"Plotting the Resurrection" - Easter 2022

 

Saint Luke 24:1-12

Growing up, one of my favorite writers was E.B. White who you probably know best for his two most famous children’s books, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.  He also wrote numerous short stories for The New Yorker where White’s wife, Katharine, was the fiction editor.  She was also an avid gardener writing about the subject at length for the magazine.  Her love of language and gardening was such a perfect marriage that, after her death, her husband E.B. collected her most memorable essays into a book called: Onward and Upward in the Garden.

In the forward to that book White wrote about his wife’s final days in a poignant, loving, and memorable way as every fall she would get into a “shabby old raincoat much too long for her, put on put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes and proceed to [a] director’s chair [where] she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while [her assistant] produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment.”

As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion – the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.1

Some of us have been plotting this Resurrection celebration for over two years as congregations waited to gather together maskless to sing “Christ is Risen, Alleluia!” or “Thine is the Glory '' once again at the top of our lungs. 

 
In 2020 when we were forced by the pandemic to close our doors, I read White’s essay to the wonderful people at Our Savior in Aurora where I was the interim pastor and promised that we would “plot the Resurrection” together and celebrate it the first chance we had.  In the year that followed things got better, then worse, then better, but we never had the opportunity to hatch our plot and hire trumpets, decorate with lilies, have brunch, and raise our voices together in the jubilation that Easter brings even if we had to move the feast to August’s hottest day.  Our resurrection plot never materialized and our attempts at replacement were thin gruel indeed.

I watched the video of Easter in the midst Covid that we produced and if a celebration of Easter could be deadly this one was.  

We prerecorded all of our online worship offerings with all of the music for Holy Week and Easter being taped in one session while I returned later in the week for the sermon and prayers.   This meant that I was absolutely alone in the sanctuary when I boomed out “Christ is risen!” and could only hear my own voice fading out as it echoed through the rafters.  Instead of being surrounded by the faithful when the paschal candle was lit, and the Easter proclamation was read it was just me in an empty church.  I preached not to a room filled with people who “got dolled up and dropped by” but to two video cameras.

I would invite you to find it on our YouTube channel but don’t even bother because, as I said, it was deadly dull.  The plot of the resurrection requires people present who not only follow along in the story but react like they were hearing it for the very first time.

Saint Luke’s account begins at dawn.  Or, as Saint John would later add as if for emphasis, “while it was still dark.”  

We know what they are talking about.  When a struggle we are going through wakes us up in the predawn darkness and we have to decide whether it is too late to try to go back to sleep or too early to make coffee.  We may just lay awake and ruminate over anything and everything that we are struggling with in our lives.  In those predawn dark moments, all we can do is toss, turn, and maybe pray but plotting a resurrection is the furthest thing from our minds.

For the woman this struggle was titanic in nature and resurrection was not in the plot line of their story.
 The one they had pinned all of their hopes on was not just dead of natural causes in the fullness of time but had been killed for threatening those who would cling to power at any cost with, of all things, a message of love, peace and acceptance.  The threats to this message in our day may still awaken us in the middle of the night and cause us to worry that if Christ’s message isn’t dead, it may be on life support.

We can tell the direction the plot is moving by simply looking at what the women are carrying in their hands.  They were expecting only to find Jesus' body and so they brought spices to do what was good, and right, and proper for a corpse.  It was a part of their devotion to Jesus.  

The women were dutifully serving Jesus in the best way they knew. They had prepared spices to anoint his body and had gone to the tomb early to finish the burial, only to be met with the challenge, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"2

That’s a very good question that contains the sudden plot twist.

The women were expecting to find their friend as dead as he was Friday night when, as Saint Matthew remembered it, Joseph of Arimathea, “took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away.”3

That’s the way it is supposed to end, isn’t it?  That is the way it ends for us.  The body is lowered; the vault lid comes down with a soft thud that indicates it is sealed; some flowers are thrown; we go off to brunch and then we go home to stare at the ceiling and wonder what life will be like without the one we loved.

Even in our day some go back to the cemetery to see that everything is in order.  If we go back at all it might be only to plant some flowers, but we don’t expect anything out of the ordinary.  Our loved one is always (Not usually but always!)  right where we left them.

I spent my high school and college years working in a funeral home and, while this should come as no surprise to you, all of our bodies stayed right where we left them. We didn’t come in one morning and find that the one we placed in chapel A was in chapel B.  They didn’t change places in the middle of the night just to play with our minds.  No, if there was one thing we could count on it was the plot was always the same and no one who had breathed their last moved unless another member of the staff moved them.

That is what Mary thought in John’s gospel when she encounters but does not recognize the risen Lord.  She thinks somebody moved Jesus and mistakes Him for the gardener, confronting  him:  “Sir, if you took him, tell me where you put him so I can care for him.”4

The resurrection plot is twisting in ways that have never been seen before and have never been seen since.  It’s not the Chemlawn man, it’s Jesus!  Jesus isn’t in the tomb but two men in dazzling white clothes, light cascading over them, are with that question and this reminder:   “He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee:  ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ”  Then they remembered his words.”5

But sometimes resurrection plot twists are hard to believe.  

At first the male disciples didn't get it probably because the messengers were women!  What they saw, the men who up until now had been cowering under the covers, or discussing matters over coffee, was determined by this do-nothing, know-it-alls, as in various translations: nonsense; a fairy-tale,  a product of the women’s sheer imagination.  

