Sermon at the Liturgy on Easter Day 2018

I remember once hearing of someone who one Easter morning complained to the priest at the door as they were leaving church, “You know, I’m getting tired of this. Every time I come to church you sing the same hymn, ‘Jesus Christ is risen today.’” To which the priest gently responded, “Well, I want you to know that we’re actually here doing this fifty-two Sundays a year. And I hope you’ll come back again; the crowds won’t be nearly so bad next week!”

Well, this is the one day every year when just about everything seems over the top. So if you are going to choose one Sunday in the year to come to church, this is the one. The music is magnificent, and everything looks at its best. And this is the day when we explore the central claim at the heart of Christian faith – that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, and because of that nothing in this world, not evil, not cruelty, not illness, not loss, not even death, can ever be the last word for us.

The last thing the women who went to the tomb were expecting, was the Resurrection.  The discovery of the empty tomb left them confused and afraid and they ran away.  Newness often makes us fearful, including the newness that God brings.

Whatever happened that first Easter morning, and no one can say for certain, it took the women a while to find words to communicate what they had seen. Something quite contrary to their expectations took hold of them and turned them inside out.

For what they had not expected to see, was God declaring himself in the dead, failed and abandoned Jesus. In the mysterious event of the empty tomb God was saying to them, ‘That was not the end; I am alive in Jesus.’

To hear that for the first time, says St Mark, is frightening. No wonder they ran away, ‘beside themselves with fear.’ (Mark 16.8)  He is saying to his readers, so don’t be alarmed if at first, fifth, or thirty-fifth reading you find it terrible and frightening too.

Unlike the later gospel writers, Mark provides no extended and happy ending to the story of Jesus. There are no gentle bridges to understanding. He makes no efforts to win us over. The women came to the tomb with their minds sealed tight in grief. The world has seemingly done its same old brutal business – killing off their Lord, reminding them (as if they needed it) that death and defeat are where everything is headed.

For all the differences in their reports of the first Easter morning, the four gospel writers do agree on this: that Jesus’ followers visiting his tomb heard news of earth-shaking proportions:

“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here……… He is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” (Mark 16.6-7)

That is the message of Easter morning. And we shouldn’t assume that it was more believable then than it is now.

The Easter gospel is saying something immense—that the God of all life is capable not just of creation, but of new creation. The early followers of Jesus experienced something vast and nearly incomprehensible—that the God who brought the universe out of nothing into existence, brought Jesus out of the nothingness of death into eternal life. Of course, it’s utterly in-credible. And so, quite naturally, we keep the tombs of our minds firmly shut, the stone rolled securely in place.

But what if we let this good news begin to roll the stone away? What if we begin to imagine a world where death is not the end, where God always has more life to give each of us? What if we saw that this world of loss and injustice and violence is not the last, dreadful word?

Of course, it’s hard to imagine it. It wasn’t easy for the first disciples either. Their first experience of the risen Lord was of an absence, not a presence. “He is not here,” they were told. “Now go and look for him.”

In the 1999 prize-winning play, Wit, by the American playwright Margaret Edson, Vivian, a college professor whose specialty is the poetry of John Donne, is dying of cancer.

She seems to be going through it alone, having kept virtually everyone in her life at a safe distance. We watch her deal with doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, and see her go through gruelling chemotherapy. She is miserably sick from it, losing her hair and a lot of weight, and what’s more, the therapy doesn’t work. It’s a dark tomb of a world she’s in, and she uses her ferocious mind and wit to cope.

Strangely, though, she keeps thinking and talking about a poem about death by Donne that goes like this:

Death be not proud,
though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not soe,
For those, whom thou think’st,
thou dost overthrow
Die not, poore death,
nor yet canst thou kill me……

It’s a poem mocking death. It belongs to the Easter story that Vivian seems to have missed. And yet it comes back, awash in the memories of her revered mentor, a distinguished professor who managed to etch it permanently in her mind. It ends in more proud defiance:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more;
Death, thou shalt die.

In so many ways the great driving force in our lives is fear. Nations live in fear. We are haunted by fears. We fear illness and old age. We fear violence and terror. We fear the moment of our death.

And to all these fears the risen Lord this morning says, “Do not be afraid.” He doesn’t say it because hard things won’t happen to us. He says it because God has raised him from the dead, and that means no loss, no illness, no terrible mistake, can ever be the end for us.

‘Death, be not proud.’

On Easter Day, a few years ago, a newspaper published an interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In it the interviewer, Gyles Brandreth, asked him his thoughts on Easter. Tutu smiled.

‘You have travelled to the Dark Continent of Africa for an Easter message for your readers,’ he said. ‘God has a great sense of humour. Who in their right mind would have imagined South Africa to be an example of anything but awfulness? We were destined for perdition and were plucked out of total annihilation. God intends that others might look at us and take courage.’ And he continued,

‘At the end of their conflicts, the warring groups around the world will sit down and work out how they will be able to live together amicably. They will, I know it. There will be peace on Earth. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ puts the issue beyond doubt: ultimately goodness and laughter and peace and compassion and gentleness and forgiveness will have the last word.’

That is a mind and spirit living in a bigger, brighter world than the one we usually inhabit. It is a spirit filled with hope that God isn’t finished with us yet.

Any way you look at it, this Easter vision is an immense mystery. It says that the risen Lord is at work in these troubling times, calling a divided world, a divided nation, and a divided church, to new possibilities of reconciliation and working together. And this Lord is at work in you and me, opening our own tombs, calling us forward.

The play ‘Wit’ takes a surprising turn near the end. Vivian’s mentor, now an old woman, comes to visit her as Vivian nears death.

This sophisticated scholar brings with her a gift - not a great literary work but a children’s book, a book about a love that will not let us go. And when she sees her gaunt former student near death, she lies down on her bed beside her, and reads this:

Once there was a little bunny, who wanted to run away.

So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away.’
‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.’
‘If you run after me,’ said the little bunny, ‘I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.’
‘If you become a fish in a trout stream,’ said his mother, ‘I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.’

“Look at that,” the dying woman says. “A little allegory of the soul. No matter where it hides, God will find it.”

‘I will become a bird and fly away from you,’ said the bunny.
‘If you become a bird and fly away from me,’ said his mother,
‘I will be a tree that you come home to.’

No matter where life takes us, God will find us.

‘He is not here. He has been raised. He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him,’ the women are told.  

‘And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.’

What a vast world this day opens to us, because Christ the Lord is risen! Alleluia!