Easter March 31, 2013 "Unlimited Resurrection"

Isaiah 65: 17-25 John 20: 1-18 The message this morning is THE most important point of all Christianity. There is a current commercial, where the interviewer asks, which is better Faster or Slower, being as fast as a cheetah or as slow as your grandmother? Which is better Bigger or Smaller? And the voice over says, “It's not complicated.” Easter is a new creation, a new reality, where Bigger and Smaller, Faster and Slower are meaningless. The Resurrection is Not about Jesus coming back from the dead. Jesus demonstrated that with Lazarus. The Resurrection is not that the tomb was empty. Jesus' Resurrection is that God creates new realities, the very God who created the world, created the world anew with Redemption in Jesus. When contexts change, when realities are different, all relationships, everything we imagine is different and new. Old fears have no power. Death has no power. Rather than an acceptance of our own mortality and limitations, that we are born and die, that we are bound to what we have known... Resurrection is unlimited. How the Resurrection of Jesus happened we do not have a clue. But what we do know, is that the resurrection began in darkness. According to the Gospel of John, the Gospel does not begin with Jesus Baptism, or with his Birth in Bethlehem, or even with a genealogy going back to Abraham or Adam. Creation according to Genesis began in darkness, a time before time and space, when everything that was, was a waste and void of chaos. According to John the Gospel began at Creation, so the Resurrection also begins in darkness, waste and chaos. Jesus the Savior sent by God was betrayed by everyone he loved. Jesus who had Called the disciples and been followed by crowds was abandoned by everyone. Jesus who healed the sick and resuscitated Lazarus, was judged and whipped and scourged, and crucified to death, and after he was dead, they quickly wrapped his naked body and buried him in a borrowed grave. Convinced his followers might steal the corpse, Pilate had had the remains sealed in a rock tomb. As miraculous as the Gospel of John is, although this telling includes more angels and mysteries and unexplainable miracles than any other Gospel, the resurrection begins in stark, cold realism. This week, a couple received a phone call from their son, that plans had been changed and they wold not be coming to share Easter. The call ended with their son saying “Oh and the kids say Hi” after which the couple could not look at one another. A man was summoned into his supervisor's office where she told him of cut-backs and lay-offs and there was nothing they could do. He cleaned out his desk and walked to his car trying to not cry, all the while wondering what he would tell his children. A patient learned from tests that that cough, that odd mole, the piercing headaches were incurable. Someone else heard after 20 years of marriage that their partner did not love them anymore. There is a reason why the Gospel names Jesus dying. Death is the most difficult reality. Anything else we can talk about, there can be different sides, there can be hope, but when you are dead you are dead. As much as we try to understand logically, when the one who dies is someone you love, one who has fed you and guided you, turned you around in life, saved you, or when it is your death, there is a point of hopelessness and disorientation that means nothing will ever by the same again. Mary went to the tomb when it was still dark, filled with anxiety and loss and chaotic feelings. Suddenly she realized the tomb was open, the grave had been desecrated, the body gone. The last many years I have been doing genealogy, which has prompted several scouting adventures to different cemeteries. There is something about a graveyard that feels eternal. For a thousand years that stone marker will identify the place. Life may be in chaos, all our normals and realities ripped away, but the dead are going to be there. With Jesus' body the question was even more central, in that Jesus bore our sins on his body. If there was no body, how do we know our sin was atoned for, how do we know our sin was forgiven. The existence and location of that body is more than a forensics television show, that Jesus lived and died is central to Christian Faith. Mary ran to find Peter who was with the other disciple. The twelve had scattered. There were rumors Judas was dead. But Peter and the other one, they had been witnessed throughout the night of his arrest, and at the foot of the cross, she knew where to find them. She told them that the tomb was open and they ran. When you are in crisis, you run. It is something basic to us as creatures. They needed to know. They needed to see for themselves. They ran and while the one got there first, he let Peter go in first. And Peter saw the emptiness but this was not reasonable. Peter's mind was reeling, he had been so sure of his convictions, certain of his own commitments, yet when confronted he had denied Jesus, when challenged he had evaded, when accused he outright claimed to not ever have known the man. Then he was crucified, dead and buried, and now he was gone. Dead bodies do not get up and walk away. The other disciple also came in, and he saw and he believed but he had no understanding. Grave robbers could not have been the ones to take him because they would not have bothered undressing the body and folding the clothes. Remember when Lazarus came out of the tomb, he was wrapped in burial shrouds, swaddled like a baby. What did it all mean? Surely that Grave-robbers had not been involved, for grave-robbers would not stop to unwrap and undress the body they were stealing. While grave-cloths and shrouds are intended for making death covered in something clean and fresh and beautiful, these also serve as a binding, limitations and restrictions of the past. Nothing in the world, in Heaven or on earth, nothing we could ever imagine, no Power, no Prince or Dictator or Government or Military, nothing high above us, nor beneath us, not even death could separate us from the love of God. To know that you are not and can never be alone, is pretty good. Chaos had turned their lives upside down and inside out, all any of them wanted to do was cry. Mary looked in and saw a pair of angels. In the Western World we have this Enlightenment reality, that reality is tangible and can be proven. The others walked away, but Mary stayed and stood weeping. It has always struck me as odd that the angels ask why she is weeping.Why weep, because Jesus whom she loved, the Savior, was dead and she was mourning in loss and chaos. Why weep? If he were not dead, THEN and only then, there would be no reason for weeping. Here John narrates something glorious, something holy and complete. Jesus came to her, and she imagined he was the Gardener. In the beginning Genesis tells us, God created a Garden at Eden with Adam who was created as Covenant Companion for God and to serve as Gardener. But they broke covenant with God, they chose not to act in love and devotion to God. For which Creation knew death and mortality, binding to sin and all the limitations of this life. She mistakenly called him the Gardener, when really Jesus was the new Adam, the model for us that we could live a different reality. When I was a young boy, we spent summers up at Fulton, NY and often took walks in the woods. On these walks I remember finding a Cicada. These are a wonderfully odd bug, that look sort of like a giant Horsefly, except that their wings come together to form an edge that looks like the blade of a knife. During the summer you often hear their buzz like the sound of locusts. But during the winter, the Cicada burrow into the ground. When they emerge from their burial place in the Spring, the Cicada split open at their back and the new creature emerges from the old shell. Where the husk is black and hard and lifeless, the new creature that emerges is bright green with beautiful translucent wings. That is what resurrection is like, the lifeless shell of sin and death is left and the living, limitless new creation emerges. SO somewhere out there, is a naked Savior, who knows each of our names and who we really are.