No Magic Wand

Luke 8:26-39

Have you been in a situation you really, really wanted to be able to change?

To fix, magically, with the wave of a wand?

 

I certainly have.

And I do have a magic wand on my desk - a passing gift, years ago, from a child of this congregation.

And I have experimented with waving it to fix things… the copier, the weather; to speed up the permit process at the town hall.
But when I wave that wand, and declare the error code fixed, the weather sunny (or cooler!), the process complete…

Well, let’s just say that the results are not immediate.

 

In fact, results of most changes in our lives, in the world, are not immediate.

Deciding on a change, declaring something to be true, doesn’t usually have immediate results.
Being declared cancer-free on one doctor visit does not mean we’re instantly back to full health - that’s a process with steps back as well as forward.

One particular birthday does not actually make us adult - in practice. Adulthood is a process of changes - steps backward and forward - before and after the one legal day.

In the same way, one birthday does not make us old (although there is some single day when you get on the AARP mailing list and will never get off it again).

 

Just like how there was not one day when all enslaved people in the United States became free.

 

I was thinking about this as we celebrated Juneteenth on Thursday, the 160th anniversary of the day news of the Emancipation Proclamation - President Lincoln’s declaration of the end of slavery in rebel states and territories - reached Galveston, TX with the Union Soldiers to enforce that freedom. Two years, five months, 18 days – Nine hundred days – after the effective date of the proclamation itself.

 

The commemoration of Juneteenth reminds us that emancipation in the US and Confederate territories was a gradual and complex process, with steps backward and forward. (And that, in fact, some people in the restored United States remained enslaved until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified by the states on December 6, 1865.)

 

In our lives, in our world, there are moments or days that mark a change. And then there are the slow and complex years of transition before the change is effective, and real, and complete.

 

That’s true for God’s actions, too.

We see that playing out in Luke’s story about Jesus.

There is a dramatic moment, a memorable day, when Jesus removes the demons possessing a man who has been lost to his community and himself for many years. The drama is elevated when Jesus allows the “legion” of demon - many thousands of demons - to enter and destroy a large herd of pigs.

The Day The Pigs Drowned is going to live in this community’s memory for a loooong time.

 

And, for all that it’s a day of healing and liberation for a neighbor who has been lost and tormented for many long years, The Day The Pigs Drowned is not exactly a happy occasion for the town.

Everyone is afraid.

The sudden appearance of liberation and healing is wildly unsettling – and it comes with a drastic loss. That’s a lot of pigs – a lot of economic investment – that just went off a cliff into the sea.

So they get up a delegation to ask Jesus to kindly move along, and stop disturbing their peace.

 

Before Jesus leaves, the liberated man begs to go along, to go away with Jesus.

Which is a thing I’d expect Jesus to be happy about, because a lot of the time when he heals and liberates, Jesus asks – really, instructs – the healed person to follow him.

But this time, Jesus says: Stay here.

 

Now, that is consistent with Jesus’ usual way of handing someone a new challenge as soon as they’re free to take it up.

Because staying in the town that’s all stirred up and afraid of miracles – and trying to recover from the loss of their pigs – isn’t the easiest thing for the healed person to do.

Every day, his liberation is a reminder to his neighbors that their world has been upset – for better and for worse.

Every day, his hometown is a reminder to the healed man that he used to be captive to demons.

 

That has always bothered me a bit, about this story.

This miracle of Jesus is thoroughly untidy. Bits of the story go trailing along into the future, unresolved.

A lot more like healing and liberation in the everyday world you and I live in, than like liberation and healing in stories and songs and other gospels. 
There’s a moment that marks the change, yes – but it’s a moment that either obscures or reveals a whole long and complex – backward, forward, around and around – process of becoming free, becoming whole.

 

When Jesus tells the liberated man to stay in the place where he lives, he also commands him to tell his story. To show what God has done.

 

To stay, and show, and tell, so that the reality of his liberation and healing stays alive in the community. So that as the community recovers from The Day The Pigs Drowned, their story is one of healing together from the uninvited liberating miracle, rather than of shock and dismay. Of changing together – steps forward, steps back – from a community used to demonic captivity into a community built around an experience of healing, around God’s work of transformation.

I suspect it’s necessary also for the man himself to learn how to be free, to be healed and whole, in the midst of a community that’s used to assuming he is broken and doesn’t belong – another process with lots of steps backward, forward, and around.

