NOTHING WE EXPECT
Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009
1 Corinthians 15:1-8;  Mark 16:1-8
South Congregational Church, Amherst, MA
Caroline K. Meyers, Pastor

Last Sunday while many of us were milling about downstairs, holding our palms, waiting to process together in worship, one of the crowd came over to me and said, with a rather sheepish expression: “Does this mean that next week is Easter?”

No matter how we may plan for it, Easter always comes unexpected, a surprise, a knock at the back door when we were waiting all along for the front doorbell to ring.  Easter is one of those holidays that moves around, that you can’t quite get a handle on.  Some years it’s in March, or maybe it’s all the way in late April.  Maybe it’s snowing, maybe all the spring bulb flowers have popped.  Who knows?  Surprise!  It’s Easter!  Christ has risen indeed! 

Other holidays we can pin down on the calendar ahead of time.  Christmas always happens on December 25.  Halloween comes October 31.  St. Patrick’s day falls religiously on March 17.  The 4th of July…well, you get the picture.  But Easter?  Easter is tied to the moon and the sun and the story of the angel of death passing over our ancestors as God prepared to lead them out of enslavement to a new and promising future.  Easter is about forces beyond us ripping open the barriers between heaven and earth, and making all that is in it, in us, new.  Easter is a moveable feast.  Easter just won’t stay put.

For those of you curious about such things (and wanting to put next year’s date on your calendar ahead of time), the date of Easter falls annually on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox; and this calculation was determined by the Council of Nicaea in the early 300s, based in part on the Passover celebrations of our Jewish ancestors who count time by a lunar calendar.  Got that?  So first we have to wait for the first day of Spring, that brief moment of the year when day and night are of equal length.  And then we have to wait until there is a full moon, (which could be anywhere from 1 to 27 days later), and then we count the days until the next Sunday, when the sun arises, and Easter happens once again. 

From the beginning, Easter has been about encountering the unexpected, as Mark’s gospel makes starkly clear.  Some of the women who had been close to Jesus went, as women had done for millennia before them, to anoint the body of their deceased friend.  They went early, and in the dark, and with heavy footsteps.  They wondered who would roll the heavy stone away from the mouth of the cave where Jesus’ body had been laid.  Their eyes and hearts were downcast.

And then – surprise! – the stone was already rolled away.   They went in to the tomb with their spices, prepared to honor and anoint the dead.  But – surprise again! – the tomb was empty of death and full, instead, of the very live presence of one who told them Jesus had been raised.  And then – surprise just isn’t a big enough word here – he told them to go and gather the others so that Jesus could meet them back in Galilee.  How do you handle such news?  

We’ve heard this story before, most of us, and so perhaps the shock of it has worn off.  We expect to sing, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” and to get our Allelulias back, and to go home in our new Easter outfits and enjoy a celebratory feast.  But for those first women who heard the news that Jesus was alive, there was nothing expected about it.  And if we take the time to look a little more closely at the story, we’ll see that there’s nothing we expect in it, either.

Easter, if it is anything, is good news.  It is the incredible good news that what has happened in Jesus means that not even death can hold God down, that life triumphs over death, that love overcomes hatred, that all the powers of hell are vanquished by the sacrifice of heaven.  When the women come to the tomb and find that Jesus’ body is gone, and that he has been resurrected – is alive! – we might reasonably expect them to be surprised, jubilant, even thrilled to be the ones to get to tell the others this amazing good news.

Instead, as Mark tells it, the women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  They were afraid.

Now, fear is not generally the first emotion that comes to mind when we think about Easter.  But perhaps that’s because we’ve done our level best to tame its outrageous truth and contain it in manageable, pastel-colored, fuzzy, adorable, or chocolate-coated packages that we can carry around in baskets and open for our pleasure whenever the mood strikes us.  But if Easter is about the fact that nothing, not even death, can contain and keep God down, then we have every reason, like those first women, to be scared out of our wits. God could change everything we’ve ever thought about the way the world works.  God’s risen Christ could show up anywhere: on the road to Damascus, or Belchertown; in the celebratory feast that’s waiting at home or in the miraculous meals shared at the Survival Center; in my kindly grandmother, or in the grouch of a neighbor who lives next door, or in the scary-looking man at the bus stop, or even in the person sitting right there in the pew to whom you’ve said hello for years but hardly know a thing about.  Surprise!  It’s Easter!  Christ is Risen, indeed, and is sitting right next to you!  Fear seems like just the right response to a God who can come upon us with such unpredictable suddenness, riddling our tame and downcast lives with life – LIFE! – where we least expect it. 

