Sermon for April 21, 2019 
Read Acts 10:34-43 and John 20:1-18 In the joy of Easter morning, we must start where the biblical story does, with a journey to the tomb. We all know what it is like to walk that road with Mary. It is as ancient as the first Easter and as contemporary as today.
Mary’s Easter began as just an agonizing extension of Good Friday. Her weeping continues there by the tomb in the darkness. Then she notices, the stone is rolled away. The body of her beloved teacher must be gone, stolen, desecrated. Mary’s journey that morning is our journey on many a morning.
An old couple received a phone call from their son who lives far away. The son said he was sorry, but he wouldn’t be able to come for a visit over the holidays after all. "The grandkids say hello." They assured him that they understood, but when they hung up the phone they didn’t dare look at each other.
A woman was called into her supervisor’s office to hear that times are hard for the company and they had to let her go. "So sorry." She cleaned out her desk, packed away her hopes for getting ahead, and wondered what she would tell her kids.
Someone received terrible news from a physician. Someone else heard the words, "I don’t love you anymore." Sometimes it feels like the world is nothing but Good Friday.
The disciples come to the tomb in disbelief and in loss, looking for answers but not quite believing in them. We are so like them that at times it is painful. We believe, and yet we are overwhelmed in grief and loss. We believe, and yet we shake our heads at how awful the world is. We believe and yet we are not sure.
And when we struggle, this story is the golden thread we cling to in those dark times, running through the Bible; this story of God’s redeeming and forgiving love, this story of God’s willingness to act in response to the world’s evil, this story summed up in the words; but God.
They put Jesus to death on a tree, but God raised him. Those words, but God, are our answer to the death, destruction, and despair the world has for us. We believe that although violence and hatred, sin and cruelty, seem to be winning, peace and justice will prevail at the end of the day. We dare to believe that the long arc of history, as Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, is toward freedom, equality, kindness, justice, and love.
Today we celebrate the ultimate but God moment, the raising of Jesus from the tomb. It is both the proof and the promise of our faith. It reminds us of what God has done in the past while promising to us what God will do in the future.
Easter is about the coming of hope in those dark days. I think that it is hard to understand Easter until we have spent time in Good Friday, time in the dark place where hope cannot be seen. Easter is the "but God," breaking into the darkness. Easter is about the rebirth into something new.
This day is not about bunnies and springtime. It’s about more hope than we can handle.
Jesus gives the disciples hope this day. He gives Mary hope. When her world was nothing but despair and she didn’t even have the body of her teacher left to grieve over, Jesus comes to her and calls her by name. Her rabbi has returned and she is nearly overwhelmed with hope. With joy.
But do you notice what happens next? Jesus tells her not to hold onto him. Not to cling to him. Yes, Jesus is alive again, but it is not going to be like it was before he died. He won’t be traveling with them, laughing and teaching and wandering place to place as his disciples follow along. That relationship has gone and something new has taken its place.
Today is about the resurrection of our lord, about resurrection in our lives. It’s about going from being dead to the world to being alive to all that is good. But it is not about going back to the way things were before.
It may take a while Easter to sink deep, deep into the fertile, broken up soil of our hearts. It may take a while to see the resurrection promise begin to grow, and bud, and bloom. It may take a while for us, as it did for Jesus’ first disciples, to dry our tears and open our eyes to the truth that this resurrection promise is not about a life of worldly success or military victory. Not about an end to all of the things we don’t like about life on this earth. Not a return to a better, happier time when we were in perfect health, when our children behaved, when our loved one was still alive.
What we long for, what we miss and beg God to give back, is gone. Easter doesn’t change that. So we cannot cling to the hope that Jesus will take us back to the way it was. The resurrection promise is not about things being the way we want them to be. Not about them going back to the way they were.
The resurrection promise is about the deep reality of holy life, even in the midst of violence, sickness, and death. The resurrection promise is about God’s reckless love for us, and our ability, by God’s grace, to live out that reckless love towards other people. The resurrection promise is an admonishment to not hold onto Jesus, to the life we think we want, the way we think we want things to be, but to move forward, proclaiming good news, trusting God for the fullness of life that awaits us in this world and the next.
The way out of the darkness is only by moving ahead. We follow the path that our Lord set before us by moving forward, by embracing the new life we are offered in the resurrection. By opening ourselves to joy again.
The German theologian Jurgen Moltmann expresses in a single sentence the great span from Good Friday to Easter. It is, in fact, a summary of human history, past, present, and future: "God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him."
After the resurrection, things do not return to normal. That’s the good news! Resurrection is about a joyful new beginning!
Whether you find yourself in the darkness or the light, know that the Risen Christ goes with you, offering hope where there is none, and leading you into the new life abundant. For Christ has risen! He has risen indeed!
