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DEATH, BE GONE!
(A sermon preached April 8, 2007, Easter Sunday, at University United Methodist
Church, East Lansing by John Ross Thompson)
Scripture texts: 1 Corinthians 10:19-26, John 20: 1-18 (Mary Magdalene at the
tomb)
These are the words of a Biblical commentator about Easter:
“Chances are that your world is experiencing…an awakening earth after
months of winter slumber. Grass is turning green, azaleas are splashing the
landscape with brilliant reds, dogwoods are sprouting pink and white blooms….”
NOT!
The writer’s point is that if all this were happening, it would be perfectly
natural. However, what happened on that first Easter was not natural.
I believe there is something helpful to us about snow on Easter. There is a
lesson for all of us.
Garrison Keillor has said that weather like this in early spring is the closest
people who
don’t drink come to knowing what a hangover is like.
We know spring is coming. We know there is new life, but something tells us,
“Not yet!”
The promise is that new life is coming, and it is for all who claim it through
Christ.
The God who created us promises us that death is not the end. There is something
more, and it is good. We don’t understand how it can be, but we know it.
John Donne is known for these words: “Death, be not proud, though some have
called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.”
Our 1 Corinthians text for today says: “The last enemy to be destroyed is
death.”
How odd that on the day of new life we discuss death more than any other
time other than a funeral. As I look around this morning, more than nine months
after Kennetha and I became your pastors, I see many of you whose losses and
difficult times I know. I realize that I only know a small portion of the needs
that you have. Today is a day of assurance for all of us.
We have the assurance of what is. Yet, there is also the wonderful mystery of
the “not yet”.
For Brazilian theologian Ivone Gebara, the empty tomb itself is the key to both
our understanding the resurrection and to living the resurrection in our own
lives. In an essay, she writes that the empty tomb "returns us to the manger,
the place of the child, the place of the rebirth of hope. The empty tomb returns
us to ourselves, women and men capable of giving birth and rebirth to the
divine, the essence of our own flesh." As mystery, the only way we can hope
to "get" the resurrection is to live it. The empty tomb is thus not
an ending, but a beginning, an invitation to each of us to birth and rebirth the
divine in the confines of our own lives.
Like the early disciples, who were focused on the resurrection of Christ’s body
and failed to stick around to see the risen Christ, we, too, can miss the
greatest story of all – we have a God who is alive and with us. Mary Magdalene
is an example of someone who didn’t understand, but stuck around because she
cared so much. The other disciples saw, at least one of them believed, but they
stayed inside behind locked doors for fear, instead of celebrating the great
news.
Many people today continue to make the mistake of searching for the Jesus of
2,000 years ago and failing to see the risen Christ among us now. Jesus did not
tell Mary Magdalene to tell the others he was risen. He told her to tell them
that he was going to God. In other words, he is alive for all time.
A word to the skeptics among us, and there is some of that in most of us. We
just don’t understand how this could be, and therefore like Thomas we want to
see for ourselves. Yet, if we look for solid physical proof, we miss the whole
point. An alive God is within us, not beside us. An alive God promises us new
life forever, not just in this moment.
Even when we can’t explain it fully, resurrection is a mystery that draws us to
it. It’s a promise that is yet to be fully revealed.
What everyone accepts as truth is that something happened that so changed a
group of people, that the greatest movement that ever existed on earth –
Christianity – was born. Those changed lives are evidence to us of a God who is
alive and active. That’s the good news!
Laurie Haller, a ministerial colleague of us, said it this way: “We don’t
understand. Yet we know deep in our hearts that Christ is risen and that the
greatest mystery of all is: love wins. Love always wins.”
Evelyn Underhill wrote: "No soul of any sensitiveness can live through Holy Week
without an awed and grateful sense of being incorporated into a mystery of
self-giving love which yet remains far beyond our span."
Go ahead and celebrate spring when it comes back to us with warmer days. But,
remember you can celebrate new life no matter what the weather, no matter what
the circumstances are in your life, no matter what…..
Michaela Bruzzese said, “We, too, have been set free, free from death in all its
forms—fear, despair, apathy. We cannot linger in the graveyards of hopelessness
and resignation. We must seek the living Christ where he is to be found—walking
with us, in our midst, as we continue to build the kingdom as he did—among those
excluded. The truth of the resurrection, astounding and incomprehensible as it
is, forms the very crux of our faith—that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and
Christ will come again! This ending of our 40-day journey is just the beginning
of our 2,000-year struggle to live more fully our heritage as a resurrection
people.”
Jesus wants us to live, and to tell others there is life, abundant life.
Death has lost its sting. We can live, and live abundantly.
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