Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Hallelujah!
You have come to know that I love audience participation, I love a call and response, and on this holy and blessed night, we are invited to rejoice and to sing praise to our God, to shout “hallelujah” over and over again, because the power of sin and death have been overcome by the glorious resurrection of Jesus the Christ. It’s finally here, beloveds. This is the night.
This is the night when we get to ask my favorite questions, brought to us by the prophet Hosea and the Apostle Paul, “Where, O grave, is thy victory? Where, O death, is thy sting?” Not here. Vanquished.
This is the night. This is the night where we do not fear the darkness, for it, too, has been vanquished.
This is the night. This is the night when we hear stories told from throughout the history of God’s people. In the full and exhaustive Great Vigil of Easter, we would have heard a dozen stories, which would have carried us from the darkness of the tomb into the resurrection dawn. As we are a modern and practical community of faith, we have heard merely six stories this evening, and they have been good ones.
Voices from throughout our congregation have told us of the creation of the universe; of the exodus and Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea; prophecies about what it is to live and to breathe as a community. The Apostle Paul insisted that we are moving from death to life. And the women gathered at the tomb of Jesus, looking for the living among the dead.
We heard poetry, we heard prose. We heard history, we heard allegory, we heard prophecy. We heard hopes and dreams and visions. We heard assurances and admonitions.
The Great Vigil of Easter invites us to listen for the whole story.
Somewhere along the line in our institutional church history, we leaned not into the voices of the women at the tomb, but of those who failed to believe them. We determined that some voices were not welcome in the church, that some people were not worthy to proclaim the Gospel. It is clear, simply from this evening’s readings, that we got this very wrong. The first proclaimers of the good news—Jesus is not dead, but alive—were women. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women who had come with Jesus from Galilee are the Gospel’s first preachers. In order to be Biblically accurate, it could be argued that only women should preach on Easter. I digress.
These women had been with Jesus on the way. They had traveled around the Judean countryside, providing invaluable service to the community. We know that they were exceptional women, given that they traveled with this band of radicals rather than staying put and keeping a home in the village of their husbands. They famously sat at the feet of Jesus, learning from him and sharing the good news that he proclaimed. But we also know that their roles as disciples were likely related to the care and keeping of the men; feeding, clothing, mending, cleaning, tending. We know that they had not abandoned this responsibility, as they approached the tomb of Jesus in the early dawn hours. They came to tend to the body of their friend, the last act of service they would ever do for him.
When we don’t listen to the whole story, because we do not hear from everyone involved, we are very likely to miss out on something important. In some instances, it might be interesting details or context. In some instances, it might be the whole point.
We know from the historical record that it is almost always the winners who write the story of the war. It is always those with power whose voices are loudest, whose expertise is acknowledged, whose contributions are applauded. But if we stuck to that version of the story, in the case of Jesus’ death, all we’d know is that some rabble-rouser was executed and nobody ever thought twice about it again. Thanks be to God, we have the testimony of these women.
Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the Mother of James, and “the other women who were with them” spent their sabbath day afraid and unsure about what the future would hold. They relied on their tradition to point them toward action, to move through the rituals of grieving together. These women probably fed their families, and gathered to pray in the candlelight. Then, before anyone else was awake, I imagine them meeting, quietly, at one of their homes, and gathering the spices they’d prepared. I imagine them looking one another in their scared faces, taking a few steadying breaths, nodding resolutely, and walking out into the dawn.
These women are some of the most courageous people in our whole scripture. While they were doing their sacred duty to their friend, they were making their way to the grave of a convicted political criminal. They took a significant risk to themselves and to their terrified community, showing their faces at this place, where Roman guards likely still stood. But in the chaos and turmoil, they had courage.
When they arrived to do their work—the practical, mundane, sacred work of tending to the dead—they were met, instead, with an empty tomb and two dazzling strangers. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” One of the strangers asks. “He is not here, but has risen.”
Not only did these women have the courage to show up at the tomb of their friend when all hell had broken loose, but they had the courage to believe it was true that he was alive again. And then, the courage to run home and tell their friends this unbelievable truth. It is, at face value, an absurd proclamation. He is risen? Could it be?
