Des Moines April 5, 2015 Resurrection

Transcription

1 Mark 16:1-8 Matt Mardis-LeCroy Des Moines April 5, 2015 Resurrection I. How do preachers prepare sermons? Have you ever wondered about that? Do you maybe imagine us seated at a desk, surrounded by thick and dusty commentaries, diligently running down the meaning of some obscure Greek word, texting our old seminary professors and asking them to remind us about the peculiar role of the past perfect verb tense in Mark s proto-apocalyptic discourse? 1 What do you think we do when we prepare for this moment? Can I tell you what I did to prepare for this sermon? I Googled the phrase Scary Easter Bunny. And I am so glad I did it, because I learned something important: I m not alone. I m not the only person who finds the Easter Bunny a little sketchy. If you were to take out your phone right now and Google the phrase Scary Easter Bunny please, don t take out your phone, your mother will be mortified but if you were to do that, here are the top hits that Google would return for Scary Easter Bunny : 19 Vintage Easter Bunny Photos That Will Make Your Skin Crawl. 19 Creepy Terrifying and Just Plain Wrong Easter Bunnies. 45 Easter Bunnies More Terrifying Than a Crucified Man. Am I the only person who does this? The only person who uses the internet to make sure I m not crazy? Google gets me. Google understands that this whole Easter Bunny idea is strange and disturbing. Show me a big bunny, all I can see is a giant rat a human sized rat that comes creeping into my home to give my children candy. It s the stuff of nightmares. But that s how we celebrate Easter. In a weird way, it may make some sense. I know it s not Halloween, but maybe Easter should be at least a little scary. Mark certainly seems to think so. His Easter story 1

2 includes words like alarmed, terror, amazement, and fear. That is what Easter felt like the first time around. Christ is Risen! Be afraid! That is the Easter Gospel according to Mark. II. Remember, Mark s Gospel is the earliest account anywhere of the first Easter morning. 2 And the story strikes a note of fear. It opens early on the first day of the week, and focuses on a group of church ladies. Now, I know: biblical scholars will object to this characterization. They will argue that it s anachronistic to refer to a group of 1 st century Jewish peasant women as church ladies. But listen: I know church ladies. Most of the women in my life are church ladies. They are fierce and smart and strong. I know them when I see them and I m telling you: this is a group of church ladies. The male disciples do not appear in this story. They are afraid, or asleep, or still curled up in the fetal position. But the women are on the ball. They get up early on Sunday morning because somebody has to do it. Somebody has to tend to all of the detail work; to do the things that must be done. Somebody has to do right by Jesus, make sure he receives a proper burial. Church ladies are always thinking about stuff like that. They re always three steps ahead. So the women get up, early, and go. As they make their way through the morning darkness wearing their hats, clutching their purses as they walk to the garden tomb, they wonder and they worry to one another about the stone. An enormous stone blocks the entrance to the tomb. What will they do about that? Will they be able to roll it away, all by themselves? Could they maybe borrow somebody s truck? But even as they discuss the Enormous Rock Situation, they come to the tomb and see one thing they had not expected: No stone. The stone has already been rolled away. How did that happen? What does that mean? Cautiously, carefully, they cross the threshold, step slowly into the tomb and scream. Or so I assume. Mark says that they are alarmed. But we all know what church ladies do when they are alarmed: They scream! (And maybe pee a little). They are alarmed because, inside the tomb, they find a young man, dressed in white, who seems to be waiting for them. Don t be alarmed, he says which is, of course, the most alarming thing that can ever be said, in any situation. Don t be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who 2

3 was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. And they thought they were alarmed before. The Easter story ends--mark s entire Gospel ends with the women dropping their purses, clutching their hats and running for their lives. So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Christ is risen! Run for it! 3 That is the Easter Gospel according to Mark. III. What a strange story. What will we do with this strange story? Well, that brings me to my assignment for this morning. Ever since the middle of February, Plymouth has been engaged in something we have called the Speaking Christian sermon series. Because you know, in church, we have these weird words: sin, salvation, sacrifice, mercy, Christ. What will we do with these words? That is the question that we have been pondering for many weeks now. Every Thursday at Vespers, every weekend in worship, we have focused on some one word lifted from the language of faith. We have looked at the word and we have asked, What does this mean? How do we hear it? What does it have to do with our lives? But I think we saved the scariest word for last. Today we come to The Big One, The Mother of All Christian Words. Today we are talking about resurrection. Or, rather, I am talking about resurrection. I want to be clear about this. Plymouth Church is based in covenant, not creed. We do not have some statement of faith to which you must subscribe in order to be a member. People around here can and do and will believe all kinds of things on all kinds of subjects especially resurrection. So I can t tell you what Plymouth Church believes about resurrection. I can only tell you what I believe. What I believe about resurrection is basically the Easter Gospel as we find it in our reading from Mark: Jesus is alive. Jesus is going on ahead of us. Be afraid. Let me unpack that a little. First: Jesus is alive. Good news, English majors! This is one of those moments when grammar matters. The worst Easter sermon I ever sat through it was not preached at Plymouth Church the worst Easter sermon I ever heard had the title 7 Irrefutable Proofs That Christ Has Risen. You notice the verb in that title? Past tense. So often when we talk about Easter, we end up talking in the past tense. What happened on that 3

