An Audacious Faith

“An Audacious Faith”
Easter + Luke 24:1-12 + 4 April 2010
Joy Community Presbyterian Church
D. Ross-Jones

Christ is risen! Christ is in our midst! Therefore, let us keep the faith. Alleluia!

Risen God, you set all things in motion and through you all things have come into being. Stir up in us now a faith in you who makes all things forever new. I pray now that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts here in this place be acceptable in thy sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I don’t know about any of you: but when I think about Easter, I usually think “chaos.” For my family, Christmas is our annual reunion – because folks can more easily get a block of time off work and school, those of us who have trekked to far-off places like Chicago, Texas, or North Carolina are able to make the trip back to Northern Minnesota and catch up. We celebrate with all the accoutrements of family gatherings at Christmastime: dinner, church, presents, political arguments, answering for the umteenth time why I didn’t bring a “special friend” home with me, the same old stories about childhood that are never flattering…

For us, Easter doesn’t mean a centralized celebration. I usually stay in Chicago, my cousins in Texas and North Carolina, even those who live in the Twin Cities area usually don’t take the four-hour drive past Duluth. But that doesn’t mean it is any less chaotic. The group of my closest friends and I who live in and around the region but find our roots outside Chicagoland usually get together for Easter and have dinner. Since we’re not blood-related, the chaos manifests itself in a different fashion. Instead of getting annoyed at questions of why us young, urban professional and academic types born after 1980 don’t really prioritize marriage by 25 as many of our parents and grandparents do, we get annoyed that someone would have the audacity to bring chicken to Easter dinner as their tradition. We don’t enjoy the more comfortable, spacious feeling of formal single-family living, but get close in every sense of the word in studio apartments and roommate group living environs.

I know that I wouldn’t trade that chaos for anything else in the world come this time of year.

That sense of chaos, confusion, mixed feelings, disconnect are all appropriate for Easter, perhaps moreso than on any other day of the year. Our purpose for gathering today is to celebrate the mighty power of our God – a powerfulness that surpasses even the human understanding of ending and death.

At that obvious, but somewhat strange, point is where we begin. Jesus is dead. We saw it this week. On Friday, we contemplated our own involvement in Christ’s crucifixion. The worship space was as dark as the tomb in which Jesus was laid. On Saturday, if anyone had the opportunity – as I did – to participate in an Easter Vigil, we kept watch over the tomb. No one went in over our vigil, and we didn’t need to worry about anyone coming out; after all, dead people don’t walk.

Early in the morning, the women came prepared with spices and oils to anoint the body, as was the cultural tradition of Jesus’ time. The women were showing proper respect for the dead. Flesh decomposes very quickly in hot climates, certainly in the constant heat of Jerusalem. It was a matter of respect and good deeds – a mitzvah – to cover up the biological smell that comes with decomposition; as the deceased are unable to repay the gesture, it becomes a genuine, pure gift.

When the women arrive at the tomb and find Jesus’ body missing, however, there is not celebration but instead confusion. Who took the body, to where, and why? If it was disrespectful to allow the odors of a dead body to permeate the area, then how much more disrespectful was it to move a dead person?

Again: bodies that are dead remain dead. This is basic knowledge of the human condition. One is born and at some point in the future they die. To say death and taxes are the only certainties in life is not quite accurate: with enough effort, maneuvering and creative accounting, one can still avoid taxes. There is no way to avoid death. It is certain, it is final, as Jesus cried out from the cross, “it is finished.”

It is common and especially easy on this side of history to turn the women’s confusion into a teachable moment. The story tells us Jesus rose from the dead; his body wasn’t stolen or moved, he is simply out stretching his legs after a trying three days. But how much more are we like the women in our own faith practice? We diminish the miracle in our certainties of religious tradition. Jesus was an insightful teacher, after all, and a fiery prophet to boot. But like all of us, he died. The best we can do is to enshrine his memory and give him the proper respect of praising his legacy. We are like the women, and we think this is enough.

The women are met with angelic visitors, which of itself is spectacular, but that is not the point: the women are told that Jesus is risen, without the benefit of proof. That is exactly where we find ourselves today.

