Not all there is to the egg

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Acts 10:34-43
John 20:1-18

As religious holidays go, Easter is a bit of a challenge.  People often compare it to Christmas, and—let’s face it—Christmas wins.  Because Christmas is easy to understand.  It is about the birth of a child, and that needs no explanation.  All of us remember what it was like to be a child, and we know what it is like to hold a child.  You can make a picture of a baby, and put a mother and father in the picture, with a donkey and cow, and maybe a star or an angel, and you can write “Merry Christmas!” on it and send it to a friend.  And even if that friend is not a Christian, they can admire the pretty picture, and understand what it is about, and why it makes you happy.

But Easter is different.  The story of Easter begins at a tomb, and who wants to think about a tomb?  Who wants to draw that on a card and send it to a friend?  And that tomb is empty, because the man who was dead in the tomb came out, and now he is alive.  So you could send a picture of the man, but while the baby in the manger is sweet and lovable, the living man of Easter is controversial.  He always was—that’s why he ended up in tomb in the first place. 

And I think that even for us who are attracted to that man, who try to believe in the things he died for, and are glad to hear he is alive, it is still hard to know exactly how to talk about it.  Easter is about finding that the house of death, that we thought was full, is actually empty, and how do you talk about emptiness? It’s about a man whose life is not closed off, but open and infinite.  And how do you make a picture of infinite openness?  If he is alive he has a future, and how do you celebrate what you don’t yet know? 

One way to talk about it is in terms of freedom.  Easter comes from Passover, the ancient Jewish festival of Spring, but also of freedom; and the Jewish story of freedom begins with a voice that speaks to Moses out of a bush that burns but is not consumed.  And the voice tells Moses its name, a name you can’t pronounce, a name that means “I will be who I will be.”  The body of Jesus that rose from the tomb is like that bush and that voice.  It lives and lives and is never used up.  Its future is open and free.       

Or you can think about Easter as transformation, like that ancient image of the egg.  The egg, that is so perfect and complete.  It is closed, and contains within itself everything that is needed, so it is hard to imagine it ever changing at all.  So it is only when something stirs unexpectedly inside the egg, and suddenly a tiny beak starts pecking through, that we realize that the egg is not all there is to the egg. It only exists for the sake of the new thing that breaks the shell and bursts out, fluffy and yellow and peeping, and totally alive.  

Yesterday I thought of another image for Easter, of freedom and transformation, which is the universe.  People used to think that the physical universe was closed, like an egg.  But in recent times we have learned that the universe is actually expanding in all directions.  Some of the scientists who study these things say that it will keep expanding and expanding forever, and some say that, as it does, the fires of the universe will get colder and colder until they go out, one by one.  To them the universe is a tomb.  But no one really knows, and I prefer to think the expansion is a sign that the universe is open.  It is free.  And maybe it really is an egg, hatching something unexpected, entirely new.

 

But none of these images of Easter can really take the place of the stories of Jesus’ resurrection.  They are stories of freedom, because the thing that was supposed to be closed forever is open.  Even Death can’t hold Jesus captive, thanks to the freedom of God.   And they are stories of transformation.  Mary Magdalene doesn’t know that it’s Jesus at first.  She thinks it’s the gardener, because even though it’s definitely him, he’s not the same.  And when she recognizes him, she tries to hold him, but she can’t, because he is still on his way.

And that’s really the whole point, isn’t it?--that Jesus is not a character in a story that once was written in a book and now is over.  We don’t close the book and say, “okay, that was a nice story—now what?”  We keep the book open because Jesus is the “now what?”  And this resurrection story tells us what that means.  Because the climax of the story, the moment when Mary sees the risen Lord, comes after Jesus calls her by her name.  The freedom and transformation of the resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus—it’s something that happened for us.  It is not the story of someone else’s past—it is the story of our future, the future we all have together in God.

We Christians sometimes talk about this future as if it will come from outside of us, as if Jesus is some kind of superweapon who will come down from heaven and blow everything way.  But the Jesus of the Easter Gospel is a future that opens out from within and among us.  He hatches out of our human story like a chick out of an egg.  We don’t recognize him, because we keep looking for the corpse that should be in the tomb.  But all the while he is alive and calling us by name.

When Mary hears her name and sees that it is Jesus, she cries out “Teacher!”  And that is what he is.  It is his voice speaking in our hearts that tells us we are not captive to the mistakes we have made, or our bad habits, or our worn out old images of ourselves, but in every moment our life is open and we are free.  Our teacher is calling us to follow his path of transformation, a journey that embraces our gifts and our weaknesses, our struggles and our victories, our doubts and our faith, our sorrows as well as our joys.  It even embraces death, the one aspect of our future we think we know with certainty.  But his life swallows death, and clothes our mortal bodies with the glory of God.   

And because it is the same Christ who is calling each and every one, what is coming into being in us is not just a new person.  It is a new world—a world from which the curse of destruction and the fear of death have been lifted; a world of unity, compassion, and justice, of deep and abiding peace; a world in which the fullness of God’s glory dwells for everyone to see, in all beings, in every cell and molecule, every drop of water and grain of sand.   This inconceivable future comes into the world in a single person, but through his death and resurrection it comes to all of us.  And so this celebration itself is a living symbol of what it celebrates.  If you want to see Christ’s resurrection, look around you.  We act it out in public every Sunday, the eighth day of the week, the first day of a new creation. 

Called by Christ we gather here, each one called by name, and we blend our voices into one song, the song of resurrection.  We open the book, the book that no hate or fear or prejudice can ever close, the book of resurrection.  We hear the living words of Christ, and keep them in our hearts; we proclaim again that these are our words, for our generation, our world, our future.  We bless the bread and wine, the gifts our teacher gave the night before his death, to be the ever-present signs of his coming.  We break and share one imperishable food, we pass one ever-flowing cup.  We take them into our bodies, to become our bodies, the many bodies of the risen Christ.  And in those bodies we go out, as witnesses of resurrection, emissaries, sent to be the freedom and the transformation of the world.   

