Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006 John 20: 1-18 Elizabeth Macaulay, RUMC

Last week at staff meeting we were laughing and sharing gratitude for the fact that we could meet outdoors in the courtyard with the sun warming our bodies and hearts. It was SPRING! And we were almost giddy with the joy of it.

As we often do, we got to talking about the service of the Sunday before, and the topic of the children’s sermon came up.

The children’s sermon, for those of you who weren’t there, sought to put the children smack dab into the excitement of that long ago Palm Sunday when Jesus entered the city of Jerusalem. So Shari Burt, one of our clowns (she was in street clothes last Sunday) tried to paint the scene in contemporary language.

Well, one of the children present is the fourth most beautiful child ever born - that would be after my three. Zach, who is two, is Hal Schippit’s grandson. Hal is our minister of Sr and Congregational care but really, his first vocation in life is being a devoted grandpa to this beautiful child.

Zach was in church last Sunday. For the children’s sermon his grandmother Sandi brought him up and plopped him in her lap as they sat on the steps here. When Shari told the children a story about a very important parade coming to town, she asked them to close their eyes and imagine it.

“Look at the parade coming down the street!”, she said. “Here come the marching bands and the floats and clowns!”

To which Zach, eyes dutifully closed, said in a non stage whisper to his grandmother: “I can’t see a parade!”

“You’re supposed to imagine you can see it, Zach” Sandi spoke into his ear. Zach’s reply, this time with a little more frustration and just as much volume:

“I still can’t see a parade!”

And so here we are, people of Jesus on this Easter morning. We have heard trumpets call our hearts to wonder and we are thrilled to sing our Hallelujahs.

And how, oh how do we begin to see the power of what unfolded long ago when the love of God burst out into the world?

How do we paint the picture and how do we take the meaning of the resurrection into our very bones so that the vision of love unleashed - behind the curtain of our own eyes and within the sanctuary of our own lives - becomes as real as the parade Zach was trying to see?

We can talk about things, but sometimes, we just have to let our hearts encounter them to make them real.

But sometimes this is so difficult, because we know from experience that the best things in life can’t be told. They can’t be nailed down into any kind of manageable sound bite.

The wondrous things in our life defy our ability to tell them. Things like what it feels like to fall in love. How do you share the resurrection of heart and body that sings in your blood when love is found?

Who can adequately describe the smell of a baby’s head or the feeling of whacking a baseball out of the park and the joy of a friend’s companionship or… the taste of chocolate? Those things can’t be told.

And so we find ourselves on Easter morning. Gathering to hear a story meant to take the confines of our heart and explode them, it is so expansive.

And we can’t tell it, not all of it, precisely because it is so very big.

But we can try.

Long ago and yesterday, a man came into our midst and brought to us a message so big it couldn’t be contained in himself. It was a message of love and compassion and how to let go of fear so that life can be unwrapped fully by all people.

This man, and all who have followed him fully in teaching this method, ran up against the powers of the comfortable and he was executed because he began to build a following of people who believed him when he taught them that all people - ALL PEOPLE - are sacred and beloved by God. And that those beloved peoples deserved the right to worship God and serve God and live the fruits of God’s abundance.

Long ago and today, preaching the message of living justice and communal grace is a radically risky thing. It can get a man killed. And it did. And it does.

So long ago and yesterday, the one who ignited hope was put to death. On a cross. And his followers were left to wonder at how they could heal their broken hearts and his followers were left to wonder what it had all meant and his followers, one of his followers, sought comfort in the only way she could:

She sought to be near him, to tend him by being present and bearing witness to what he had unloosed in her heart and in her life.

Long ago and yesterday, Mary came to the graveside of her beloved alone, as those who have sought to make sense of the pain of death have done through the ages.

And what she saw broke her heart. Because she saw that the place of rest for her beloved teacher, he whose body had been desecrated by so many, that place had been violated. And she could only imagine that it was grave robbers, come to heap a final indignity upon he who had suffered so much.

In the wildness of her grief, her beloved appears to her, but her heart has been so bruised and her sense of devastation so profound that she could not see the Christ even as he stood before her.

When finally she is able to know that death no longer holds her beloved in its grip, she is overcome with the joy of knowing that nothing, nothing, nothing could take him from her.

And while she yet seeks to hold him to her, he tells her that he must be loosed in order to be fully present for her and for creation. For the ultimate healing, for the future of the movement of grace that we celebrate yet today on this Easter Sunday, Jesus could not be clutched, but rather, needed to be loosed to be a force in this world that lives yet: a force of love and vision.

The power of love is stronger than death, stronger than fear, stronger than clutching. How do we tell the immensity of that story in words?

We look to the world and seek stories of resurrection to ground and remind us.

During this week, we mark the deaths of two great men who lived recently in our midst.

A year ago today, Warren Kirk died. He was a man who lived such powerful ministry. The echoes of his absence are yet present here in this church, and certainly in the community of his family and friends.

Warren was a tireless promoter of VEAP - Volunteers Enlisted to Assist People. VEAP is a local outreach ministry of many churches in the south metro area. Warren was maybe the second person to my door when I arrived here, telling me about the ministry and harassing me (it’s the right word!) about how we were going to make good on our commitment to feeding the hungry and creating justice.

When we want to close our eyes, like Zach did, and envision what Easter looks like, we can look to a man, Warren Kirk, who fought hard to live until the end of his life and while he lived he fought hard to bring grace into the lives of the so many in our neighborhoods who go without basic human services.

I thank you, Warren. You taught resurrection.

The world also marked last Sunday the 60^th anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a 20^th century German Lutheran pastor executed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was a man of faith who could not bear the way that Hitler desecrated creation and he could not bear the way that Hitler used the name of God to justify the obscenity of his actions.

On April 9^th, 60 years ago, Bonhoeffer led prayers with this fellow prisoners. A guard came into their midst and said: “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready and come with us.”

Bonhoeffer quickly wrote a message to his family and friends. A message that proclaimed resurrection: “This is the end… for me the beginning of life.

I want to share an account of what happened the week before his execution. Because it is a story of the resurrection.

Shortly before his death, Bonhoeffer’s fiancée, Maria, came to visit him. They were made to sit side by side on a sofa, talking loudly enough for the guards to hear their every word, and without touching. They knew that the time was near when they would never see each other again. They knew that the space between them would have to serve as conduit of the profound love that they shared. When the visit was declared over, Maria went to the door at one end of the room and Bonhoeffer was taken to the door at the other end.

Just as Maria was about to go out of the room, she turned and ran across the room, away from the guards, and rushed into Bonhoeffer’s arms. And they could feel, one last time, the power of love, made touchable.

Their love would not be contained. The tomb of a prison cell could not contain it.

That rush to embrace. That insistence upon love and life beyond any policing or limits. God’s gifting of resurrection.

That’s the image we live as Easter people.

Hopefully we’ll live it so that Zach can see it. With his eyes open.

Amen.