Matthew 28:1-10
“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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