a sermon for easter sunday – matthew 28:1-10
One of my closet colleagues in the years I lived in Mexico pinned a powerful quote from Indian novelist Arundhati Roy to the wall of our office. It’s since become imprinted on my heart. “Another world is not only possible,” Roy writes, “she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Church, Christians are gathered in spirit around the entire globe today to claim against all odds this defining event of our faith. Christ is risen, and nothing will ever be the same. I know that Grace is accustomed to celebrating the resurrection with the beautiful, well-done, all-out liturgy and music that is so core to our congregation’s identity. My heart aches along with yours that our celebrations are so much quieter and so much simpler today. There’s no brass. There are no choirs. There are no banners, and no collective shouts of “Alleluia!” There are no kids shrieking with joy around the playground area as they hunt for Easter eggs. There’s no buzz of energy in the fellowship hall over continental breakfast. It’s hard. It hurts. And to be honest, I kind of hate it. I kind of hate that our first Easter together is unfolding in this way.
But then I remind myself of the thing I said to you a couple of weeks ago when I first started as your pastor. (If you didn’t know it already, sometimes pastors say the things that we ourselves most need to hear!) The church has never been about the buildings in which we gather. And while God loves our faithful offerings of beautiful worship, God is still God without them. So although there’s perhaps a certain sadness tingeing our celebrations today, I also wonder if maybe, just maybe, Easter might be quiet enough this year for us to hear afresh the breathing of a new world that Jesus’ resurrection ushered in, and keeps ushering in, and will keep ushering in.
Because that first Easter didn’t start with trumpets and fanfare. It started with one man, awaking by himself in a dark, stone cave, peeling off the linen cloths that Joseph of Arimithea had used to wrap his lifeless body just a few days earlier. It started with Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, sitting outside the tomb at first light in the damp cold, the dark and the chill no doubt matching the feelings they carried within them. And though Matthew’s gospel doesn’t tell us exactly where the disciples were in the days after Jesus’ crucifixion, we can take a hint from John’s telling of the story, which finds the disciples quarantined together in a locked room, fearful and uncertain.
And into the quiet, into the grief, into the fear and uncertainty, the unmistakable power of God breaks in. Of the four gospel writers, Matthew has a special penchant for drama and so he tells us of a sudden earthquake, of an angel that looked like lightning, with clothing as white as snow, and of guards who shook and then fell to the ground out of fear, their bodies suddenly as still as corpses. These things sound improbable at best to our modern ears, but they are Matthew’s way of ensuring that the first hearers of this story would know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that what is happening here is of God. First century people well-versed in the Old Testament scriptures knew that the presence of God was signaled by natural phenomena. Wind, lightning, thunder, hail, fire, and earthquakes all carried the power and the often-terrifying mystery of God’s presence into the ancient stories of the faithful.
And this being who looks like lightning? We trust that he is of God because we’ve heard some of these phrases before, in the book of Daniel, where God is described as having clothing “as white as snow,” and where the man who appeared to Daniel had “a face like lightning.” The Hebrew tradition taught that anyone who saw the face of God could die and so the guards’ response of paralyzing fear before this angel of the Lord seems the only sensible one. The women, however, are specifically invited into God’s presence when the angel speaks to them directly – “Do not be afraid,” he says. “I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, but has been raised as he said.”
Shhh. Quiet. Can you hear her breathing?
Can you hear the wind of the Spirit’s breath filling Jesus’ lungs as he awakes from death?
Can you hear the wind of the Spirit’s breath on the lips of the women as they run to tell the disciples what they’ve seen?
Can you hear them catching their breath as they run smack into the risen Christ along the way?
And can you hear the wind of the Spirit’s breath on Jesus’ own words to his beloved friends – “do not be afraid”?
Can you hear the wind of the Spirit’s breath whispering now to a beleaguered creation…and to your own hearts…that Christ is risen, and nothing will ever be the same?
Church, can you hear a new world breathing?
It’s okay if you can’t. It’s hard for me right now, too. It’s hard to hear that new world breathing when the current one is smack in the middle of what feels like a very, very extended Good Friday. It’s been hard for me to hear the promise of new life when each day brings with it new statistics of death, and even harder still when the numbers reported on the news increasingly include the names of people we know, and sometimes even people we love. It’s hard to hear the breath of new life when the sounds of worry or stress or sadness or frustration or loneliness or exhaustion are rattling around in our brains in the low-level kind of way that makes us think it’s not that bad, I’m doing okay. Except that even these low-level rattling feelings still interrupt our sleep or our concentration or our relationships with the people we love.
It’s okay if you can’t hear a new world breathing, because here’s the thing, friends. Other people can. Today, right here, right now, others can.
And that’s why God doesn’t leave us hanging out there on our own, but instead calls us into communities of faith…communities just like Grace.
That’s why the Bible reminds us that we are part of the BODY of Christ and aren’t just lone rangers out there having to make faith appear out of the inadequately thin air of our individual lives.
That’s why, when we come around God’s table for communion, which we’ll do together in just a few minutes, we confess that Jesus is right there with us, along with all of the saints in faith who have ever lived before us.
Thanks be to God for this call into community, because if these moments of collective vulnerability we’re experiencing the world over show us anything right now, it’s the truth that we simply can’t MAKE it on our own.
That’s always true, and it’s especially true right now. We want to say “yes!” to the new world breaking forth with Jesus’ resurrection, but sometimes we need to lean on our community to believe for us when we’re having a hard time, and to trust that the strength of that community is enough to hold us when we’re struggling. Because truly, this incredible story of a God who brings live things out of dead things would be incomplete if even one of us was missing. We all play different roles in that story, and we move between roles depending on where we are in our lives on any given day.
Sometimes we’re like the guards at the tomb, paralyzed with fear in the face of all that’s unfolding before us.
Sometimes we’re like the disciples, imperfectly stumbling our way through a life with Jesus and then hiding away in shock and in fear when the risks of being associated with him become too great to bear.
Sometimes we’re like Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, sitting grief-stricken outside the tomb of the one who loved us beyond all imagining…the one who loved even the parts of us that other people laughed at, or that we felt ashamed of, or that we couldn’t love in ourselves…until the blazing presence of God hits us like a ton of bricks and turns us into witnesses, running toward our friends with a confounding mixture of fear and joy.
And sometimes we’re like the angel, absolutely radiant with God’s power as we confidently – even defiantly – proclaim a message that comes from God’s very mouth – that love is stronger than death. That goodness is stronger than evil. That in Jesus, life is stubborn…powerful enough to make her way in the world, breath by breath, against all odds.
Christ is risen, Beloved of God. A new world is on her way. And indeed, she is already here. Listen to her breathing. Praise be to the God of Life.
Heidi Torgerson 