easter reflection at palmer 2024...

Recently, Fr. Richard Rohr wrote that Easter: "is the feast that says God will have the last word and that God’s final judgment is resurrection. God will turn all that we maim and destroy and hurt and punish into life and beauty."

What the resurrection reveals more than anything else is that love is stronger than death. Jesus walks the way of death with love, and what it becomes is not death but life. Surprise of surprises! It doesn’t fit any logical explanation. Yet this is the mystery: that nothing dies forever, and that all that has died will be reborn in love.  

That's ONE of the reasons I LOVE Easter Sunday: I love its music, I love its flowers, I love its promise that God’s love is ALWAYS with us no matter what. AND I love the courage it gives me to live into the Spirit of Jesus like the women in today’s Bible story: on that first Easter morning, no one knew exactly what it all meant except that while he lived Jesus showed us God’s tenderness, creativity, patience, compassion, and grace; and as he died, weeping “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” he showed us God’s incomprehensible commitment to forgiveness. Easter was all about REAL shock and awe – and that’s my starting point. Preacher Brian McClaren tells us that:

In his living: Jesus showed us that God is pure love, so overflowing in goodness that God pours out compassion on the pure and impure alike. He not only spoke of God’s unbounded compassion – he embodied it every day – In the way he sat at table with everyone, in the way he was never afraid to be called a “friend of sinners,” in the way he touched untouchables and refused to condemn even the most notorious of sinners. In his living, Jesus embodied a very different vision of what God is like…. 

So, too, in his dying where he showed us that: God is not revealed in killing and conquest or violence and hatred. No, God is revealed in the crucified one — giving of himself to the very last breath – giving and forgiving. God is like Mary Magdalene, standing witness in a vulnerable solidarity; or his beloved mother Mary who held him close to her heart in prayer when that was all that was possible. And now it’s Easter – the first morning of a new age saturated in grace – and NO one knows exactly what to do. The men are in hiding, the women are bewildered by the rolled away stone and the appearance of angels, and it looks as if Jesus has somehow gone AWOL – which, I must confess, strikes me as GOOD news in a truly upside-down kingdom kind of way. Here’s what I mean…

· I don’t always get living by faith not sight, ok? Like some of you, I get cranky and worn-out. Sometimes I want to rush to get the job done or control events so much that I miss being with a loved one when they need my attention; or, worse, overlook them when they cry out for love.

· And THAT’S why I find the initial confusion of Easter morning to be such GOOD news. It says to me – and ALL of us - that even when we make a mess of things – or can’t see the forest of God’s grace for the trees – this NEVER inhibits the Lord from unleashing a mystical blessing on Easter morning that promises the spiritual presence of Jesus will be with us forever! In good times and bad, when we’re grounded or unhinged, faithful or even lost in sin: God is WITH us whether we grasp, comprehend, or believe this or not.

And that’s what today’s Bible story asks us to celebrate: the Easter promise that God’s love and forgiveness is ALWAYS available to us through the spirit of Jesus. Now, let’s be clear, such radical grace is bewildering. Incomprehensible and seemingly beyond reason. So, tradition asks us to practice trusting this love that we can’t explain or comprehend – it’s truth but we can only experience and acc-ept – or as our 12 Step buddies put it: we have to fake it till we make it.

And to assist you in doing this on Easter Sunday, I’ve asked Donna Lee to help me with two new songs for our community. Easter, you see, is really a festival of faith not an intellectual exercise in linear thinking. It’s experiential. Soul satisfying. More a matter of the heart than the head. Which is one of the charisms of singing together: when we really get INto it, scientists have found that our hearts start to beat together in unison as if we were one body. St. Paul calls this the body of Christ re-membered. Over the years two songs have become foundational in my quest to practice trusting God’s grace so I want to share them with you. The words are on the communion insert in your bulletin, so let’s try this together. Donna Lee and I will sing the first verse and chorus through once and then we can we sing all 4 verses together, ok?

Now, there are four parts to this song and each verse invites us to experience the mystical love of the Lord a little deeper. To begin, we’re reminded that God comes to us in our ordinary, everyday, working, and walking around lives – not JUST holidays or holy times – but every day: I looked up and I saw my Lord’s a’comin’ down the road. Can you think of an ordinary time when you became aware of God’s love?

What about the wisdom in the second verse: I looked up and I saw my Lord a’ weeping? Anyone here ever wept? Maybe cried because you were hurt, or you realized you had hurt someone else? This verse recognizes that we’re going to get it wrong SOMETIME in our lives; and Jesus not only KNOWS this – knows it so well, in fact, that he weeps for us in love - but comes to us spiritually when we’re lost and hurting. Did you catch that? Being with us is about grace, not judgment so that we never need be afraid or ashamed to call out for help. NEVER!

That’s the heart of the third verse concerning the Cross: I looked up and I saw my Lord a’dying on the Cross. Part of the Easter story is that Jesus came into the world to show us that when we hurt another, neglect them, take someone for granted, or abuse their love… something dies. Trust is broken. God’s heart is wounded. The Cross shows us graphically what it looks and feels like when love is killed – but it also shows us God’s way to deal with that loss. Someone far smarter than I put it like this: Jesus didn’t die so that you don’t have to; rather Jesus died so that you would know HOW to. He didn’t die instead of you; he died ahead of you – and he didn’t rise so that you don’t have to but so that you would be able to rise with him! Are you still with me?

