Easter Sunday

Luke 24:1-12

Alleluia Christ is Risen, The Lord is Risen Indeed Alleluia!

It is Easter morning.  Christ has risen we have made it through the darkness.  Today we begin a new day, but it may not be exactly what we expected.   And of course, because it is Easter the women are back.  I love that about Easter, because the Easter story is always about women.  Every story, every account, even Paul and the early church Fathers acknowledge it, everyone knows women saw first, women knew first, women told the story first, women were the first evangelists.

And so, our women come, a big group of them.  And they are ready, because these are the same women who ended our Passion story last Sunday.  They are the ones who stood at the foot of the cross, the ones who stayed to watch as Jesus’s body was taken down.  Our story tells us right before this: “The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid. ⁵⁶ Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments. On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.”  They watched Jesus be laid in tomb and they knew what they should do.  So they prepared, they got their spices and oils and at the very first moment they were safely allowed after the sabbath ended, they arrived at the tomb to do what they could to honor their teacher.

But then suddenly nothing is as it should be, nothing is as they expect.  The tomb is empty.  Jesus is gone and everything is topsy turvy.  But maybe that is the point of all this, of Easter itself.  Maybe that is the point of the whole resurrection story.  That it points us to something new, to something else, to something completely different than what we had before.  Because let’s take a look what our Easter story really says.  There on Easter morning, once the sabbath has passed, the women show up to accomplish a task.  They are looking for Jesus’s body so they can finish the job Mary started the week before, to care for and anoint him for burial.  But they do not find what they are looking for.  They find nothing like what they expected.  Because Jesus is not there.  He is not where they left him when they return.  Instead there is something entirely new in his place.  Heavenly messengers who tell them “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” 

The Easter story isn’t like the Lazarus story, this isn’t just undoing death, bringing someone back to life to pretty much keep on living more or less as he was.  This is a new thing.  A completely new life brought out of death.   The heavenly messengers have to remind them of what they already know, that Jesus told them all this, that he told them he would rise from the dead.  That something new has begun. 

And then, shock of all shocks, when the women go and tell the men what has happened, no one believes them, they say it seems like an idle tale.  Why is it so hard to just believe women?  Apparently, it is too much to take in, too much to deal with, too big of a change.  But Peter, blessed Peter, he at least goes to check it out, perhaps only to prove them wrong and low and behold, he has much the same experience as the women.  He sees the old stuff, the grave clothes, but not Jesus.  Amazingly, Jesus is nowhere to be found in Luke’s Easter story, he is never anywhere near the tomb today because he is already on the way.  Literally, the risen Jesus by this moment is already on the road to Emmaus so he can meet up with more disciples when they arrive there. 

And Luke, the author of both Luke and Acts is noticeably scant about retelling Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances because Luke wants members of the new church, and us, to focus not on the Jesus they knew before, but on the movement of the Holy Spirit and the ways that Jesus is present with us now.  In the breaking of the bread, in the fellowship of believers, in the ways of the church.  He wants us to use today to start getting to know Jesus in a new way.

And this is still as true for us today as it was for the disciples on that very first Easter.  We too dear people are living in a world that seems startlingly unfamiliar, where norms and traditions and ways of being a community and a nation are being challenged every day.  And it is scary.  And I guarantee you, the women at the tomb were scared too, Peter was scared, the disciples were scared.  But they didn’t let that stop them from participating in the new resurrected reality that Jesus was bringing into being.

Because still today and every day Jesus is doing a new thing.  Easter is very much about starting anew.  We heard God say in the book of Isaiah this morning “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” God is creating something new today and Jesus is inviting us to be a part of it.

Jesus us inviting us to speak up and to speak out.  Jesus is inviting us to care for our neighbors and the vulnerable.  Jesus is inviting us to set down our screens and take action in the real world.  Jesus is inviting us to be his hands and feet, the body of the risen Christ in the world.  Alleluia! We have risen.  Breathed into life by divine breath and Holy fire.  Called by the one true God to witness to the Good News of Christ’s resurrection to the world.  Amen.