NELSON UNITED CHURCH

"We dare to live the Way of Jesus,
Embodying the Love of God"

The Sermon: March 31st, 2024

       I have a Christmas confession to make; no, I haven’t lost it!  I know it’s not Christmas.  My confession is this: I’ve given up the fight for Christmas to begin December 25th and last 12 days.  It’s just too hard to fight against the culture around us that basically says that Christmas begins around December 1st.  In the Church, we’ll always observe Advent because it is such a beautiful Church Season, and we’ll continue the 12 days of Christmas ending in Epiphany, but that’s just for us.  The culture around us will be what it will be, and I’m finally OK with that.

       But for Easter, except for Easter Day, the culture generally leaves us alone.  We are free to observe Easter for the traditional 50 days and then step right into the festival of Pentecost.  We follow the Jewish tradition in this calendar time frame.  For Jews, Passover was followed 50 days later by Pentecost, which is a Spring harvest festival.

       And really, that’s what Easter is for us in the Northern Hemisphere, a Spring harvest festival.  Easter Day and the stories we tell today are the first fruits of this Spring harvest festival.  Jesus being raised to life is just the beginning; we have the next 7 weeks to explore the meaning of Easter for us and for the world.

       The Salt website that I access regularly cheekily says this of the Easter story, “Ask ten Christians why the women come to the tomb that Easter morning, and nine will tell you that they bring spices to anoint Jesus’ corpse — but that’s not the story John tells. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus have already wrapped the body in linen, myrrh, and aloes, and when Mary Magdelene arrives alone before dawn, she has no spices in tow (John 19:38-42)”[1]  So, the question is, “Why did she go?”

       Maybe she went because of her grief; that’s pretty apparent in the story from John.  Maybe she went because she was afraid that someone would desecrate the tomb; they’d already derided and mocked Jesus so why not go deride and mock the tomb, too.  Or maybe, just maybe, she’s holding out hope that what Jesus said may be true, that death isn’t the end.

       The Salt website reminds us that Mary stands in a long line of biblical women who were “bold, resourceful, and tenacious defenders of life and of the dignity and honour of the human body.”[2]  Think of Eve, the first biblical woman; or Shiphrah and Puah, Jewish midwives who defied the Pharaoh and didn’t kill new born Jewish babies in Egypt.  Or think of Rizpah, King Saul’s widow, who defended the bodies of her slain sons from scavengers for 6 months while camped nearby.  Or Ruth who wouldn’t abandon her mother-in-law, Naomi.  Or think of the women disciples who were with Jesus right up to the end when he was on the cross.  Peter denied Jesus.  Other male disciples fled.

       After finding the tomb empty, Mary ran back to tell Peter and John, who then ran to the tomb.  Peter didn’t know what was going on.  We’re told that John believed, but the two returned to their homes anyway.  Mary stayed behind, weeping from grief—grief from losing Jesus, or so she thought, and grief also because the hopes and dreams that they’d had seemed to come to nothing.

       In her grief, Mary wandered in the garden surrounding the tomb and saw someone who she thought was the gardener.  And only when the gardener called her by name did she recognize Jesus.  As John reminds us earlier in his gospel, names are important.  The garden setting is also important as it harkens back to the Garden of Eden: God created and the Garden of Eden came into being; God recreated and Jesus was raised to life and a new garden was created—an eternal garden of Spring blossoms.

       All in all, this story from John is the beginning!  It is not the ending.  Just like a trumpet is used to herald the arrival of something, Easter heralds the arrival and declaration of God’s intent that love will triumph.

       In his little book, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, Rowan Williams points to John’s story as a story not to depict a fantastical event or a vision of something extraordinary.  Williams claims that John’s depiction of Jesus raised to life is that of an ordinary person.  This Jesus, after that first Easter morning, is the Jesus who acted like a gardener, met people on the road and people in an upper room; Jesus was the one who started a cooking fire for fish by the lakeside, and broke bread in a tavern… Jesus raised to life went on doing ordinary things with ordinary people.

       And that’s the point, I think!  God’s not looking to create something fantastical and unbelievable.  God’s point is that the resurrection, while wonderful and beautiful, is about transformed everyday lives.  We witness Jesus in the everyday lives of the people we see around ourselves.  We see the resurrected Jesus in lives of hope and goodness, love and compassion, justice and grace that are everyday stories around the globe.  Easter isn’t about fantastical manifestations of God’s power.  It is about the simple act of love in the face of fear or despair or war or poverty or whatever challenge we or the world faces.

       You may remember that I’ve made mention of the Canadian Ukrainian artist William Kurelek.  He grew up on the prairies in the 30’s and was deeply influenced by that challenging decade.  His Christmas Book was A Northern Nativity and the refrain that went along with his art was, “If it happened here… as it happened there ... If it happened now … as it happened then ... Who would have seen the miracle?  Who would have brought gifts?  Who would have taken them in?”  Well, Kurelek’s invitation is to us: We would have seen.  The love would have started with us.  We would have taken them in.

       And so, this Easter Sunday, we are witnesses to the living Jesus just as Mary was; just as John believed.  We are witnesses and the love flows from us.  The love starts with God, flows from us into the world, infuses the war-torn places like Gaza and Ukraine, like Nigeria and Yemen, Haiti, anywhere and everywhere there is struggle.

As I mentioned in the worship blurb in the bulletin for today, and as our Executive Minister Treena Duncan reminded us, Joan Chittister wrote of hope, “Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."  Easter is our invitation to join with others in declaring with a loud and clear voice, “There is good worth working for.  There is love worth declaring.  There is justice worth fighting for.  There is peace which can be achieved.”

       Today, Easter Day, is the beginning of something new, a new wave of hope, a new wave of peace, a new wave that says, “Death is not the final word.  Life is!  And if life began anew for the first followers of Jesus, there in Jerusalem, life can begin anew here, or in Gaza, or in the Sudan, Somalia, Ukraine, Haiti or anywhere there is injustice, oppression and despair!”

       So, may the words of ee cummings inspire us to ensure that death is not the final word:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

       Amen.

 

[1] See the website here: https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2021/3/27/dawn-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-easter-sunday. 

[2] IBID.