Encountering the Living Lord

sermon by Carrie Eikler
John 20:1-18
Easter Sunday

I spent the summer between my first and second year of college at Camp Bethel, a Church of the Brethren camp near Roanoke, Virginia. I held crying children who missed their parents, I put on goulashes and stomped in the creek, I even serenaded the boys’ cabins with the young girls at youth camp.

One of my counselor colleagues that summer was a young woman from Australia, named Caitlyn.

One evening on our day off, Caitlyn was showing me pictures of her home “Down Under”--her family, her friends. “And here” she said “is a picture of our Christmas Day barbeque.” And there was her family, shorts and sandals, throwing a “shrimp on the barbie.” Behind them was the window to her house, which had paper cut outs of snowflakes and Santa Clause and that fake white snow that comes out of an aerosol can you spray around your windows.

On the outside, people were celebrating Christmas in 80 degree weather, because Australia is, after all, in the Southern Hemisphere and our winter is their summer. And yet, they still took great strides to decorate in a very “northern hemisphere” sort of way, complete with Santa and fake snow.

Yes, I know. Today is EASTER, not Christmas. But as I thought about looking at summery-Christmas pictures with Caitlyn, I realize how much we associate what is going on in nature in our part of the world, to the Easter story. Lilies, eggs, butterflies, budding tress, new life. Easter is spring and spring means Easter to many of us. The warm weather is coming back (although this week may have been giving a different story), the days are getting longer, and new life is everywhere!

It makes you think God really knew how to plan a resurrection. If you were going to bring someone back from the dead, spring is obviously the ideal time. Pastel Easter bonnets just wouldn’t look as good any other time of the year.

I read this week about one recent university graduate’s 6-week trip to South America last year. Emma was from England and had just finished university finals. Obviously a stressful experience. So she and her friend decided to take a vacation to get away from the bleak, rainy skies of Nottingham, England to bask in the sun of South America.

Emma wrote “Perhaps I should have paid more attention in Geography or maybe this was my punishment for becoming so blasé about travel…somehow no one saw fit to point out to me that in the Southern Hemisphere the seasons are reversed and we were heading there in the middle of winter…. [We] embarked on an epic journey across five countries that demonstrated a total disregard for the size and diversity of the continent that we were tackling. I landed in Buenos Aires with a backpack full of bikinis, ill-prepared for what was to come.”[1]

If Christmas for many of our brothers and sisters in the Southern Hemisphere actually takes place in the heat of their summer, then Easter, as the traveling Emma discovered, is not a spring time event. For them, Easter is the beginning of winter: it’s getting darker, colder. Things are dying not being reborn; hibernating, not bursting from long slumbers.

Perhaps this is the reason that many Christians caution against using nature’s imagery to symbolize Easter and the resurrection. After all, there is nothing natural about the dead coming back to life. Yet eggs, and flowers, and butterflies all convey a truth about what was witnessed at Easter: Life burst out of the shell, the bulb, the cocoon that encased it.

But it seems to me, that celebrating Easter, shrouded with the prospect of darkness and winter, has its place too; if only, because many of us come to the Easter promise, in our own dark winters.

Now I bet that the two disciples who came to the tomb that morning, Simon Peter and the one referred to as “the disciple Jesus loved, ” believed to be John, would be flower and butterfly, Northern Hemisphere-type Easter people. Springtime! Excitement! They didn’t know how it happened, all they know is that Jesus was dead and now he’s…well, he’s just not there! It didn’t make sense, but it says one of the disciples believed. He believed…something. But what? Then they simply “returned to their homes,” it says. I wonder what they did there, at home? Just sit around wondering about it? Talking about it? Wondering that if Jesus’ fate of crucifixion came to their lives, would such a strange event happen to them in their tombs, as well?

