Easter, KBC April 8, 07 Luke 24:1-6

…possibly these women who showed up at the tomb with fear and trembling, in despair and despondency, would have agreed with Tennessee Williams (and Jim Morrison) who famously said: “the thing about life, is that no one gets out alive.”

No doubt the women were feeling like trapped animals, starring at the wire cage of a certain depressing destiny. Their hope nailed, bled, and entombed. Would they get out alive? Of course not. Was their life to be more than a few pleasant moments before a painful end? OR… was there a way out? Where was Jesus? How is it that they found an empty space, where they left his lifeless body?

If you are expecting something worthy of the occasion today, forget it. Words in general, and specifically my words, will not approach the mystery that is Easter. The loudest and best sermon on the resurrection is but a shrill hackneyed imperfect portrait of an incomprehensible event. For the glory of it, can’t be put on canvas – not with brushstrokes of words, or globs of colored oils. You get closer to the beauty of it as you lift your voice or you bow your head, as you praise or as you ponder. It appears that some of the earliest Christians thought it such a glorious mystery that even to describe it, was to sully it.

Today we celebrate this historical event, which is God’s ultimate piece of art. I can’t fully describe it, explain it, or make you believe it. What I can do…like all good curators of art… is create a frame.

So, what I want to do, is to create a propositional frame through which we might see again the glory. It is a frame that, if God wills and if the Spirit moves, will allow you to see the reality of the resurrection with the eyes of your heart… a window built on the experience of believers for 2,000 years… through which we might see a life-endued vista, encounter the sublime vision that transcends thought, the sight which looks past the wire cage of our temporal destiny.

Here’s the frame (four sides):
Bewilderment is natural
Belief is possible
Hope follows faith
New life follows hope

Mary stares at Jesus and thinks it’s a gardener, Thomas won’t believe without touching the scars, Mark says the first ones at the empty tomb were trembling and bewildered.

The base of my frame is this: bewilderment at this event is a natural. The gospels are so refreshingly honest. The disciples are not painted as super-heroes who got it, but rather human beings, who like us, walk around in the stumbling darkness.

Mary didn’t recognize Jesus who stood in front of her! The other disciples couldn’t believe it, when they were told. Thomas insisted on touching Jesus, putting his hand in his side.

In our science and faith class we’ve talked briefly about our prejudice towards our ancient ancestors. In this advanced technological age we are tempted to look back 2,000 years ago and consider everyone a superstitious bumbling Neanderthal. This says more about us, than them. For to read the ancients, is to understand that we’ve created a lot of gadgets, but at moral innovation we’re less successful. Poor Plato didn’t have a palm top, the dummy!

The disciples were not simple-minded credulous Cretans who had some absurd hope that their teacher who died on a cross was going to rise. They were a scared group thinking they were next.

Scholar NT Wright makes it clear that a resurrection of the dead was just as unthinkable in that day as it is in this. Most Hebrews didn’t believe in an immortal soul which went off into heaven. At best most believed in some kind of shade. The Greeks talked of Hades, but didn’t believe in resurrection from the dead; ghosts possibly, but not dead men walking. The only group that believed in some future resurrection was the Pharisees. And it’s quite clear that the disciples were not in their camp.

The disciple’s worldview said that things like this don’t happen. It said, “no one gets out alive!...” Ours does also.

James Cameron and friends have found a tomb that he and a statistician think is the tomb of Jesus, Mary, and their child. Most archeologists think this nuts, but belief in the “less than empty tomb” is driven by our understanding of how nature works. Dead men don’t walk. There is no escape. There have to be bones somewhere.

No one gets out alive… Of course we’ve been wrong before. We used to think the sun went around the earth. We used to think that space and time were constant. We used to think that the natural world was ruled by predictable forces, and now quantum theory says that “unpredictabity” is built into the very fabric of the universe. Astrophysicists now say that the universe is 96% dark matter – which is there, but we can in no way perceive… so, we only perceive 4% of this universe. And not much of that.

In such a universe is it crazy to believe that Jesus rose? The disciples thought so in their universe. They were clearly bewildered, doubtful, wondering… facing their own death… But then something happened.

