The incarnation of the resurrection
Sermon Note:
What I had originally planned to say this Easter morning went out the window the afternoon of Good Friday. Originally, the sermon titled “Who Are You Looking For?” was intended to explore what kind of Jesus we are looking for and what veils need to be lifted so we can recognize God’s resurrection in all the places it occurs. I’d be hard pressed to find a better question to ask at Easter than “Who Are You Looking For?” But Easter in Nashville feels different this year. The good news of “Christ is Risen!” has not changed. But it feels like Nashville has. And so my message ended up going in a different direction. These are my preaching notes and may vary from what appears during the recording on our YouTube channel.
Introduction
On the early morning of April 9, 1945, theologian and church leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 39, was hanged by the Nazis in the concentration camp of Flossenburg. One year earlier in a letter which he wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge from a Gestapo prison at the time of Easter that Christ’s resurrection is not primarily about learning how to cope with death, rather it is about learning how to live now. He wrote: “It’s not from the art of dying, but from the resurrection of Christ, that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world…If a few people believed that and acted on it in their daily lives, a great deal would be changed. To live in the light of the resurrection - that is what Easter means.”
I began with Dietrich Bonhoeffer this morning, because for starters you know how I love the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and what better day to say his name and mention his witness than the anniversary of his death, April 9, 1945 (78 years ago). But also because of his reminder not to overly emphasize the resurrection as an act of salvation for the unlocking of eternal life as we tend to do on the otherworldly, but upon our present world. So, if this sermon is in need of a renaming, reflecting the change in direction it is: “The Incarnation of the Resurrection.”
In my role as pastor, it often feels like I am a scout sent ahead on the trail into the Season of Easter and ahead of you in the Scriptures. And it is in the going ahead of you I have been clearing the trail for you to follow. And as I have gone ahead, I have been cherishing the gospel stories we read on Easter morning and in the weeks following because they show us a way forward. They show us simply and beautifully how to do this holy thing, this hard essential thing to love and not despair in this present world. To trust and not retreat even in the face of uncertain times. What feels possible now is to stay very close to the story this Easter. Not to everything pretty we’ve added to it over the millennia. With the brunches and flutes of mimosas. And Easter hats and eggs. According to the Good Book, the first Easter was not a Hallelujah Chorus. It was a woman walking through a cemetery dressed in black – dressed in the clothes you wear when your heart is torn up by grief. I know… I know… this sounds a bit curmudgeonly. But the first Easter wasn’t a victory lap. It wasn’t a celebration at all. With its confused running. Its timid peeks into empty tombs. Hope and uncertainty, intertwined. Faith waiting in the shadows for understanding.
The first Easter dawned on a world saturated with fear, haunted by death, shaken by God, and blessed by the loving actions of a few brave souls. All of which is to say, the first Easter feels a lot like this Easter in Nashville.
…And, for me, there is hope to be found in this comparison.
Let’s Look at the Easter Story
Early in the morning, while it was still dark. That’s where Easter begins. In John’s version of the story, Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb before sunrise. Frederick Beuchner expands on this detail to comment on “the darkness of the resurrection itself.” He describes the first Easter morning as a time “when it was hard to be sure what you were seeing.”
Needless to say, this is frustrating. Why can’t the promise of Easter come to us in blazing brightness? With unmistakable clarity? Why all this stumbling around in the darkness? Why so much occasion for bewilderment? Summing up the writers over the centuries on this feature of the resurrection it could be put as a question: “Could it be that Death is such an abyss, such a horror, such a violation, that only a mystery as profound as resurrection-in-the-dark will suffice?” After all, here in Nashville over these past few weeks, we have seen Death magnified. Death exceeding the boundaries we try to impose on it. Boundaries such as preserving the innocence of children. Cushioned boundaries we like to line our lives with our assumptions that we as parents can protect our young children. That boundary was pierced by the tragic event of the shooting in Nashville.
I wonder: can we rest in our shiny religious certainties any longer, given the scope of these losses? But I wonder, too, that maybe we need mystery right now. Angels in murky places. A stranger’s voice, a gardener perhaps, revealing the divine. Maybe we need mystery right now — mystery commensurate to the beauty of a flower in bloom from a bulb to the vastness of the cosmos.Transformations both inexplicable and uncontainable. Maybe we need God, who dwells in light so bright and so unapproachable, he covers us in merciful darkness to protect our fragile sight.
