Easter in Four Parts
Easter in Four Parts
Matthew 28:1-9
I like to think of this morning’s sermon as Easter in four parts.
Part 1: All God Ever Wanted
For me, the central image of God is as a loving parent. Just like with our own parents (if we were lucky), they loved us from the start. We were their beloved children, with whom they were well pleased. And like those loving parents, all God has ever wanted from us is for us to grow and to love God back. Parents who are worth their salt at all do their very best to love their children unconditionally—no matter what kind of day it has been. It’s not that parents don’t get frustrated or angry or exasperated. It’s that parents who love unconditionally never stop loving.
For me, we catch glimpses of that kind of love from our parents and maybe a handful of friends in this life. When we catch those glimpses from those people, though, what we are really seeing in a fleeting way is how God loves us all the time. Again, it’s not that God loves or agrees with our every choice. It’s that there is not a thing that we can do or a thing that can happen to us that can make God not love us.
The conscience that God has planted deep in our hearts may convict our latest self-centered choice or impulsive action. We may feel guilt and shame or remorse or regret. However, like a loving parent at their best, what God wants us to do at that point is to seek forgiveness and choose differently and grow. What God may also expect of us is for us to be more forgiving of others and more patient as they try to choose differently and more hopeful that this other person can grow, too. Really, doesn’t any loving parent want their child at some point to get over themselves and get on with the business of unconditionally loving the people around them.
As parents, we know we can’t force such things. There are only a few years where we can pick up those toddlers and whisk them away. There are only a few years beyond that before our sweet child looks us in the eye and says, “You’re not the boss of me!” or very sweetly asks us if we could just drop them off a few blocks from school…because…you know…who really wants to be seen with their parents in front of school! There are only a few years until they look us in the eye and say, “You can’t stop me!” And hard as it is to admit, we know it is true. They are free and every time they break, our hearts break with them.
Think of all the things God tried. God brought the people out of slavery and fed them and led them for years and gave them a set of rules to live by. The people broke the rules. God brought them into the promised land and all they wanted was to be like everyone else. “We want a king!” “We want a temple.” “We want to do whatever we feel like doing.” God gave them prophets to tell them the truths that they didn’t want to hear. Rather than heeding the message, they attacked the messengers. God intervened in their history and the people forgot God’s care almost immediately. God spoke about what happens when people mistreat one another, the people turned a deaf ear. Ultimately, God gave the people the ultimate time out—exile—strangers in a strange land, once again.
God never stopped loving them, not for a day. How do I know that? Because I’ve known the parents who loved their children unconditionally who have had to quietly watch them self-destruct because, in the end, those kids were grown ups now. They couldn’t save them. They were going to have to freely choose to save themselves.
Part 2: All People Ever Wanted
People are a mixed bag. We are all—each and every one of us—capable of doing the most amazing things and then turning right around and being total knuckleheads. Sometimes, we are just blind to what’s wrong with our choices and we want, almost immediately, to take our words or our choices back. Other times, we just don’t care. We’ve had it. We feel like we are entitled to something. We are ready to bulldoze our way through the people around us just to get what we want.
Things really get bad when we can’t tell the truth to ourselves about ourselves anymore. If we can own our mistakes in real time, if we can seek the forgiveness of others and if we can do the hard work of forgiving ourselves, if we can try to make amends for the damage that we have done, then we’ve got a shot at being able to move on in our lives. Mostly, though, that’s more work than most of us want to do. This whole “taking responsibility for my own choices, being forgiving, being merciful, loving my neighbor thing” takes more energy and attention than most of us are willing to give. So, we end up deeper and deeper in this giant hole of our own making. It’s the baggage that we lug with us, no matter how many times we move, no matter how many times we’re sure we’ve finally changed. It’s the stuff that stands between us and the chance to be the best of who we might otherwise become.
At face value, it might seem that all people ever wanted was to get to do whatever we want to do and have everyone leave us alone. Really, though, isn’t that who we wanted to be at our worst in junior high school? If most of us were really just stone cold honest with ourselves, wouldn’t it be great to shed the stuff that we’ve carried with us our whole lives—some of which wasn’t even ours in the first place but was our parents’ stuff and their parents’ stuff before them? Wouldn’t it be great to shed the baggage?
Even more than that, though, wouldn’t it be amazing to have someone really know me for who I am—just as I am, without one plea—as the old hymn goes—and be totally loved? Wouldn’t it be great to feel like it was possible to look myself in the mirror and love myself? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know that this particular self who I am is not an accident but that I am designed by the one who is the source of all that is because the world needed one of me?
If all God ever wanted is to be loved then isn’t it true that all we’ve ever wanted is to be loved, too? If I felt loved like that, how would I live differently? If I felt loved like that, what would I do with this life? If I was loved like that, how would I ever say, “Thank you!”
