Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's April 11, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.  If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE.

The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented.

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Garrison Keillor begins with his predictable first sentence: “It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was warm and bright and the trees were in full color – reds and yellows, oranges, some so brilliant that Crayola never put them in crayons for fear the children would color outside the lines. Maple trees the color of illicit romance, blazing red sumac and oaks and aspen, such color that you weren’t sure you were in this world but perhaps had stepped through a seam in the tapestry and walked into a magical wood. But the only trail through there is a cowpath, so you have to watch where you step” (Leaving Home, 133).

I thought, at first, I might step into this Easter sermon by stepping on a few toes, a not so subtle reminder that, as my title suggests, Easter has become a kind of homecoming for those who only irregularly find their way back home to this church. Or as a braver preacher than I once greeted his flock on Easter Sunday morning: Not, the the words, “Christ is Risen! Alleluia!” but with Happy Memorial Day, a glorious 4^th of July, good labor day, a peaceful veteran’s day, and a gracious thanksgiving – not expecting to see them again until Christmas Eve. He did this with a smile, tongue-in-cheek . . . even as the large congregation blushed and tittered and waited for him to get it out of his system (Peter Gomes, The Good Book, 332).

But, as always, the joke’s on me. I’d gladly trade places and let you try and figure out what to say on Easter. You have come because you, at some place in the essence of your being, are hungry and thirsty. And you come because Jesus has said, whenever a man or woman is hungry, we should not offer stones in place of bread (Gomes, 333). Yes, we do want the bread of life!

Preaching about Easter is, in the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, a bit like “watching a tightrope walker climb onto the platform as the drumroll begins. [The preacher] clears her throat and spreads out her notes on the pulpit; the [tightrope walker] loosens his shoulder and stretches out one rosin-soled foot to test the taut rope. Then both step out into the air . . . If they reach the other side without falling, it is skill but it is also grace – a benevolent God’s decision to let these daredevils tread the high places where ordinary mortals have the good sense not to go” (The Company of Preachers, 47)

When looking around for Easter words, some places are safer places to look than others. This week, I turned to the heading “Easter” in my handy-dandy Westminster Collection of Christian Quotations, perused the listings, and found these quotes:

Easter: “The best news the world ever had came from a graveyard” Easter: “The stone at the tomb of Jesus was a pebble to the Rock of Ages inside” Easter: “Easter says you can put truth in a grave, but it won’t stay there”

Amen! How true! You don’t even have to buy a book to find these nice sort of platitudes about Easter – just drive around long enough and look at enough billboards outside of churches and you will see these words hanging about in the air, boiling Easter down to the nutshell of just a sentence or two.

All of us like it when something important can be stated in a simple proverb or a catchy phrase. It sticks in the memory, reduces big ideas down to a size we can chew and digest. One of the reasons that Mel Gibson’s film on the death of Christ has been so popular is that it does exactly that: it takes the four distinctive gospel witnesses and reduces them to one; it reduces the many events of holy week to a portrayal of our Lord’s torture and execution, it reduces the act of execution to bloody suffering – all of which is designed to overpower the senses and make a particular theological point about the meaning of the crucifixion as atonement for sin.

All of which is fine for those who feel the need to reduce the meaning of the life of Jesus down to a single episode.

But when it comes to the resurrection, especially when we turn to John’s account of what happened, instead of reduction or catchy phrases, we get instead, a confusing, darn near contradictory multiplication of perspectives on what happened that first Easter, early in the morning.

Clearly, for students of the scriptures and particularly of John’s Gospel, which was written perhaps as many as 50 years after the events therein described, an editor has been hard at work, elaborating here, trimming there, making sure the reader gets his point, adding what amounts to almost parenthetical explanatory statements and comments along the way.

Indeed, if you line up the four gospel accounts of Easter morning, beginning with Mark’s report which is the earliest and which has only the barest of details, and continuing with Matthew then Luke, and finally with John’s account, the latest of the four, you will see how the story seems to get more and more detailed, even confusing, with each writer’s rendition. Each gospel had its own audience, its own community that knows, yes, that Jesus died at the hands of the Roman executioners, but a particular community with particular questions that also must be told and convinced that crucifixion did not have the final word.

Notes one commentator: “The Gospels are far from clear as to just what happened. It began in the dark. . . . Matthew alone speaks of an earthquake. In the tomb there were two white-clad figures or possibly just one. Mary Magdalene seems to have gotten there before anybody else, but perhaps the mother of James and another woman named Joanna were there with her . . . one suggestion is that there were only the women who came and that the male disciples, who were elsewhere, didn’t believe the women’s story when they heard it. Confusion was everywhere. There is no agreement even as to the role of Jesus himself. Did he appear at the tomb or only later? Where? To whom did he appear? What did he say? What did he do?” (Beuchner, Whistling in the Dark, 42).

When it comes to Christmas, we can easily parade a colorful cast of characters across the stage, blending the Matthew and Lucan stories as if they were a seamless whole. The manger is as familiar as home, and we make such a major production of Christmas that even the most apathetic of citizens or cynical of non-believers usually gets caught up in the spirit of the occasion.

But it can be hard to make sense of Easter. How do you make a dramatic production out of an empty tomb? How do you turn that into a pageant complete with strings of lights and a shining star, with children in bathrobes and carrying Mom’s jewelry box?

The testimony of the Easter witnesses, if not presenting nearly outright contradictions, at least seem to lend little coherence for why the post- Good Friday story should be found credible and trustworthy.

