Sermon, 4.20.25, Easter Day: Resurrection is for the Living

Easter Sunday, John 20:1-18

Good morning! He is risen! We have flowers and bells and special music and celebration this Easter morning - the Alleluias are back, there will be special meals today, special chocolate, time spent with family. We’ve unshrouded the crosses and emerged from the dark wilderness of Lent. And if you weren’t here last night for the Vigil, if you’re seeing only this glory in the bright new light of day, it might be easy to forget that Easter begins in the dark. And not only in the dark, but with fear, bewilderment, and incomprehension. The first Easter begins in the dark and, if we’re honest, there’s always a bit of the same in all our Easters. We are still here in the midst of life, good and bad, when we pause to proclaim Christ risen, indeed.

And I don’t bring that up to bring anybody down - today IS a day to be joyful! He is risen, and love lives. The darkness has not put out the light. Will not put out the light. But the reality is that we proclaim the Risen Christ with hopeful but sometimes breaking voices, because we proclaim it from the midst of an often broken and bewildering world. We haven’t shaken our own fear and incomprehension, have we? Like the disciples, we come to the empty tomb and are sometimes unable to make sense of what we’re seeing. Like Mary, often we do not recognize the Risen Christ right before us - it’s not what we’re expecting to see, after all, our lives being what they are; the world being as it is. And the Risen Christ, himself, looking as ordinary as the gardener.

It’s been a hard year for a lot of people in a lot of ways. The news from the White House continues to be bad - terrifying, even, and certainly disorienting. Violence rages on in Palestine, Ukraine, and elsewhere. The price of eggs is so high, I hear people are dyeing potatoes this year. And there was another mass shooting on Thursday, this time at Florida State. So, truly - Easter comes right on time, just in time - right in the midst of fear and darkness and bewilderment. Which is to say, it comes to us right when we need it the most and right where we are - in the midst of this broken, mortal world.

And, for me anyway, it’s precisely the utter humanity in the Gospel story - the brokenness, fear, and bewilderment, the insistent darkness - that make it ring so true. It’s the humanity in it that’s comforting to me. I am reassured by the fear and incomprehension of these first witnesses to the resurrection - reassured that my own bumbling around in the dark doesn’t, finally, disqualify me from a place in this story. That my shortcomings, my doubts, and my failures don’t preclude me from witnessing the resurrection, or from the presence of the Risen Christ in my life.

And that’s precisely where resurrection matters and is needed most, isn’t it? In our everyday lives. We’ve sometimes been taught that the resurrection of Christ is primarily significant as a promise about the next life, about what happens after we die. But I think its real significance is for this life and world. See, just as in his earthly ministry, so too in his risen appearances, Jesus is oriented - always - toward humanity, toward life in THIS world. Toward our lived circumstances here and now.

And in all the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection appearances, we see that same focus on the human perspective, on life in this world that characterized his ministry. Mary’s bewilderment, Simon Peter’s and the Beloved Disciple’s mute confusion. Breakfast on a beach. Jesus showing up to dinner behind a door locked in fear. Thomas’s doubt. Over and over again, the Risen Lord encounters us in our humanity, not to shame us for it, but to affirm us in it, and to love us in it, where we are and as we are. To soothe and care for frazzled nerves and weary, fearful souls. This is who we’re to understand Jesus to be: one who is oriented toward and who cares deeply about our human lives. Embodied and finite, often bewildered, stumbling in the dark, mired in doubt and fear HUMAN lives - that’s what Jesus is focused on and cares about - both in his life and after his death, in his resurrection glory.

When Mary sees him, risen, and mistakes him for the gardener, he doesn’t rebuke her or scold her for her error. He simply meets her where she is, knows her, and calls her by her name - and it is in that simple act of intimacy, in being known and named, that she recognizes him.

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Writer Marilynne Robinson notes that, throughout the Gospels, “the holy in all its otherness is addressed to and profoundly loyal to this world,” noting that the central assertion of the Gospels, of the life and ministry of Jesus, and the resurrection of Christ is that these “two realities, earthly and divine, are simultaneous rather than opposed.” Which is to say that the resurrection is never a negation or a refutation of our mortal, mundane lives, but an affirmation of them. The resurrection, after all, is for the living. For the world.

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Resurrection not only shows us how loyal God is to us, to our lives and to this world, it also asks that same loyalty to the living, to the world of us. When we come to the empty tomb, when we see the Risen Christ standing before us looking as ordinary as any old gardener, we are invited not to stretch, yearningly, away from this life and this world, but to hear God calling our name, beckoning us back toward it, into it more deeply, showing us the holy right in front of and all around us. God comes to US. HERE. NOW. THAT is what the Risen One shows us. It’s the very same message as the incarnation at Jesus’ birth, the same message he gives us over and over in his life: God comes near to us - in THIS world, not to draw us out of it, but to redeem it by drawing us further into it, showing us how to bring that incarnate, undefeatable love to it with our own lives.

In the empty tomb, in our encounter with the Risen Christ who calls us by name, we are invited not only to be witnesses to resurrection, we are invited into it as a way of living, invited to practice resurrection ourselves.

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God loves the world enough to join us right here in it. And even in death, does not hit the eject button, does not abandon a world hellbent on death, but persists in a love more powerful than death. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s doubling down on that love for the world. Jesus’ resurrection body still bears the scars of wounds inflicted on a broken body by a broken world. And so, on Easter morning, encountering the Risen One, we are shown that the human and the holy are one and the same. And if that is true, if the human and the holy are inseparable in the person of Jesus and in the Risen Christ, then resurrection is ours to practice, too. If that is true, then following the Risen One means adjusting our vision for this mortal world - seeing its beauty and its worthiness, witnessing the resurrection already written into it, and making resurrection a practice.

In his poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Wendell Berry offers suggestions of what that it might look like to practice resurrection in the midst of brokenness and death. He writes:

Love the Lord. Love the world.

Love someone who doesn’t deserve it.

Work for nothing. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant and will not live to harvest.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees every thousand years.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap.

Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Practice resurrection.

And doesn’t the world need some resurrection right now? We need this hope, this insistence that evil doesn’t win, that death doesn’t have the last word, that the darkness does not, finally, overcome the light. Like the disciples in the early morning darkness, before the light has fully returned, we often can’t be quite sure what we’re looking at, peering into the empty tomb. We’re scared and bewildered and not sure what comes next in a broken and chaotic world.

But God shows up. When darkness feels relentless, we are reminded by the Risen One that it does not, will not, overcome the light. When things feel broken and dying, we are reminded by the Risen One that death doesn’t have the final say. When we are lost and bewildered and not sure what comes next, we hear the Risen One calling our name, calling us home, inviting us to practice resurrection.

Love the Lord. Love the world. Lie down in the shade. Be joyful.

He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

Amen.