“Amazing Place” Vance L. Toivonen
READING Luke 24:1-12
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again." Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
READING John Shelby Spong, A New Christianity for a New World
Who is…Jesus that early Christians could assert that God had united God’s self with this Jesus in a number of ways…It is the experience that demanded these explanations in the first place that now begs for reexamination. What does it mean to have a God-experience? What was the Christ-experience for the disciples and others who knew Jesus? How can you an I touch it, appropriate it, and enter it today, two thousand years later?
SERMON
Last Saturday morning I was thumbing through the local paper and, finding little pertinent news, turned myself desperately to the pile of ads that took up more than half of the paper’s heft. The grocery store ads usually contain some item or another that I plan to be foraging for in the coming days, so I spent a little extra time perusing their fodder. One of the supermarket ads featured the offerings of their bakery, which usually do not interest me being of the low-carb persuasion as I am. I was not drawn to the pictures of hot cross buns or butter flake dinner rolls or fresh bagels or even the Danish coffee cake, which were certainly represented there. No, I was drawn to the centerpiece of that bakery layout, a cake, all pastel colored flowers and an abundance of white frosting.
Now, I’m sure this cake is being offered in good faith, and I’m sure the bakery is well-intentioned. I’m sure that the people ordering this cake do so out of their deep and abiding Easter faith. But this cake was in the shape of a cross, and seemed to me, anyway, to miss the point altogether. For the cross is certainly not about sugar and spice and everything nice. The cross is not about frosting and frilly decorations. The cross is a reminder that with Christianity there is a path to be walked, and that this path may be costly, and painful, and difficult.
Sure, I know that this is Easter. It is the morning we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It is the morning we rest in the assurance that no matter what happens, everything will be okay in the end. God’s got the whole world, and so forth. But, on this morning in particular, there is a mystery, of sorts. The story is not complete. We’re not sure how it ends. There is a hole in the ground without a body in it where a body once was. Call Columbo, or Monk, or Miss Marple, or Sherlock Holmes. Somebody needs to get to the bottom of this!
The women come to the tomb early. In all of the gospel stories it is the women, by the way, who seem to have the most courage. While the male disciples were cowering in a house somewhere for fear that they too would be arrested and crucified, the women stood at the foot of the cross, and now walk openly to the tomb where Jesus was buried. Our first clue at the scene is that there is courage involved, and the women have it. They needed it too, because there seems to have been a pretty scary encounter at this amazing place. Two “men” in bright, shiny outfits tell them that Jesus has risen from the dead.
The women rush to the place where the disciples are hiding out to tell the men what they witnessed, but Peter doesn’t bite. He thinks the women are making things up, which is not so egregious. I would too, I suppose. It sounds a little ludicrous. I mean, really, how many of us have witnessed a bodily resurrection at a gravesite? It’s a pretty rare occurrence, if not altogether the stuff of Hollywood special effects. The New Testament mentions one other, the resurrection of Lazarus, and also a kind of generic resurrection mentioned during the crucifixion story in Matthew implying that many dead martyrs were seen alive in Jerusalem after the resurrection of Jesus.
But I have not seen such stories on the pages of the newspapers, nor on 60 Minutes or Dateline NBC. Certainly such stories would be newsworthy. Which is all to make the point that Peter was a lot like the rest of us, an “I’ll believe when I see it” kind of guy who goes to the tomb to check out the women’s claim. He leans down, suggesting that the tomb was low to ground, and not the big walk-in tomb we have often seen depicted in bible story art, and sees that the linens Jesus’ body had been wrapped in are laying there without a body. In that moment, in an instant, Peter is transformed into what we can surely call a believer. He goes on to become a leader in the early Christian church who, as legend has it, is eventually crucified himself.
Which brings me back to that cake. That cake really bugged me when I saw it. It is the transformation of the cowardly disciples into people who walked the path that Jesus walked, preaching the good news of the kingdom of God and speaking truth to power, that marks this holiday we call Easter. The path they walked was costly. Some early Christian baptisms were marked not with a party and a cross cake, but rather walking, often naked as the day they were born, through the waters that filled a hole dug in the ground in the shape of a cross. This was to symbolize the sharing of the neophyte in the baptism of Jesus’ death before emerging on the other side to be clothed with a baptismal robe. There was a profound sense that baptism into Christianity meant a willingness to walk the path that Jesus walked.
This is, then, our amazing place. It is the place we are when we realize that no one, no priest or prophet, no Jesus or Buddha, will walk the path for us. It is the place we are when we accept that the call to enter the kingdom of God is a tangible call tied to justice and speaking truth to power. It is the place we are when all of our defenses fall, and we are left to depend solely upon the grace of a loving God. What place, or moment will this be for us? When will we be transformed into those who would risk even life itself for the sake of the kingdom of God, as Jesus did. And not just Jesus, but others as well, others who have spoken truth to power, either through action or through inaction, and in some cases have died because of it.
On this Easter Sunday 2007 we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ not because it is somehow an exclusive event intended to be a substitution for walking the path that Jesus walked, but precisely because it is the clarion call to walk the path that Jesus walked. If Easter is about anything it is about the confidence and courage that we need to confront the powers of this world, and first and foremost the powers in our very hearts and minds that would lure us off the path; the siren songs that seduce us into thinking that Easter and Christianity can be soft, and sweet, and frosted with a half inch of white cream and sugar.
Of course I want to wish us all a Happy Easter. We want to leave here feeling good, go have brunch, eat too much, and then perhaps go home and watch the end of the Masters. Hey, that’s what me and my family are doing today. But in the spirit of weeping with those who weep, we need to understand that our Easter happiness is inexorably tied to those who exist far from Easter on this morning. They are not eating Easter cake today because they are not eating much of anything today, or even nothing at all. The path that Jesus walked is a path of justice and equity and confrontation with all systems of oppression; yes, even the church, if needs be.
Of course we can enjoy the day, and our special times with our families and friends. We can even eat Easter cake if we want. Such is the nature of our cultural privilege. But let’s also take just a moment to stoop down, and peer into that empty tomb, that amazing place, and wonder what that emptiness means for us, and how God might be calling each one of us to fill that emptiness with our lives. Let’s question ourselves every day, every hour, every moment, asking ourselves how we will walk the path that is set before us, the path that Jesus walked, and walks still, not for us, but with us. Walking together with the risen Christ, well, who knows what this world might be like if we did? And the whole of humanity is certainly waiting to find out. Let’s not just let them eat cake.