The gospel writer John who is telling us of Mary’s walk through the darkness of the cemetery garden begins his gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1:1-4)
There is light, but there is still darkness. And there is still darkness that remains after the resurrection.
Did you notice that Mary did not recognize the risen Jesus in the garden? In the garden, she confused him to be a gardener. Have you ever found it to be the case that Jesus comes in the darkness, and sometimes it takes a long time to recognize him. Then he doesn’t look the way we expect him to look. Then he doesn’t let me cling to my old ideas of him. And then he disappears again just like he did for Mary, as I try to grab hold of him. But he comes, nevertheless, and calls my name just as he did to Mary. Just as he does to you. And in that instant, I recognize both myself and him.
Mystery. There is so much about the resurrection that we don’t know. What we do know - what we need to know - is that somehow, in an ancient tomb on a starry night, God worked in secret to bring life out of death. Somehow, in utter darkness, God saved the world.
Again, back to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reminder that the focus of resurrection is not just on the otherworldly, but upon our present world. Reading the Easter texts it seems the present world is where the risen Christ wants us to focus. The Incarnation of Resurrection. It is strange to talk in this way because incarnation is the talk of Christmas and the Manger, not the Cross and the empty tomb of Easter. Finding the words of Debie Thomas on Good Friday, changed my direction as she casts the long reach of the incarnation of God through Jesus in this way as she writes:
“for me the Jesus of Easter is the Jesus of the incarnation. The Jesus who develops in a womb. Slides through a birth canal. Sleeps in a feeding trough and nurses at a peasant woman's breast. The Jesus who soaks in the waters of baptism hungers for bread in the Judean wilderness. Weeps at Lazarus's tomb.” (I would add: basks in scented oils on his feet by Mary Magdalene who anoints him for his death. From the Mount of Olives cries over the city of Jerusalem lamenting “If you only have done the things that make for peace.”) Sweats blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and asphyxiates on a roman cross. This is the same Jesus - human embodied, incarnate - who shows up in today's gospel to Mary and says do not touch me… but then will appear to the disciples and say “touch me and see.”
Debie Thomas points us to the incarnation and also to the theologian James Alison who describes the resurrection this way:
“Jesus doesn't simply erase death. He carries death's shell on his living body, rendering his scars a trophy, a sign of life's ultimate and lasting victory.” “What type of life is this?” James Alison asks in awe that includes death allowing it to be something that can be shown to others in order to allay their fears. if even at the height of resurrection victory, Jesus's witness is a witness of visible scars and named hungers, then maybe we should pay attention. Maybe when the world looks at us to see if our faith is authentic and trustworthy, it needs to see our scars and our hungers, too. Our vulnerability, not our immunity. Our honesty, not our pretenses to perfection.
I love this story in John with Mary and then with Jesus’ visit in the Upper Room for the way it grounds divine revelation in the concrete and the ordinary of our lives. And upon bodies. That the disciples find a way to begin again which is why perhaps all of Jesus's post-resurrection appearances in the gospels center on bodies. He receives the tearful embrace of Mary Magdalene who wants to cling to him as tightly as he can. He makes footprints on the Emmaus road with two of his bewildered friends. He tears into hunks of bread at their dinner table until at last they recognize who he is. Jesus makes a campfire on the beach and cooks breakfast for Peter and his friends.
I love to sing “Lift High the Cross” on Easter morning of Christ’s triumph and the empty tomb, but lest we forget in these Easter stories: Jesus offers his friends his vulnerability. His beautiful and broken body enlivened and transformed by the high costs of love. He offers them not a scientific treatise on resurrection. Not an eloquent sermon. Not a dazzling spectacle of holy roller pyrotechnics. But his body. The narrative of his body. Its scars. Its trials. Its losses. Its history. He showed his resurrection in the evidence of his hands and his feet. Again, leaning on Debie Thomas who describes Jesus as saying: “I am alive not just to triumph and victory but also to pain and sorrow. I don't float somewhere above you. I am here with you in the hot searing heart of things where the grace of God makes its home. Belief doesn’t have to come first. Bodies come first.”
