The Rev. Ann R. Lougee
Easter Sunday April 8, 2007
God's New Age
Luke 24:1-12

In churches all over the world today, ministers are stepping into their pulpits to try to tell their congregations something inspiring and uplifting and hope-giving about Easter. For many of us, though, it's troubling when we're asked what really happened in that tomb. We don't know anymore about what happened there than anyone else does. All that we ministers have to go on, like everyone else, is the accounts in the four New Testament Gospels.

But these accounts were written to tell about the significance and importance of Jesus to the writers, not to give historical facts. They contain themes familiar to them, from the dying and rising myths of the Egyptians and Greeks, and from their own Hebrew scriptures.

The gospel stories would have been understood by people in that time as mythological treatments in which a great universal truth is embodied. It's one of our modern failings that so many would-be Christians have given up on the faith because they ask the wrong questions and can't get past a literal reading, missing the great truth that the stories tell.

The question we really need to ask is, not what the facts were, but what do these stories mean? The gospel accounts are more like sermons than like historical reports, and they weren't even written down until a generation or two after Jesus life and death.

The four gospels' stories don't, in fact, agree because they are based on stories that were told and retold, added to, and retold, evolving in response to the different times and circumstances of their tellers and hearers,

One of my mentors long ago told me that if archeologists ever came across bones that could be undisputably proved to be those of Jesus, a great number of the world's Christians would lose their faith. This is a tragedy, he said, because it shouldn't matter at all. It's not what Christianity is about.

What Christianity is about, what Jesus began his public work by proclaiming, is the good news of the kingdom of God, contrasting with the imperial kingdom of Rome and all other worldly empires. All such ways of arranging society do so by allowing a few people to be at the top and profit by the labor of the many. These are domination systems, in which some people count and other people don't.

In the kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed all people are equal and free, and people treat each other with justice and love. The kingdom of God is neither a geographical locality nor life after death. Jesus kept telling and showing people that the kingdom of God is present whenever people choose the way of peace and justice, out of love for others.

Christianity, therefore, involves a realization that we are all in God and God in us, and that nothing can change that, nothing in life and nothing in death. The Christian life began, with Jesus, not as a set of beliefs but as a Way, a way of living in God's kingdom on earth.

It would be nonsense to try to explain Easter in terms of what happened or didn't happen to Jesus' body, because, as the gospels themselves indicate, the body and the tomb are not where to be looking for the miracle of Easter or the meaning of Christianity. Looking beyond the tomb, not at it, shows us the true miracle.

In fact, the very existence of the New Testament itself proclaims it. Unless something very real happened among the followers of Jesus there would be no Gospels, no Church, no Christianity.

Something happened that turned those frightened disciples who had forsaken Jesus and fled for their own lives into bold proclaimers that Christ was alive among them. Resurrection happened, if nowhere else, in the spirits of Jesus' followers. So what can we say?

We could say, of course, that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry, and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than the literal would be. But it would be hard simply to take this approach because there really isn't any story about the Resurrection of Jesus in the gospels. As an event, it isn't described at all. It is simply proclaimed. Christ is risen!

So what can we say? Well, we can say, for example, that the story of the Resurrection of Jesus means that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven, and that their wisdom, beauty and truth will live on forever.

We can say that the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus is undefeated and undying, that he lives on in and among us, in the good that he left behind, in the lives of all who follow his great example.
We can also tie Easter in with the return of life to the dead earth after the winter and to the rebirth of hope in despairing souls.

This is all fine. But we do want to be careful about reducing it all to poetry, or what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager and simplistic: this "miracle" of truth that never dies, the "miracle" of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the "miracle" of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope.

These are, of course, all part of what the Resurrection is about, but my heart tells me there's more. How do we get to see the "more?"

I'm not a morning person, but, whether or not I see the sunrise I can see that the daytime world is flooded with light. And though I wasn't there to see what happened in the Resurrection, I see the world flooded with the life and glory of the risen Christ two thousand years later. So I can say, "Christ is risen."

When I look at the many members of this congregation who engage in works of healing and compassion and care for others, I see the life of Jesus continuing in the Body of Christ, which is what the Apostle Paul called the community of followers. And I say, "Christ is risen!"

Sometimes, you know, it's the little things that make us stop and think, and help us to understand. Did you notice the many times Luke uses the word "but" in his telling of the Easter story?

Such a simple little word, but such a powerful one. Much of what is written about Resurrection might be summarized in the "but" that keeps bringing us up short, forcing us to understand that no matter what we've heard, we haven't heard the whole story yet." (The Christian Century, March 20th)  The raising of Jesus beyond place and time meant that God was saying "yes" to his life, his teachings and his deeds, and "no" to the imperial powers that killed him. The way the ancient writers phrased it was that Jesus was raised to God's right hand.

