Sunday: Easter A
Reading: Matthew 28:1-10
Preacher: S. James Steen

I know a preacher who always begins his sermons with a funny story. Sometimes they are very funny. He must have a book of sermon jokes, because his supply of these stories seems endless. But there's a problem: his leadoff stories never have anything whatsoever to do with the sermon that follows. So after my colleague preaches, people invariably say that the only thing they remember is the joke.

I tell you this because I'm fearful of preaching an Easter sermon that has nothing to do with what you have come here this morning hoping to find, and, more importantly, nothing to do with the real message of Easter.

If I believed that had it not been for Jesus' sacrificial death and resurrection, we and all humanity would be condemned to spend eternity sweating it out in hell, then preaching this day would be a breeze. Wow! What a difference a resurrection makes. Do you know that most Americans believe in a hell where the unredeemed will spend eternity? But the funny thing is that only one percent of these pyromaniacs believe that they will end up there. Still, even with one percent, it strikes me as worse than perverse that a God who is wildly in love with his Creation would set things up that way.

Another, less dramatic, possibility is that you've simply come to celebrate the hope that because Jesus rose from the dead, our souls shall continue on after death. I imagine that we all have this hope to some degree; so let's examine it. A few years ago, when the respected Anglican thinker and Bishop N.T. Wright was concluding his two-volume work on the historical Jesus, he planned to devote a final chapter to the Resurrection. But he found popular Christian piety on the subject to be so off the mark that he ended up writing an 817 page book entitled The Resurrection of the Son of God.

Its main point is that popular Christian thinking about heaven comes much more from Plato than from Jesus and our Jewish heritage. Most Christians think in terms of heaven as an ethereal un-earthlike place where one goes after death. The grave problem with this thinking - no pun intended - is that Jesus and his followers, all devout Jews, would never have a hope that devalues God's Creation. Their God is the Creator who lovingly made the heavens and the earth; and such a God would not scrap the earth in favor of heaven as a holding tank for migrated souls.

Popular Christian thinking prays that souls go to heaven when the body dies. That was not Jesus' understanding. Just look at the Lord's Prayer. It prays, "Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven." In other words, it prays that heaven comes to us on earth, not that we go to heaven....We pray for God's will - for heaven - to merge with earth and bring it to fulfillment.¹

Please don't think this is just about a better political system, or less pollution, or improved public schools, or Barrack vs. Hillary - or the other way around - present as our earth-loving God may be in any of these achievements.

It is true that the Resurrection gives us hope for the realization of God's values, and it should compel us to take God's Creation and God's Creatures very seriously. But the Resurrection is more. It is the vindication of what Jesus lived and died for; and that was to proclaim the coming of God's reign of love and justice and to urge people to begin preparing for that reign by participating right now in a whole new way of being, a way of being that is radically - not just incrementally - different from the present order.

Because such phenomena as the kingdom of God surpass our ability to describe them, we can only speak of such things with metaphor, with story and symbol. And examples abound in the words of Jesus' predecessors: Ezekiel spoke of standing in a valley of dry bones and watching them rise up and take on flesh and come to life as God puts her spirit in them. Isaiah spoke of a time of peace when the wolf and the lamb will live together... "for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." Zephaniah heard God saying, "And I will save the lame and [I will] gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth."

In Matthew's Resurrection story, when the women encounter Jesus they grab his feet. It's a great visual. I wish we had a screen. "This time you're not getting away from me, not again!" But this reflex to self-protection and safety, completely understandable as it is, seeks the opposite of what Jesus' Resurrection promises us. He seems to understand, and he speaks to the women both tenderly and with a challenge, "Do not be afraid!"

Do you know that the words "fear" and "afraid" appear four times in this brief Resurrection story? Fear is what shackles us and keeps us from living abundantly; fear is what put Jesus to death: fear that my power will be taken away; fear that there won't be enough for me: enough money, love, life, or time for me unless I grab it and hold on to it. Fear is what holds us back and inhibits us from becoming people who inaugurate God's kingdom of justice and love and from discovering joy in the process.

You don't have to be afraid is the real message of this day. You don't have to be afraid, because the one who wants to give you everything, the one who has more to give than you could ever need, the one who has the power to free you from fear and to make you a citizen of God's joyful kingdom is vindicated today. God's banquet table is prepared. Come and feast sumptuously; then go out and feed others. Amen.

Paul Nuechterlein. "Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary." Easter A (March 23, 2008), http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/easter-a.htm (accessed March 22, 2008).