That frighteningly free, untethered God was not the first shock for the women that Easter morning, though.  What first caught them by surprise when they got to the grave was that the stone that had closed the mouth to the tomb had been rolled away.  And that points to a second unexpected Easter gift for us as well. 

I was taught, in good Puritan form, that God helps those who help themselves, who pull themselves up by their bootstraps, who shoulder the burden on their own with no whining, who earn their keep.  And for generations the church has used that very ethic to frighten people into obedience: you have to work your way up to God in order for God to reward you…or else.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch, or a free eternity.  You want God to come through for you, then these are the steps you have to follow.  In other words, for far too long the story that has been stamped on our hearts is that if we want God to come out to us, then we’re going to have to roll away the stone.  It’s all up to us. So we’d better work on those spiritual muscles early and often because there are a heck-of-a-lot of enormous stones out there, and if we don’t roll them away, if we don’t do our part, if we don’t help ourselves, then God’s not going to come through for us, either.

But the Easter story reminds us, my weary, sore, aching friends, that nothing – nothing – could be further from the truth.  “When the women got to entrance of the tomb, they looked up and saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.”  Here is more of the amazing good news of Easter: we don’t have to lift a finger to encounter the living God.  God has taken all the initiative in coming out to us, has done all the heavy lifting, has already rolled away that immovable stone between us.  Surprise!  It’s Easter!  Christ is Risen!  And it was all of God’s doing; we were utterly helpless in the process. Contrary to all our expectations, God has come to help those who can not help themselves.

Which brings us to Easter surprise number 3: Peter.  You remember him: “the rock.”  There’s an ironic nickname if ever there was one.  When Jesus needed him most to be that rock, to stand firm, to stand by him, Peter’s conviction trickled out like sand.  Three times on the night before the crucifixion, Peter had denied Jesus, denied that he even knew the man whose every step he had followed, faithfully, for the last three years.  And on the night when Jesus needed him most Simon, re-named Peter, had utterly turned his back on his friend and teacher. 

And, of course, the logical response, the expected response to such betrayal is to turn one’s back in return.  It was against all logic that Jesus returned to life in the first place, but it was further beyond all human calculation or inkling that Jesus would desire to return, in love and blessing, specifically to the fickle companion who at the crucial moment would not even admit that he knew who Jesus was.  Specifically to Peter – did you catch that?

When the women entered the empty tomb and were met by God’s messenger, he told them that Jesus had been raised.  And then he said, “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”  Go tell all of them, but especially the one who denied him most vehemently.  Go tell the disciples, but especially the one who needs to hear it most.  Go tell them all, but make sure Peter in particular knows that Jesus is alive, and nothing he has done is going to keep Jesus from meeting him again with open arms.

This, above all, we do not expect.  When we mess up, we expect consequences, retribution, punishment.  We expect either the heat of anger coming at us, or the cold shoulder turned away.  We expect the weight of judgment to come crashing down on us like a heavy wooden beam.  But nothing prepares us to expect that Jesus would return from that ultimate betrayal yearning to see the very friend who’d thrown that friendship to the dogs, and naming him specifically as one to receive the good news that Jesus is alive and as full of love as ever and wanting to meet him again.

And this is the most unlikely good news of this most unexpected day: that no matter what we’ve done to deny Jesus, to betray him, to turn our backs on him, to throw the gift of his life with us to the dogs, Easter means that he still comes back to life yearning for our company, as full of love as ever, wanting to meet us again and turn our hurt to healing.  Read the passage again, but with one small change.  Hear God’s messenger say to the women: “Go, tell the disciples and…insert your name here….”  Go, tell the disciples and Ann, Steven, Shirley, Richard.  Go, tell the disciples and Lee, Patrick, Carol, Bob.  Go, tell the others, but especially tell James, Emma, Spencer, Liz, that Jesus is alive and looking forward to seeing them.  Surprise!  It is Easter!  Christ is risen!  And nothing we have done or not done can make him not want to be with us. 

How do we handle such news?  Perhaps we can’t.  We can’t possibly put the earth-shattering good news of Easter in any sort of package that we can handle, manipulate, nail down, and make stay put.  But we can let that good news handle us, and shape, and unbind, and set us free.  Surprise!  It is Easter!  Christ is Risen – for us!

So let us also rise, for our names have been called, and Christ is alive among us, and is nothing like we expected, and everything that we had hoped for.  Come: stand up!  Stand up!  And let us sing together for joy!

Amen!