The first Easter feels a lot like this Easter in Nashville. …there is hope to be found in this Comparison
It feels painful to talk about bodies this morning and of course we all understand why here in Nashville. How shall we speak of empty tombs when 6 precious singular god-breathed bodies were lost in a tragic shooting. A seventh lost soul was lost too. How shall we speak of empty tombs when there are many in the limestone halls of power who insist that the health and safety of our children don't matter. I imagine many of you, like me in Tennessee, are so discouraged because this week we have heard said that bodies - our children’s bodies, womens’ bodies, and (some of you may struggle with what I say next)… elected black bodies, trans bodies….are expendable. We are a resurrection people. But I need to acknowledge we are also a people in pain right now in Nashville. We are grieving. And many of you were hopeful that maybe just maybe, Nashville could lead the way to help bring change and we fear that it will just be business as usual. And looking at the Easter story, if we begin to count all the ways in which the story of the crucifixion, a story of state-sanctioned violence, mass apathy, loveless legalism, and spiritual nostalgia and spiritual amnesia of that day 2000 years ago ripples today across Houses and across the landscape, making our knees want to buckle. Jesus and his scars are everywhere. As are ours.
Yes, I know that in some circles it’s unfashionable to need the empty tomb and the Risen Christ. I know that the resurrection is sometimes dismissed as a crutch. A naive refusal to dwell squarely in the here and then now. But here's the thing. We don't cling to the resurrection in order to escape the here and now. We cling to the resurrection so that we can embody new life in the here and now. So that we can pour out our lives for the vulnerable, the threatened, the hopeless. The resurrection is anything but “business as usual.” Of course it's so much easier to wax eloquent on the poetic beauty of the resurrection as metaphor. (“In the bulb there is a flower.”) And all of that has its place. But here is the risen Jesus focused on his bodies. And on us. Calling to us by name as he did Mary. I need to acknowledge that Jesus says this weird thing “I have not yet ascended” …”Do not hold onto me.” I said I am like the scout going ahead of you in this Easter story and I’ll be honest: this line makes me wince, and part of me wishes Jesus hadn’t said it. Especially when it is good advice to ask a child right now - indeed all of us - the question: “Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged?” Didn’t it make all the sense in the world for Mary to hold on tight to Jesus? Who among us wouldn’t cling? Especially if a loved one unexpectedly returned? Wasn’t Mary simply expressing her love? Maybe, too, it was acknowledgement. That when Mary heard her name, maybe it was then that Jesus truly became fully God and fully human. She loved all of him, because through him she had experienced a love that embraced all of her. Or maybe Jesus cautioned her against in his seeming rebuke was not love, but possessiveness, insecurity, and fear. An unwillingness to let things change. An unwillingness to mature in her comprehension and her calling. I wonder if Jesus was saying, “Mary, you are more than a disciple now. You are a witness. A preacher. An apostle to the apostles. Do not hold onto what you thought you knew about yourself and about me. Do not cling to the way things used to be. Loosen your grip on the past. Stop expecting life to be what it was before the cross and the grave. I am doing something new in the world. I am doing something new in you. Don’t cling. Don’t hold on. Grow.
Don’t stay here, Go!
And they all go. The disciples lose enough of their fear to hear what Jesus is saying to them and in their open hearted hearing they change. The disciples become witnesses. Witnesses with skin in the game. Confident in their testimony. By Jesus sharing his scars and his body, they become his body in the world. And we who follow are to be Christ’s body in this world. Be my body in the halls of power. Be my body in the institutions of power and influence you inhabit. Be my body in your community. Be my body in the locations where hatred, violence, and trauma lurk. Be my body in all times and places where death mocks and diminishes our children and with the power of the resurrection within you and around you stand up and say enough. Enough.
This is not a call for an “insurrection” but to proclaim the resurrection. The resurrection is not a platitude or a line in a creed. God said to the prophet Ezekiel, “Mortal, will these bones live? And Ezekiel said, “O God, only you know.”
The resurrection is fire in our bones. Impetus for our feet. A song of ferocious hope for our souls. The resurrection is God's clarion call to you; God’s clarion call to the church. God’s insistence that we speak, stand and work for life in a city, a state, a nation desperate for fewer crosses and fewer little caskets. In the resurrection as God declares that death will not will not have the last word, we run ahead like Mary as witnesses to an ancient and ever-living story of embodiment. We do so because of a love of God that conquered a grave two thousand years ago. Who conquers graves still. And because that same scarred, vulnerable, and earth shattering love is ours to cherish and ours to give away. Trusting that it is Jesus himself who is among us. Amen.