April 24, 2011 - Easter
"From Fear to Courage"
W. Gregory Pope, preaching
Click arrow to listen
Eastertide Series: Practice Resurrection
Matthew 28:1-10, 16-20
It is the story too good not to be true.
Without it, the world makes no sense to me.
The first day of the week was dawning.
It was the first day of a new creation.
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary are on their way to see the tomb where Jesus has been laid.
Suddenly there is a great earthquake.
An angel of the Lord comes and rolls back the stone,
and is sitting upon it when the women arrive.
The angel’s appearance is like lightning, clothing white as snow.
The guards, afraid of the angel, experience their own “body-quake” and become like dead men.
Turning toward the women as they arrive
the angel says what angels always seem to say: Be not afraid.
It is God’s most oft repeated word to us in scripture.
Not “be holy” or “be good” or “sin not.”
But “fear not; do not be afraid.”
Which tells you something about how well God knows our anxious human hearts
and the fear that clings so closely.
Fear can stop us in our tracks.
It can hide all that is beautiful in the day.
It can keep us from being who God made us to be.
The angel says to the Marys: Be not afraid.
Be not afraid
afraid of life, of yourself, of resurrection, of all you are about to experience.
The angel then delivers the Easter gospel:
“I know you are seeking the crucified One,
but he is not here; he has been raised;
come and see the place where he lay.”
Then the angel commissions the two Marys to be the first evangelists of the Resurrection:
“Go quickly and tell his disciples he has been raised
and that he is going ahead of you to Galilee
and there you will see him.”
And the women run away quickly to the tell the disciples “with fear and great joy.”
Fear and great joy. Both.
Don’t all our highest and most important moments have both?
Fear and joy? Trembling joy?
At our wedding, our baptism,
in moments of life-changing decision, entering a new country,
at the birth of our child?
So here at Resurrection’s dawn.
With fear and great joy the women run to tell the disciples. They run.
Reading through the four gospel resurrection stories,
we learn that Easter is full of running feet!
Maybe on Easter we should run to church - or drive real fast - in our boats!
Maybe we should have the choir sprint down the aisle into the sanctuary,
hair flying, robes flapping, bells ringing!
What is so strange here is that this running occurs in a cemetery.
I go to cemeteries quite often. Nobody ever runs there.
In a cemetery we always walk, slowly.
And we’re always hushed as we stand among memories.
Can you think of a more striking sign that tells us today’s news really does change everything. When there’s running in the cemetery, we know something extraordinary has happened.
While running, on the way to tell the disciples, the risen Christ appears to them.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Jesus appears and greets them with a word that means
“greetings,” “rejoice,” “be glad” all rolled into one.
Instantly the women know who he is and take hold of his feet and worship him.
This is the first and most essential act of the church: to worship.
When the disciples meet the risen Christ later, they also worship.
But some, Matthew tells us, doubt.
Jesus knows it, but he doesn’t criticize them for it.
He includes them in his work in the world: to go and make disciples.
He knows the best antidote to doubt is action.
Go into the world and see what God is doing and join in.
While worship is our first calling, it is not our full calling.
We are called to go and tell.
Jesus tells the women at the tomb:
“Go and tell my brothers”
(he calls these men who deserted him in his hour of greatest need his brothers)
So there is redeeming hope for us all.
“Go and tell my ‘brothers’ to meet me in Galilee.”
The first act of the risen Christ is forgiveness.
Resurrection inaugurates a new humanity,
which is a reconciled humanity.
As Frederick Niedner put it:
“He hadn’t come back to get revenge or condemn anyone.
No, he returned to gather his family.
Our sins and betrayals died with him.
He took them to his grave and now he’s come back without them!”1
The risen Christ gathers his family and sends them, us, out into the world:
“Go and make disciples, baptizing them,
teaching them everything I have taught you.
Go, and I will be with you always, to the very end.”
But what do we do if we’re too paralyzed by fear to go and do anything?
A starting place might be to receive what millions have testified to,
experienced themselves, and shown the world with their very lives:
that the Risen Christ has indeed inaugurated a New Humanity.
On Easter a New Humanity arises.
What is the New Humanity?
It is the image and likeness of God, in which we were all made, restored and set free!
Paul put it this way:
“For as in Adam all are made dying, even so in Christ shall all be made living.”
We have all found ways to participate in death and destructiveness.
But in Christ we are all made alive.
And as Easter happens, courage begins to happen.
