WHAT CAN YOU COUNT ON?

April 4, 2010
Easter Sunday
Luke 24:1-50
Isaiah 35:17-25
John 20:1-18

A combination of messages shared at two easter morning services

• FROM JOHN: Mary thought she knew what was certain.
• Jesus was dead. The best she could do at this point was provide him with the dignity of a proper burial.
• Often executed criminals' bodies were not afforded such dignity. The Romans preferred to let them begin to decompose on the cross - as an encouragement for law and order.
• Even when she found the stone rolled away and the body of Jesus gone, Mary was certain she knew what had happened - the body was stolen. One last act of humiliation and terror to stop the Jesus Movement.
• When she saw that she was not alone in the garden, Mary was certain that this must be the gardener.
• She hoped that he might be certain where the body was - perhaps the vandals just carried it off a short distance and left Jesus lying somewhere in the garden. She was hopefully certain that the gardener might know.
• Mary's certainty was thrown into disarray.
• FROM LUKE: The women were told by the brilliantly glowing messengers that Jesus was not there, but was risen. They need not look for the living among the dead.
• When they told this to the others, they sluffed it off as an Idle Tale.
• Anna Carter Florence, one of the speakers at last year's United Church Worship Matters event, told me (and the others at her lecture) that we might best understand the attitude of the disciples if we translate that phrase "idle tale" as bulls**t.
• The reaction of the disciples was that the woman's story was crap! It didn't make sense; they were certain of it.
• My favorite line that Anna Carter Florence had last June was "When dead things won't stay dead, what can you count on in this world?
• That's the power of the resurrection - it pushes us beyond what makes sense, past what we think we know for certain.
• There is so much anger and fear and ward and poverty and oppression and discrimination in the world that we have come to think that it is a certainty that these negative and worst aspects of the human condition are here to stay.
• But the prophet imagines with such hope that God's peace will reign that it will be as marvelous as if a lion was able to lie down with a lamb and not grab a snack.
• Easter hope is marvelous - it is a marvel. We should marvel in it!
• I know that for some Christians, the whole point of Easter is that it serves as proof that Jesus was God. It is like a holy "ta-dah!". I'm not so certain.
• If it was proof, it wasn't very effective. It seems that even people who were right there had trouble recognizing Jesus.
• Cleopas and Simon only realized that their travelling companion was Jesus when he broke the bread at supper.
• Mary, Joanna and Mary's angelic message was not all that convincing, nor was Mary Magdalene's proclamation that she had seen the lord!
• Uncertainty is a good thing - it makes faith necessary!
• Maybe we do well to not try and figure out all of the wheres whys and hows of Easter. Let's live with the uncertainty.
• Let's marvel in the experience of feeling that Jesus is a living presence among us.
• Thank God for the mystery and uncertainty of the resurrection.
• Faith is the by-product of this uncertainty.
• When dead things don't stay dead, anything could be possible.
• As Mary was told at the start of Luke's gospel: With God all things are possible.