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Hope in Easter

Luke 24:1-12

Rev. Richard R. Wohlschlaeger

Swarthmore Presbyterian Church

April 4, 2010  Easter Sunday

My mother died three years before my father.  Nearly a year ago I visited their graves when I went home for a high school reunion.  Funny how we can still call a place “home” when we haven’t lived there for fifty years or so.  But if we’ve grown up in one place, that place is to some extent always “home,” isn’t it?  And so when I went home I visited again the graves of my parents and my grandparents.  The members of my maternal family are buried together in one cemetery.

I know what Luke means about not looking for the living among the dead, but gravesites can give us focus nonetheless to pause and remember.  Looking at the dates on the stones, I realized my mother had been dead for six years already and my father three.  The sting of loss can make dates irrelevant, for death seems like only yesterday when someone we have loved deeply and long is no longer with us.  At the same time, dates don’t lie, and we realize how quickly time passes.  How many birthdays and Christmases have gone by since then, though not without our notice, not without our grieving.

But then, as I gazed down at the stones, I began to smile in remembering, for enough time had passed to ease the pain of loss and to recover those things of life – in their lives – that gave the rest of us so much joy.  At a holiday meal sometime in the last year, I remember that as we were cleaning up the dishes one of us remarked with a smile, “Well, Marie was really here today.”  Marie was my mother’s name.  She had been there with us that day as surely as the recipe of hers we had used yet again had satisfied our physical and emotional appetites so keenly sharpened at a holiday meal.  She had been there even in the ways we did things, as naturally as by instinct.  Remembering her imprint on our lives gave us pleasure, deep pleasure, and a sense of hope for times after the holiday as we re-enter the daily routines that give structure to our lives.  Remembering her helped give us hope for our own living.

We have come this day to Easter morning, the day toward which as Christians we have been journeying these past forty days of Lent, seeking hope.  For Easter is about hope.  If there is no hope in Easter, then we are bereft indeed.

Paul lays it squarely on the line for us in his first letter to the Corinthians.  In words that actually predate the writing of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, Paul proclaims what he believes: If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.  One can hardly say it more clearly, or with more risk, than that.

These words of Paul’s come from the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians and follow close on to his own very personal confession of faith.  “Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters,” he says, “of the good news I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you . . . For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scripture, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.  Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.  For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.  But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.”

How Paul speaks to and for all of us!  For each one of us is “who we are,” flawed and incomplete, our own failings known best, if we are honest, to ourselves and, by the grace of God, to God as well.  Yet God in the mercy of forgiveness chooses to reach out to us to call us in life and, beyond life itself, even through death, to renewal of life – to the resurrection life we have come to celebrate this morning.  We have come to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the hope for our own resurrection in the span of time.

Paul faced skeptics all along the way, of course.  He would face his share if he were preaching today.  “But someone will ask,” he recounts – to be sure, from his own experience – “‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’” We can just hear the sarcasm dripping from those words, can’t we? 

But Paul turns to a nature image to explain what can’t really be known.  It’s an apt image for a morning like this – not only Easter morning on our Christian calendar but one of nature’s splendid mornings on anyone’s calendar.  “Fool!” Paul responds.  “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.  And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.  But God gives it a body as [God] has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. . . . So it is with the resurrection of the dead.  What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.  It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.  It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.  If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.”

Not much more than that can we say about these things.  It is what it is.  There is yet no scientific proof; there is only proclamation from the heart through those who have seen and come to believe.  It all started back there at the empty tomb as we hear the Gospel stories, and, for those who insist on the inerrancy of Scripture, then these accounts present a challenge because each Gospel writer tells the story somewhat differently. 

They are consistent in reporting that there were angels in the tomb to meet the women who had come to anoint Jesus’ body, but how many?  Just one?  Or were there two?  And where were they?  At the head and at the foot where Jesus had lain?  Matthew says there was only one angel sitting on the tombstone which he had rolled away after an earthquake had dislodged it.  No one else mentions an earthquake.  That would have been pretty noticeable, I would think.  And why can’t the Gospel writers tell us precisely which women came to the tomb?  Each one carefully identifies different women by name but offers varying numbers in the group.  Why does only John talk about Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Christ who appears at first to be a gardener?  Why all these different details in a story we would want to be rock solid?

I began to understand this apparent confusion better in the moments following my mother’s death.  My brother and I and our wives had been there, as well as some of our children and theirs.  And my dad had been there, too.  Why, then, even in moments following the final breath, did we begin to remember what had happened in different ways?  Because, I came to believe, that as my mother had been the same yet uniquely different person to each of us, so even in her passing each of us remembered certain details more than others.  We began to remember what we wanted especially to hold on to.  My dad’s version differed the most from what I remembered, but I never challenged it.  Not when I realized that he needed to remember his part in his wife’s death in the way he needed to remember it and that in his remembering he yet held the same truth we all did.  That we all had loved this woman deeply and that we would never forget her and that, yes, she would appear to us again and again in her spiritual body, often at our Thanksgiving table which she had so enjoyed serving for the rest of us through all the years we had known her in life.

In these ways, in our own reminiscences, do we not catch a glimpse of the Resurrection that has caused this day to be?  And we are moved to rejoice!  For this day tells us that death is not the last word.  This day tells us that even though life for each of us must end, resurrection transfigures life reached through death.  This is the hope in Easter.

Easter is not simply a recurring day of celebration on the Christian calendar.  Easter is the shattering of the known in order to make way for the real.  And the reality it proclaims is that everything that restricts, diminishes, imprisons, and limits life as God intends it to be is trampled down in victory by the risen Christ.  Christ’s victory challenges everything within us and within the world that resists Christ’s all-embracing freedom.

If Easter were merely a wonderful event that happened a long time ago – the way God used to work but works no longer – then the Resurrection would have little relevance to our lives today.  But today – as in days gone by and in days yet to come – Easter proclaims that in Christ all is made alive.  Whatever “tomb” we are in, wherever we have resigned ourselves to deadliness and have given up hope, Christ can raise us up.  “‘Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee,’” the angel in the empty tomb reminded the faithful women who had come to minister to the body, “‘that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’  Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to the rest.” 

And that’s how it all began.  That’s why we’re here today.  To remember and to hope.  Through this proclamation and with this power of the risen Christ, we, too, come alive in hope.  Amen.