The New Testament offers no newspaper or journalistic account of the Resurrection, no video clips or documentary footage, but what we do have are wild, personal reports about the empty tomb and some rather strange appearances of the risen Christ. In the 20^th chapter of John’s Gospel several of that small remaining band of followers report their distinctive experiences of the post-mortem Lord.

Peter, brash as always as we have come to expect, enters, looks about, sees everything and sees nothing, and then leaves. He left, giving no indication that he felt any different than when he first looked around inside. For once, garrulous Peter seems to have nothing to say. Perhaps he has been simply stunned into silence.

The beloved disciple then enters, having deferred to the older Peter, looks upon the same scene, and instantaneously believes. He is, of course, the star disciple for John, his perfect faith here based on the rather scant evidence of an empty tomb containing a few abandoned grave cloths. And then in what is perhaps the most understated verse in all of holy writ, the gospel says, “Then the disciples returned to their homes.”

Mary Magdalene, who actually was the first to notice that the stone had been rolled away, represents faith being formed in a quite different way. The empty tomb did not even hint of resurrection for her; it only saddened her with the assumption that Jesus’ body had been stolen. Even the appearance of the two angels does not break her sorrow. And the voice of Jesus, initially spoken, does not stir faith in her, for she assumes that he is only a gardener who has taken the body and put it elsewhere. She, a sorrow-stricken follower of Jesus, comes to the tomb Easter morning while it is still dark, but she was not out looking for a miracle, only for a little consolation for her grief.

It is interesting that when Jesus speaks her name and she responds, that she calls him “Rabbi” or “Rabbouni.” It is a modest title, a title that when used in scripture seems to be more characteristic of the beginning of faith rather than faith’s culmination. And even in that moment of recognition when she reaches for Jesus, to touch and to hold him once more, he, it seems, draws back, as if to say to her that her experience of him cannot be as it once was before. “Touch me not. Do not hold onto me.” “Do not cling to me.” Her old familiar Jesus is not the same as this Easter Jesus, the Jesus who will now form her faith in new ways.

It must have been a surprise, a shock to her. Not only to see a dead man walking, but to have this dear companion and friend react to her in such a way.

Faith and resurrection, I think, are often like that – taking us by surprise, when our heads are down, when even our dearest companion seems to be preoccupied with other matters.

“So what do I believe actually happened that morning on the third day after he died?” asks the preacher in a sermon I read earlier this week. “When I was young, I would never have dreamed of asking a minister that question, not even if someone had offered to pay me; and I would have to know one quite well to ask now. Nobody has ever asked it of me, and I have been asked just about everything else. I do not mean some theological version of the question, like, what is the relevance of the resurrection to some doctrine. I mean the very straightforward, naked, somehow unmentionable thing itself: what do we think really happened? If you had been there yourself, what do you think you would really have seen?” (F. Beuchner, The Magnificent Defeat, 79)

You, of course, can do what you like with the swirl of the Easter story, the amorphous shape, the clashing colors, its canvas like one of Picasso’s paintings, open to different interpretations depending on just where it is that you stand and look.

But I, for one, like the tightrope walker clutching his balancing pole as he steps gingerly across the taut rope, do feel a certain kinship with the Easter faith experience forming in Mary Magdalene. She has gone some place where ordinary mortals, in a way, should have the good sense not to go. She comes to the tomb, while it is still dark, but in the receding darkness, in a way she did not expect, she meets Christ. She stumbles a bit, doesn’t get it quite right the first time, lets her emotions get carried away, but in the end, races back to the others and tells them what only she could have truly believed, for herself, “I have seen the Lord!”

Like Mary Magdalene after Good Friday, anxiety and fear and despair are often what we know best. There are wars and rumors of wars. Everything we hold dear feels threatened or already lies in ruins. We have heard so much tragic news that even when the news is good, we have a hard time hearing it.

Easter, in the end, is not about an easy optimism where everything always comes up rosy; nor even, in the end, is it as plain as day what it was, exactly, that even happened. Or that even yet, might happen again.

But Easter is about death not being the end. The proclamation of Easter on April 11, 2004, all reports to the contrary, is that all is well. We have faced the cross with all of its obscenity and absurdity and , like Mary Magdalene, we have all somehow managed to stumble our way to the empty tomb. Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life, for . . . .

Christ the Lord is risen today! Alleluia!

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We thank you, God, for the Christian hope that is ours, the assurance that death cannot defeat your purposes, for in our dying is our rising with Christ into life eternal. We thank you, God, that the sickness and sorrows, injustices and oppressions we may suffer in this present age will fade at our coming home to the light and warmth of your love. We thank you, God, that you bind us to yourself, that there is a spiritual essence at the core of our being, which draws us back toward you in life and in death.

Hear us as we pray for ourselves: for trust that in your own time you will unwrap the shroud of grief that covers us when a loved one leaves us here to go home,; for faith that knows you will never leave us comfortless or alone; for trust that our stumbling faith is sufficient, that we no longer have to cling to the past, but can walk with the risen Lord into a new future full of promise and hope.

Hear us as we pray for our world: you have gifted us with such a marvelous, beautiful, stirring creation, full of new life in these days of spring. In our rejoicing for the goodness of creation, help us also to hear the moaning of creation, to pray with sighs too deep for words for the places where the grandeur of your world has been marred by violence, hatred, greed. Renew the nations in the ways of peace, so that the violence of the cross will not have the last word, but that the glory of this day would compel us now to work, together, for justice, compassion, understanding, and always, the pursuit of new and peaceful ways to resolve differences and to demonstrate the love of neighbor as we love ourselves.