Message 03-23-08 Resurrection Day
Series: Lectionary
Scripture: Matthew 28:1-10
Title: No Fear
When you show up on the Day of Resurrection the first thing you should hear is “Don’t be afraid.” On the day of Resurrection women travel to the heart of their deepest despair, the very ground shakes, rocks move, angels show up with the ferocity of lightning and men faint. The first thing you should hear on the day of Resurrection is “Don’t be afraid.”
And that’s what God says. Did you ever notice that’s what God usually says? That tells you that God is pretty scary. When God shows up you’re supposed to feel something and there’s a good chance that you’re supposed to feel afraid. It’s not that God is doing something frightening. I don’t think it’s that God looks especially frightening. I think it’s the realization of God’s raw power. When God shows up you’re supposed to be afraid because you suddenly realize just how human, small, finite, powerless you are in comparison. You’re not God and God is. I think that’s why when God shows up the first thing he says is “Don’t be afraid.”
When God shows up the greatest power on earth, which was Rome at that time, fell down like dead men. Now that’s God. Isn’t God supposed to be like that? When God shows up the rock rolls away from the cave, the earth shakes. Now that’s God.
God isn’t some good feeling. God isn’t a nice idea to help you get through the day or help you find a parking place. When God shows up something should happen. The word we use for Spirit, like in the creation story in Genesis where it says “the Spirit of God moved over the waters”, that word for Spirit is the Hebrew word “ruah”. It’s the same word as the word used to expresses “hurricane.” When God comes something happens. The world moves. Life shifts.
It shows a bit of fear I think when people try to shut down the Resurrection. People talk about the Resurrection as a symbol. Stanley Hauerwas, the Duke University professor talks about how it’s silly to think that the disciples just had some experience, some spiritual insight. It’s like “they said, ‘Wasn’t it great being with Jesus before they killed him? You remember those great stories he told? The lectures, er, sermons? Just thinking about it makes him seem almost still here. Yep, by God, he is still here. Let’s all close our eyes and believe real hard that he’s still here. Okay?”
Do you think that would change the world?
I had a friend up north, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who told me that Easter was just a renewing of spring celebration. You’ve heard that kind of thing in other places, haven’t you? As if Christians just took over spring celebrations in different cultures, or that they just imitated the ancient stories of gods who died and rose again. You know something you don’t find even a hint of in the Bible? You don’t find the disciples even coming close to suggesting that it was like Jesus just woke up and the flowers started to bloom and the wheat began to grow again in the fields. When my friend, the psych professor told me that I laughed. I told him he’d never read the stories. And he hadn’t. He just read what people said about the stories. This story is not about springtime.
That’s why I don’t like using the name Easter for the Day of Resurrection. I use it because it helps people know what I’m talking about, because that’s what it’s come to be called. But Easter is the name of a Germanic goddess whose symbol was the wild hare – the Easter bunny. Her celebration took place during the spring and the culture tied their party to it since it came at about the same time as the Christian celebration that the emperor Constantine said they had to celebrate now. I think that was an unfortunate choice, because that’s not what Resurrection is about.
Resurrection is about God acting.
Jesus is about God acting. Acting is what Jesus is all about.
The chief difference between Jesus and the religious people of his time was his action. He put into action what they talked about. He moved as they debated. He told the people to pay attention to what the Pharisees and the teachers of the law said but not to follow their example. Do as they say, he told them, don’t do as they do, because they did nothing.
Karl Barth, the famous German theologian, once wrote that “religion is unbelief.” Religion is unbelief. This was a man who stood up to Hitler back in the 1930’s when Hitler was claiming that the state was the head of the church. Karl Barth was instrumental in writing a document that stated quite plainly that the government does not control the church, only Jesus Christ is the head of the church.
You see when you believe something you act.
Religion is talking about what you believe. Believing is not talking. Believing is not talking. Believing is acting.
Believing is Indiana Jones stepping out into thin air and finding something is holding him up.
So when you come to the Resurrection what do you do? When you hear the words “Don’t be afraid . . . Jesus is risen” what do you do?
You know when you’re really afraid, you don’t do anything. You know that, right? You’ve had those nightmares where you can’t move, right? Haven’t we all? Where you know the monster is coming, it’s coming right up behind you and you can’t move, you can’t even open your eyes; you know that dream, right? You believe the monster is going to get you. If you flip the pages of your Bible over to the next Gospel, to the Gospel according to Mark you find that kind of scene. The women come to the tomb, the angel speaks and the women are terrified it says. They are so scared they run away and tell no one.