4 first Easter morning? Was the tomb really empty? Did angels really appear? What happened? Past tense. But resurrection is all about the present tense. The Easter Gospel does not tell us about an event back there, back then, in history; the Easter Gospel tell us something about today. Jesus is alive. Jesus the very same Jesus who was crucified is a real living presence that we can and do and will meet: in the Bible, in worship, in our relationships with each other, in the face of the stranger. We encounter the Risen Christ. It can happen anytime, anywhere. Jesus is alive. 4 But how do we meet the risen Christ? Well that brings me to the second thing that I believe: Jesus is going on ahead of us. The women went looking for Jesus in a logical place; in the last place they had seen him: his grave. But Jesus is not there. Jesus cannot be found there. What does the young man say? He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him. Galilee. According to Mark, Galilee is the sight of Jesus earthly ministry, the place where he did his teaching and preaching; the place where he welcomed outcasts and ate with sinners; the place where he healed people and helped people and cried out for justice. That is where he was. That is where he is. That is where he always will be: among the least and the lost, the hurting and the helpless, the outcast and the stranger. Jesus works and lives and loves among them. If we follow on that path if we go to our Galilee and do what Jesus did we stand on his turf and we are bound to bump into him. Don t go to the grave; go to Galilee. There we will see him. Jesus is alive. Jesus is going on ahead of us. So be afraid. Be very afraid. I believe that resurrection has a lot to do with fear. In my own life, the moments when I have most deeply believed the Easter gospel the moments when I felt that I stood in the presence of the living Jesus those were the moments when I was the most terrified. My first kiss. My high school graduation. My wedding day. My first day walking into this building. My first Sunday in this sanctuary. Our first night home alone with our newborn daughter. I have never been so scared. I have never been so happy. There is a fear we feel when something is about to die. But there is a fear we feel when something is about to live; when new possibilities lie open before us; when God is doing something new, something beautiful, and claims us to play our part. 5 Jesus is alive. Jesus is going on ahead of us. We will see him. 4

5 Isn t that terrifying? Isn t that amazing? Thanks be to God. Plymouth Congregational Church United Church of Christ 4126 Ingersoll Avenue Des Moines, Iowa Phone: (515) Fax: (515) mmardis-lecroy@plymouthchurch.com 1 Just in case you were wondering: this sentence is gibberish. 2 For more on Mark and the scholarly consensus that this is the earliest Gospel, see Amy Jill- Levine s Introduction in The Access Bible. Gail R. O Day and David Peterson, General Editors. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press., 1999), pp This one verse includes three different words for fear, each of which is the root of some English word. tromos is a kind of trembling or quivering ( tremors ); ekstasis denotes astonishment, terror or even a trance like state ( ecstasy ) and phobos is of course the Greek word of the English term phobia. Sake Kubo. A Reader s Greek- English Lexicon to the New Testament. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1975),.p It is hard to point to a moment or a book that really changed my life, but for me, one of them would have to be Professor Susie Stanley s Contemporary Theology seminar, which I took at Messiah College in the Fall of As part of that course, we read Luke Timothy Johnson s The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. Responding to the work of the Jesus Seminar then in its heyday Johnson argued that the real Jesus is not the reconstruction of historians but rather the living presence we encounter through the worship of the church. It is no understatement to say that this argument altered my whole trajectory. Interestingly, although Johnson is explicitly engaging in polemics vis- à- vis historical Jesus scholars, his position seems similar to Marcus Borg s post- Easter Jesus. See The Heart of Christianity Rediscovering as Life of Faith. (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2004). 5 I owe these insights about fear to my wife, The Rev. Mary Beth Mardis- LeCroy, who first drew my attention to the prominence of fear in Mark s account and who helped me to develop the idea along the lines expressed here. 5