But as the people of God, who have heard the stories of God’s work in the world over millennia, we are perhaps familiar with such odd things.
“Let there be light,” God says, and it is so.
“Go into the ark,” God says, and Noah goes.
“The Lord will provide,” Abraham says, and Isaac nods.
“Do not be afraid,” Moses says, and the Israelites cross the Red Sea.
“Prophesy to these bones,” God says, and Ezekiel breathes.
“He is not here, but is risen,” the stranger says, and the women believe.
They believe, but their friends and coworkers in ministry fail to believe them! They are dismissed, their proclamation of the gospel truth disregarded as an idle tale. How many women—and how many marginalized and minoritized people, across time and space—have told the truth and not been believed? How many times have people insisted on their lived experiences, only to be ignored or invalidated or even punished? This cannot be the example we follow in a post-Easter world.
We, hearers of these stories in the Year of our Lord 2022 know the truth, and the truth has set us free, because, for centuries, people have had the courage to tell that truth. And the person they told it to trusted them, believed them, and continued to tell the story. Our ancestors in faith have told the stories of the people of God, and told them again, and again. Year after year, night after night, telling the stories. The simple stories, and the weird stories, and the confusing stories, and the complicated stories, and the gruesome stories, and the uplifting stories, and the liberating stories.
And in the same way, each of your stories is part of God’s story. Your lived experiences, many and varied, are reflected in the pages of our sacred texts. Your victories and your defeats, your hopes and your fears, your joys and your sorrows, all of you belongs here, in the story of God.
The truth, as hard as it is to believe, is that Jesus, who was once dead is alive again. You, who were once dead, are alive again in Christ. Hallelujah! Amen.
You, beloved, are alive!
Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.
Hallelujah! Christ is risen! [Christ is risen, indeed! Hallelujah!]
This evening we are gathered to celebrate the pinnacle of our church year, the holiest of days in the Christian life, the feast of the Resurrection of our Lord. This is the day, and the 50-day season, where we shout HALLELUJAH at all available opportunities, praising God for bringing life out of death. And all the songs have exclamation points!
If you attend a few year’s worth of Easter services, you’ll notice that there are four different versions of the story. We have the Gospel According to Matthew, to Mark, to Luke, and to John. Each story is a little bit different—the cast of characters shifts a bit, the dialogue and the events are not quite the same, but in every version, the tomb is empty. In all four versions of the story, the women who knew and loved Jesus—who had watched him murdered just days before—arrive at his graveside to mourn, to pray, and—in this year’s Gospel According to Luke—anoint his body with “the spices they had prepared.” Imagine, for a moment. It is merely hours since Jesus has died and been buried.
Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the Mother of James, and “the other women who were with them” spent their sabbath day afraid and unsure about what the future would hold. They relied on their tradition to point them toward action, to move through the rituals of grieving together.
These women probably fed their families, and gathered to pray in the candlelight. Then, before anyone else was awake, I imagine them meeting, quietly, at one of their homes, and gathering the spices they’d prepared. I imagine them looking one another in their scared faces, taking a few steadying breaths, nodding resolutely, and walking out into the dawn.
What did they talk about on the way, I wonder? Their community was in disarray, as Judas had disappeared and Peter had denied being one of them and, come to think of it, they weren’t sure where Thomas had gone to, either. Should they be going into hiding? Should they be demonstrating in the streets? Who would decide? I wonder if they simply discussed their work for the rest of the day, and their children, like a normal morning.
But when they arrived, “they found the stone rolled away from the tomb” and “they did not find the body.” This was not what they expected. I imagine their minds beginning to race. Had their friends come and moved his body, without telling them? Had they misremembered where he had been laid? Had the Romans not been satisfied with stealing Jesus’ life, they had to come back and steal his death, too?
Before they probably even formulated a complete sentence to say to one another, “suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.” Terrified, they fell to the ground and covered their faces. Nothing prepared them for this. One of the dazzling strangers speaks: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
“He is not here; but has been raised.”
“Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again."
Remember. Last week, on Maundy Thursday, we talked about that word “remember.” Re-member. To put back together. These dazzling strangers are complicating the story by the second, and yet have calmly asked these women to put the pieces together. While Jesus was alive, he told them he would be killed but that he would rise again.
These women—and the male disciples, too—were astounded by this every time, and never believed that Jesus could have been telling the truth. It was impossible. And yet, in the creeping light of the resurrection dawn, it is all coming into focus. Maybe, just maybe, the worst thing has not been the last thing.
The Luke story doesn’t tell us the play-by-play, but I imagine that these women scrambled to their feet and ran all the way back to their homes, panting for breath, shaking their loved ones awake, exclaiming “Jesus is alive!” To what I’m certain was their unspeakable disappointment, the women are dismissed by the eleven male disciples, who call their proclamation “an idle tale.”
In general, I abide by the maxim “believe women.” Have you ever—whether or not you are a woman—told an important story only to have someone wave it off as unlikely, since he hadn’t experienced it for himself? You can identify, then, with these women. It is important that we listen to people’s lived experience, especially when it vastly differs from our own. There are many ways of knowing things, many ways of being true.
And, simultaneously, we live in a world where seeing isn’t even always believing. A healthy dose of skepticism and doing your own research can, sometimes, save you from being dangerously misled. So, if you show up to the resurrection dawn with confusion and skepticism, you’re in good company. Most of the disciples are unsure.
But Peter—dear, dear Peter—got up and ran to the tomb. He corroborated the story of the women, that the tomb was, in fact, empty, and was amazed.
The thing that changed on the first Easter morning was not that a group of people suddenly became certain—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that Jesus had been raised from the dead; it was that they were willing to live the rest of their lives open to the possibility. They stopped looking for the living among the dead. They understood that sometimes God steps in in ways that don’t make sense.
One of my favorite writers, Hanif Abdurraqib, wrote this week that his “relationship to faith changes daily, but [he’d] like to think that one part of believing is our shared stumbling toward the witness of something that was once thought to be unbelievable.”
The resurrection morning isn’t about certainty, isn’t about correct belief, isn’t about being able to explain how someone who was dead is alive. It is about the vulnerability of allowing yourself to live into the wildly unlikely reality that God put an end to death.
Through the life, death, and glorious resurrection of Jesus the Christ, God shows us what it means to be fully human. God shows us that it means expecting the unexpected and delighting in mystery. When we find ourselves in the depths of despair, in the throes of grief, frozen in fear, and trapped in our anger, God has been there. God has lived and died as a human being, and understands our life—and our death—from the inside.
As Jesus is raised to new life, so, too, are we! In the light of Easter, we see with new eyes that the possibilities are endless! God’s love for you is boundless! You, beloved, are alive!
Whole Numbers—A Sermon on Being Twelve, Three, and One
Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.
I wonder, a lot of the time, about the stories chosen from our scripture for the lectionary. The lectionary, remember, is a three-year cycle of stories that guide us, week by week, through the seasons of the church year. This is the seventh Wednesday in Easter and our story is in a sort of odd in-between space. Jesus is about to ascend into heaven. Next week, we’ll celebrate Pentecost, the arrival of the Holy Spirit in the life of the apostles, the birthday of the Church. And so this week, the apostles have some business to attend to.
Throughout the ministry of Jesus, there were 12 disciples. There were 12 of them because 12 was an important number to the people Israel; there were 12 tribes among them, and so having a corresponding number of disciples would represent a completeness, a wholeness.
The traumatic and dramatic events of the last several weeks, which include the horrific death and miraculous resurrection of Jesus, also include the death of Judas Iscariot, one of the disciples. The different books of the New Testament tell slightly different stories about Judas’ death, none of which I will describe for you because they are all grisly. But Judas is dead, and the disciples are incomplete. They’re incomplete because there’s literally an empty seat at their table, and they’re incomplete because one among their trusted circle seems to have brazenly betrayed everything they held in common. Filling his seat, so to speak, will right this wrong to varying degrees.
