Sunday: Easter Sunday
Reading: Luke 24:1-12
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, those women preached an Easter sermon that morning. "The tomb could not hold him," these devout Jewish women told the 11 disciples, "Christ is Risen." They had left Jesus' body at sundown on Friday when the Sabbath began and were only returning at early dawn on this 1st day of the week, when Jewish law allowed for the preparation of bodies for burial. What they were doing was incongruous with crucifixion. The crucified dead were thrown into unmarked graves. Jesus' must have been the only crucified body to ever have had spices and ointments prepared for it. These disciples of Jesus-Joanna, the two Marys and the other women-were going to honor his body and I am sure they would have honored his memory had God not intervened. But as it happened they became perplexed. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb and when they went in they did not find the body. How disappointing, then, that when they figured it out, their proclamation, "Christ is Risen," was deemed an idle tale, an inconsequential story, something told and forgotten. What made the tale idle was not the tale but the eyes. The women had Easter Eyes; the eleven disciples did not. The power of the resurrection gave the women Easter Eyes; the power of the resurrection can do the same for us. Easter eyes transform memory and when that memory possesses it renews lives. Christ is Risen. That is no idle tale. It can move us to love and to know that we are loved, to forgive and know that we are forgiven; to seek justice and know that God will engage us strictly on the basis of mercy.

Easter eyes are not, on the base level, a matter of habit or practice; they are a gift of God. God raised Jesus from the dead. Encountering that reality does not give us certainty; it gives us the possibility of becoming familiar with God's story and integrating it with our own. The women's immediate reaction to the empty tomb was perplexity, the disciples' dismissiveness, and Peter ambiguous amazement. The fullness of God's revelation in Jesus can't be captured in a single instant. But as the disciples, male and female, had opportunity to remember and let that memory possess them, it renewed their lives.

If you look back at the passage from the Gospel of Luke that our Deacon Jack just read you will see that "Christ is Risen" is not all the women preached when they returned from the tomb. Luke says, "[The women] remembered [Jesus'] words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven..." The first Easter sermon, the one preached by the two Marys and this mysterious Joanna, was not only a proclamation of an empty tomb. It was a proclamation of the words of Jesus, words made all the more powerful by the reality that God had raised from the dead the one who spoke them. I shouldn't actually say that the women preached the first Easter sermon. They preached the second. Two men in dazzling clothes (probably Episcopalians) preached the first Easter sermon. "Why are you looking for the Living One in a cemetery? He is not here, but raised up. Remember how he told you when you were still back in Galilee that he had to be handed over to sinners, be killed on a cross, and in three days rise up?" [1] The 1st exhortation in the 1st Easter sermon is to remember. We create our meaning with memory. "Great is the power of memory," the great 4th century St. Augustine said, "exceedingly great is it, O God, an inner chamber, vast and unbounded."[2] We make ourselves from our memories. It is why we put together baby books and albums of favorite vacations, why on anniversaries we try to remember what we did previous years, why we research our ancestry. The power of the resurrection functions similarly. The two men in dazzling clothes send the women back to their photo albums and diaries and shared stories to remember Jesus, to make sure an empty tomb would be followed by a community that was the Body of Christ. If the resurrected Jesus was to have arms and legs in the world, then the community would have to feed on his words and become Jesus' body.

The bedazzled men said, "Remember how he told you..." What is amazing is that the very words of Jesus are what we need to explain his death. A great thing about the Church year is that Easter doesn't come at the end. We have eight months of Sunday gospel readings to remember what Jesus said. Let me provide some highlights from Luke. The first thing Jesus did in his public ministry was to read from the prophet Isaiah, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Jesus cleanses a leper, heals a paralytic, has significant conflict with the religious leaders over the Sabbath (they were too rigid) and tells his disciples that the poor and hungry and those who weep are blessed. And, Jesus told the disciples that he would be betrayed into human hands. He even prefaced that remark by saying, "Let these words sink into your ears." What finally does makes those words sink in is the resurrection. It gave them, to switch senses, those Easter eyes.

On Good Friday we mourn the world and appreciate that God is in solidarity with our suffering. For we live in a difficult world. Bombs wreak havoc in the subway in Moscow; bullets rip through bodies in Ciudad Juarez; a minivan in Southern Illinois snuffs out a precious life and inexorably alters three others. Less spectacularly but still powerfully, we lose our elderly parents, we navigate the joys and headaches of marriage or partnered relationship, and we both love our kids and sometimes want to strangle them. Jesus died in this dark world. Life is difficult. There are so many antidotes to this difficulty. The amazing number of catalogs that stuff my mailbox are a reminder that I can anesthetize myself from all of it through consumerism. But somewhere in those 30% post-consumer-waste catalogs selling goods designed to become obsolete lurks the suggestion that life is without intrinsic value. Another option is the certainty of fundamentalism, with its clear rules, strong support systems, and convictions that ultimate meaning is easily discernable. Living with Easter Eyes provides a third option. Easter eyes are not, at the base level, a matter of habit or practice; they are a gift of God. But on a secondary level Easter eyes are a matter of habit and practice, a practice of remembering who Jesus was and who we are. The transforming power of the resurrection requires a lot more than the discovery of an empty tomb. It requires becoming familiar with God's story and integrating that hope of the world into the reality of our lives. So that on Easter we can celebrate that we might overcome that suffering, that the lion might lay down with the lamb and swords might be beaten into plows.

Initial reaction was muted, but Mary, Mary and Joanna's sermon didn't turn out to be an idle tale. If we can remember Jesus' words, forming a community of power around that common narrative, then today's sermon will not be an idle tale either. The proclamation, "The tomb could not hold him. Christ is Risen" will give us Easter eyes. Those Easter eyes will transform our memory, that memory will possess us, and our lives will be renewed. The idea that new life can come out of death, that joy can be found amidst sorrow, that peace can be forged from war won't be so far-fetched. We will be moved to love and to know that we are loved, to forgive and know that we are forgiven; to seek justice and know that God will engage us strictly on the basis of mercy. Alleluia. Christ is Risen.
AMEN

[1] Luke 24:5b-6; The Message
[2] Augustine, Confessions translated by John K. Ryan (Image Books: New York, 1960), Book X.8