Luke 24:1-12
Romans 8:31-39
           
What is the resurrection?  That was the question a teacher asked her fifth grade Sunday school class. One boy blurted out his answer, “That’s when Jesus came out of his tomb, saw his shadow, and went back in for three days and there were six more weeks of basketball.” Not only children but people of all ages struggle in answering the question, “What is the resurrection?” Anyone and everyone who has tried to answer that question has struggled and wrestled and come up with an ambiguous conclusion at best. 
           
Many things contribute to out ambiguity not the least of which is that we live in a Good Friday world.  What makes the Good Friday story so devastating is that it is still so shockingly true.  Like Peter, most of us follow Jesus halfway, but not the other half.  As for the majority of citizens, are they not like the crowd gathered on Calvary, not to cheer the crucifixion, but also not to protest it?  Failing to realize that compassion without confrontation is hopelessly sentimental, the people go home beating their breasts, preferring guilt to responsibility. 
           
The price we have to pay for a truly human life has not become less since ancient times, much as we may want to believe that it has.  People are still being tortured today because they have fought for justice.  People are still dying today from the indifference of others who do not want rebellion and do not need resurrection.  But despite the betrayal of the revolution and, God knows, the betrayal of Christ, we see happening again and again what we all need most: uprisings of life against the many forms of death; which is to say, resurrection. (Dorothy Soelle, The Strength of the Weak, 1984, quoted in The Living Pulpit, April-June 2005, p. 46)
           
By all appearances, it is indeed a Good Friday world.  But the light of Easter, seen through the thick darkness covering the nations, we can dimly discern a “Yes, but” kind of message.  Yes, fear and self-righteousness, indifference and sentimentality, greed and selfishness kill; but love never dies, not with God and not even with us.  The Easter message says that all the tenderness and strength, which on Good Friday we saw scourged, buffeted, stretched out on a cross—all that beauty and goodness are again alive and with us now, not as a memory that inevitably fades, but as an undying presence in the life of every single one of us, if only we will recognize it.  Christ’s resurrection promises our own, for Christ is risen for us—to put love in our lives, decent thoughts in our heads, and a little more iron up our spines.  Christ is risen to convert us, not from life to something more than life, but from something less than life to the possibility of full life itself.  As it is written: The glory of God is a human being fully alive.
           
Defeat is not the last word.  Death is not the last word.  The message of Easter states that we are willing to follow the way set out by Jesus.  We do not proclaim that we are raised to wait for the hereafter.  We do not proclaim that we are finished with the journey.  We do not proclaim that there is nothing left for us to do.  Rather we claim that what happened to Jesus will happen to us.  We are raised to walk, right here, right now, in newness of life. (Kenneth R. Lyle, Jr. “Preaching the Resurrection to Experience the Risen Christ,” The Living Pulpit, April-June 2005, p. 14)
           
It’s necessary to emphasize that Easter has less to do with one person’s escape from the grave than with the victory of seemingly powerless love over loveless power.  Too often Easter comes across very sentimentally, like a dessert water—airy and sweet.  But there’s nothing sentimental about Easter.  Easter represents a demand as well as a promise, a demand not that we sympathize with the crucified Christ, but that we pledge our loyalty to the risen Christ.  That means an end to all loyalties, to all people and all institutions that destroy and crucify. 
           
For example, I don’t see how in our time we can proclaim allegiance to the Risen Christ and remain indifferent to our government’s intention not to abolish nuclear weapons but to continue with nuclear armament.  Or how can we think that the Risen Christ would applaud an economic system that wreaks havoc not just on us, not just on the poor, not just devastating to people in this country but even more devastating in other nations, an economic system that reverses the priorities of Mary’s Magnificat—filling the rich with good things and sending the poor away empty (one in four children in this country live in poverty and the number of people devastated by a health crisis increases by the hundreds if not the thousands every day).
           
Easter becomes an opportunity to roll the stone away from our grave.  Easter becomes the experience of the courage to confront death and to believe that love is eternal.  Easter becomes the assurance that God is present in our times of limits and loss.  God’s love reaches into and beyond the tomb.  Easter begins by rolling away the stone that keeps us more dead than alive.
           
From this perspective Easter is not the triumph over the idea of death; it is the discovery of life in the midst of the experience of death.  It is the experience that God’s presence makes a difference in how we live our lives and deal with our losses.  With death being present in so much of our experience, the promise of God’s presence is power, power that helps us to develop both courage and action.
           
Easter is not only the triumphant celebration of an eschatological event but also an experience of how to make sense of life here and now.  I want to experience Easter as an event which helps me to face the powers of death which already have me in their grips.  The realities of terrorism, racism, economic deprivation, drug addiction, inadequate education, and reduced public support for women and children are the contemporary faces of death which wreak havoc on our society.  Easter speaks to these forces.  It promises that God will help to roll away the stone so that we can face these forces and find the courage to overcome their destructive power with the eternal power of God’s presence.
           
Easter is not so much directed to the church as it is directed through the church to the world.  Churches are to be vehicles for putting the principalities and powers on notices.  Too often churches are merely accomplices to the principalities and powers rather than putting them on notice.  God is rolling away the stone from the grave and unleashing the power of life.  Easter calls the world to this earthshaking news as God seeks to release a world groaning from the damage of death to experience the presence of life, the power of God. (Keith A. Russell, “Who Will Roll the Stone Away?” The Living Pulpit, January-March 1998, p. 20-21)
           
True loyalty to the Risen Christ is surely that displayed by Peter, who finally went the second half, who became 10 times the person he was before Jesus’ death.  It is the loyalty of Stephen, unafraid of confrontation, and who under the rain of death-dealing stones cried out, like Jesus, “God, forgive them”; the loyalty of so many early Christian men and women who, like Peter and Stephen, watered with their blood the seed of the church until it became the acorn that broke the mighty boulder that was the Roman Empire. 
           