Even when Peter decided to go and have a look for himself all he did was bend down; looked in and “saw only the cloth that Jesus’ body had been wrapped in. Peter went away to his home, wondering about what had happened.”6  There is no sense of amazement as the translation we read today would have us believe but only as Dr.  Eugene Peterson, paraphrased it in The Message.  “He walked away puzzled, shaking his head.”7

This resurrection cannot be plotted on a clipboard or understood easily.  It is a puzzling turn of events that has turned the world upside down.

Recently I heard a podcast that featured Dr. Amy-Jill Levine who holds the very unique position of being both the Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School.  She was asked by a United Methodist Pastor, Dr.  James Howell, what she believed about the resurrection, and she said: “It isn’t about whether you can catch it on a camera, but can you see what the payoff is?  I think the followers of Jesus generally experienced him as being alive and it changed their lives.

Look,” she went on, “I’ve seen Elvis twice on West End Avenue pumping gas, but it didn’t change my life.  The people who saw Jesus [the resurrected Christ] it changed their lives.”6

That’s where the Resurrection plot comes home for us.  Does what we do on this day or what we proclaim to be true on this day change our lives?  Will it make any difference for us tomorrow, or the next day, or the next?  Will it inform and inspire our lives to somehow make them better or more in tune with God’s will and ways.

Believing in the resurrection will sometimes make us look as foolish as the woman whose life is ebbing away but is still picking out bulbs and charting their perfect placement in her garden knowing that her winter is coming, and she might never see them bloom.  But still, she plots the resurrection and so must we.

The plot turns on our ability to hope again, to believe again, to rely again on the goodness and power of God.

A belief in this kind of power is hard to hold onto at a time when, on an unbelievable scale, we see the horrors of war played out our television screens.  The power of God may be hard to see in a nation as politically divided as ours – red against blue and blue against red – in battles sometimes as deadly as those of the Civil War when it was blue against grey.  Liberals and conservatives, black and white, gay and straight, all taking sides.  It is hard to see the Resurrection’s plot in all this but still it is there.

We could have seen it in the Pope’s decision (though not without some blow-back) of having a Ukrainian woman and a Russian woman, “who work together at a Rome hospital and are friends, to carry the cross during part of the [Good Friday] procession, which recalls Jesus’ suffering as he was being brought to his crucifixion and death.”9

While those entrenched in the ways of war were outraged, an onlooker caught the symbolism perfectly when she called it “very moving and meaningful symbol.” She added, “I think that real people in the real world are concerned about peace. We want peace, we don’t want war.”  She understood the plot of the resurrection and saw it in two friends carrying the cross together.

In more concrete terms columnist, David French, saw the plot of the Resurrection being advanced in the church.

When great evil arises, great good answers. Yes, it’s represented by individual Christian Ukrainian soldiers laying down their lives in defense of their nation and their homes, but it’s also represented by a very different kind of institutional Christian response.
I’m thinking, for example, of the report that the average Baptist World Alliance Church in Ukraine is “feeding and sheltering 100 people.” I’m thinking of Samaritan’s Purse setting up an emergency field hospital outside of Lviv, Ukraine.10

Perhaps you caught a glimpse of Resurrections’ plot in a young man named Mark who, amidst the rubble of a bombed out building, decided to play his guitar.  It reminded me of what President Zalinsky said to the audience at the Grammys

“Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos, they sing to the wounded in hospitals. Even to those who can’t hear them, but the music will break through anyway,” he continued. “We defend our freedom to live, to love, to sound. On our land, we are fighting Russia, which brings horrible silence with its bombs. The dead silence.” 

He concluded: “Fill the silence with your music! Fill it today, to tell our story. Tell the truth about this war ... Support us in any way you can. Any way — but not silence. And then peace will come.”11

Until peace comes, we can fill the silence in some small way today with our music as we play our tiny part in plotting the Resurrection by proclaiming that Christ’s message of love, peace and acceptance has not died out – it isn’t even on life support.  It is alive!

So, let’s fill the silence with our music as we sing of Christ who rose and conquered the powers of death for us and all humankind.  

Thine is the glory, risen and conquering son.

________________

1. White Katharine Sergeant Angell and E. B. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, Giroux , 1997).  p.  iii. 

2. R. Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter's Bible Commentary (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2015), 272.

3. St.  Matthew 27:59-60.  (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]

4. St.  John 20:15.  (MSG) [Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The New Testament Psalms and Proverbs (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1998).

5. St.  Luke 24:6-7.  (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]

6. St.  Luke 24:12.  (NCV) [NCV=The New Century Version]

7. St.  Luke 24:12.  (MSG) 

8. Drs. Amy-Jill Levine and James D.  Howell, “Jesus And...Holy Week,” Myers Park United Methodist Church Weekly Bible Study webcast (Charlotte, North Carolina, April 6, 2022).

9. Francis De'Milio, “Ukraine War Weighs Heavy on Pope’s Good Friday Ritual,” The Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2022, sec. 2, p. 2.

10. David French, “The Best of Christian Compassion, the Worst of Religious Power,” The French Press (The Dispatch, March 13, 2022), https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-best-of-christian-compassion?s=r

11. Emily Yahr, “Zelensky Makes Surprise Grammys Appearance to Urge Support for Ukraine,” The Washington Post (WP Company, April 4, 2022), https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/04/03/zelensky-grammy-awards-appearance/.

Sermon preached at Trinity Lutheran Church 

Foster Avenue 

17 April 2022