Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
Easter Sunday April 16, 2006
Mark 16: 1-8
A story told by Fred Craddock: “I’ve told some of my friends what a shocking thing it was to discover that I had not really heard the story of the prodigal son, even though I’ve preached many sermons about his coming from the far country, about them bringing the ring and the robe and killing the fatted calf, then bringing in the musicians and having a party. I preached those sermons as though this was the wonderful, natural, easy thing to do. But I had never really thought about that party until a family up the street, a family with three girls, divorced.
One of the girls was very attractive, prematurely mature at fourteen. She was truant at school, into marijuana, and always in trouble, always up before the judge, chasing around and hanging on the tail end of every motorcycle that went roaring through the neighborhood. She got into so much trouble that the judge finally said, ‘I’m sending you to the detention school for girls in southern Oklahoma.’ And that is where she went. About the fourth or fifth month she was there, she gave birth to a child. She was fifteen at the time.
Word came to the neighborhood some months afterward that she was coming home. People asked, ‘Is she really coming home, back to our neighborhood? Will she have the baby with her?’ The day we heard she was to arrive, all of us decided we had to mow our grass. We were out in our yards, mowing the grass and watching the house. For a long time nobody came, but we kept watching and mowing. I was down to mowing about one blade at a time, still watching, when a car pulled into the driveway and out stepped…’It’s Cathy! She has the baby!’ People in the house ran out and hugged her and took turns holding the baby. As they went in they were all laughing and joking. Another car pulled in, then another, then another. There were cars all up and down the street, everyone gathering in the house for a welcome home party.
“Suddenly I got disturbed and anxious and went into my house, because it suddenly struck me, what if one of them saw me and said, ‘Hey Fred, she’s home and she has the baby. We’re giving a party and we’d like you and your wife to come.’ Would I have gone? If you lived next door to the prodigal son’s father, knowing all the terrible things that boy had done, would you have gone to that party? It’s easier to preach on the party than actually to go to the party.”
What do you do when God throws a party, when God unexpectedly intrudes in life, turning expectations upside down with a power we cannot control – the power to make new beginnings possible, new life possible, even in all the seemingly failed places, in seemingly failed lives? What do you do when God throws such a party?
Charlie Brown is seeking out a little psychological advice, and fortunately for him, or unfortunately for him, the doctor is in. Lucy says, “It’s too bad you’re not a self-actualizing person, Charlie Brown. Self-actualizing persons are free from fears and inhibitions. They accept themselves and they accept others. They have self-esteem and confidence.”
Charlie Brown asks, “Can I become a self-actualizing person?”
“No way!” responds Doctor Lucy, “Five cents please!”
Lucy - so often she is the harshly realistic voice of the world. Ah, but what if she is wrong? What if there is a way? What if new life is possible, no matter what anyone says or thinks, even for someone like Charlie Brown, who once said he needed a course in “remedial living”? What if God unexpectedly intrudes with a power for life that shatters all our categories and presuppositions about the world, each other and even about ourselves? What if…?
“And very early, on the first day of the week, they went to the tomb…”
I once came across an Easter sermon in which the preacher said this: “In raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, God showed us the world according to God. It is now a new world. It is a world where the meek do inherit the earth, even when they don’t have a deed to it registered at the courthouse. It is a world where the bread is blessed and broken and everyone has enough. The new world of the resurrection is a world where the peacemakers know themselves, and everyone else, as children of God, and the merciful know what mercy does; it turns our enemies into sisters and brothers and causes weapons to rust or corrode or be transformed into tools.”
Folks, in case you hadn’t noticed, it is Easter Sunday, and because of Easter, a new world has dawned. But can we believe it? How can we possibly believe it? A new world? You can read the morning headlines as well as I. It sure seems like the old world is still very much with us. It sure seems like nothing much has changed. But it’s Easter…it’s Easter! And believe it or not, things have changed. Dare to believe it…things have changed!
Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, writes, “The people in the Gospel narrative could smell the danger in Jesus. They needed only sniff the air around him or notice the people who traveled with him to sense the threat. They had life arranged about the best way it could be. Then Jesus came into their midst as a threat of newness and deep change and massive transformation.”
That’s Easter. That’s resurrection…this divine intrusion that refuses to make peace with the world and its death-dealing ways. It shatters our familiar and comfortable categories. It asserts that newness is possible, indeed that newness is here, a newness which we cannot control or manage.
Many of you have heard this story. One morning after breakfast, Elizabeth Barrett Browning left her husband and went upstairs while the dishes were being cleared. Sometime later, while he was working at the table, soft footsteps sounded behind him and his wife’s hand on his shoulder kept him from turning to look at her. She slipped a manuscript into his pocket saying, “Please read this, and if you do not like it, tear it up.” What she had given him to read was her classic, Sonnets from the Portuguese. Hidden in one of these marvelous sonnets of love is this line: “The face of all the world is changed, I think, since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul.”
“The face of all the world is changed….” Words of love, but also not a bad description of Easter. For those women, standing before an empty tomb, the face of the world was forever changed. In fact, Mark tells us they found it rather fearful. Standing at the tomb, there was much they didn’t know. But the women knew enough to know that everything in the world had been turned upside down and that nothing would ever be the same again. Think about it. Now parties are thrown for wayward sons and daughters, even life’s losers are honored and precious, and everyone, absolutely everyone – young, old, healthy disabled, male female, everyone from gay and lesbian couples to right wing Republicans - everyone finds welcome around the table. That is the way it is… now. “The face of all the world has changed…” Welcome to resurrection, welcome to Easter, welcome to a new world. Is it the world for you?
Now I am very aware that there are many people, no doubt many in this worship service today, who just can’t quite wrap their brains around Easter. The empty tomb, Jesus risen from the dead…it’s just too much to believe. Many of you have heard me say this before, but the Bible never really asks if we believe in the doctrine of resurrection. Interestingly, in his letters Paul never even mentions an empty tomb, but he is absolutely certain that he has encountered the living Lord, and it has changed his life forever. That is the issue for us. Easter, not as something that happened then and there, as some religious doctrine to be believed or rejected, but Easter as an ongoing reality here and now. In the words of Brueggemann, “The Easter question for us is not whether you can get your mind around the resurrection, because you cannot. Rather the question is whether you can permit in your horizon new healing power, new surging possibility, new ways of power in an armed, fearful world, new risk, new life…No more frightened hearts, but hearts alive to a powerful, unimaginable alternative”
Mark doesn’t say much, but you get the feeling that the women were never the same after Easter. I mean, what do you do when you expect to find a sealed tomb and instead find one filled with angels; when you come to mourn the past and find yourself confronting the future; when you seek a corpse and find a living Lord? They thought it was all over between them and Jesus. To their surprise, they found that things were not over. No, things were just beginning.
I wish, I wish, that today each of us could be touched by this resurrection power. I wish each of us could walk out of here changed – not the same as when we came in. It’s hard to trust it, this divine intrusion. Again the old world has so much power over us with its doubts and sorrows, anxieties and fears, sin and guilt; even its routines and securities.
Ah, but if Easter is true, if Jesus is alive, if God has the last word, well then, hold on to your hearts and hats. The facts of life and death are turned on their heads. Nothing is secure and fixed now. Jesus is raised, and God is on the loose, on the move, and he knows our names.
“He is not here,” says the young man at the tomb, “He is going ahead of you…” Going ahead of you…still alive and active, still busy, still blazing a trail for us to follow, still preparing a place for us, still bringing into being a new world and inviting us to join him there. Enough of the old ways that threaten to destroy us, as familiar as they are. Enough of fear. Dare to embrace this wild Easter hope; dare to take a stand in the name of God’s creative and redemptive purposes in the world; It’s Easter. An alternative is offered to each of us. It’s a risky choice. Make it. Dare to take a stand on the side of the wild and unpredictable and unimaginably hopeful newness that, even now, God is working.