Easter Sunday Sermon 2023: Tag, You’re It

Matthew 28:1-10

“After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, “He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.” This is my message for you.’ So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’ And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.’”

You can watch the sermon live here (scriptural differences will happen):

https://youtu.be/cgvgJRrj5SQ?t=2017

Also… no I didn’t fix all the grammar and stuff… you’ll survive. 🙂

When we were in college, Caroline and I met in the second semester of our senior year  – and that’s a good thing.  Not that we met… that was a great thing.  But it was good that we didn’t meet until so late in college on two accounts… Caroline is pretty sure if she had known me any longer in college she would have dumped me like the rebound relationship I am…. But the other is on my side.  You see, Caroline had transferred to William and Mary and didn’t live in student housing. She lived in an apartment right on colonial Williamsburg, and in the second story relevant to this moment because her apartment was right across the street from the Williamsburg Baskin-Robbins, and it’s dangerous to find yourself daily next to 31 flavors of Satan-approved “wilderness temptation” ice cream.

Just as Baskin Robbins offers you their 31 flavors of ice cream when we get to the gospel of Jesus Christ we are we have four flavors of the gospel Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell the same story, but with decidedly different flavors, and almost nowhere is that more true than at the beginnings and ends of the story.  Each of the resurrection accounts gives us vastly different feelings and flavors to their recounting:

Mark’s gospel is unrefined and rushed… a first draft that never got to the editors and he leaves us with largely darkness, questioning an unresolved resurrection.  There is no resurrected Jesus experience… the tomb is empty, but the disciples do not feel the strength of the proclamation of resurrection rather they run away afraid and tell no one what they heard.

Luke is the way Luke is – a recorder of all sorts of details, and as Luke continues to tell the story in the Book of Acts, it is not surprising that Luke gives us not just the resurrection account, but the road to Emmaus and the ongoing fallout of the confident assertion that resurrection has indeed taken place.

John’s Gospel is a favorite of our high and holy weeks – John’s gospel is the story is the pinnacle of refinement – there was plenty of time for the theologians to get ahold of the story and fill it out, John’s Gospel gives us much of the story as we remember it 

Matthew’s gospel sits in a little different place than those: not quite Mark’s bare bones fear and trembling but not quite Luke’s on-going resuscitation of the day or John’s full retrospective written many many years later.  And Matthew injects a new element to this story, Matthew’s Gospel brings us apocalypse.

I’m sure you felt it in the recounting of Jesus’ death which on Friday caused the world to tremble in Matthew’s gospel. We are reminded that the earth helped to create in Genesis that it was the earth herself that brought forth beasts at God‘s commands just as the seas brought forth the fish And we are reminded of the ongoing story in Genesis when God tells Cain that the Earth cries up out to him of Able’s death blood.  The world is alive and a living agent of creation, not just something we tread upon, and so it seems the world itself cannot contain the grief of Jesus’ death, the temple veil torn in two, earthquakes, the dead rising and walking – the living appearing to be dead. 

By any measure of the word, scriptural, or Hollywood, this is apocalyptic.

And the apocalypse doesn’t end with Jesus’ death, but it continues with Jesus rising – this is no subtle and questionable empty tomb but overturning of the rules of life and death.  The stone is not simply rolled away, but an earthquake itself has happened. Striking like lightning, no one could miss this breathtaking and awe-inspiring invasion of Earth by Heaven.   

But we don’t get time to sit back and take it in.  Matthew’s Gospel apocalyptic also has a sense of urgency. A sense that this string of dominos is running downhill fast now… Jesus has work to do… place to go and people to see… and so do we.

Do not be afraid, the angel says – fear is the tool of death and this is about life… so don’t let me scare you, I know that you were looking for Jesus – the crucified one.  He is not here, you’re too late – he’s on the road for he has been raised.  Go quickly. Tell his disciples he’s been raised from the dead, and indeed, is going ahead of you to Galilee – there you will see him.

They run and then suddenly Jesus meets them on the road and they worshiped him, but Jesus doesn’t have time to be worshiped. It seems the resurrection is not a spectator sport. Jesus repeats: do not be afraid.  Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee for there you will see me

Tag You’re it!  The game is afoot and this game proceeds at a quick pace: Jesus is on the loose.  Life is on the loose. I have to imagine that if I was there, I would be gasping for breath, gasping, grasping, grabbing for a firm rock to hold myself up while I try to imagine what I am perceiving.

I would ask Jesus for a time-out!  Like a basketball coach when another team is on the 12-0 run and you feel it all slipping out of your fingers. It has slipped out of their fingers this last holy week, and now when – despairing as it is – they finally know what is what because the dead are dead – even that is no longer true.  I have to imagine that this was a day they thought would proceed slowly… full of grief they would get to the tomb they would begin to do the burial preparations, the right way, the way they were unable to because the sabbath had begun upon his death on Friday night. They thought today would be excruciating. They thought it would be excruciatingly slow, and all of the sudden they are like shot out of a cannon: Jesus isn’t in the tomb, what’s going on… Jesus is alive. What are you talking about? Jesus is on the road. You’ve got to go catch up to him. Stop! Wait! Hold on on moment.  I’m still back in the tomb trying to figure this out.