Changing expectations

Isaiah 65:17-25

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

Acts 10:34-43

Luke 24:1-12

The first time I went to St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco it was Easter morning.  I’d just moved into an apartment a few blocks from there, and, walking around my new neighborhood a few days before I’d come upon the Anchor Brewery.   And, right across the street, there was this extraordinary building, looking like a cross between a log church from Siberia and the Shogun’s castle in a Samurai movie.  A sign out front claimed that it was an Episcopal Church.  Which was my brand, so to speak, at least it had been for about a year-and-a-half, so I took note of the service times.  And because it was right before Easter, I decided to come the next Sunday.

I showed up a little before 10 o’clock on Easter morning to find the place strangely quiet.  There were empty parking spaces along both sides of the street, and the sidewalk the entire length of the block was completely deserted.   The doors of the church were closed, and the windows were dark.  But there was a small white paper sign taped to the entrance, and so I went up and I read, “Our Easter service was last night.  You are invited to join us for an Easter picnic at the Southwest corner of Jackson Park at 11 a.m.  Sorry for the inconvenience, and please come back again soon.”  I was a little exasperated as I scrambled to come up with Plan B, and I remembered that the service at Holy Innocents, the Episcopal church near my old house, was at 10:30.  So I rode off on my bicycle across the Mission District thinking to myself, “What kind of church doesn’t have worship on Easter morning?”

When Mary Magdalene and Joanna and the other women from Galilee set out with their spices at early dawn on the first day of the week, they went with certain expectations.  And they were reasonable.  It is reasonable to expect that, when you go to a Christian church on Easter morning, there will be people there worshipping, and in the same way, when you see a man publicly executed, and you see his lifeless body taken down from the scaffold where he had been hanged, and placed in a tomb, it is reasonable to expect that when you go back to that tomb, his body will still be there. 

One can imagine that they set out for the tomb that morning with a sense of dread.  Perhaps they were anticipating the pain of saying good-bye.  Maybe they were already starting to imagine the sight of their spiritual master, who had been more alive than anyone they’d ever known, lying lifeless and cold.  Maybe they were already weeping at the thought of the marks of torture on his beloved body, as the raw memory of shock and horror came flooding back.  But they went, hoping to do the only thing they could do for him anymore— to finish the job of embalming his corpse.  Now that his enemies had finished using him for their public spectacle, the women went to have just a few quiet moments to grieve together with his body, so that their last memory of him would be one of reverence, and tenderness, and peace.

That was all they were hoping for, but what they found when they got there was something else entirely.   There are really only a couple of things I want to say about this.  The first thing is that the writers of the Gospels, in this case, Luke, want us to take these women seriously.  Luke acknowledges that there will be skeptics—there were skeptics right away, starting with the male disciples of Jesus.  They came around pretty quickly, when Jesus himself came and ate and drank with them.  But the women were the first, and their vision at the empty tomb was enough to convince them.  Perhaps when Luke wrote this he was thinking of the skeptics in his own day, who no doubt tended to be men.  Does that remind you of anyone?

This, of course, is a continuation of a theme that you see throughout the gospels, but especially in Luke, about how the wisdom that Jesus teaches is hidden from the wise and understanding but revealed to babes—or women, or shepherds, or Samaritans, generally people whose opinions were discounted.  It is interesting that it is just at this point, at Jesus’ resurrection, that these women, who have been obscure, background figures up to now, suddenly emerge as main characters.  They even have names.  They were real people, Luke seems to be saying, and the story they told was true.

And I think this has implications for the way we think about Christ’s resurrection now.  It suggests that a lot of the arguments that have gone on over the past couple of centuries between male scholars and theologians about whether or not Jesus “really” rose from the dead have missed the essential point.  I think these arguments betray a lot of typically modern condescension toward the Gospel writers, and the characters they portray.  To hear some of them you would think that people in the 1^st century had never had a warm, fuzzy, feeling about a dead friend—“You know, it was like I could almost feel his presence, almost like Jesus was really here”—and couldn’t tell difference between that, and what they were experiencing now.   There’s also an anachronistic materialism that sometimes creeps into those arguments, as if the disciples were saying “Wow—God reversed the auto-metabolic processes of organic decomposition in implausible contravention of the laws of nature!  Far out!”  

No, the essential point about the resurrection is that the people who were there knew it happened.   And if I were to paraphrase their proclamation for today, it would go something like this--“ I just woke up from the worst nightmare.  Just when I thought all the worst things I’d ever thought and heard about human beings had been proven right, and just when I thought that God had justifiably abandoned us to a never-ending downward spiral of greed, hate, and ignorance; and just when it been occurring to me that the bad guys will always win, and we might as well just give up on ever having a world where justice is really done and peace actually prevails, because people never will learn to love each other, and for all our promise we’ll never have anything to show for it because our hearts our just too cold and our eyes are just too blind, and our tongues are just too forked for anything good to last—just then, at that moment, when I was ready to stick a fork in it and call it done, something happened.  

Something happened that turned that whole picture completely around.  It was like the world I thought I lived in had suddenly turned inside out, and where all I had been able to see was cruelty, suddenly I saw compassion.  And where before all I could see was misery, suddenly I saw resilience.  And where there was treachery I saw forgiveness, and where there was sorrow I saw joy, and where before there was only death, suddenly I could see only life.  And there was one little phrase that summed up the whole transformation.   It was the truest thing I ever said, and as soon as I said it I knew that people will never stop saying it as long as the sun shines and the sky is blue—Christ is risen!”