Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Resurrection Perspective -- Easter Sunday

Matthew 28:1-10
April 16, 2017

            “Joy to the world! The Lord is come! Let earth receive her King! Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing. And heaven and nature sing. And heaven, and heaven and nature sing!”
            When I was in my first church as a solo pastor and preparing for my first Easter Sunday as a solo pastor, I read an article in some homiletics journal about different ways to approach Easter worship. The author suggested that in order to remind your parishioners of the intrinsic connection between Christmas and Easter it was completely appropriate to sing “Joy to the World.” After all, are we not joyful this morning? Should we not be shouting our praises from hilltop to hilltop, and making the valleys echo with the sound of our voices singing out,
“Joy to the world! The Lord is come! Let earth receive her King!”
All this may be true, but a few members of the congregation did not get the memo. And they made sure that I knew that. They were lovely, forgiving people who gave me a lot of room to try new things, but singing a Christmas carol on Easter Sunday was just too much. It was jarring and felt wrong. It shook them up, and they were not prepared for the shaking.
We are not going to sing “Joy to the World” this morning. You won’t hear anymore of it than what I just sang. But even though we are leaving the Christmas carols to Christmas, we cannot avoid the shaking that comes with Easter.
Just as a quake shook the earth at the moment of Jesus’ death, a second quake rocked the earth as the angel descended from heaven and rolled away the stone to the tomb. Sitting on the stone, the angel, with his lighting bright, dazzling appearance, must have been both splendid and terrifying all at the same time. It is easy for me to understand how the soldiers sent to guard the tomb must have fainted away in the face of this awful and awesome angelic presence. Yet, how ironic that in this moment of LIFE, the guards fall down as though dead; they could not bear the shaking.
Surely Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were equally as thrown by the descent of the angel as were the soldiers. But they saw the angel through a different lens, a different perspective. The angel’s descent did not send them into a dead faint. They were not overcome by fear, but seemed to take the angel’s words, “Do not be afraid” to heart. They heard the good news about their Teacher, and understood that the promises of God were now fulfilled. Everything was different. The shaking did not make the women fall. Instead, it gave them swift feet.
We may not be having an earthquake at this moment – although we here in Oklahoma know a little bit about that – but the ground is still shaking and quaking, rocking and rolling beneath our feet. Easter is that earthquake. A seismic event signaled the announcement of an empty tomb, and Easter is a cosmic event that signals that God is not done. God is not done – not done with us, not done with the world. Everything is shaken up. Everything is different and changed and new. Easter is here, He is risen, and the ground beneath our feet is shaking, rolling over and over, because the Lord is come. Joy to the world!
Joy to the world is wonderful, but I don’t think the world knows it is supposed to be joyful. The struggle I have every Easter, and every Christmas for that matter, is that I feel joyful and exuberant in here. I am overflowing with love and hope in here, in this place. But I cannot stay in this place. I have to go out there. And out there is still so broken. There is still so much pain, so much turmoil, so much hatred and hurting and killing and death. There is still so much death. If Easter is the earthquake, shaking the world to its very foundations, spinning even the cosmos into new patterns of glory, then the world seems not to have noticed. Nothing seems to have changed … and yet everything is changed because we are changed. How can we not be changed by that empty tomb? How can we not be changed by the knowledge that this day was and is about God? God resurrected Jesus not for Jesus’ sake alone, but for ours. A colleague once said that he can understand why God would resurrect Jesus, but us? And yet that’s what God did. That is what God is doing, resurrecting us from our old ways of living and being and seeing the world. Resurrection is not just a one-time event; it is a new perspective, a new way of seeing not just the world but the people who inhabit it.
Resurrection is a new perspective. It is like old eyes being made new. Easter may not seem to change anything, but we see differently. Resurrection is not something reserved for the last day or the end of time; it is a new perspective now. We see differently now. We have been given new eyes to see God working in this world, a new heart to feel God’s presence in this world, and new mind to understand God creating and re-creating in this world. We have been given a new perspective, a resurrection perspective.
Yesterday, Brent and I watched a video of a family gathering centered on their grandfather. The grandpa was color blind. The gift his family gave him was a special pair of sunglasses. When he put them on, he saw color for the first time. He saw the green of the grass and the blue of his ball cap. Those lenses gave him the gift of color. They gave him the gift of a new perspective. Easter is a new pair of glasses that allow us to see a glimpse of the world as it was created to be. It gives us new eyes, new lenses, new perspective.
When the women ran from the tomb, filled with both great fear and great joy, they met Jesus, the risen Christ. The New Revised Standard Version we read from translates his first word to the women as “Greetings.” But this is not a great translation. Put it into modern vernacular, and we hear Jesus welcoming the women with ‘Hi there!” But a better translation is “Rejoice.” Jesus meets the women and tells them, “Rejoice!” The women’s response was to fall before him and take his feet. He repeated the angel’s words, “Do not be afraid.”
Rejoice! Do not be afraid. These are the new lenses Easter gives us. These are the frames of our resurrection perspective. Rejoice! Do not be afraid. We know that the world is still caught in darkness. Harm is still done. Danger still lurks. Resurrection does not magically fix that which is broken, waving a wand of wonder over creation. But we are able to see beyond the dark’s long shadows. We are able to see the wholeness lying just beneath the broken places. We are able to see the ongoing presence of the risen Christ. We are able to see God everywhere, in every place, in every person.
Easter shakes the ground we walk on. Because of it we see with new eyes. We see with a new perspective: a resurrection perspective. And now that we see, we are also called to go, to tell others, to share the good news, to witness that we too have seen the Lord!
Rejoice! Do not be afraid. Rejoice! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!” Amen.

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