Easter Sunday 2007
Text:  Luke 24. 1-12

"Resurrection Happens"

            The women went to Jesus’ tomb that morning with broken hearts.  Jesus, who had breathed new life into their pallid existence, had been brutally killed.  They went to the tomb, as prepared as they could be to look upon and take into their hands his body, hideously disfigured by the beatings and the cross.  But when they got there, his body was gone.  “What’s going on?” they asked each other.  They didn’t get angry, they weren’t scared; they were just perplexed. 
            Their life with Jesus had been one wild ride.  People being healed, people being raised from the dead, Jesus narrowly escaping mobs that wanted to throw him off a cliff, Jesus tossing off snappy one-liners that made the brainy Pharisees look like idiots.  It was one eye-popping incident after another.  But what Jesus gave to these women was in some ways the most radical of all.  At a time when women and children were non-persons, Jesus treated them like people.  I bet that took some getting used to.  Maybe that’s why their reaction to the empty tomb was so muted at first.  This is just one more big surprise in their life as Jesus’ followers.  Maybe looking at those linen cloths crumpled on the ground they gave each other That Look:  “Uh oh.  Jesus is being Jesus again – get ready for anything.” 
            Two angels show up.  “Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, but has risen.”  “Huh?  I don’t get it.”  “He told you this – don’t you remember?  He said ‘the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’” 
The women pause to take this in.  They do remember.  They remember Jesus saying this, and they remember having no idea what he meant when he said it.  Light begins to dawn.  And with that light, a spark of hope is kindled in their hearts. 
They race back to the rest of the disciples to tell them what they have seen, what the angel said, what Jesus had meant.  But the other disciples can’t make the mental leap.  “These words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” 
The text tells us that, despite his disbelief, Peter got up and ran to the tomb to see for himself what they were talking about.  But here’s something interesting.  There is a big controversy about whether that line about Peter was really in Luke’s original gospel.  There are different ancient versions of Luke’s gospel.  Some of them include that verse, and some don’t.  Think about what it means if Peter didn’t get up and run to the tomb.  It means that the first proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection is ignored – repudiated, actually – by the core group of Jesus’ own followers. 
The male disciples’ response to the women is derogatory and mean.  They dismiss the women’s experience as “idle talk.”  You can imagine them rolling their eyes at the women, who in their female hysteria dare to distract them from their manly grief.    
Now play this scene out in your head.  The women come racing back from the tomb, out of breath, and try to get the rest of the disciples to understand.  You know that these women have said to the male disciples exactly what the angels said to them, “Remember when Jesus said that stuff about dying and rising again in three days??  That’s what has happened!”  This is the proclamation that the eleven reject.  Take a moment to let this sink in -- it’s not just the women that they don’t believe.  They don’t believe Jesus.  And it’s not a small, insignificant piece of Jesus’ teaching that they reject.  That formula of betrayal, execution, and resurrection is at the very heart of what Jesus was doing on earth.  It is the kernel of truth that explains his whole ministry.  The disciples didn’t understand it when he first said it, and the men, still stuck in the grief of Good Friday, simply aren’t ready to receive it now. 
Why does Luke tell us this?  After all that the disciples have gone through, why does Luke want to make them look bad?  I hear two important messages here.  First, I think that Luke is letting us know just how much power we human beings have to deny the resurrection, even when it is staring us in the face.  Second, I think Luke is telling us that we will recognize the truth of resurrection only if we make room in our hearts for it.  We have to be  ready. 
Why do the women get it?  I think they recognize the resurrection because they have already felt the power of it in their own lives.  Jesus breathed new life into them, in a sense, simply by making them his disciples.  He turned them from non-humans to very-humans. 
This is what resurrection is.  It is the power of God to bring life in the face of death. 
Walter Brueggemann is an Old Testament scholar who has spent time contemplating the terrible story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son, Isaac.  Brueggemann asks why Abraham agrees to take Isaac up the mountain, with the knife and the wood for the fire.  God had promised Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars in heaven, and Isaac is the key.  If Isaac is dead, what happens to God’s promise?
Many people think that the moral of this story is that Abraham models blind obedience to God, and God rewards him for it.  But Brueggemann thinks that Abraham models faith in what we would call resurrection.  “Resurrection,” Brueggemann writes, “concerns the keeping of a promise when there is no ground for it.  Faith is nothing other than trust in the power of the resurrection against every deathly circumstance.  Abraham knows beyond understanding that God will find a way to bring life even in this scenario of death.” 
For Abraham, this is his kernel of truth – it is what he knows is right, it is what he prays for every day, it is what gives his life meaning. Abraham knows that resurrection happens.
What about you?  Do you think that resurrection really happens, or are stories about it merely idle talk?    
