The 1st United Methodist Church of Napa

⁶On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. ⁷And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; ⁸he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. ⁹It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

¹When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. ²And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. ³They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” ⁴When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. ⁵As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. ⁶But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. ⁷But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” ⁸So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Who are we? Why are we here? During this past week, called Holy, many of us have walked behind a cross and watched with stunned disbelief the crucifixion of a good man. Some of us, maybe without fully realizing it, helped nail him to that cross. Some of us just ran away – in horror or because we were afraid that the same thing could happen to us.

Who are we now? The church would tell us, as we gather here Sunday after Sunday, that we now are the Body of Christ. Are we? Or are we just a motley collection of humanity haunted by a lurking suspicion that life is without meaning and then we die? Are we the people of faith that we claim to be, or are we a people who've become lost, confused, and yet still hungering for something in which we can no longer believe? Who are we on Easter Sunday?

Of course, as in any church and on any given Sunday, we are both or all of these. Some of us come here with great joy in our hearts, confident that we will experience what we've known before: the wonder and awe in the presence of a resurrection, convinced of the limitless possibilities and hope that has overcome all suffering and death in the world. Some of us come doubting our memories, doubting the enthusiasms that don't come over us like they once did. We come because we've always come, but we don't hope for much anymore.

Others of us come with more modest memories and expectations; the sight of row after row of lilies and the sounds of new life have given us pleasure in the past so, after all, going to church is a good thing – every so often.

Still, there are those among us who remain heartsick and afraid, who are so haunted by a sense of despair and a fear of death that it's become a great emptiness in their hearts. So, yes, some of us are like this.

But who among us will be, this Easter day, filled with hope, and who will be caught up in despair? We can't know for sure because the climate of our every day changes like the rainy and then sunny days of this past week. On one day my heart is full with the promises of life, while yours is broken and overcome by depression. On the next I am the one who's feeling lost and alone, while you celebrate with hope. Both and all of these feelings are the spiritual weather of the soul, changing just when we think that we know what season of life we're in. Never is this uncertainty clearer than when we all come together for worship on Easter Sunday morning. Here, now, surely, are all the degrees of hope and despair, joy and sorrow, gathered together to sing "Christ Has Risen!"

On the morning of that first Easter (at least according to Mark's version of what happened) three women – Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome – get up at dawn and go to the tomb to do their duty: the ritual anointing and dressing of their friend's body in preparation for the final burial. Everybody else is still asleep. Like those three women we gather to do our duty this morning, heading toward the tomb maybe more out of a sense of obligation and custom than anything else. We come looking for Jesus who was executed, but like those women we may only expect to find a dead body. And yet we do come, Easter after Easter, as we have this morning. Maybe most of us would rather be home just now waking up, along with the other disciples, coming out of hiding all packed up and ready to go back to business as usual after the disruption of this past week. We learned long ago the hard lessons of "Good Friday." We're sophisticated people of the 21^st century, we know that the greater our hopes and dreams, the greater our disappointment will be. So we've just stopped hoping, as well as dreaming, for a better day. We are rational human beings, after all, we know that nothing ever really changes. We don't expect miracles to reverse the inevitability of war, poverty and injustice. We're realists, we know that the last word is always death. So we live as best we can, managing, coping, surviving…sleeping.

Don't be afraid. You're looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He's not here. He's gone on ahead of you. Go back home. There you will see him, just as he told you that he would.^³

The women don't understand, at first. They're terrified by this empty tomb! So they run away, and say nothing to anyone. But then they do. The other disciples are just as confused and full of doubts so they don't understand either. Finally they, too, go back home. And there the miracle of Easter happens. They encounter the risen Christ, not in some empty tomb (not even in a church!), but in all of the messiness and uncertainties of their everyday lives – in a conversation on the road with a stranger, in the breaking and sharing of bread, in serving others in the name of this Jesus and in the same way that he did.

I think, ultimately, that the real power of the resurrection is how it's meant to be connected to any boundary-breaking event in our lives. Resurrection calls into question the past and opens up the future to new life and new possibilities. Anyone who is content to live entombed in the past will find the resurrection simply unbelievable, unrealistic and naïve. But anyone who will dare to embrace the future, and a new way of being, will find the resurrection a source of courage and great power.

Tomorrow, as these lilies begin to turn brown, may well be our day to reach out to someone with an embrace, to hold her or him in the arms of our faith. That's the way of this Easter pilgrimage, this Easter memory of a few good women and the poor men who could not, or would not, believe them. We might take along a couple of other unlikely companions as witnesses for us as we go back home to find Jesus: George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Herbert, a country parson of 17^th-century England wrote this about his Easter joy:

Hopkins, on the other hand, was a troubled Jesuit of the 19^th century; he offers us a quite different point of view, something that came to him while meditating on the words of Isaiah who said, "Truly, you are a God who hides himself…."^⁵ To which Hopkins responded:

Both Herbert and Hopkins speak for us, both speak for the Body of Christ. May any of us who are still haunted by a lurking suspicion of resurrection, find it in those places where we live and move and have our very being.^⁷

It could be that our greatest fear, after all, is not of death but of life. How often have we felt like tiny islands, cut off and alone? Death is the tragic "wisdom of the world" that makes us dull and somber, marching to rhythms that we hate, afraid to say what we feel, unable to proclaim and live out the mystery that is the center of our being. Death is the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son, the one who never causes trouble, but who also never weeps for joy, the one who lives all his life in a low-grade rage against the world. This is the death that the Christ broke! When will we ever let it pass forever from our lives?

Life is good! Life is a gift. That's the profound simplicity of the Easter message. Life isn't supposed to be something that we just endure until death comes along to carry us off – when the "real" thing then begins. The real thing is here. It's now. We are made new in witnessing to the life of one Jesus of Nazareth. The old ways cannot hold us any longer. Why let ourselves be overwhelmed by suffering and death? We are Easter people!

1 The prophet Isaiah was active from about 740 BCE to 700 BCE when the threat to Judah and Jerusalem came not only from the Assyrian army but also from Judah and Jerusalem's own internal struggles over how to cope with that invasion. The Northern Kingdom of Israel was utterly destroyed by the Assyrians during Isaiah's time. Isaiah expresses his belief that God will intervene in history, and a time will come when Mount Zion will be the scene of God's ultimate victory – when grief and mourning will be no more. You should be able to hear how the early Christian church used this imagery for its own understanding of the events surrounding the life of Jesus – and its eventual claim of his resurrection as the Christ, the long-awaited Messiah.

2 This is the way that the story first was told. The point that Mark wants to make here is that a new age has begun; the past, about which Isaiah has spoken, is fulfilled in the death of Jesus. Now our search for the "risen Lord" is meant to take place in this life. And we will find him, as a mysterious messenger tells these women, ahead of us.

6 Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Nondum," in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. G.H. Gardner, 3^rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 43.