 

These days, you and I and the world we live in mostly don’t experience the forces of disruptive evil, the things that corrode and break our humanity, as “demons”. As external spirits that can be uprooted from within us, negotiate with God, and supernaturally seize livestock.

 

Those forces of corrosive evil, the dehumanizing and destructive tides of the world around us, still work to “possess” people; to keep us captive in inner torment, to isolate us, to create unconscious barriers to seeing our neighbors or strangers as beloved siblings in our human family.

 

And the miracles and transformations which heal us – which bring liberation and wholeness and reunion and the recognition of the face of God in the eyes of a stranger – are still disruptive. Still tend to make us uncomfortable and anxious.
The experience of sudden relief and release can do that just as much as any experience of loss.

 

I would still like to be able to wave a magic wand, and get us all the way to our rebalanced, whole, free and holy selves in the same moment as healing begins. To skip all of the adjustment to liberation, all of the missteps and detours of reconciling relationships, of repairing the holes in ourselves, and supporting the healing of others. To go all the way immediately to the happily ever after we haven’t gotten to yet.

 

But one lesson of the Day the Pigs Drowned,

one lesson of Juneteenth,

is that “all at once” never really happens.

Not even with the miracles of God.

 

That when we are set free, when we witness others set free, we will need to keep alive that uncomfortable but hope-filled moment for all the long days of change – backward and forward and around – that lead to a whole, healthy, sustained freedom.

 

We need to tell our stories; to wake up day-by-day and remember; to continually integrate salvation, healing, liberation into who we are – as a community, as individuals.

We need to keep remembering, and responding, to those moments that mark a transformation still unfolding.

 

So mark your calendars – not just last Thursday, not just this Sunday – but mark your calendars every day, to remember and respond to God’s constant work among us, making us step-by-step holy, and whole, and free.

 

Crazy Talk

Luke 24:1-12 (Isaiah 65:17-25)

All over again today, the world is turning upside down and inside out.

 

God’s chosen is not supposed to die a shameful, premature death.

Jesus’ friends have been devastated by that for days.

But even more than that, dead people are not supposed to disappear out of their graves.

And if that happens, calling it good news is upside down, inside out, and backward.

Crazy talk.

 

But that’s just how Magdalen and Mary and Joanna and their friends are talking this morning. Telling other disciples that not only is their rabbi, their teacher, leader and friend, gone from us into death, but now he’s gone from his tomb. And some unnaturally shiny people there said that this is what was supposed to happen. That Jesus told us he’d rise again – and he has. And that it’s good…
(But he’s disappeared. No one has seen him. He’s just…gone.)

 

I find it curious that the fresh and first experience of resurrection is of utter disorientation and uncertainty.

Comfort, joy, healing, celebration all come later. But the first experience of resurrection is one of being tumbled upside down, the world turning inside out.

It’s the experience of impossibility.

Of disbelief.

 

Of an “idle tale”, as the gospel says today.

Or, better translated, as “delirious nonsense”.

Crazy talk.

 

Because believing that someone you know personally

– someone who you love, who you are grieving, who was real and human and tangible and also definitely dead –

is now, in fact, alive again is, in all honesty, nuts.

It’s hard enough to wrap yourself around his sudden death.

But death happens. You’ve seen that.

But to believe that the dead rise again – whole and holy and healthy, not zombies – and that you knew this was going to happen because he told you he would – is crazy. Foolish. Nuts.

 

But…

why not be nuts, if it gives you everything?

 

To believe in – to put our trust in – the literal resurrection of Jesus is difficult for many of us living in a world built on the ideals of scientific proof.

 

To believe in – to trust in and hope for – a truly holy, just, generous, trustworthy humanity and a world full of the glory of God, as Jesus invites us to, is radical, and challenging – and really, kind of nuts, given the world of commercialism, self-interest, and competition most of us navigate every day.

 

To believe in literal, instant miracles is to constantly bruise ourselves on the scorn of others, or on the grinding, inefficient normal processes of healing what’s broken, feeding the hungry, or saving others – or saving ourselves from ourselves.

 

But why not take a little risk, or a big leap, of faith?

Why not be a little foolish, a little crazy, when it gets you impossible joy?