Part 3: God So Loved the World
Having exhausted all the other possibilities, God became one of us—Emmanuel. We’ve all been there and done this in some fashion. The hardest thing in the world some times is to explain how to do something to someone else in the abstract. Diagrams are always better than written instructions. An instructional video on YouTube is the bomb. But best of all is when you have the person who knows how to do something right there beside you and they are ready to walk you through this process: “I’m going to show you. Then, I want you to try!” If you’re really lucky, they look you in the eye and say, “You’ve got this!” If you’re the luckiest person around, when you make a mistake they say, “No big deal…Let’s try this again!”
God became one of us to show us how to live. Or, if you prefer to think of things from the human side of the equation, this amazing person, Jesus of Nazareth, arose in this world and spent three years showing us time after time after time what lived faith looks like. It looks like touching the leper. It looks like preaching the truth that no one really wants to hear. It looks like caring for the people whom no one cares about. It looks a lot less like going to church all the time than it does caring about one person after another in the course of a day.
In all those moments, he focusses us not on how others react when we do any of these things but on how pleasing being this kind of caring, loving, compassionate person is to God. The cool people may not like you. The powerful may feel threatened by you. The most “religious” people around you may question your faith. However, the point isn’t to win anyone’s approval. The point is to do the right thing, the faithful thing, the loving thing. If you do these things then you are doing things God’s way. Jesus came to show us that way.
What you may hear that’s missing for me is a different reason that some people think Jesus came. Some people think Jesus came because the only way God was ever going to love us again was if Jesus died. I’ve got to be honest here. That’s called Atonement theology. Do you remember when God supposedly asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, only to stop Abraham at the last minute? I’ve never felt like that’s the God that I worship. Do you remember the prophet Micah, when he is horrified that the sacrifices of the “faithful” at the temple are now rumored to include first born sons? Micah responds, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to act with loving kindness and to walk humbly with your God…” That’s the God I worship. In ancient days, people thought all sorts of gods were just looking for all sorts of human sacrifices. The God that I’ve known my whole life long has just been looking for us to be willing to sacrifice our own self-interest long enough to see how much better life is and how much more whole we feel when we spend it loving God and loving our neighbor.
So, light the straw and assign me a heretic’s fate but I think Jesus came to show us the way to live a loving life and to point out that the choice has been ours all along…
Part 4: Do Not Be Afraid
The only thing that stood between us and the chance to live a loving life was our own fear. We get afraid of what others will think. We get afraid of what we’ll eat or where we’ll sleep or how we’ll have any security. We get afraid of people who are different than we are or who are sick with illnesses we don’t understand or who are mentally ill and seem for all the world to be possessed. We fear powerful people. We fear the authorities. We fear that we will have wasted the life that we’ve been given. However, most of all, we fear death.
We are aware that our lives have a beginning and a middle and and end. We know that we don’t know where we are on that journey. Accidents happen. Diseases arise. People get wrongly charged. This life could all be worth nothing and if it is…boy…I should have done every selfish thing that I could squeeze in before the deadline. The fear of death can make people do crazy things. The fear of death can cost a person their faith.
The fact of death, though, might just be what makes us see how precious life is. If this life is time limited, then maybe what I want to do is live every moment of it that I’m given. Maybe I want to squeeze all the life out of it that I can. Maybe, I might even want to be grateful for the fact that I’m alive at all, even if it’s a tough day, even if the crowd has turned on me, even if I’m pretty sure that my disciples are about to run for their lives…
You see where I’m going, right? I totally believe with all of my heart that when this life is done, there’s more. I am absolutely convinced that the God who has loved us our whole life long loves us well beyond this life. I will even go so far as to say that beyond this life, I think there is an amazing reunion, with everyone you’ve ever loved (and the dogs get to be first in line to greet you! The cats still just sit off to the side and act like they don’t care…)
However, the point in setting us free from the fear of death, in turning the fear of death into the fact of death (and it is still a fact!) is so that we will really live! The angel’s message to the two faithful women who make it to the tomb on Easter morning is simple: “Do not be afraid!” Then, there is work to be done. There is life and faith to be lived. They are to go and find the disciples. Yet, before they can even make it a few steps, they run straight into the presence of the risen Jesus—who tells them, “Do not be afraid!” Then, he tells them to go fetch the slightly less faithful disciples and tell them to meet him in Galilee. There’s work to be done. He’ll meet them all there.
“Do not be afraid!” We all need to ask ourselves not where we are going after this life but how is that we are going to live—today? There is work to be done. There is faith to be lived. There is not a thing in this life, not a power, not an authority, not a virus, not even death, itself, that can separate us from the love of God. We are perfectly free to navigate today’s challenges in Christ’s way.
Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed!