"Jesus Is On the Loose" - Easter 2A

 

Saint John 20:19–31

Prayer

Alpha and Omega, our beginning and our end, you break through the locks of gated communities that harden hearts; accept our doubts, heal our desire for certainty and, by your Sprit’s gentle touch make us a people faithful and forgiving; through Jesus Christ, the Giver of Peace.  Amen.1

Dr. Scott Black Johnson is a majestic preacher and the Senior Minister of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York city.

Last year he told the story about his seminary roommate who at some entirely random point on Easter calls him up and without pleasantry or introduction announces: “Jesus is on the loose!” and then hangs up.  It’s his quirky way of saying “Christ is risen!” 

Dr. Black-Johnson continued: “Over the years other friends have joined in the tradition.  Now I get all sorts of texts and emails declaring that ‘Jesus is on the loose.’”

Then he turned to his congregation last Sunday and said: “Some of you, even in the middle of the night texted me and emailed me.  Please,” he begged, “I need my Easter sleep and my phone is buzzing ‘Jesus is on the loose.’”2

I was going to tell this story and make these observations last week, but we had company and my family always told me that when we had guests everybody was to be on their best behaviour.  So I saved it for this week when it is just us.

It comes from my years of working in a funeral home.  

I began in high school, continued working in one during college and seminary and when I approached my retirement from the ministry {Which does not seem to have lasted very long!} I bought a hearse and founded William Randolph Hearses. {You may need to think about that one for a while.}

What I am about to tell you should come as no surprise, but all of the bodies entrusted to our care did not move on their own but always stayed right where we put them. We didn’t come in one morning and find that the person 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 that no one who had breathed their last moved so much as a muscle unless a member of the staff moved it for them.  

So, what was happening on that first Easter morning and first Easter evening was astonishing to say the least.  Jesus was on the loose!

Jesus was on the loose that first Easter and he shows up when the disciples needed him most.  They were locked behind closed doors in fear.  Afraid of the authorities but also, I think, that the events of that day were too good to be true.  

Remember friends, we have had hundreds of years to work through this Resurrection business, and I don’t think we can fully comprehend it. They only had twelve hours and probably were working on a couple of nights with little sleep.  To be confused, frightened, unsure is a perfectly natural reaction to a life-changing event, good or bad.

So, they rush back to a safe place, lock the doors, take a deep breath and ask each other, “What the heck just happened?” It is not an unreasonable response.

Poor Thomas has been called the “Patron Saint of Doubters” but I think a better title would be the “Patron Saint of the late arrivers.”

If anything, “I remember Thomas more for his bravery and his straight forwardness. He didn’t sugar coat things and he didn’t run away. He wasn’t huddled behind a locked door scared and afraid that day. I bet he was out getting on with his life.”3

The only thing Thomas is guilty of is tardiness on that first Easter evening when Jesus made one of his appearances to the whole group of disciples.  They were all gathered together but Thomas is not there.

Perhaps he got tired of the endless speculation about what happened.  Perhaps he was as confused - as we can sometimes be - by all the stories of resurrection encounters with Jesus.  Perhaps he was just tired of staring at the wallpaper and wondering what to do.  Perhaps he needed a breath of fresh air.  We don’t know what Thomas was doing. All we know for certain is that he wasn’t in the room where it happened when Jesus made his grand re-entry into the disciples’ lives.

Upon his return all Thomas does is wonder if what his friends are saying is true.

Thomas walks into the upper room, and everyone says, “Oh my gosh, guess who was just here? Jesus! He breathed in our faces, OK that was weird, but then he showed us his wounds! It was really him!”4

Remember, what they are telling him is that his friend Jesus who was stone cold, definitely dead a few days ago is on the loose, running around making guest appearances to everybody Thomas knows.  Everybody that is but him. 

We’ve been celebrating Easter for all of our lives and while the story has not lost one bit of its power experiencing it for the very first time must have been an entirely different matter.  This is not something that is taken in easily and Thomas is not sure he can believe it just based on word of mouth.

It is then, I believe, that faithfulness begins to appear.  It is visible and invisible.  Faithfulness is there in what is done and left undone.

The disciples who were there do not try to persuade Thomas that they are right and he is wrong.  They do not berate him for being gone when the big moment came.  They don’t even doubt the sincerity of his doubt.  They just keep the faith for him and isn’t that what we do?

I am sure that there were lots of people who came to this church last Sunday that we won’t see again until Christmas.  Where I used to attend, we called them “CEO’s” for “Christmas and Easter Onlys.” 

We may wish they were here every Sunday.  We wish they would walk with us and discover that there is more to this Jesus guy than a manger full of baby and a tomb full of empty, but they have decided that twice a year is plenty. 

Our job is to do for them what the disciples did for Thomas.  We are to keep the faith for them so that when they need it, when they want to have a real experience with Jesus, there is a place and a people who will be there for them.