Let me ask you a different question:  What do you know of death?  How badly do you want God to breathe new life into your existence?
Early on in my time here at Canterbury I was talking with a friend who said condescendingly, “What do college students know about death?  They’ve hardly lived!”  Talk about idle tales.  I have met students at Northwestern who have faced the sudden death of a family member, or endured the long agony of terminal illness.  I have encountered students who have been traumatized by physical and emotional violence, and students whose families are broken by death-dealing anger and resentment.  If you have had experiences like this, you know what it means to look death in the face.  You may have spent a lot of time praying for new life. 
Even if you haven’t faced this kind of trauma, you probably know that there are times when anxiety about life becomes so great that it feels like a kind of death..  Achieving clarity, finally, about the direction your life will take can be a kind of resurrection. 
I want to tell you a story about a time when resurrection happened to me.  I had been working as an inner city chaplain to folks with HIV/AIDS.   My work with folks who were dying was surprisingly life giving.  Ironically, the deadliest part of the job was working with my boss, who was doing a long, slow, ugly burnout.  One day he called me into his office.  “Liz, the hospital is laying off 150 people today.  I can’t justify keeping a chaplain anymore.  Clean out your desk this afternoon.  You’re done.”   
I had six months of unemployment checks coming to me, which gave me some time to find a job.  I allowed myself a couple of months simply to rest.  The job had taken a real toll on me, spiritually, and I knew I needed time to heal.  When the time came to start looking for work, I tried to name the single most important thing I needed.  It came to me almost immediately.  After the spiritual decay of working for a man who hated his job, I needed to work with people who loved what they did.  That was a kernel of truth for me.  It was my working definition of the new life for which I hungered, and it became my prayer. 
Unfortunately, if you go to a jobs website and you do a search on “jobs that people love,” you don’t get many hits.   I trolled the newspapers, sent out reams of letters and resumes, but nothing happened.  As weeks passed, and destitution loomed closer and closer on the horizon, I began to worry that perhaps I wasn’t giving God enough guidance.  Or maybe God wasn’t giving me enough help.   Three weeks before my employment checks were going to run out, I stood in a circle in my church and asked folks to pray for me.  I started to cry, I was feeling so lost.  As my community prayed, I began to feel less alone.  I was still scared, but a little spark of hope was kindled in my heart.  In retrospect, I can see that this was the moment when I got ready to receive new life.  Two days later, my mentor called to tell me that The Metropolitan Museum of Art was looking for someone to direct their office of government affairs.  “Huh?  I don’t get it.” I said.  I didn’t see that one coming at all.  I hadn’t held a political job since I entered seminary.  “I left all that behind!” I stammered.  “I haven’t done it in years!  Why would they hire me?”  He said, “You are perfect for this job.  They will love you.”  And they did.  I started working there the week that my benefits ran out.
The Met was a place where God raised me to new life in so many ways.  After years in the sensory hell of the hospital, I found myself surrounded by astonishing beauty.  After years of walking people to their deaths, my job was to preserve the fruits of human creation.  When I’d been there for a few months, I found myself telling a friend that the Met was the healthiest organization I’d ever worked for – and then it hit me.  The Met is a place where people love what they do. 
It is important that I be clear about the moral of this story.  You probably all know stories where someone asserts, “It was a miracle -- God fixed everything!” as if God were a magical character in a sappy movie, bestowing the requisite happy ending.  I don’t tell this story to convince you that you should believe in God.    I don’t tell this story to make me sound important, or to suggest that God loves me better than anyone else.  I tell this story to remind myself to trust God.  Especially when I am facing a major transition, this story reminds me that it is a good thing to name that kernel of truth – that thing for which I most long, that essence of the new life I seek.  This story reminds me that once I have named that kernel, that’s it.  I have to let go of putting other conditions on it.  I have to trust that God will take over and bring  the new life I seek. 
Placing yourself in the path of resurrection requires a willingness to stand in a place of death, just as the women did who came that morning to anoint Jesus’ body.  You have to be willing to look death in the face, trusting even then that God will bring you new life.  On this Easter Sunday, I stand here and ask you:
Where in your life do you need to feel the power of resurrection?
What is the kernel of truth for which you hunger?
Are you ready – are you really ready -- to let go of everything except that kernel in order to have new life?

The women who went to the tomb that Sunday morning had allowed the living God to enter their hearts, take them by surprise, and breathe new life into them.  This was not idle talk.  This was not nonsense.  It was the defining story of their lives, and of ours.
Resurrection happens.                        
                                               
                                                            Amen.

                                                           
                                                            Rev. Elizabeth M. Stedman
                                                            Canterbury Northwestern