It’s kind of funny but there are people who suggest that the book ends there. Our earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end there. Did you know that? It ends with the women running away and telling no one. People come to that and say, there see, the story’s all made up. They didn’t tell anyone.
Hello?
There a famous story by Edgar Allen Poe where a monster traps a man in a ship on the sea and the story is told all in the first person. The story ends with the man writing “Oh my God… going down.” Now what you’re supposed to believe is that as the monster is crashing in on him and dragging the ship down he has enough time and for some reason wants to write that down. But then you’re also supposed to believe that he stuffed all his handwritten pages into a bottle, corked it and threw it into the sea. The story is called “Message in a Bottle”. Now, the bottle and the monster and the sinking Poe related may have been referring to other things, but the story, just in itself, loses some edge of reality.
Are we really supposed to believe that the women said nothing to anyone because they were so afraid? Hello? If they didn’t say anything to anyone how is it that you happen to be reading the story?
There is every possibility that Mark wrote his Gospel of Jesus – which he starts by calling it “The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus” – to a group of Christians in Rome who were living in constant fear of the punishment of Rome. If you were a Christian and you read a book called “The Start” and you read all the story of Jesus healing and speaking and challenging people’s hearts and you got filled up with all those great lessons and then you read that the first witnesses to the Resurrection ran away and told no one. No one ever knew anything about it. If you were hiding away, for fear of being persecuted, would you feel guilty? Would you feel bad that what you were doing was not showing what you believed? Mark wasn’t writing a book called “The Story of Jesus.” He wrote a book called, “The Start of the Good News of Jesus.” He expected that the people were supposed to be doing something in response to this news.
Believing is doing. It will never ever be anything else.
You see if Jesus rose from the dead then everything that Jesus did and said before that is proved true. We’re told that the disciples hid away until after Jesus rose from the dead. We’re told that Jesus’ family, his brothers, said he was crazy and were sarcastically rude to him about his ministry and his notoriety until he rose from the dead. At one point, in a conversation with a woman whose brother had just died, Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?
And that’s the key, isn’t it? Do you believe this not like you can say, “Yes.” But do you believe this like you are going to walk out of here differently and make choices differently. You’re not going to walk out of here saying, “Okay, so what’s for lunch.” You’re going to walk out of here starting to look for God and to look for God to tell you what to do in and with your life.
A guy named Ken Davis tells this great story of having to do a speech for speech class. He gave a talk on the law of the pendulum. He explained that a pendulum will never return farther than the place where it started. In fact, it will already be slowing down and it won’t even get to the place where it started. It will continue to slow down until it comes to rest where it reaches equilibrium. He used a child’s toy, a top to demonstrate how a pendulum worked.
Thinking he was done the professor came forward leading the applause for the talk, but Ken told him he wasn’t done. Ken had prepared a large, 250 pound pendulum hooked up to the steel beams of the classroom ceiling by 4 500lb test weight parachute lines. He asked the professor if he believed in the law of the pendulum. The professor said, “Yes.” He brought the professor up to a chair where the professor’s head would lean back against a cement wall. Then he brought the pendulum up to just a fraction of an inch from the professor’s nose and there he explained again the law of the pendulum that it would not swing farther than or even up to the place where it started. And then he asked the professor if he believed in the law of the pendulum and the professor, now with sweat on his upper lip said, “Yes.” Ken let the pendulum go. It swished as it swung through the air and then paused at the other end of the arc before it swung back.
That professor didn’t move out of the way. He dove from the chair. Ken’s talk wasn’t about pendulums. It was about belief. Did the professor believe in the law of the pendulum, Ken asked the class, and the whole class said, “No.”
Believing is what you do. The professor believed the pendulum would hit him and not just come close to him.
If you believe in the resurrection of Jesus what is holding you back? If you believe in the resurrection of Jesus then you know that life is built on forgiveness and not on vengeance. If you believe in Jesus you know that you’re just wasting time holding grudges. If you believe in Jesus you know that the worst people can to you is what they did to Jesus. They can ridicule you, they can frustrate you, they can abuse you, they can torture you and they can kill you, but they can’t get the last word on you. They are not the final authority. They are not the final power. Not even death is the final authority.
When the women came to the tomb they came because they had realized they had something to do. They could anoint Jesus’ body for true burial, according to their customs. Having something to do is great when you’ve lost someone you love. It helps you move ahead. It helps you keep going. It’s something you can get lost in so that the pain doesn’t just shut you down. But when the women came to the tomb, the earth shook, the angel came down, the stone rolled away and men fainted.
And the angel, the messenger of God, the voice of God told them what to believe. He told them the truth. He said, “Don’t be afraid.”
Don’t be afraid. Christ is risen!
