Happy Easter! I had the privilege of preaching this morning at the Sunrise Service at my home congregation, Ascension Lutheran in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The texts for the day were Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Colossians 3:1-4; and John 20:1-18.
The sermon audio and text are below. This is the first sermon I’ve preached for a congregation since starting preaching class, so enjoy! Comments are welcome! Oh, and sorry for the awkward beginning to the audio – I had to switch microphones right at the beginning. Moral: Always, always, always do a soundcheck 🙂
Christ is Risen!
He is Risen indeed!
Christ is Risen!
He is Risen indeed!
That pretty much covers it. Christ is risen. What else is there to say? We know what happened. We know the story so well that it’s easy to forget how confusing this must have been for Mary Magdalene and the disciples who were living it. But let’s try thinking about it from their perspective.
Ever have one of those weeks where nothing seems to go right? This has been one of those weeks for the disciples.
Last week, Jesus came into the capitol city of Jerusalem like a prince to a coronation. It was a triumphant parade. Jesus was going to be the King, going to kick out the Roman occupiers and set up God’s kingdom here on earth.
And then everything went wrong. The crowds that had welcomed Jesus abandoned him, disillusioned. One of his own disciples, one of his inner circle, betrayed him to his enemies. He was arrested, put through a sham trial, beaten, and mocked.
There was a brief glimmer of hope for his release when Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, offered to release him, but the crowds called for his death, yelling, “Crucify him.” On Friday, just before the celebration of Passover, one of the biggest holidays of the year, Jesus was crucified, executed in the worst way possible. Jesus was dead.
Everything had gone wrong.
And then it was the Sabbath, what was supposed to be the day of rest. For the disciples, for all of Jesus’ followers, I’m sure it wasn’t very restful. They were in shock. Jesus, the one whom they thought was the Son of God, was dead.
Obviously, they must have been wrong. Maybe he was just a great human teacher. Maybe not even that. Maybe he was just a common radical, a rebel who deserved to die.
One of their own had betrayed him, and who knew if they themselves were in danger as followers of an executed criminal. But it was the Sabbath, so they waited.
Early the next morning, the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb. And something else is wrong. The heavy stone that had been protecting the tomb is gone. Mary’s first thought isn’t, “Wow, Jesus is alive again!” No, her first thought is that something else has gone wrong. Someone has broken into the tomb, maybe stolen Jesus’ body. Why can’t they just leave him alone!?
Mary goes and gets Peter, who’s had a pretty lousy weekend too after denying three times that he even knows Jesus, and she gets the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, presumably John. They run to the tomb to see for themselves.
I don’t know what’s going through their heads at this point as they run, but it’s kind of fun to speculate. Are they just upset that something else has gone wrong? Do they have a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, Jesus is alive? Do they not believe Mary that they need to go look for themselves?
The other disciple outruns Peter and gets there first, but he doesn’t go in, he just looks. Then Peter comes up and goes right into the tomb. And it’s not just that the tomb is empty, but the graveclothes are lying there. There’s no question that they might be confused and have the wrong tomb, or anything like that. The linen wrappings are there, but the body is not.
Now here’s the part that I don’t quite get. The two disciples go in, look, believe, and come back out. And then they leave and go back home. There’s a hole in the story there. What about Mary?
Did they tell her, “Oh, he has risen from the dead?” Did they just look in, figure it out, decide to go home, and leave her behind? We don’t know. But they go home, and Mary stays.
Maybe they told her, but she wasn’t ready to jump to the conclusion that just because the body was gone Jesus must be alive. Or maybe they just went walked out in shock right past her.
Regardless, Mary doesn’t understand. She stays outside the tomb and weeps. Nothing is going right. As she weeps, she looks in and surprise! The tomb isn’t empty after all, at least not entirely. There are two people inside who want to know why she is weeping. And she begins to tell them what’s going on. Everything is still going wrong. “They’ve taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
For everything she’s been through this week, Mary is impressively rational. The logical conclusion from an empty tomb isn’t resurrection, it’s that someone has moved or stolen the body.
So she turns around, and there’s a guy standing there who looks like he might be the gardener. He too asks her why she’s weeping.
Can you hear her frustration by now? This time she doesn’t even start to try to explain, she jumps straight to asking where the body has been taken. It never occurs to her that the one she is speaking to is Jesus, the one whose body she’s looking for. He’s standing right in front of her, and she has no idea.