The Apostle Paul writes, “If Christ has not been raised  . . . you are still in your sins.” I don’t know why sin is such a bad word these days.  Obviously, we’re all sinners, the more so the more we try to deny it.  But that’s not the issue.  At issue is whether there is more mercy in God than there is sin in us.  And according to Paul, just as love is stronger than death, so forgiveness is stronger than sin.  This may be the hardest thing in faith to believe.  The empty tomb is as nothing compared to the fact that we are indeed forgiven.  Peter denied Christ just as surely as Judas betrayed him.  The difference is that Peter came back to receive forgiveness.  The tragedy of Judas is that he never did.
           
Amy Lamborn told about a woman who had been in hospice care for three years.  The diagnosis on her medical chart was, Failure to thrive.  That’s a diagnosis usually associated with infants who fail to gain weight and enjoy normal growth and development.  Often the failure to thrive is described as a failure of environmental provision.  Babies who are not handled and held sufficiently—or who are mishandled through abuse—can lose the will to go on being. 
           
Theologically, the failure to thrive is a crisis of hope.  It seems that nothing can be done to compel the environment to become adequate.  Those who “fail to thrive” have, at some level, given up on hope itself. 
           
If the resurrection is to mean anything to us here and now, not just in some distant “sweet by-and-by,” we must attend to the totality of our human experience, including the aggressive, dark, negative parts.  New life happens in the trenches, where tombs and death are—all the places and circumstances we have written off as hopeless.  As those who would proclaim resurrection, we must first be those who witness and experience resurrection.  We must go to the grave, sit with the anger and hatred, listen to the questions and complaints, and there be curious and imaginative.  Could there be a sub-text of hope behind all the aggression and rage?  Is there an attempt to compel the environment to provide that which is missing for the fullness of life! (Amy Bentley Lamborn, “I Know That My Redeemer Lives,” The Living Pulpit, April-June 2005, p. 21) 
           
Easter proclaims that forgiveness is offered to all of us exactly as it was to Peter.  All the rulers of the world are forgiven and church people, too.  All are forgiven; which means that if we appropriate our forgiveness, we are relieved not of the consequences of our sin, but of the consequences of our being sinners.  Now we are forgiven sinners; which means that with the zeal of gratitude we too can become 10 times the people we are.  It means that instead of trying to prove ourselves endlessly, we can express ourselves as fearless, vulnerable, dedicated, joyous followers of the Risen Christ.
           
The resurrection faith of Paul, the earliest New Testament writer, like the faith of the disciples, was not based on the negative argument of the empty tomb, but on the positive conviction that the Risen Christ had appeared to him.  Christ’s appearances were clearly not those of a resurrected corpse, but more akin to intense visionary experiences. 
           
Not only Peter, but all the apostles after Jesus’ death were 10 times the people they were before; that’s irrefutable.  In response to their enthusiasm (the word means “in God”) the opposition organized; and in response to the opposition—so many scholars believe—the doctrine of the empty tomb arose, not as a cause but as a consequence of the Easter faith.
           
There are only two essential subjects in human life, love and death.  I know that with April 15th looming ahead of us that you thought the two essentials were death and taxes but no, it’s death and love.  There is no fear greater than that of the dawning Easter morning, the fear that death has the power to conquer love. . . . Even worse than natural death is the dying we human beings can impose on ourselves through our deadly practice of anxiety and cynicism that does not and will not see anything but death. (Eugene Drewermann, Dying We Live: Meditations for Lent and Easter, 1994 quoted in The Living Pulpit, April-June 2005, p. 47)
           
The Bible is at pains to point out that life ends: “All mortal flesh is as the grass” (Proverbs 40:6).  God raises living and recognizable entities out of dead remains.  This is how plants grow from seeds.  The seed dies.  The mass plant that emerges from the deed seed is far beyond the mass from which it came.  And Paul insists that “neither death nor life . . . can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:38-9), that “whether we live or die, we belong to God” (Romans 14:8).  There are two certainties in life, death and love. Easter says there is no way that death is more powerful than love, no way that death can overcome love.  Easter says that love always is more powerful than death.  Death, then, is no threat to our relationship with God.  In the words of the Easter hymn, “made like him like him we rise, ours the cross, the grave, the skies.” If we don’t know what is beyond the grave we do know that love is beyond the grave, and Christ resurrected links the two worlds.  Love is eternal, and death is a horizon, and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.
           
God’s part is done.  Now it’s up to us: every time we worship we have the opportunity to continue the illusion of a Good Friday world, or to help people start living the reality of an Easter world. Every morning when we wake up we have the opportunity to continue the illusion of a Good Friday world or to be Easter people in a Good Friday world. It is time for us to live Easter lives in a Good Friday world. (“Easter and Forgiveness,” Henry Sloane Coffin The Living Pulpit, April-June 2005, p. 8-9) We are Easter people in a Good Friday world.  It’s is time for us to live Easter lives in a Good Friday world. It’s time! It’s time!