Somewhere along the 50 days from Easter to Pentecost, they moved from bewilderment to faith, from faith to hope, and from hope to a new kind of life. What was that something that happened?

Somewhere along that journey they went from total bewilderment to hopeful bewilderment… somewhere along that journey they went from thinking the women who finally saw him were nuts, to thinking they were nuts also… somewhere along that journey they moved from the doubt of despair to the doubts of the faithful. What happened?

Someone happened. There is no other way to explain how a group of 12 disciples and smattering of fearful women would transform the world by their faith… except that at some point they came to believe… so much that they could, and did, put their life on the line. Something happened… someone happened. They had a personal encounter.

Bewilderment is natural, but belief is possible and hope follows faith. You may be bewildered, doubt-filled, incredulous (I certainly am at times)… this is OK. Let us not obsess on the state of our faith or the status of our belief. Trying to fix your faith by focusing on your faith is kind of like looking at your stomach in order to increase your appetite. I don’t know about you, but if I want to get hungry, I just need to see food. Bring me a sizzling sirloin, don’t bring me a mirror!

WE are all bewildered by what we celebrate today, but let us not look to our faith, let us look to the risen Christ. We praise before we proclaim we sing before we say. Only such an encounter, personal and intimate, mysterious and ineffable, can spark the flame of faith.

Francis Collins was the lead scientist in the human genome project, he is an esteemed biologist, and eminent evolutionist, and a committed follower of Jesus, who he met on a hillside. He describes his “surrender” as a moment alone, when his mind was cleared of clutter, and when he could sense that there was someone behind the glorious mystery which he had spent so much time studying. So he “leapt” into faith and was caught up in hope.

A consistent message of Christian believers is that the one who brings faith, convincing men of sin, is not reason or sight, it’s the Holy Spirit. The Spirit…the ineffable quality like wind, or breath, or life… the Spirit brings the encounter. And when that encounter happens, when that voice of reason that transcends reason speaks, faith is planted, giving rise to hope.

The resurrection is our ultimate sign of hope. Our invitation is walk through it, into hope. It is our only ultimate hope. Otherwise there is no exit. No one escapes here alive.

“No exit” would exemplify the conventional wisdom, except most are in purposeful denial. A friend, who did a Ph. D. at Emory, told me this story about a group in Atlanta who began a church called “the First Church of Existentialism.” Existentialism is the philosophy that encourages you to understand the fundamental place of freedom in your life. We are, in the words of J-P Satre, condemned to freedom. You and your decisions decide what you are going to be. Your life is the sum of your decisions, there is nothing else, and when you die, you die. In Sartre’s words: there is no exit.

This group wanted to do a service where they performed Sartre’s play, entitled No Exit. They called my friend’s professor, an academic expert on existentialism, and asked him to talk to the group about the play and about existentialism. He talked about Sartre’s belief that we are condemned to freedom and to the consequence of the choices we make. No Exit is a play of people in hell – with the famous line: “hell is other people.” The torture they experience isn’t that of the flames, it’s that of others. It basically teaches that we are all in the hell of our choices and that there is no hope.

Sometime later, when the professor contacted the First Church of Existentialism, they had decided to not perform the play. It was, and I quote, too depressing.

Let us face the two alternatives with forthrightness and honesty. Either there is no exit, OR God has provided a door.

I believe, based on an internal conviction of a personal encounter, that there is an exit out of despair, and into a life of service based on hope. This is the top part of my Easter frame: new life follows hope. We can lay our lives on the alter of service, knowing there is hope for chance, hope for life, hope endued with an eternal purpose.

We naturally think of the door of the tomb as a one way entrance, where there is no exit. But God has transformed it into a door of life. Maybe no one gets out without going through that door… but that door isn’t death. It’s life. For he has risen. He opens the door.

I love John Updike, famous and possibly best American novelist. And I like his poem, the Seven Stanzas at Easter, I’ll close with one stanza:


Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy,
sidestepping transcendence; making of the event a parable,
a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.