Why doesn’t Mary recognize Jesus? Because she’s looking for a dead body. She knows how this works. Once someone’s dead, that’s it. They’re dead. How could this person in the garden talking to her possibly be Jesus? And then he says her name. “Mary.”
And she recognizes him, and everything changes.
Even though we know the end of the story, we understand Mary’s confusion. We’re here this morning celebrating that our Savior is risen, celebrating Jesus’ victory over death, but we don’t always see that victory.
Our experience doesn’t always match what we believe. The world is still messed up. There’s concerns over civil war in Ukraine. Almost 300 people, many of them school children, are dead or missing this week from a ferry sinking in South Korea. You don’t need me to run through a list of everything going wrong in the world.
And yet here we are, proclaiming that Christ is risen, that we serve a living Savior.
The miracle of Christianity, the unique claim that sets us apart from everyone else, is that we claim God has become one of us. The fancy church word for it is incarnation. The infinite, all-powerful God who created everything came into the world as a human. Jesus, God’s only Son, lived in our messed up, broken world.
I know the snow outside is finally gone, but let me mix up which holiday this is and talk about Christmas for a second. One of the words we use at Christmas is Immanuel. Immanuel. God with us. Jesus. As Pastor Jeff likes to say, Jesus is God with skin on.
These last few days as we went through the journey to the cross, we’ve focused on just how fully God entered into our world. We’ve heard about Jesus being welcomed as a king on Palm Sunday, then being betrayed and abandoned by his closest friends, being arrested, beaten, mocked, and eventually killed.
When God comes into the world, He doesn’t do it halfway. He comes all the way in. Even into the worst parts of our reality, of our lives. Jesus is 100%, certifiably, fully human.
From a theological perspective, I understand why Good Friday is important, but I’ve wondered at times about Easter.
We talk a lot about how you and I are sinful people who need a savior, but Jesus has paid the penalty for our sins by dying on the cross. We separate ourselves from God by our sin, but God reconciles us to Himself through the cross. Christianity’s good news is that you are forgiven because Jesus died for your sins. God loves you enough to die for you on the cross.
Absolutely! That’s all true. God loves you. Jesus died for you. But that’s the Good Friday story. So what are we doing here today on Sunday? Why do we need Easter, when our faith is so focused on the significance of the cross?
The Christian story is that God entered into our broken world and lived among us. Jesus lived and died as a human being like us. But he didn’t stop with dying. The culmination of the incarnation is the resurrection. Christ lived and died as one of us, but he didn’t stay dead, and as we just read in Colossians, that means we too can be raised with Christ
I think I understand better now why we need Easter. We need Easter because Easter means we have hope. We have hope that our world can be better. We have hope that in a world full of tragedies, there is something better. We have hope that the resurrection defeats death.
That’s what today is about. Easter is about death not getting the last word. Tragedy is real, but tragedy doesn’t win. Death is not the end of the story. Yes, you and I will still die, but we know because of the resurrection that God has overcome death. Christ is risen, and we are raised with Christ.
The closing hymn for this morning claims that the strife is over. The battle is won. The song of triumph has begun. Alleluia! But sometimes it doesn’t feel like that. We’re living right now in the in-between. Christ has been raised. Easter has happened. The song of triumph has begun, but we’re still in this broken world.
We don’t have to understand it all right now. Mary looked in the empty tomb and still had no idea what was going on. Jesus had to tell her before she could understand.
But when she gets it, when everything changes for her, Mary has exactly the right reaction. She goes and tells people. Like Peter in the reading from Acts, we have a message to proclaim. We proclaim the God who loves us so much that He came and lived among us, taking all of our sins onto the cross, then rose again so that we too can be raised with Christ. We serve a living, risen Savior.
Easter isn’t some abstract religious idea. It’s not that some itinerant preacher died two thousand years ago and that was it. What we celebrate today matters. The resurrection gives hope to our broken world, hope to us living in a world that still has brokenness.
Easter gives us hope.
Easter changes everything.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, thank you. Thank you for sending your son Jesus to come to us in our messed up, broken world to take our sins, our brokenness, our despair, our shame, our hopelessness, everything that separates us from you, to take all of that on the cross and put it to death.
Thank you for the freedom and the hope we find in the resurrection. Thank you for loving so much that you refuse to leave us where we are. Thank you for Easter. It is in the name of our risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that we can say Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed.
Amen.