
For, you see, when you go some
place expecting to witness only death but, instead, encounter new life the
universe shifts. Mary understood that, although I doubt she was any better able
to articulate the shift than any of us.
She knew what she expected –
death, grief, memory. She knew what she experienced instead – life, hope, joy.
She did not go to the tomb
seeking to be part of the founding of an institution whose success would be
measured by volume. To paraphrase my friend, Rick Ufford-Chase, “[Volume] is
not the goal of the gospel. Faithfulness is a goal of the gospel. Spreading the
Good News to the places where people long for meaning is a clear goal of the
gospel. Resisting Empire values of domination and power is an indisputable goal
of the gospel. Growth for growth’s sake [– volume –] is not a goal of the
gospel.”[1]
What Mary knew, beyond question
if not beyond doubt, was that she had to share what she had seen and heard and
witnessed, that she needed to take good news to places where people longed to
hear it amidst all the voices of despair.
“They say he is dead, but I have
seen him. He is alive!”
If that fundamental assumption
can shift, then everything can change.
They say he is dead, but I have
experienced his presence. He is alive!
They say that death has the last
word, but I do not believe it.
They say that our community is
broken apart, splintered and shrinking, that we are finished, but I believe we
have just begun.
They say that I should just shut
up because I am a woman, but I have a voice and a story to tell.
They say that the empire of violence
and domination will last forever, but I believe love will have the final word.
They say that we should be
afraid of strangers, and outsiders, and foreigners, but I know that we,
ourselves, all were strangers once until God welcomed us all as friends.
They say slaves should accept
their condition, but I say all of us are created equal and endowed with certain
rights including the right to be free.
They say that the only important
lives are the lives of the important, the powerful, the rich; but I say that
queer lives matter, that black lives matter, that immigrant lives matter, that
the sick and the silenced matter, that the very old and the very young matter,
that the poor matter, and that all of these lives that don’t seem to count for
much most any other day in these parts count for everything in the kindom of
God on this day and every day.
They say it’s just any other
day. But I say, it is Easter. Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! And if our
voice today is not as loud as the cultural cacophony that surrounds us on any
other day, may our voice, nevertheless, sing out a richer, deeper, and more
profound “hallelujah!” Amen.