Wouldn’t it be easier if God had allowed the women to meet the resurrected Christ walking out of the tomb? If God, in God’s all-powerfulness, were able to ruffle up the energy to send heavenly messengers, couldn’t God just as well have cut out the middlemen and just put Jesus back in his proper place? Beyond being proof, surely this is at least testament that God doesn’t have an MBA; it’s just simply inefficient.

But no. The women are told, “Why do you look for the living among the dead… remember how he told you…?” They are given a message of resurrection that flies in the face of everything they know and understand to be true. Just as bizarre as if someone were to walk in here and tell each of us we had the ability to jump and hover in the air without falling back to the ground, returning to life from death is impossible.
That unbelief is logical. Death wins – that is our experience, our human observation. Even before science became a discipline, it was the only scientific fact. We know this, but we also know we have been told that Jesus lives. In the absence of observable proof, it is entirely understandable – logical, even – that we would continue to believe what we have observed.

When the women delivered this living message back to the Apostles and their friends, they responded as any of the rest of us would: “an idle table, and they did not believe them.” I never had a chance to really know my grandfather as he passed on when I was only seven and lived in convalescent care for almost the last year of his life. I have heard stories from my family, and deeply wish that I had been able to know him. But sure as I am standing, if my mom were to come interrupt this service, telling me grandpa was alive and waiting for me to fly home… well, let’s just say I’d just wait for her to pay the airfare.

Unbelief is not indication of a lack of faith, but quite the contrary. It simply means they believe something else. “You’re kidding,” or “I don’t believe it” are common responses in this situation, because people believe something else more strongly. The Apostles are not saying they don’t believe in those tangible aspects of Jesus’ ministry – the healings, insight, teaching, passion, prophesy – they’re just saying that they believe their experience of death as being “game over” more than this audacious claim to the contrary.

That audacity is where our faith begins, and where this story starts to get real. It challenges our understanding, our concepts, our models. It challenges all that we know to be true. It forces us to accept on faith – true, genuine faith; not out of the comforts of certainty and truth, but the impossible, uncertain uncomfortability of faith – that in Christ, life gets the last word. Easter is death being Punk’d by God. All that’s left is for Ashton Kutcher to announce it as such.

The Easter message calls us to move from our old belief – our old understanding – of death, into a new paradigm of life. The tomb could not hold Jesus, the stone that was ordered to seal the entrance to prevent others from getting in failed to prevent the occupant from getting out.

We respond with a tentative curiosity. At the end of the passage, Peter is not like the others. He wants some proof for himself and he’s not willing to wait for it to arrive. He gets up and rushes to the tomb to see what is there, and discovers the women were correct in their summation. Jesus is nowhere to be found; the burial linens were sitting by themselves, as if in some storage closet. Peter is amazed at what he sees, and by experience is now able to begin processing what has happened.

The Apostles accepted the message as nonsense, but the audacity of it was enough for Peter to venture down the path and to entertain the claim. What if it is true? What if death has been conquered by life? What if Jesus is no longer in the tomb? How does this change the game of life? How does this challenge my own understanding? If this is true, how much more of Jesus’ teachings and ministry is true?

Have I accepted it? Have I challenged it? I don’t know if these were the questions that raced through Peter’s head as he went to the tomb to test what he had just heard, but I know these are questions I bring to the empty tomb this morning. We gather here in the spirit of Peter, hearing the rumor that Jesus is alive, but questioning its reality until there is more proof. We gather in the space of the empty tomb, the space of a new creation and a new life.

The Easter story continues beyond Peter’s amazement into our own, and the amazement of the Christian faithful throughout the ages and places of creation. God continues to challenge the certainty of death; we can tell God that it is outrageous to expect anyone to believe in a risen Christ. We can tell God that death simply gets the final word. None of this is news to God – its all be heard before. But as human experience refuses to accept life trumps death, so too does God accept death trumps life. “Why do you seek the living among the dead,” God wonders. Through the living Christ, I give you the gift of new life. Why would you accept anything less?

In the liturgy of communion, there is a point at which we proclaim the utter audacity of our faith, the claim we celebrate today, the claim which holds us in cosmic tension and keeps us rooted in faith:

Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again.

Therefore, let us keep the faith.

Soli Deo Gloria: to God alone be glory. Alleluia and amen.