Impossible Things

Luke 24:1-12
One of the things I love about Easter morning - besides, of course, the chocolate - is that when I walk into this room and call out, “Alleluia, Christ is risen!” you all respond enthusiastically: “Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia!”

It’s triumphant, joyful, exuberant, and most of all, confident. We’re proclaiming a truth that we know, affirming for one another that love wins, life triumphs over death, and we have everything to celebrate.
So it’s funny to read the story of that first Easter morning, and realize there’s no triumph, very little confidence, and a great deal of head-scratching confusion.
Remember how that went?

The women come to the tomb – women who had followed Jesus, financed his ministry, studied with him, probably fed him from Galilee to Jerusalem – they come to do one last thing for him today. They come to anoint his body: clean off the blood, wrap cold flesh with spices to give some dignity to the inevitable process of decay.
It takes some bravery to do this – to care for the body of a criminal who was the focus of a lot of political anger just 36 hours ago – so they come quietly and early, before most folks are up and about.

And when they arrive,
Jesus is gone.
His body is missing, and he is not there in any way, shape or form.
I imagine they feel shock, dismay, confusion – perhaps fear or anger.
Triumph is the furthest thing from their minds.

And then two men appear, and ask, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
Before the women can explain that they were, actually, looking for the dead, the men go on, “He is not here, but has risen.”
With just a bit of a nudge, the women begin to remember the things Jesus had said, they
begin to understand that he is risen – gone from the tomb in an living, active, but still mysterious way – and they go to tell the others.
Who almost certainly laugh.
Or wave the women off in anger and grief: Nonsense! Garbage.  You’re delusional in your grief.  Go have a cup of tea; you’ll feel better.
The English translation cleans up their response with a dismissive “idle tale;” but in the original Greek the word is stronger – effectively, the disciples thought the story was crap.

But Peter,
Peter who is one of the eleven, one who also probably thought the women’s announcement was nonsense,
Peter gets up.
He runs to the tomb.
Ducks in.
And sees the emptiness.
And he goes home amazed, full of puzzled wonder.

This, my friends, is resurrection.
It’s not what we proclaimed when we came into church this morning, but Peter offers us an experience of resurrection we can share.
The story is impossible,
and so he jumps in to it.  He runs to the tomb.  He thrusts his head into the cave, and is amazed.

There’s a moment in Louis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, when Alice is chatting with the White Queen.  It’s a conversation – as so often happens in Wonderland – that’s as confusing as any Jesus ever offered the disciples – when the Queen mentions that she is one hundred and one, five months and a day.
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use in trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.  Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”*

When was the last time you believed impossible things?
Before breakfast today?
Or are you out of practice, like Alice?

Because when you come right down to it, that’s Easter.
That’s what Peter is doing.
He hears an impossible story, this one about Jesus being risen, no longer dead, long gone from the tomb. It’s impossible, so Peter plunges right in.
He acts on the impossible and so he discovers resurrection.
Resurrection that offers neither answers nor endings, but pure amazement.
To practice Easter is to embrace amazement: to plunge in to the unbelievable, to act on the impossible until it is real, until it does change your life.

Just about everything that’s changed the world has come from that practice of believing the impossible: airplanes, space flight, civil rights, the internet….and of course, our Christian faith.
So, what dreams have you had for your life?
What impossible things did you hope – in childhood, or last week?
How would it be, right now, if they were true?
Would you act any differently?
Where would you go, what would you see, if you believe impossible things today?

It’s easier, most of the time, to look for the living among the dead: to go back to the things that we’ve believed and done before, whether they’ve worked or not. That’s closure, and familiarity, and even comfort.
But joy lies on the other side of impossibility.

Today, this week, this Easter season, it’s time for us, too, to believe impossible things.
I want you to practice – before breakfast, even – believing in time travel, the Star Trek transporter, invisibility cloaks, and other fun things.  Believe, and be amazed!

And then go deeper.
Believe in a world without violence, or fear.
Believe it deeply, and see what that faith leads you to.
Believe in reconciliation, in healing, in an end to poverty and oppression.
Dust off the dreams for yourself you’ve shelved as impractical. Believe them, and act.
Believing the impossible can be disorienting, but it is the doorway to abundant life.

The Easter story that Luke tells isn’t actually a happy story, it’s abrupt, and confusing, and kind of crazy.
But first the women,
then Peter,
then others, one by one or hundreds by thousands,
believe the impossible.

And that has brought the world to a place of flowers and joy and chocolate and fanfare this Easter morning.
Believing the impossible brings us to a place where resurrection is acclaimed with
triumphant shouts, where you and I can be fully confident in eternal life, calling to one another,
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia!

*Carroll, Lewis, Alice Through the Looking-glass; illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, Cambridge, MA : Candlewick Press, 2005, p 104-5

Lonely

Tonight we stand at the foot of the cross; we see the nails, the crown of thorns, the cross itself. 

And oh, it’s hard to watch someone else’s pain.

On balance, that’s probably a good thing.  

Hating to watch people suffer drives discovery and care in the medical field.  It means that we offer help to one another. It motivates people to work on solving chronic hunger, overthrow dictators, reform laws or systems of injustice.

But when we can’t help, it’s a handicap.

It keeps parents awake at night, wears spouses thin, even grates on friendship, when someone we love is suffering, and we just have to watch.

So sometimes we flee the helplessness,pull back from a relationship,wait out the pain from a distance, wondering what happened to the one we used to know and love.

That’s what happened to Jesus, when the disciples fled in fear, and even those condemned to die with him made fun of him.

Pain can be so lonely. 

Because pain can’t actually be shared, even when you’re surrounded by friends and companions.

Tonight it’s not just the pain of Jesus.

There’s Judas’ despair.

The fear that separates Peter from himself.

The grief of the women huddled at the foot of the cross. Even, in some ways, Pilate’s frustration and the mockery of the soldiers – since both of those are ways we defend ourselves from pain we don’t want to face.

It’s the loneliest story in the Gospel.

And that, after all, is why we’re here.

We’re not here to change the story.

We can’t be good enough, or sorry enough, to keep Jesus from dying.

We’re not here to help, to comfort, or to make ourselves feel better.

We’re here because when Jesus is alone, isolated on the cross, treated as a joke – not a person – by the powerful and the oppressed alike,

when Jesus is so alone, we know that we are not.

Today is a promise that even in the loneliest of our pain, God is with us.

When other people give up on your pain, or when you turn aside, helpless in the face of someone else’s pain, God has been there; God is still there, in pain that no one else can face. 

The loneliness of the cross is a promise that in fact God does not turn away when our pain is beyond help, or even comfort.  God has seen this through to the end, and beyond the end, so that nothing can separate God from us.

The story we hear tonight is hard.

Because pain is hard.

And you and I live with it – if not today, then some time in our lives.

So we come to the foot of the cross tonight to meet the truth that God cannot, and will not, turn away from our pain.

It’s a story of hope,

a story of truth.

The truth that God will never give up on us,

the hope that we can face the pain, and be drawn closer to God, and to one another.

Tonight, at the foot of the cross,

we’re not simply seeing someone else’s pain,

but looking through it,

to the hope and truth that spell “love.”

Good Friday, 2013.  Preached at the community worship service combining First Methodist Church, First Church UCC, and Calvary Episcopal Church in Lombard, Illinois