March 31, 2002
Easter Sunday
Jeremiah 31:1-6
Matthew 28: 1-10

Matthew begins his account of the Easter story with the same words as the other Gospel writers, "As it was dawning…." The story begins in liminal, in the thin space between darkness and light, unconscious and conscious, sleep and waking, things unseen and seen, the visible and invisible world. It's a powerful time, the hour of dawn, dreams become so vivid we swear they are real! In the silver sliver between night and day —dawn, we find our way through dreams as the spirit prepares for the possibilities contained in a new day. It's a free floating time, this liminal space when madness is as important as sanity, the spirit is free to frolic in the wildness of our divine and demonic unconscience, as unformed and re-forming as the early morning clouds on their way past the window.

What a contrast this early morning mystical moment is to our tepid attempts to capture the meaning of Easter through stories of eggs and bunnies and blooming daffodils! The Easter story is meant for mystery and wild imaginings, rather than dancing rabbits and confectionery eggs! Going to market, we might be tempted to think that this day is all about sugar coating the stark truth about real life and death. Standing in the aisles, we could assume it's only about blossoms, bunnies and bon-bons! So let's get real this morning and return to that scene, the first dawn, to see if we can discover something new, something different from what we have been lead to believe about this day.

All four Gospel accounts of this day begin at dawn. Discovery always begins in luminous darkness. All accounts begin in the same way: "Very early on the first day of the week" (Mark), "While it was still dark" (John), "As the first day of the week was dawning" (Matthew) , "At early dawn" (Luke). But after the first sentence the stories become varied and fantastic. Mark describes a young man dressed in a white robe sitting at the right side of the tomb; Luke writes of two young men in dazzling robes standing beside the tomb; Matthew describes an angel; and John has a gardener, but no angel at all. All four stories place Mary Magdalene at the scene, but she is alone in John, accompanying many others in Luke, and with another Mary in Matthew and Mark, the two earliest accounts. All four accounts agree in their attempt to convey to us that something terribly important has happened, even though each writer narrates a different drama and has a particular window into the experience.

No matter how many explanations and differences of opinion, all the Gospels pivot around the story of the resurrection. New Testament scholars tell us that the resurrection narratives were written even before the stories about the teachings and healings of Jesus. The story I memorized as a fourth grader is Matthew's, the big story, the Steven Spielberg version of the life of Jesus, written so that all who hear will stand up, pay attention, come awake with trembling expectation and fierce longing:

This was no ordinary morning! This is not a sentimental, sanitized, rationalized version of the life of Jesus, no Jefferson Bible, no rabbits here, at all.

Perhaps earthquakes, angels and a trembling humanity are metaphors for the amazing event which took place in the tomb that morning. We don't know…. All we can be sure of is that something extraordinary happened on that first day of the week. We don't know exactly what it was, but we do know that whatever happened shattered the minds and opened the hearts of all those who had anything to do with it. There is ample historical evidence that Jesus lived and roamed about Galilee along the banks of the River Jordan teaching, preaching peace and justice, and healing in ways that riveted both the common folk and the power brokers of his time. He teachings proclaimed a vision of the Kingdom of God, the coming reign of God in the world. His life was as demanding and powerful as his extraordinarily cruel death.

We know that, following the crucifixion and burial, the community around Jesus collapsed into despair and utter hopelessness! The fellowship born out of the vision simply fell apart under the horror of a failed messiah. They had come to a dead end.

Once more, the brutality of history defeated the dream of a New World, of the hope of new life and further possibilities. They experienced history as tyrannical, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

We know the feeling. As we watched those towers collapse last September, did we not feel their weight land on our own spirits? Do we not continue to ache from the loss of life on that day and the destruction of so many other lives since then? Doesn't the war and malice we know now cause us to feel doomed to hatred and enmity between nations and races? We know how it feels to come to a dead end in the midst of life. (Even though I knew rationally that it was not the end of the world, I felt a certain ending, a real death on that day, in a way that I have never felt before.)

No hope. The curtain goes down. Perhaps this is why so many of us feel fine about skipping Good Friday and going straight to Easter. Good Friday is hard. It is hard because it is real. The threats of death are everywhere in this world. We've had a most un-holy week in the Promised Land. This very morning, there was a fourth suicide bombing and Israeli troops have stormed Ramallah and Yassar Arafat's compound. We wait in fear for what might happen next. We live with death every day. A diagnosis of cancer, the death of a loved one. A child runs away from home, never to be seen again. Lives squandered everyday by drugs, violence, war and terrorism. Death is everywhere and it looks for all the world as if we are stuck at Good Friday. Stuck in darkness, the dominion of death.

In the beginning the disciples themselves could not envision a way out of death and despair, a way beyond grief and hatred, a way past utter hopelessness, a road leading beyond Calvary. Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, something transforming but not explainable happened. We know not what happened, but where it happened. In the heart of the gathering, in the coming together, in the rebirth of the community. In all the Gospels the locus of the resurrection is in the community, who gathered around Jesus in life, was disillusioned by his death and chose to keep hope alive following his burial.

The dream of the dominion of God came alive in the life of the community. The point is that the community became the resurrected body of Jesus. The event is not literal, but it is foundational to everything we want to believe about this day. The way we come to know and grasp the triumph of life over death, hope over despair, love over hate is only in the community of the dream. Alone, we are always prey to despair, to the dark vision of the triumph of death over life.

We have become individualized in this country and so alone. Everything we do and say stresses our great faith in the individual. But the Gospel is not concerned about private resurrections, Jesus' or yours and mine. The Gospel story tells us that we are resurrected into a network of relationships called community. First the women were told, "He is not here," and then they were told to go quickly and tell the others. Resurrection has personal significance, only if we can comprehend ourselves as communal beings. It is a corporate, social and political event, an event in which hope, truth, love and justice come to fruition. God comes to us in the life of community. Resurrection hope forces us to abandon any illusion that we can go it alone through this world.

We hope. We believe … together or not at all. Wherever we witness the disintegration of community—the triumph of "I" over "we" — we are in the presence of a dead and useless messiah … witness Israel today. Unless Jews and Arabs rediscover that they are brothers who share a common father — Abraham — the cycle of fratricide will continue. Until they can say, "We Semites," they will both be guilty of anti-Semitism. The only hope left is for a change of all hearts. Nothing less will do. Likewise, in this country, until we find some common humanity with those we name "terrorists" we will fight evil in a way that only increases evil.

Sally McFague has named the world "The Body of God." We might, then, call the body of believers "The Body of Christ." The resurrected Christ lives in the Body of the community. The truth of life is found in the plural. Alone we cannot keep the dream of hope alive. Together we can resurrect hope for new life to come to our homes, our churches and temples, our nation and the world. It is the same hope that animated that small group of disciples who came to the tomb so long ago and found the stone had been taken away and were left to tell the story.

True community, as Richard Rohr has written, comes from having "walked through liminality together" and coming out the other side completely different. It happened to the women who came to the tomb so early on Sunday morning. They walked from darkness into light, from the despair of loss into hope born of the possibility of new life in community, from trembling fear into great joy.

Let us become a people who dare to hope in the now and coming reign of God, who have tasted God's grace in the wilderness of life. This morning, let us say to each other Christ is risen, risen indeed, in this house, this community, risen for life in this desperate world. Today the impossible is possible if we only dare to hope together.

Christ is risen! Risen Indeed!