Easter 2013 Sermon Notes

Easter 2013 Is. 65:17-25, Lk. 24:1-11

Easter is the great moment of revelation for the church. we are given new eyes to examine this have a sudden insight, they puzzle over it. they do report it however.Had they wasted time, effort, and money to go to the body? followed by two disciples-no less than 5 women, three named. Are the two unnamed women to life.-women and spices they were going to do a good and proper thing, to anoint the body. They could find no body and were understandably puzzled. The were going to honor a lifeless body, but they do not encounter the stench of death, but the springtime of fresh new life.Notice that they do not draw us into identifying with them, to getting us to place ourselves in the midst of that first Easter morning? So do it, place yourself at the tomb with the women or the two male disciples.

“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” I was asked to read by a dying minister for his spouse. It resonates  as a good question to ask oneself in the recesses of a soul when things seem lifeless and unremittingly  grey.(see Feasting on Word for Easter paragraph) Even at Easter, death continues to stalk us all, and that leads to the new creation imagined in Isaiah.

Easter is the beginning of a new story, not the end of the story of Jesus Christ. In itself it points to a new time, and Jesus is the trailblazer.Jesus interrupts them on their way to speak to the disciples.Easter’s message comes as an interruption.they were not believed, (idle tale=leros=nonsense, as in delirious).

I do agree that we keep the dead alive in our memory. Easter goes far beyond that. Here we take a stand that the God of life does not permit death to be the ultimate fate.Second,  Easter light not only shines on to a distant future but it lights up life here and now. It puts a relentless focus on how the past merges into new. The national PCUSA ordination exams had an essay on eternal life. Many of the essays asserted this, but they rarely amplified it. Third,Easter does point to a new and better future and our loved ones live in it through being incorporated into the presence and time of God. They are dead indeed, but they are with the living, all those who lives persist within the life of God.the Lord and Giver of life ignores the grace and opens us to a new dimension of life. Heaven is clearly then linked to Easter.

Is Easter reform or revolution? Reform means that something is OK, but needs some adjustments. Revolution wants to sack an entire system and start anew.Part of me just dismisses all of the stuff associated with Easter, the breeding green plastic grass, the eggs, the candy, the bunnies. I do get that they presage life in the spring.No, I am not going into some diatribe on incipient paganism. I do want to say that all those signs of new life are part of the natural course of events, but Easter is a transformation of nature with its heralding life beyond the vale of death.In one sense, it is a revolution of what we know. In another it is a reform of life. I have the sense that God cannot bear to lose us forever. Even though God created mortality, resurrection is turning a new leaf on that creative design.The way we view the day Easter starts in the dark of the stone-cold tomb.In the pre-dawn darkness, light appears before the sun. Teh sun rises on the shadow of death and dispels it, for on this day, life, blessed life gets all the attention. In the way Jesus saw the day, it was almost half over when he was raised. As Dorothy Bass says, he received the day as a gift, as we all do.