josephholubsermons


 

Easter Sunday
April 4, 2010
Luke  24:1-12

Living With Resurrection Expectations

I’ll never forget a short reflection I heard at a church anniversary years ago.  The speaker began with this question: “Is this a backward day or a forward day?”  Of course his point was, is this a day we look backward and pine for the good ole days; the good ole days that have passed through the filter of our selective memories where we sift out all the bad and romanticize the good?  Or is it a forward day where we celebrate this moment in time and look forward to the future with anticipation to the new opportunities that are waiting there to be embraced.  His question is a good question for us on this Easter  day.    

What makes this day so glorious is that we are here to rejoice, not reminisce.  Today is not a day we look backward with nostalgia, but a day we are fully alive in the present and look to the future with a sense of hope and anticipation.  I am standing here today to declare to you that the truth of the resurrection is not about proving something that happened in the past, but the truth of the resurrection lies in our experience of it in the present and the power it has to move us into the future with new expectations.  We are not here to remember a past event, but celebrate a present reality!  

The front page of Friday’s Denver Post had an article about the Shroud of Turin, the supposed burial cloth of Jesus – or not – depending on your perspective.  The article described the current state of discussion and research on the shroud.  I read it, and I found it to be interesting, but little more.  For to me, the shroud business sends us in the wrong direction regarding the resurrection.  It sends us backward to reconstruct something that cannot be definitively reconstructed. 

Not even the gospel writers could accurately reconstruct the resurrection as past event. Read the gospel stories some time.  I mean really read them.  Lay them down side by side and read them closely with discernment and acumen. 

As I do every year, I took time this week to read and reflect upon the various accounts of the resurrection recorded in the four gospels.  As always, I was struck by the fact that each gospel resurrection story is unique and different and the four cannot be reconciled into one story.  Why?  Because the stories were not written as literal-historical-accounts.  The gospels were written after Jesus was gone over a 30-40 period beginning in the 7^th decade of the first century. Their diversity tells us that the gospel writers were not interested in reconstructing the past, but each writer shaped the story in order to apply it to their present reality. The stories are not literal-accounts, but testimonies to the spiritual and theological meaning Jesus had for their lives. 

One thing they all had in common is that they experienced Jesus as a present reality, not a past memory.  The most relevant question to ask is not, “Is this how things actually happened?”  A better question is, “What did the resurrection mean for them in telling the stories the way they did?  How did the resurrection empower them their present and move them into the future”?

To answer that, I will tell you a story.  The church I served in Anchorage had an annual Spring  rummage sale that raised money for a designated outreach project.  One year Marcia decided to donate an old chair that we had dragged around with us that had never made it out of storage.  It was a musty, worn old chair that was covered with a rather hideous green and beige paisley upholstery.  However, it wasn’t just any chair. It was a chair that had belonged to Marcia’s beloved grandmother.

When Marcia decided to donate that chair, a little voice went off in my head that said, "I hope she doesn't regret giving that chair away."  So what I did was secretly buy the chair back at the rummage sale.  I brought it to some congregation members who were in the custom furniture manufacturing business.  I asked them if they would restore the chair.

They said “yes”, so I picked out a nice piece of fabric with which to recover it and left the chair with them.  Months went by and a few weeks before Christmas they called and said the chair was finished.  I excitedly drove over to their shop to get it.  When I got there I had to wait a few minutes in the reception area, so I sat down.  After a few minutes one of the owner’s, Gina, came out said, "Joe, how do you like the chair?"  "Chair?”  I asked with puzzlement, “Where is it?"  She said, “Joe, you’re sitting in it!”  I had been sitting in the restored chair and hadn’t recognized it. It was beautiful and transformed!  But, the old image of the ugly, worn-out, musty chair was so dominant in my mind, I wasn’t prepared to behold the new reality that was so far beyond my expectations.

I gave the chair to Marcia for Christmas.  She recognized it instantly, bringing tears to her eyes and joy to her heart!  Since then, that chair has occupied a significant place in our home, and I sit on it all the time. 

For me, that is a kind of Easter story.  It  reminds me that my view of life can be obscured, and my  experience of life can be limited by my short-sighted expectations.   

As I reflected on the resurrection stories, I was struck by something I had not quite seen before, and it jumped out at me, and it hit me in the face.  It was this: those post-Jesus communities’ experience of the living Christ, decades after Jesus was gone, moved them to a place beyond their short-sighted-expectations that had been shaped by culture and religion, and they began to live their lives by a new set of expectations – a new set  we could call resurrection expectations. 

For example:  *The resurrection changed their expectations about women. One thing all four gospels have in common, even though the details vary greatly, is that women were the first bearers of the resurrection message – women were the first ones entrusted with the message.  This was a radical and outrageous thing in a rigidly patriarchal culture where women were marginalized under the crushing weight of patriarchal hierarchy. In a culture where women were only known through their husbands, these women of the gospels stand alone on their own and are no longer anonymous but named.  They are portrayed as hanging in to the bitter end, especially after all the men had scattered, leaving Jesus alone, betrayed, denied and abandon at his most desperate hour.

The resurrection changed expectations about those that culture and religion had conveniently marginalized - and an astute reading of the New Testament reveals that it threw those early faith communities into conflict over the treatment of women and other marginalized persons.  Some faith communities lived by resurrection expectations and elevated women and other marginalized to equal standing with men.  Other communities did not and continued to live by the old expectations of the rigid hierarchies of culture and religion.  

The question for us is, who are those in our world who are marginalized by the short-sighted expectations of culture and religion?  Isn’t it about time to be guided and informed by resurrection expectations and recognize the full humanity of marginalized persons?    

*The resurrection changed their expectations about the Jesus way of life.  Those gospel faith communities decades after Jesus were questioning the validity of living the Jesus life.  Jesus had invited his disciples to follow him into living his way of life: the way of grace; the way of compassion; the way of pursuing justice for the oppressed; the way of inclusive love – and what had it got him, but a hideous execution.  Why should they follow Jesus?  After all, look what happened to him! 

But also, for many in those early gospel faith communities, the resurrection validated Jesus’ way of life as the authentic way of the kingdom of God.  The resurrection convinced them that Jesus’ way was God’s way, so much so, that in the face of hardship, persecution and threat to life and limb, “took up their cross” and continued the ministry of Jesus by boldly living his life in the world-no matter what the cost!

I can recall numerous times when someone has tried to convince me that the Jesus way of life is impractical, foolish and even suicidal.  My response has been, “Perhaps, but resurrection expectations say that truth is often contained within paradox – the paradox that Jesus’ way of self-giving is the way to authentic fullness.

*The resurrection changed their expectations about living in the tyranny of the past. In my own life, and in the lives of many I have ministered to, I have experienced that the past is not past, but that the past can tyrannize the present.  I would dare say that many of us in this room this morning live our present lives in the grip of old failures and regrets, old wounds that have never healed.  Their influence upon us can drastically limit the way we live our lives in the present. 

I think of Peter who denied Jesus.  In an intense but yet tender encounter in John’s gospel, the risen Jesus encounters Jesus on the beach and is forgiven and set free from the oppressive power of his past denial, and Peter is launched into the future.  It is John’s way of saying that the living Christ sets us free from past things that limit us from living life fully now.

What makes this day so glorious is that we are here to rejoice in a present reality, not reminisce a past memory; not a day we look backward with nostalgia, but a day we are fully alive in the present and look to the future (even to eternity) with hope and anticipation as we participate in the life of Jesus by shaping our lives around resurrection expectations.