Mathew’s story is apocalyptic and urgent: tag you’re it – it’s time for you to get on board.

Worshiping authentically through the Easter story is challenging.  We don’t really want to do the work of suspending what we know to allow ourselves to feel what we are covering up.  We have worshipped through this Holy Week in a challenging rehearsal of this ancient story – but culturally we mostly just show up for Easter and skip the unraveling betrayal, desertion, and death. 

We knew the tomb was empty. It always has been empty in our entire lifetime. There is no Jesus on our cross we already knew that… Jesus won a victory over death and we have lived our whole lives in the light of that truth.  What’s to get on board with Andrew?  This is an old old story. In all it’s routineness nothing here is apocalyptic or urgent.  Not in the least.

Perhaps we need a little bit of Mathew, a little bit of break us out of domesticating this story, because if we are being honest with ourselves, our lives cannot be saved by a domesticated God!  We need God to break out of the chains of our comfort and safety and do some world-overturning healing of the fabric of creation.

For all want for an easy and comfortable and tame – we need more – the world needs more.

We may not think we have time and energy for anything more than being a spectator but we are more deeply mired in the quagmire of life and death than any quaint resuscitation of empty tombs can handle.  This is a bigger mess than the can be cleaned up by any domestic gods.  We descended into Maundy Thursday… we descended further into Good Friday. We descended not because of the atypicalness of those stories, but because of the deep and abiding relevance and prevalence of that kind of distrust and betrayal fracturing our lives, the regularity in which we encounter hatred and enmity which is running amok in God’s world, our world.

On Good Friday, my colleague TJ from Southminster stood there and preached and reminded us that unfortunately, Jesus death was not once and for all, but it is daily and regularly occurring over and again in the populations and people in our world.  People are being crucified wherever they are being targeted by hate, wherever they are being abandoned by the protections of our society, and wherever we are ostracizing those who do not fit our normative understandings of good and righteous.  Wherever these acts are occurring Christ is being crucified again such is the solidarity Christ’s love demonstrates and lives with the oppressed.  We descended into Maundy Thursday and we were leaves on the wind unsure of what was going on. We no longer knew anything.   I don’t know about you, but every time I read the news, I am aware of how little my knowledge matters anymore. How did we get here?  COVID exacerbated fracturing of our social contract as left us in disarray unable to trust the simplest things we always knew.  How do we find restoration in our lives? We are adrift nowhere near the shore, holding the rope in our hands, wondering how we got here.

The biblical story of Holy Week speaks to this reality… to just such a place of despair. The story speaks to people being too tired to give time and energy anymore… to distrustful to invest in the future… to unsure they can believe anything or anyone.  Fear rules.  Do not be afraid. 

The story speaks about the dangers of love.

When I think about many of the tombs I see people in today: I see kids fearing another school shooting… I see doctors fearing the practice of medicine made illegal… women feelings unvalued and unrecognized… I see unhoused neighbors demonized as drug addicts and criminals… and hungry children with too few places willing to get them a meal of nourishing food beyond the initial first moment… I see teenage identity crises become harder and harder.  I see the targeting of minorities made legitimate – antisemitism, transgender fear-mongering, refugees unwelcome, police being made the villains, name-calling across the aisles of our government, the tearing apart of social fabrics such that what we cannot know much and what we don’t?  We have no trust for… and fear reigns… Do not be afraid. 

But love is dangerous in this game.  Because frankly… most of those tombs don’t have to matter to me.  I’m highly educated… have a position of authority and trust… I bought my house when the market was begging for me to do so… and I’m a white male with a supermom wife and four pretty awesome kids… well… most days on that one.   

You see most of the list in that isn’t really a problem for me – at most one or two of them… and so… they don’t have to be my problem… because I don’t have to care.  I ended up in a lifeboat… and mine has no holes.  Maybe that wasn’t true for others… maybe it wasn’t true for most – but that doesn’t have to be my problem… does it? 

There are large gaping holes in our society – tombs placing people in an early grave… and we splintered into affinity groups create less by what we value and more by what we despise.  We are not pursuing value-based ethics but are people on the attack.  It is into this state of affairs that Niccolo Machiavelli’s seminal and jaded ends justify the means book The Prince opines: 

“It is much safer to be feared than loved because … love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of human, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”

You see… Machiavelli is a brilliant man – and he understands the game afoot… he is simply playing for the other team.  Love is dangerous because caring is a burden most of us wish not to pick up: I just don’t have the bandwidth, I don’t have the time, and I can’t make a difference in this world anyway – so why try.  This week confronts that narrative and turns it on its head.