They discern that it should be one of two men: Joseph or Matthias. These two candidates are worthy, in their eyes, because they have been part of the movement from the beginning. Peter says that they were there for the baptism of John—one of Jesus’ first public acts—and were there when Jesus was arrested and killed. They understand what it means to be a witness to the resurrection, going out into the world to continue the work.
They are, apparently, equally qualified, because the disciples are comfortable “casting lots” to determine who will join. “Casting lots” is a phrase we’ve heard before; do you remember when? The Roman soldiers at the crucifixion of Jesus cast lots for his belongings. Casting lots is sort of like rolling dice, in that we are not the ones doing the choosing. But this practice is more spiritual than that, in that it was believed that the result would be left up to God. Casting lots would show God’s will in the situation.
So to determine which of their friends will officially join the roster of apostles, the 11 gather to pray and then to let God’s will be done. And Matthias it is! The apostles are 12 again, whole again, complete again. The first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles—literally—comes to a close.
In this week’s portion of the Gospel According to John, we drop in on Jesus in the middle of a prayer. As you heard, this is one of those times when Jesus talks for a long time but seems to say the same thing several times in several ways and we have to read it several times to get it all.
It’s a recap of his ministry—“I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world”—and a plea for safety—“protect them from the evil one”—and some instructions for the apostles to overhear—“as you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:6,15,18).
Biblical scholars call this part of this book Jesus’ “farewell discourse” as he says a lengthy goodbye (three chapters long) to the disciples. I think it’s interesting to look at how Jesus prays for the disciples, and to think about what that means for us.
One of the lines that sticks out to me the most is when Jesus prays, “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one” (John 17:11b).
Jesus knew, in the very beginning of the life of the Church, that one-ness would be hard for us. He knew we’d need God’s help, straightaway. Verses from this chapter are the guiding mission of and organization called the World Council of Churches. This is a network of hundreds of denominations around the world, who gather under the one-ness of our common Christianity. It is notable that we are not one Church, one denomination, one congregation. We are millions of people, in thousands of communities, in hundreds of countries. As usual, Jesus was right. We need God’s help.
Christian history is full of division and injustice. We have a troubled past, no matter where you begin. We engage in quote-unquote holy wars, the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, genocide, terrorism—gravely slandering the name of Christ. Every time we draw a line between who is in and who is out, we’ll find Jesus on the other side.
I wonder if we’ve misunderstood this prayer of Jesus. I wonder if we’ve misunderstood one-ness and unity as uniformity, assimilation, and erasure. We’ve looked out into God’s world, in all its brilliant diversity, and determined that our way is the right way, and that everyone else must change or die.
This is wrong.
Christianity’s allegiances with white supremacy, and colonialism, and imperialism, and militarism, and environmental degradation are all wrong. The one-ness that Jesus speaks of here is not whiteness, or Westernness, or maleness, or even humanness. The one-ness Jesus prays we will attain is much deeper than any of our divisions.
You have probably seen at least an image or a tweet about the massacre in Gaza this weekend. Dozens of Palestinians were slaughtered by Israeli forces. This sermon will not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I hope it will not perpetuate it, either.
Our holy lands are holy because they belong to God and because we belong to God. They are not made holy based on who purports to own them.
Every person—Israeli, Palestinian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, White, Arab, Black, Latinx, able, disabled, immigrant, indigenous—every person is beloved of God.
If we believe that anything we do is in the name of God who created us or the Christ who redeemed us or the Spirit who guides us, we must never forget that that is as true for every other person as it is true for us. God loves you, and Jesus prays for your safety and your wholeness, and the Spirit moves among you to this very day. Our completeness is based in that, and only in that. Our completeness cannot come through war, or death, or violence of any kind. Jesus prays for us, that his “joy may be complete” in us. His joy. As people of God, as the Body of Christ, we are made for life and for joy, not for death or for fear.
Let us go forth into the world in peace, not in terror.
Let us go forth into the world in joy, not in sorrow.
Let us go forth into the world in hope, not in fear.
Let us go forth into the world in life, not in death.
Let us go forth into the world.