Sermon: Resurrection of Our Lord-Easter Day, Matthew 28:1-10, April 9, 2023 Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church, Pastor Linman

Sermon: Resurrection of Our Lord-Easter Day, Matthew 28:1-10, April 9, 2023

Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church, Pastor Jonathan Linman

Look at how beautifully adorned our church is for Easter. Few congregations do flowers and festive decorations better than Faith-La Fe. Thanks be to God, and thanks to everyone who has made possible such beauty.

Easter, as word derived from Old English and German, is associated with a pagan goddess of springtime. Easter, in terms of word origins, may also relate simply to the East, that is, the direction where the sun rises. That’s s-u-n, not s-o-n!

But there’s no coincidence that the feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord happens generally amidst springtime with flowers and new growth and the dawning of new days, particularly as the daylight gets longer until the summer solstice.

This is my first Springtime in Phoenix and I marvel at how distinctive the season of Spring is here – especially after a winter and previous monsoon season that offered comparatively generous rainfall. The desert wildflowers are magnificent. I love it.

Then there are the Easter Eggs. And the bunnies. And the baby chicks and the marshmallow peeps. All symbols of the Easter season.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy all these things (especially Easter chocolate), but all of these symbols of the season essentially have little directly in common with what we’re actually celebrating today on the feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord.

You see, flowers and eggs and bunnies and chicks are all symbols of fertility, of life emerging from life. Spring growth is about life, new growth coming from dormancy. It’s a kind of waking from sleep. And the rising of the sun – s-u-n – is all about natural astronomical cycles. The rising of the Son – s-o-n – is something completely different from natural cycles. In fact, Christ’s resurrection completely shatters what we know about natural cycles. That is to say, resurrection, in stark contrast to springtime growth, is about life from death, not life from life. Life from death is a whole new ballgame.

As with so many human tendencies, tainted by sin and the limited perspectives of our own mortality, we’ve managed to domesticate our views of Jesus’ resurrection. We’ve toned it down and reduced it to a manageable size and familiar terms. We’ve come to associate Jesus’ resurrected new life with emergence from dormancy, life from life, in the renewal of springtime according to predictable annual cycles – as if Jesus simply woke from three days of sleep. But again, Jesus’ resurrection, as life from death, breaks open natural rhythms and cycles.

To get of sense of how earth-shattering Jesus’ being raised from the dead is, listen again to features of the account of the resurrection in Matthew’s gospel – feel the dramatic energies of the words: “And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. The appearance of the angel was like lightning, and its clothing white as snow. For fear of the angel the guards shook and became like dead men.”

This is anything but a domesticated and manageable account of things. These are happenings, joining heaven and earth, that just don’t occur in our ordinary experience of the cycles of the seasons.

Thus, unlike our domesticated, manageable, pastel Easter feelings, an appropriate reaction to the resurrection was fear and shaking and paralysis becoming like dead men – responses we don’t generally have to pastel-colored eggs and bunnies and chicks hatching from eggs. Indeed, the color of the resurrection may well be far more striking and vivid than pastels which tend to be soft and delicate.

The experience of resurrection is more akin to those events of our lives when our routines and cycles are disrupted, shattered even – like earthquakes, and floods, and tornadoes, and more. Or the unexpected death of loved ones. Accidents that completely re-orient our lives. Except that the resurrection of Christ is not a tragedy like so much of what disrupts us; no, it’s good news, a divine comedy in the wondrous shattering of everything we have known before in our natural rhythms and cycles.

Most of our tragedies leave us in fear and shaking and paralysis like those who witnessed the angel of the Lord at the empty tomb. But the earthquake of the resurrection does not leave us in fear, paralyzed like those dead.

Indeed, we are not left there in terror. For the angel of the Lord said to the women – curiously, not to the guards, but to the women – “Do not be afraid.”

This becomes good news to us, the ones who are so often terrorized by the ways our lives and routines are shattered by bad news. Do not be afraid – these are words of balm to alleviate our fear, to calm our shaking, and to get us moving again and on our feet, arisen like Jesus.

Indeed, after that phrase “do not be afraid” – a common introduction to messages from God’s angels – the good news is shared: “For I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.”

The women were still fearful, to be sure, but now they were also filled with great joy as they ran from the tomb quickly to tell the disciples the good news of the angel’s message about Jesus’ resurrection.

That’s when the risen Jesus himself appeared to the women with another message – “Greetings!” Or better still, “Rejoice!”

Then the women fell to the ground, not paralyzed with fear, but taking hold of Jesus’ feet joyously to worship him.

And what does Jesus say next? The same words of the angel: “Do not be afraid.” And then Jesus said, get up and “go tell my disciples to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” So, off the women went to become apostles to the apostles in sharing the good news of Christ’s resurrection.

The earthquake of Christ’s resurrection which upended human and natural business as usual two thousand some years ago still has its aftershocks today, reverberating through the centuries to our present day and our current circumstances and practices.

Take our sacraments, for example, baptism and eucharist. We tend to domesticate these practices, too. For some, baptism is as much a cultural thing to do as it is an expression of genuinely spiritual commitment. Some have children baptized simply because generations of their family have had their children baptized. We might simply think of baptism as a nice thing to do, akin to taking your daily bath.

But baptism is so much more. Like a sudden earthquake, baptism is a drowning in a raging flash flood in which we die to sin, but are raised up out of the threatening whirlpool, rescued by the outstretched arms and hands of our risen Lord Jesus Christ, joined to him not just in death but in resurrected new life as we are born again as children of God through water, word, and Spirit.

And consider Holy Communion, a simple meal of a bit a bread and barely a taste of wine. For some it’s what we do on Sundays because Jesus said so, “do this in remembrance of me.” But once again, our reducing the extraordinary to the ordinary does not do justice to what happens in the eucharist.

For in this meal, like the lightning bolts of a sudden thunderstorm, the divide between heaven and earth is ripped wide open, joining heaven and earth like a clap of thunder.

Then also in the eucharist, the demarcation of chronological time is shattered. And that which is long past becomes present, when Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples is re-enacted right here in our midst. And here, today, we also receive a taste of the promised future of eternity with God in Christ. And we can thereby live fully in the present moment, joined to the resurrected Christ in the flesh even now.

May your eyes of faith see with clarity that what we do in church is not business as usual. It’s not the stuff of nature’s usual cycles, nor the predictable patterns of the cosmos. No, not at all.

And when we come to understand in faith that Christ’s resurrection shatters all of our normal ways of thinking and believing and doing, then our pace is quickened, and like the women, we run to tell others this good news: do not be afraid, for the old ways which terrify us, and cause us to shake and tremble and which paralyze us no longer have the last word.

Our faith-driven, quickened pace in life is evidence of the claims of Christ’s resurrection on us even now, aftershocks and tremblers of that original earthquake of Christ’s resurrection generations ago.

We run to tell the ones terrified, shaken, and shaking, paralyzed by the ways of human and natural business as usual: do not be afraid. Rejoice, for Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed, alleluia!

When we serve our neighbors in need, we proclaim in deed: don’t be afraid. Rejoice. Christ is risen.

When we fight for justice, the antithesis of unjust business as usual, we also are saying to a fearful paralyzed world, “don’t be afraid. Rejoice. Christ is risen.”

This is exactly the good news that our sorry world needs, for Christ is risen; Christ is risen indeed, alleluia! Amen.