That is what the disciples did for Thomas and that is our work in the world - to remain faithful.

Thomas didn’t just doubt.  He hung around.  This is the second invisible moment in this story that we miss.

Thomas didn’t listen and dismiss the other’s story as being out of hand.  He didn’t say, “Ah, you’re nuts!” or “What have you been smoking?”  He stays with his community.  Even amid his doubts he sticks with his friends.  He lets their certainty buoy up his uncertainty. 

We do that for each other too.  In difficult times when those doubts begin to creep in, at our best, we are there for each other with a word of reassurance that all is not lost and God is not finished.  We can say this because of the faithfulness of Jesus. 

If you don’t remember anything else I say this morning, remember this: Jesus was faithful too.  Jesus never gave up on Thomas! 

Jesus could have responded: “All right then, don’t take your friends word for it.  Don’t listen to them for all I care.”  He could have even said, “Listen I’m not going to subject myself to your cockamamie tests.  Either believe or don’t believe but don’t you go poking me.”

Instead, Jesus says: “Whatever you need Thomas.  Poke, prod, ask, talk, do whatever you want.  While your doubts may have rocked your faith a little I have never lost faith in you.”

As you know we follow a three-year cycle of readings called the lectionary.  Very few stories appear more than twice, most only once but every year like clockwork on the second Sunday of Easter we have Thomas. 

As the sound of the trumpets have died out, as the crowds have returned to their normal size, there is the story of Thomas because he is us.

Sometimes we doubt.  Sometimes we believe.  Faith is a struggle.  It waxes and wanes.  Faith is sometimes strong and sometimes weak.

In this story we hear Jesus tell us.  “Yes, you weren’t there to see my miracles firsthand but here you are in church anyway faithfully working your way through your doubts and opening your eyes to faith.”

When that moment comes and faith triumphs over doubt maybe we will be able to say with Thomas - perhaps in a shout, perhaps only in a whisper - “My Lord and my God.” 

In that moment when doubt becomes belief you know that “Jesus is on the loose.”

________________

1. Steven Shakespeare, “Easter 2,” in Prayers for an Inclusive Church (Church Publishing, 2009), p. 22.

2.  Scott Black-Johnson, “Epiphany.”  Sermon preached at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York city.  April 9. 2023.

3.    Judy Kincade, “A Sermon About Doubt ,” A Sermon for Every Sunday (asermonforeverySunday.com, April 11, 2023), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Judy-Kincaid-2nd-Sunday-after-Easter-4-16-2023.pdf.

4.  MaryAnn McKibben Dana, “Doubt Your Faith, Have Faith in Your Doubt,” A Sermon for Every Sunday (asermonforeverySunday.com, April 3, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/sermons/a22-second-sunday-easter-year/.

Sermon Preached at The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saint Luke

16 April 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhI1g07FLlQ&t=4314s

"Participating in Resurrection's Plot" - Easter 2023

 Saint Matthew 28:1–10

“Participating in Resurrection’s Plot”

Prayer

Lord, you dwell within the limits and press beyond them all for borders are not borders with you and death is a gateway to life: take us to the thin places where hearts are thrown open wide, feet sink into earth and the sky sings a new song, through Jesus Christ, the passion of God.  Amen.1

 Growing up, one of my favourite 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 ... 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.2

What we celebrate this day cannot be plotted out on a clipboard.  It has too many twists and turns for charts and graphs.  It doesn’t end where we would expect it to end and it doesn’t continue where we would expect it to continue.  The plot of the resurrection doesn’t even begin the way most of us remember it beginning, with women rushing to the cemetery and the male disciples at home in their beds, it begins the day before. It began yesterday.

It all begins when “the learned ones” once again show up on Pontius Pilates’ doorstep. They may have been the first to believe that the resurrection just might happen so they go to the only one they can think of who, they also believe, has the power to stop it. They go to Pilate.  He was the Roman authority.  He had the power of the empire behind him.  He had given them what they wanted once, maybe he will do it again.  All they wanted was a little assurance.  All they wanted was something that would give them some peace of mind. If someone was “plotting a resurrection” they wanted to stop that plot in its tracks.

“Sir, {they say to Pilate in their clandestine meeting} we just remembered that that liar announced while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will be raised.’ We’ve got to get that tomb sealed until the third day. There’s a good chance his disciples will come and steal the corpse and then go around saying, ‘He’s risen from the dead.’ Then we’ll be worse off than before, the final deceit surpassing the first.”3

Pilate only wanted those guys out of his palace. He just wanted everybody to move on and get this tawdry business behind him, so simply says: “‘You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.’ So, they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.”4

So, there it was, “done and dusted” as the British might say.  Or, in the words of Stevie Wonder, “Signed, sealed and delivered.”  With the tomb sealed and a guard posted there would be no way Jesus would get out.  This resurrection plot would come to an unceremonious end before it got completely out of hand.