Paul Tillich called the most essential form of courage “the courage to be.”2
He said there are three great threats to our being.
They are inside our heads, but they are as real and as lethal as bullets or bombs or disease.
The risen Christ comes to us to set us free from these paralyzing killers.
There is the anxiety of guilt.
You’ve done something wrong; you’ve harmed another.
You betrayed someone close; you’ve betrayed your own best, truest self.
And guilt clings like clothing on fire.
You’ve heard of God’s forgiveness,
but it has not made its way from your ears to your heart.
And you’re a long way from forgiving yourself.
Have you heard Easter’s good news?:
God loves you exactly as God made you, and nothing will ever change that.
God is bigger than your darkest secrets and nobody is outside the grace of God.
The Risen Christ is here to call us from the ways of death and destructiveness
to make us alive, truly alive.
The great fourth-century theologian Athanasius,
uses the analogy of a great painting that has been destroyed by the elements.
Its artist does not throw the canvas away, but begins to repaint it to its original glory.3
We each have our truest, deepest self created in the image and likeness of God.
But that divine image has been hidden, distorted, covered - encrusted by layers of the false self.
And when we act out of our false self, more layers are built,
til we can no longer find this true self.
But Christ has to come to resurrect our true self and give us the power to live from that self.
So guilt - be gone!
There is the anxiety of meaninglessness and despair.
You feel like giving up on any notions of truth and beauty, justice, love, peace or purpose.
For life can rip your heart out.
The death of a child.
The death of a dream.
The persistence of evil.
The persistence of what Reynolds Price called our own “loyal flaws.”
Think of how Jesus’ disciples must have felt to know that Jesus was dead.
But Jesus, who knows how to hold our broken hearts,
returns to them and to us to say:
What we’ve begun is not over. It’s only begun.
God’s dream of a just society, of a whole person, of a reconciled humanity:
It has only begun, and you can be part of it.
So don’t give up.
Life is winning; death is losing. Pass the word.
The kingdom of good will prevail over the kingdom of evil.
Love wins!
From the crucified and risen Christ we hear these saving words:
Do not be afraid.
Your sins are forgiven.
Your past no longer has the final word about you.
Whatever your past may be -
divorce, addiction, a terminated pregnancy, unemployment, betrayal -
none of those things define you and they do not have the last word about you.
Resurrection invites you to give yourself to the most beautiful world view you can imagine
and live for it with courage -
a world purged of all decay and brokenness.
Give yourself to the poor and brokenhearted
because resurrection says God loves this world and refuses to give up on it.
Resurrection says history is headed somewhere -
toward the reconciliation of all things -
and resurrection gives you the courage and strength to give yourself to a new direction.
So let’s join in the New Humanity,
following Jesus, not into the past, but into the future.
For we follow the Risen One who “goes on before” us.
God is still in process of transforming us and all humanity into what God made us to be.
God the Artist is repainting us to our original glory.
God is making us like Christ.
This is the glory Irenaeus had in mind when he said:
“The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”
All aglow in Easter light, Paul wrote:
“We all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord,
are being changed into the likeness of Jesus from one degree of glory into another.”
How do we get from paralyzing fear to participation in courageous mission?
For the disciples
it was an encounter with the risen Christ,
the transformation from the false self to the true self,
and the promise of his sustaining presence.
The move from fear to courage
calls for us to be a part of the community of Jesus, refusing isolation.
It calls us to live in the transforming grace and power of the living Christ, who says,
“I am with you always, even to the very end.”
The end. That is our final anxiety, is it not, the anxiety of death:
What will happen when I die?
Many of us have a fear of dying,
fear of a particular way of dying,
a fear of dying alone.
A fear that death may really be the end of it all.
A fear that when I die there will be too much left undone, unsaid.
Jesus came back to tell us that death is a door,
the door to the Final Healing and the Final Mercy.
What is on the other side of the veil is unimaginably good.
Scripture says:
Eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard,
nor has entered into our human imaginations
what God has prepared for those who love God.
People have many different images of the life to come.
But the Risen One says it will be a Final Healing and a Final Mercy.
So be of good courage, Jesus says to us this Easter day.
In this world you will find tribulation.
But be of good courage. I have overcome the world.
With fear and great joy,
emboldened by courage:
Go out into the world and practice resurrection!
Christ the Lord is risen! Alleluia!
________________________________
1. Frederick Niedner, “Rejoice, Believers,” The Christian Century, March 11, 2008, 21
2. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, Yale University Press, 1952.
3. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003, 41