But they weren’t the first to arrive. Mary Magdalene was the first to see that something was wrong. To me, it seems like she could understand what it means for people to celebrate Easter as they went into winter. The tomb was empty, dark. She didn’t go home, excited but perplexed. She wept outside the tomb. She didn’t celebrate that the body wasn’t there, but searched for any clue as to what might have happened. She was terrified that grave robbers had desecrated the body of her teacher and the healer of so many people. She was even so distraught that she didn’t see the angels for what they were…she didn’t even recognize Jesus, mistaking him for the gardener.

It often seems that those who are facing their own winters—the darkness, the desolation—are just the ones to whom the promise of resurrection means the most. Because you have to have faith that even though it’s not springtime, the warmth will return, and that life will burst forth. There are no blooming daffodils to prove to you that new life is here. There is just the fear that the darkness will never end, along with God’s promise that it will.

But no doubt it is a longer process to live into that promise, to live through the winter into the spring, than to have the proof of it in front of you. The disciples saw the clothes and were convinced-that’s all the proof they needed. For Mary, it took a little longer.

Now, some may say the disciples had more faith than Mary. After all, Jesus tells Thomas soon after this encounter, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” But Thomas and Mary are different, in my estimation. Thomas demanded to touch and feel in order for him to believe. For Mary, Jesus only needed to say her name for her to recognize him. He only needed to say “Mary!” for her to recall that this was her Rabbi, for her to reestablish their connection. And in fact, instead of saying if you need proof, come and touch me (like he did to Thomas) Jesus says to Mary: Don’t hold on. Don’t touch. I’m here, but I’m gone. Can you believe it? And she does believe it.

No, I don’t see Mary as one with little faith. I see her as an example for all of us. It’s not just about believing in the risen Christ--believing it is spring just because it’s warm. It’s about longing for Christ, searching for Christ, and facing the winters of our lives with the foolish faith that this does not last--that if we struggle through it, there will be new life.

On Easter morning, there was still weeping at the tomb, the prospect of Mary’s dark winter becoming even darker. And then, Mary found Christ in the most unexpected place. Not on a cross, not in the tomb--but standing next to her, (looking like a laborer!) asking her “why are you weeping?” and calling her by name. Her winter was ending, her new life beginning.

And after Mary, Jesus kept showing up. Making himself known. He draws his beloved followers out of their darkness and fear into surprise and fellowship. Barbara Brown Taylor said that it is these encounters with Jesus that “cinch the resurrection” for her, not what happened in the tomb. She said “What happened in the tomb was entirely between Jesus and God. For the rest of us, Easter began the moment the gardener said, ‘Mary!’ and she knew who he was. That is where the miracle happened and goes on happening -- not in the tomb but in the encounter with the living Lord.”[2]

She goes on to suggest that “In the end, that is the only evidence we have to offer those who ask us how we can possibly believe... Because we have found, to our surprise, that we are not alone. Because we never know where he will turn up next. Here’s one thing that helps:” she says. “never get so focused on the empty tomb that you forget to speak to the gardener.”

The Easter experience encompasses all of this: the winter, the spring, the darkness, the light, the fear of death, the promise of new life. But I think, whether you are coming to Easter in your winter desperation, or your springtime joy, the essential question of Easter is this:

How are you encountering the living Lord? AMEN

--
Throughout the Easter season, we will be inviting people in the congregation to stand before you and give a short testimony to the way the living Lord is working in their lives. Eastertide is a season of renewed hope and calling on the power of the risen Christ to overcome sin and death in the world.

It is in this spirit, and the spirit of Easter morning, that I have asked Mike Fike to share with us in testimony today. He has been reflecting on the question that you are invited to reflect on this week: What small resurrection have you witnessed in your life recently?” After Mike shares, I will invite you all to respond with affirmation and appreciation with the words in your bulletin: “We celebrate your resurrection with our Alleluias”




[1] http://www.gapyear.com/gaplasses/winter_in_south_america.html
[2] Taylor, Barbara Brown. “Escape from the Tomb.” Christian Century. April 1, 1998. (www.religion-online.org)