Soren Kierkegaard tells a parable that goes something:  like this if you were to hand someone a sharp and needed instrument, you would not do so in the same way you handed over a bouquet of flowers, all nonchalantly presenting it with flourish upon your beloved.  No, you would hand it to them in a way that conveyed both your sense of recommendation of the excellence of this instrument, but also the foreboding sense that it is dangerous, and must be handled with care and caution.  in precisely the same way Kierkegaard imagines this is how it is with Christianity. We should hand it over to each other in a way that says both: this is simple and wonderful and joyous and the world needs it. Also, it’s dangerous: handle it with care or maybe run the other way.

There is no greater sense to what that instrument is than the cross we stare at on every single Sunday.  The cross, which was for Rome an instrument of humiliation, excruciating pain, and death.  The cross, which became for Christ, the symbol of love we are to pick up daily. Christ tells his disciples if you want to follow me you have to carry the cross – that two-edged instrument of life and death.  Love is a many splendid thing, but it’s dangerous for I will teach you to care so much you will give your life for the world as I have done. The cross weighs heavy, to love the world so deeply is heartbreaking. Heart-rending.  To love the world so deeply is maddening and vain… to reveal oneself so fully is a cause of fear and trembling, such vulnerability is too much to ask.  We hide behind locked doors, we hide behind tinted windows, we hide behind increasingly expensive and elaborate clothing to wall ourselves off from vulnerability. Christ’s love invites us to identify so unreservedly with the poor and the outcast to identify so completely with the marginalized and oppressed… it is to throw your life away!

That’s the message of Friday – the consequence of unconditional love and unrelenting care for justice and equality… is loneliness and death. 

But we get it back.

All of it back.

And that is the message of today.

Today’s message is that for all that it feels futile and despairing. The tombs of this world will be harrowed by God’s abundant life, the message of this day is that we will take places of death and make them trampolines of life and love is the way we do this. The message of this day is that there is work to do: turning the world upside down. Making ourselves earthquakes to the unjust status quo.  We should not have come today bearing lilies and our Sunday best… but shovels – to unearth and empty all the tombs.  And we are just getting started. It’s an all-hands-on-deck event

Tag,  you’re it.  Love, this Sunday tells us, is the instrument we all need and yes it will be scary (Do not be afraid) and yes, it will feel like throwing away our life (you will get back all that really matters) and yes you will never sleep well again for lack of worry (but you also won’t be alone)  that there is just so much to do, and yet it’s like awakening from a monochromatic world into a rainbow splendor of God’s creation!  And it is rooting ourselves so deeply in parts of our life that we have not allowed to live until today – we can feel the tingling in our bones – can you?  Its like parts of our body coming awake because we haven’t allowed ourselves to truly live..  This day is about turning graves into neonatal wards, being born again like Nicodemus, born again to a desire to make life sing with potential for everyone, it’s to go on a grand adventure, chasing after Jesus down the roads of Galilee carrying a shovel to dig people out from the graves in which they, we, are mired along the way, knowing that if you are the next one to get stuck, there are others caught up in the same kind of loves as you traveling the same road playing the same game of tag: We can all care.. ALL.  Machiavelli may be right – its safer to make people fear you than love you… but Jesus’ way is the only way to a world worth living in – being truly alive and risking it all for the possibility of a place rooted in trust and love.  Jesus tells us safety was never the point, it is more deeply meaningful to live life together to invest in the well-being of all creation.

This is what lets God sit back on the sixth day and say it is very good. It’s also what makes God bang their head against the wall in frustrated hope… but God never stops hoping… and God never stops living… and God never stops rescuing those entombed. 

Jesus invites us on a journey of freeing creation from the grasp of safety and fear and domestication… to let it be wild and woolly; alive and free. I came across a great reflection from novelist Dean Koontz, talking about golden retrievers,

Golden retrievers are not bred to be guard dogs, and considering the size of their hearts and their irrepressible joy in life, they are less likely to bite than to bark, less likely to bark than to lick a hand in greeting. In spite of their size, they think they are lap dogs, and in spite of being dogs, they think they are also human, and nearly every human they meet is judged to have the potential to be a boon companion who might, at any moment, cry, “Let’s go!” and lead them on a great adventure.!

Friends may we be like golden retrievers on this day… may we pick up our cross infused with love and care and follow Jesus on a grand adventure, risking a reckless love that cares for everyone and yearning to see the world free at last to pursue our dreams together in irrepressible joy in the little things and the big things and the turned upside downness of the world in which we are not afraid… and we are not seeking safety… and we loving the world into a new day. 

May we be cataclysmically caught up in the abundant life of Easter and resurrection, that no one will not take notice something weird is going on with us and maybe pausing to say: I want a little bit of that too!

 May we see in everyone we meet not an adversary to be contested,

but a boon companion, who might at any moment cry let’s go!

Tag, you’re it.

Amen