The resurrection of Jesus is, therefore, the dawning of a new day, in which it is realized that the Way Jesus lived and taught has been vindicated. The life and teachings of one executed as an insurrectionist has been elevated as Truth.

Our study and remembering of this Truth, in the light of our own experience and that of the community, can lead us to deeper faith. The shadows are always behind us when we walk toward the light.

So when we face our own cold, stony tombs: the losses and disappointments, heartbreaks and failures, loneliness and despair, we seem to share the Good Friday experience of Jesus and those disciples. But we also share Easter Sunday with the power of resurrection, new life and new hope.

This defiant little conjunction "but" gets in the face of every cynical, hopeless, harsh evaluation of the state of the things and the meaning beneath them. It says that God isn't through with things yet.

God hasn't spoken the last word, not yet, in our situation any more than it had in the disciples' time. God is still speaking, so, instead of being the end of the story, Easter is the beginning of a new age in which we live, an age that has begun but has not yet come in all its fullness.

Still, people suffer. Still, people wage war. Still, our hearts are torn and our health worries us, our loved ones die and our doubts trouble us. But, we proclaim on Easter, Christ is risen, and Christ is Lord. There is always that "but," and it carries us through every suffering, every loss, every Good Friday experience, knowing that hope in the end will triumph and the God of life will have the last word.

The Resurrection means that, not just Jesus' time or the gospel-writers' time, but also the present time is weighted with great significance. What is done in the Spirit of God in the present helps to bring God's new age. So acts of justice and mercy, the creation of beauty and the celebration of truth, deeds of love and the creation of communities of kindness and forgiveness – these all matter, and they matter forever

No matter what things look like now, no matter what suffering and strife may be before us and in our midst, no matter what the powers that be or the cynics of this world may say, this Easter morning says, Wait, Stop, "But." It says that we are part of something greater than ourselves, and our lives are lived in a new age of hope, even in the midst of suffering.

Historians' tell us of the brutality of Roman rule endured by people of Jesus' place and time, and of the bloody destruction of their homeland that the authors of the gospels had lived through about 40 years after Jesus' death. Those writers had experienced the presence of God in those terrible circumstances, and put that knowledge into the gospels.

In realizing that, I begin to understand and trust that God is to be found amid the sometimes-frightening conflict and turmoil and upheaval of our own times as well. And we can say, "Christ is risen!"

When I read the gospel accounts of the suffering and humiliation and ignominious death that Jesus endured, and reflect on how the gospels show the love of God at work there, I realize how important that image is. Our sufferings and deaths are no more a mark of God's disfavor or absence than Jesus' were. So we can say, "Christ is risen."

Christians don't say this with the easy, unthinking optimism of people who have never known of a time when all was not well. Rather we say it as those whose foundation story includes the tragedy and obscenity of the cross and its transformation into glory.

I personally also say it, with painful honesty, as one who has known in myself what it is like to feel separated from God. For me, the dark night of the soul involved the isolation of my own alcoholism that entombed me until the stone was rolled away for me some 23 years ago.

For me, as for many other people, Easter experience has come, not as a trumpet blast, but as the still, small voice within saying, Choose life. Choose life instead of addiction. Choose life instead of perpetual mourning for what is past. Choose life instead of the stony tomb of implacable resentment and bitterness for disappointments. This Easter experience has given me the chance to live a new life. My faith has grown with experience -- grown into a trust that even in the deepest darkness a small light can light our path.

I now trust that the meaning of Easter is not death reversed but life lived fully. I now know that life has greater depths of beauty, mystery and blessing than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream. I also know myself to be called into the Body of Christ. And I say, "Christ is risen!"

I will conclude my Easter message of God's new age with a poem written by a colleague, a Disciples minister named Steve Miller:

Every morning is Easter morning. But I don't always remember.
In the race with my mortality I often lose the peace of the immortal.
Is Easter resurrection about eternal life in heaven or
     renewal of life each Spring, or possibilities of personal hope, or
     he victory of love over fear, or meaningful life over apathy, or
     the glory and power of God, or God's love so great it cannot die?
Yes.
Easter is all these and more wrapped in mystery,
    to be unraveled in each life and interpreted by each generation,
    even told in different stories by various religions and cultures.
Easter is Yes.
Yes to hopeful possibilities!
Yes to whatever eternity holds!
Yes to heaven in this moment!
Yes to God's justice and mercy!
Yes to Life!
The tomb is empty. Life is full.
We are invited by God to Resurrected hope,
     gifted by God with Eternal Love,
     addressed by God who calls us by name into a relationship of faith.

Christ is risen. Risen, indeed! Alleluia! Amen.