The Cross is not so much about substitution, as about participation. Do you recall what Jesus kept telling those he loved: Follow me – follow me into life, into death, and into life beyond death. Which is what verse four tells us: I looked up and saw my Lord… what? Rising from the grave. Easter is the assurance s that our sins and mistakes, our selfishness and pain, are not the end of the story. They CAN bring us new life, new love, new possibilities. In Jesus, God comes to us where we live, loves and cares for us when we hurt, weeps and dies for us when we are selfish or cruel, and KEEPS coming back to us with new life and forgiveness so that we can get back to loving others again as was the plan in the beginning.

That’s why Mary Magdalene, a trusted friend of Jesus who became the apostle to the apostles, accompanied Jesus even to the tomb. When Magdalene first met him, SHE was hurting. She was broken and not in her right mind; but her confusion and pain didn’t stop Jesus from befriending her with healing because God’s love meets us where we are. We don’t have to be good enough, holy enough, or pure enough to taste grace. Mary’ story insists that Jesus met her where she was and shared God’s love with her: he wept for her pain, he helped her become healthy and whole again, and then he asked her to give to others what he had given to her.

And that’s what he asks of us on Easter: that WE, too share God’s love with the world. And, when Jesus went to the Cross, not only did Mary WEEP for him, she kept him company so that he wasn’t alone during his suffering. She didn’t know what would come next, but she HAD learned the importance of staying connected in love during her hard time, so when her time came to stand and de-liver for Jesus, she was ready to give back as good as she was given. She couldn’t fix things – Jesus was still going to die on the Cross – but she could bear witness in love. And when WE do THAT, as impotent as it can feel, we’re not only RE-membering Jesus, we’re sharing God’s love like we’ve received it – and God’s love carries with it the courage to face hard times.

Easter asks us to trust God’s grace even when we don’t know exactly what that means. Or what’s going to happen next. Today we’re told that the women fled the tomb in uncertainty and fear. A writer in The Christian Century recently put it like this:

The resurrection is unknowable in the way we like to know things, the journalistic who-what-when-where-how that we grandchildren of the Enlightenment think comprises truth. But St. Mark was different: he was willing to have his life changed before he understood fully what was changing it. Actually, this is the only way life ever really changes. You won’t understand marriage until you’ve been hitched for a while—maybe not even then. You’re not going to know what it’s like to have a baby until you have one. You don’t even know your profession until you’ve been in it a while. Nothing in life is obvious immediately. It all grows on us. And this is how we approach the resurrection of Jesus at Easter: we can’t and won’t understand it until we let it grow on us.

That’s why our song closes with the assurance that God’s loving presence changes everything even if we don’t fully grasp that now. Nowhere in this song or in the Bible is Easter explained, ok? It is experienced – it grows on the disciples and us as we practice trusting and sharing it. And that’s really why we’re here today: not to explain Easter or Resurrection or grace. We’re here to celebrate it, to trust it, and then share it. Like Clarence Jordan, great grandfather of Habitat for Humanity, used to say: the proof of Easter is NOT the rolled away stone but the carried away community that keeps on sharing love no matter what happens. But, as Diana Butler Bass notes: more often than not it takes some sorting out and time before we can celebrate God's presence in our lives and our world. Like the abrupt and startling end to St. Mark's gospel, today's story closes with NO clarity:

The passage for Easter this year is the original ending of Mark. In many ways, this short reading is puzzling. There’s no actual risen Jesus (just a “young man in a white robe” saying he has risen); there’s no triumph or joy. There are only women who have seen an empty tomb with its phantasmic herald: 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. That’s it. That’s the ending of Mark’s gospel and his entire story of resurrection. Verses 9 - 20 were added much later, no doubt because of this abrupt and unsatisfactory finale. I wish they hadn’t been added. For, without them, the story of that first Easter Sunday is the most human of all the accounts. It is simple, straightforward: mourners, an empty tomb, an otherworldly being, and a directive to tell everybody what happened that the frightened women promptly disobey.

Being afraid is a much more normal than shouting alleluia. Empty tombs and discarded burial cloths, spiritual visitations and conversations with the dead — these should make us tremble with wonder and fear. What do you say when you’ve seen such things? Nothing makes perfect sense. Mark is the most believable resurrection story ever told. But Mark didn’t let terror lead to denial. And fear doesn’t mean the women remained frightened forever. Instead, his account holds out an invitation, one the women surely remembered and eventually followed. The angel-ghost-whoever tells the women to go to Galilee — go back to the place where it all started — and “there you will see him.” Go back to the beginning. Go back to where the story began. And then, you will understand. You will see him.

So, I want to share with you another song: a prayer song that you can sing whenever you feel like the women confronting the empty tomb. Whenever you need encouragement. It’s a round to remind us how much we NEED one another. Donna Lee and I will sing it first two times and then we’ll break into a round. I will be part one over here – and she will be part two over there. And I’d like to have the choir join Donna in part two, ok?

The words are also in the bulletin insert so… is that clear? She and I will sing it through twice, we’ll ALL sing it through twice in unison, then we’ll do it as a round three times. And be certain to listen to one another during the round, ok? Listen to the beauty our Easter prayer offers. Listen for the love we’re sharing right now with one another and the Lord. And listen for the presence of Jesus in what we’re doing, too…here we go.

Jesus, Jesus, let me tell you what I know:

You have given us your Spirit: we love you.

This Easter, I'm with Dr. Bass - and St. Mark - and Jesus: 

We are invited to go back to the place where it all began. You need to know the whole story before it makes sense. You’ll see him as you follow him. Don’t get stuck in fear, even when people may think you’re nuts or don’t understand what you’ve seen. When nothing seems right. When the tomb is empty. When you’ve encountered the Unexpected One. He lives. You will see him. It may well be a miracle, but it is most surely a journey.