“With the Eyes of Faith”

Easter Sunday 2007

Rev. Dr. Jon Smoot

 

 Intro: The story is told about a witness at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. He had escaped from a death camp and the gas chamber. The witness survived by hiding for a time in an open grave in a Jewish cemetery in Wilna, Poland. While he was there, he saw a young Jewish woman giving birth to a child in a nearby grave. In her delivery she was assisted by an 80 year-old grave digger. When the baby uttered its first cry, the old man lifted his eyes to the skies and prayed: “Great God, hast Thou finally sent us the Messiah? For who but Messiah could be born in a grave?” Who indeed?   (Prayer)

 

It’s Easter morning: Our sanctuary is overflowing with beauty and redolent with the fragrance of lilies and azaleas. Our children are dressed up; our pulpit and lectern are draped in white, colors of joy and light. It’s Easter morning – family members and friends have gathered from all over. The cooks in our congregation keep looking at their watches. It’s Easter morning; we come to hear hallelujahs and brass instruments and cascading organ chords to speak the word of hope for us. And maybe, just maybe, we might sing a bit louder than our usual, acceptable Presbyterian level. It’s Easter morning; big, brash, bright, noisy and beautiful.

 

How different from that first Easter morning in the graveyard garden. The pre-dawn chill, all dark and quiet. A bleak morning; hopes and dreams of believers nailed to a cross and put broken and limp and lifeless in a cold and lonely tomb, sealed shut forever behind a giant stone. There was no rescue, no 11^th hour reprieve, Jesus was dead, gone. All was still, deadly silent, except for the sound of a lone woman crying as though she would never stop.

 

Easter Day is a day for shouting, but before that, it is a silence. This is a day of wonder and awe. Today we both celebrate and ponder the central affirmation and mystery of our faith. But for me, frankly, speaking about the act of resurrection at all seems almost an invasion of God’s privacy. The resurrection was something that God had to undergo alone, in private. We were not invited to the resurrection of Jesus Christ – no one was – not even those who followed him. Everything else about Jesus – his birth, his teachings, his healings, his preaching, his confrontations with authorities – even his crucifixion; these were all public events, in the plain sight of everybody. But no one knows the essential mystery of what happened between heaven and earth that first, dark, Easter morning. No one was present to witness the agony of God or how far God had gone to bring back the Son from a place so far away that only God could have brought him back.

 

I tell you this, because the New Testament offers no account of the resurrection of Jesus. What we do have are reports of an empty tomb and appearances of the risen Christ. The New Testament is remarkably mute on the “How” question – “How did resurrection happen?” but downright loquacious on the “What” question – “What is God up to?” Seems to me the “how” questions show our intellectual obsession with reason and scientific proof. Literal resurrection, faith in the action of God in history, sticks in our modern throats. But to treat Christ’s resurrection as intellectual abstraction or idea or theory about eternal life requires no application to every day life and is a waste of time. I believe that you and I have come today because although we have little or nothing to say about resurrection, we believe that God just might have something to say to us about Life – life beyond containment, life for all, life that blows away all barriers, including humanity’s final enemy, death. 

 

I’m not talking about empty-headed, pain-free triumphalism. Easter faith does not whistle in the graveyard, suspending for an hour on this morning the stark reality of death and Darfur and discrimination and disease. Easter faith does not deny the too many tombs in our lives and in our world – for those tombs are real. What Easter does is challenge death’s durability as God rolls away the stones that keep humanity more dead than alive.

 

Easter faith is not just some arcane Christian teaching about life beyond the grave. It is so much more than this. Easter is also the moment of recognition, as it was for Mary in the garden graveyard. Easter is the startling, unnatural recognition of the reality of God’s presence – the explosive discovery of life in its fullness in the midst of the natural experience of death and loss. Archbishop William Temple once said that “Life is a larger word than resurrection – but resurrection is the crucial quality of life.” 

 

The resurrection of Jesus is not the resuscitation of a corpse, or the projection of a fond and vivid memory by wishful-thinking disciples. It is the reign of God breaking into our broken world to transform it. We call it good news because the risen Lord is still breaking through to transform us.

 

Easter also means a transfer of power – God’s power. The power that raised Jesus from the dead is the same power that is available to transform the way we live our lives in the world. The promise of God’s presence fuels muscular, powerful hope – and hope, according to St. Augustine, has two twin daughters: courage and action. God’s transfer of resurrection power and hope helps us to find both courage and action in our lives and in God’s world. Easter means that God is not content with leaving us orphaned and powerless against the powers that demean and destroy. One theologian says that Easter is God’s class action suit against hatred, racism, nationalism, saber rattling, hunger, economic deprivation, addiction, inadequate education, and all the contemporary faces of death which wreak havoc on our world. Easter promises that God will help to roll away the stone so that we can face these forces and find the courage to overcome their destructive power with the eternal power of God’s liberating presence. Our Easter God shouts out at these forces with same shout at the tomb on that first Easter morning: “Oh, no you don’t!” and flings back the stone every time and everywhere we take Easter courage and action into our lives and into our world.

 

My friends, that’s why we’re here this morning: We believe that with the eyes of faith, resurrection is a fact of daily life because the Risen Lord is powerfully at work. And if you can’t bring yourself to believe this, then believe that the moment of recognition is never far away. Stand with Mary in the garden graveyard, dazed and confused, because your hope has been stolen. With her, through your confusion, anger, and tears, say out loud, “I don’t know where to find Jesus” to the man standing next to you in the dark. Then hear your name called. You, like Mary, may not be able to find Jesus, but he finds you. The voice of the Risen Lord calls from across the abyss of death, across the small logic that we have, throws a line across the cavernous expanse between our small, natural logic, and the power of God to work wonder, as unnatural as that is.

 

Maybe the greatest miracle of Easter is that there are people still daring to believe that Christ has been raised, and has taken the world up with him into the blazing presence of God’s power and love – and that means endless possibilities for explosive joy and justice and hope for us and for our world.

 

Easter once was a day of silence – but now it’s time to shout. Hallelujah! Amen!