Mark 16.1-8                                                                                                       12 April 2009

“FORGET EVENTUALLY, COME ALIVE NOW”

Before celebrating this Easter with you, I must confess something about the last one. After singing last year’s Easter praises, confined in our Fellowship Hall, we all went home happy and spent. Driving away, I impulsively decided that I was too drained to go home and prepare my dinner. And I didn’t feel like eating alone.  So I pulled myself up on a bar stool at Oliver’s and ordered a chicken sandwich.

Yes I looked more gussied up than the typical tavern brunch patron. Folks could see that I had just come from church. Two ladies asked me how it was. Before I could brag about our glorious worship, one whom I’d never seen before declared, “My church is Dennis Union Church. That’s where I always go.” Feeling a little like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral, I wanted to ask, “What do you think of the preacher over there? Is he any good?” Instead I stifled myself and didn’t let on she was having Easter dinner with “her preacher” and didn’t know him from the fry cook. A sense of humor is never out of place. As one pastor put it, some folks fondly choose a church to attend.  Others fondly choose a church not to attend.

But here’s the thing, I wonder what that lady from Oliver’s would say Easter is about? Maybe something like, “Because Jesus is raised from death some day we can hope to go to heaven.” Actually, we hear that message not just from casual Christians. We also hear that message in all kinds of Easter hymns and sermons.

Frankly, however, that’s not Mark’s message from Easter morn. In truth, none of the four Gospels focus on Jesus’ resurrection as a distant future eternal hope.   Matthew, Mark, Luke and John describe the Risen Christ not as our rescuer from eventually dying. Rather at Easter they proclaim Jesus as our rescuer from living here and now without hope. Jesus’ lordship is not off afar as some future reality. It’s now in this moment and place, in this circumstance and with those around us.

Mark claims on that first Easter morn, women went to the tomb to pay their last respects to poor, dead Jesus. To their alarm, Jesus’ body was gone. A young man robed in white said, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified?  Well, he isn’t here. He is raised. He is going ahead of you to Galilee.” So where’s Jesus on Easter?  In Galilee, not Jerusalem. In Galilee, not in Rome.

 
Why Galilee?  That question is one wonderful beam of light on Easter Sunday.  Galilee was a forgettable, off-the-beaten-path kind of place.  Of course, Jesus of Nazareth was from Galilee. Not only that, most of his disciples were from Galilee.  They detected Galilee in Peter’s accent at the fireside that night Jesus was arrested and Peter denied Jesus three times. When observers of Jesus’ ministry heard that he and his own were from Galilee, they mockingly wondered, “Can anything good come out of Galilee?”   I understand what it feels like to hear that. After all, I’m from Detroit. People crinkle their noses and seem to sniff something malodorous when I announce my birthplace. Some of you are from New Jersey.  You understand what I am talking about. Think of it this way. Jesus was from the Galilee exit of the New Jersey Turnpike. And that was the first place he went af-ter God raised Jesus from the dead.  We need to hear and grasp that on Easter.

Never mind that Jesus spent most of his three years working in podunk Galilee.  From Galilee he prepared his followers for the eventual trip up to Jerusalem, where the real action was. Jesus ministered mostly in Galilee, but his bigger goal was caught up in the capital city of Jerusalem.  In Jerusalem he died, and in Jerusalem he rose. Of course, all pious believers were certain the Messiah would transform holy Jerusalem into the great power-center it was always meant to be.

“You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified?  Well, he isn’t here. He is raised. He is going ahead of you to Galilee.” So where’s Jesus on Easter? He’s in Galilee, not at the White House.  He’s in Galilee, not at the Kremlin or at Downing Street telling the Pilates of this earth they have seriously miscalculated.

Why Galilee? Nobody special lived there. Nobody except the followers of Jesus. He refused to appear to the grinning shakers and movers. Instead he came to his own just as we were having the spiritual equivalent of the worst possible bad hair day. The resurrected Christ returns to the same rag-tag group of disappointments who had only just misunderstood him, forsaken him, and fled into the darkness. Jesus returns to the inadequately faithful. He returns to broken people like us.