Certainly, that’s what the women expected.  While the Mark and Luke remember the woman bringing spices, to do for their dear friend Jesus what there wasn’t time to do after he died, all Matthew remembers them wanting was go to his tomb and have a look.  When they got of bed they expected Jesus to be exactly where they left him, “sealed in a stone-cold tomb.”  They never expected the plot twist that followed.

It is here that the plot becomes, well, earthshaking.

Don’t you just love the way Matthew has set the scene?

The woman walking expect nothing.  The guards on their stake-out of a tomb expect nothing.  Suddenly, unexpectedly, the earth begins to move under their feet.  There is a rolling stone and an angel perched triumphantly upon it smiling, no doubt, a broad smile. “The guards shook with fear when they saw him and fell into a dead faint.”5

These soldiers that “the alliance of political retainers, chief priests, and Roman governor Pilate had been dispatched to keep Jesus in the tomb ‘shook and became like dead men.’ As the angel proclaims resurrection and marks the tomb as a place of life. The demonstration of divine presence ... renders Rome’s military lifeless.”6 It all is there to show us that God, whom Jesus proclaimed, can’t be stopped by armed guards and an official seal.

That would be more than enough for any good plot but this one continues on a personal level when the two women hear from that very same smug and satisfied angel the central message of the Resurrection and of our faith.  “Do not be afraid ... He is not here for he has been raised, as he said.”7

Running back to tell the other disciples they bump into Jesus who tells them where the plot will continue.  Because this day had been more than they, or anyone else for that matter, had expected, Jesus had to repeat the angel’s “fear not” but then he ties it to a command, “go tell my brothers {and sisters} to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”8

This plot doesn’t end in a cemetery because Jesus is leading them back into life.  The events in the graveyard can only get them so far.  In order for the plot of the Resurrection to be completed it must be lived out in life, their lives, your life, and mine.

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 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.”9

“They were beaten, whipped, stoned, and crucified, yet they would never cease proclaiming the risen Jesus. And it worked! Perhaps the most obvious reason not to dismiss the disciples’ resurrection experiences out of hand is that, among all the other failed messiahs who came before and after him, Jesus alone is still called messiah.”10

That is where we figure into the plot.  We may not be asked to do what the original disciples of Jesus did, but we are call to announce bravely and truly to the world and the powers there-in that they do not have the last word.  

We may feel as powerless as a woman wearing a tattered raincoat and mud-soaked wellies charting where flowers should grow in her spring garden, in the hope that she might someday see them bloom. 

Our job as followers of Christ, the risen one, is to proclaim that not only did the third day come for the disciples but, in God’s great resurrection plan, the third day will come for us and our world.

We proclaim to the preening, performance politicians of our day, who make Pilate and his kind seem like Political Science 101 dropouts, that the third day will come.

We proclaim to those who put more faith in their guns that kill God’s children and leaves them dying and crying, than the God who saves them, that the third day will come.

We proclaim to those who, based on years of history and tradition, have relegated women to a subservient and frivolous status, that the third day will come.

We proclaim to any who seek to divide and diminish any one of God’s children because of their race, creed, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, that the third day will come.

We proclaim to those who continue to battle over which part of the land where Jesus lived that is called Holy, is theirs and will do anything to keep it or win it back,  that the third day will come.

We proclaim that because in the cross of Christ God was reconciling the world and in the resurrection of Christ was proclaiming its ultimate redemption that the third day has come.

We proclaim the plot line of the resurrection: Fear not! He is not dead but alive, and he is going ahead of you and me, in the days out front of us.  

We proclaim that we will see him in all those days in every pain and tragedy, every joy and moment of bliss, we will see him.

We proclaim that until the curtain falls in the final moments of our last act and the plot line of our lives is complete, when our days and years are gone, we proclaim that he will find us, and we will see him, and he will greet us.  

Until then we proclaim:  Fear not. Do not be afraid ... for Christ our Lord who was dead is risen and is going ahead of us into the future.

Earthly future.  Eternal future. There is nothing to fear. 

Christ is Risen!  Christ is with us! Christ is risen and with us, indeed!

Sermon preached at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saint Luke - Chicago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQf9xb94mio 

April 9, 2023

_______________

1.  Steven Shakespeare, “Easter Eve,” in Prayers for an Inclusive Church (Church Publishing, 2009), p. 20.

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

3. St. Matthew 27:62-64. .  (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, with Topical Concordance (NavPress, 2005).]

4.   St. Matthew 27:65-67.  (RSV) [RSV=The Revised Standard Version]

5.   St. Matthew 28:4. (TLB) (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible. (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971)]

6.   Warren Carter, “Matthew 28:1-10. "Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” in Connections. A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, ed. Thomas G. Long, vol. 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, n.d.), pp. 204-206.

7. St. Matthew 28:6.  (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]'

8. St. Matthew 28:10. (NRSV)

9 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).

10. Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York, NY: Random House, 2013), 175.