Friends, Easter would have been good enough news to hear that after Jesus died, he was raised again. But hear the full force of this news: he died for us!  We know this because he returned to us rather than more distinguished personages. Paul writes elsewhere that some might be willing to die for a really good person. Jesus was willing to die for the looked down upon, those who come up short, those who mean to be true to the end but get scared, chicken out, and are now ashamed of it. Jesus’ response to our disloyalty isn’t to write us off, but to give us a new, deathproof gift of hope, just as we are at so much less than our very best.

So it’s not so much Jesus died and rose so someday we might go to heaven. No, he did it rescue those lost in the crushing details of life working out poorly now.
 
Do you want to know where Galilee is? I’ll tell you where. It’s the tale of my most anguished but precious Easter Sunday. It was Easter sunrise, 1997. Still drip-ping wet, the telephone was handed me with news that the Kirkpatricks were in trouble. I was close to this family, having welcomed then into the church and bap-tized their firstborn. Expecting their second after a normal pregnancy, Karen went into labor on Holy Saturday.  Everything was perfect until the final moments. Suddenly, the baby’s vital signs plummeted. Their daughter Demory was stillborn at Easter dawn. I sped to the hospital, next door to that Colorado church I served.  The same church where I would proclaim, “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” How would I be able to utter those words with anything like joy? I wondered.
Holding each other’s hands, crying each other’s tears, we prayed each other’s prayers over the child they would never raise before bidding permanent goodbye.  We were baffled.  We were anguished.  We were numb.  Probably not unlike Pe-ter and company after the temple guard arrested Jesus and then strung him up.

How could this be?  It had all happened too fast.  Big sister Ali would never get to tell Demory her first awkward hello.  Karen would never get to coo a warm, sweet motherly welcome to a perfect baby.  Paul would never leave his glad, beaming message on voice mais, “Karen and Demory are both just fine.”  Instead he had to call his showering pastor and utter words he couldn’t believe as he said them.

Why do I believe in Jesus’ resurrection? Not because I have any proof or evi-dence. Wanting proof and evidence is barking up the wrong tree. Rather I believe because of the composure of parents who, despite the inadequate pastor praying over their lost infant with shaking knees, felt the Risen Christ come back for them then and there in that setting and in subsequent days. That is where Galilee is.  These are the people to whom the risen Christ appears. Easter is not about an empty cave!  It’s about Jesus’ presence in life’s tough haunts where he is desper-ately needed, darkened rooms where hopes are dashed, with followers who are blaming themselves, whom Jesus loves by restoring, just when it matters most.

Forget about Easter eventually getting us to heaven, we need Easter hope now! Forget about Pilate or Putin or Shimon Peres, Jesus appears to everyday people! Like the overdressed guy in the tavern too self-conscious to sit alone at a table and instead sits at the bar. Or the lady who might well love God but never gets around to doing much about it, even on Easter. I will let you fill in your own blank.

The young man in the cave, dressed in white, said, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified?  He isn’t here. He is raised. He is going ahead of you to Galilee.” Now we know where that is. We’ve all done a lot of living there. Galilee is a scorned and forlorn backwater inhabited by our likes as we blew our chance to get things right, leaving us feeling we somehow weren’t good enough.

The stories of Jesus’ resurrection show us what to expect from the true and living God who refuses to give up on us after nailing him to a cross. The stories teach us that just when we thought God would leave us to our own devices like squab-bling children he returned to make us God’s beloved children. It would have been good enough news that Jesus outlasted all that we put him through. But then he showed up for us. That is why our good news is so great as to be called Gospel. 

To be Christian, friends, is something more than to know this, something more than to believe through these stories something that non-Christians don’t believe. To be Christian is to experience new life here and now. It is to taste it and to want to share it with the despairing. That no matter how dark things get, the light of Easter dawn is for us and with us in ways no one expected or predicted.  Paul and Karen Kirkpatrick gave me that experience by letting the Risen Christ come back to them despite their disastrous Easter, and their profoundly senseless loss.

At Easter God has declared in a way we cannot ignore, I will be your God and you shall be my people.  That is what this risen Savior does.  He comes back—again and again—to the likes of us who disappoint, abandon, and betray him.  He appears to us, finds us, grabs us, embraces us and bids us to go and tell of it.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia. In life, in death, in life beyond death, this is our hope and our salvation. Experience it first. Then go and tell of it. Amen.