When “crazy” is just another name for life so vivid, bright, and full it can’t be dimmed or contained by the grind of daily news and work?

When “foolish” is just another name for fierce and unquenchable hope and an unbounded sense of possibility?

When “crazy” is, in fact, just plain overwhelming love, and belovedness?

 

I think Peter wants to take that risk, in our story today.

He risks being a little crazy, taking the unbelievable word of his friends on trust enough, at least, to run to the tomb, and let the emptiness there leave him amazed. And probably grasping for hope, longing for the impossible he couldn’t begin to imagine an hour before.

 

I think Mary, and Joanna, and Magdalen and the other women do take that risk.

They know they are going to sound crazy, when they go to the other disciples and tell their story of an empty tomb, of glowing otherworldly messengers who insist that the impossible is reality: “He is risen.” Who remember what Jesus has indeed been telling them all for years, since Galilee, and know it is absurd and unbelievable, and share it anyway, because they need their friends to know, and believe.

 

You and I, here and now, live in a world where the story of Jesus’ resurrection, his vivid, healthy, holy life emerging vibrant from the grave, is a familiar story. Taken for granted; at least as a story, whether or not it’s believed by many.

 

For the most part, here and now we don’t sound delirious when we say that what we celebrate today is the Son of God defeating death, rising from the grave, making all things new. It’s a story we can tell to our children confidently, as a joyful occasion to thank God and eat chocolate.

(Frankly, trying to explain how neon-colored, sugar-crusted, bunnies and chicks shaped out of marshmallow express the joy of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead might be more delirious to someone who hasn’t seen it in every grocery store for weeks, even though that absurdity is well established in our current context.)

 

What’s risky, what’s a bit crazy, or foolish, for us, this Easter Day and season, is to believe it matters, here and now.

To believe that since Jesus left that dim and cool cave-tomb alive and better-than-well two thousand years ago can still change your life, and mine, and the very everyday, familiar world we live in.

 

To believe – to trust – that although our own graves may not open after our funerals, that we already live where the power of death cannot hurt or defeat us, and so live free of the fears that keep us small, and quiet – or angry and aggressive.

 

To believe – to put our hope and trust in – the promise that the world not only can be, but will be, different than it’s always been. That – in spite of all the evidence to the contrary in the news or our own lives right now – as God keeps “making all things new”, humanity can be fundamentally and thoroughly holy, and healing, peace-building, generous and just, trustworthy and joyful.

So that we can be free to live joyfully, generously, honestly, hopefully, in all life’s circumstances, without fear that the world will destroy our joy, hope, and peace.

 

To believe, to trust with all our hearts, that the love of God is more powerful than any other force in the universe.

More powerful than our own griefs and greeds;

more powerful than the boss or the media;

more powerful than hatred or fear around us or within us;

more powerful than death itself.

 

So that, wrapped in that love, filled with that love, inspired with that love, we know we can never be separated from God, no matter what.

Even when it seems like Jesus is gone.

Like love is gone.

 

To believe we are free, always, everywhere, to live as God’s best-beloved. And thus to actually become free to love without fear, and without limit, and with extravagant, holy, foolish joy.

 

Crazy talk.

I know.

 

But why not be crazy, foolish – and free?

Why not embrace the absurd, the impossible – and live beyond every limit?

Why not be a little bit delirious – and infinitely loved?

 

Jesus, after all, was crazy enough to walk the earth in the form of generous, trustworthy, peace-building, wonder-making humanity.

Crazy enough to tell us that we could be that, too.

Crazy enough to die for that faith, and trust, and love.

Crazy enough to leave the tomb, to beckon us onward, to set us in the middle of impossible stories, and see what happens next.

 

Shouldn’t you and I – just for Easter, or for always – choose to believe these foolish tales?

And be just a little bit, very joyfully, crazy, too?

Layer by Layer

John 20:1-18; Genesis 1:1-2:2; Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21; Isaiah 55:1-11; Zephaniah 3:14-20

Centuries ago, and tonight, Jesus’ resurrection unfolds slowly, in half-revelations, stages and hiccups.

 

As the darkness starts to fade into dawn, Mary of Magdala stops and stares at the stone rolled away from the entrance of Jesus’ tomb.

Sees the darkness behind the stone and feels her loss.

They’ve taken him away, she tells Peter and the other disciple.

She sees part of the truth. A clue, but not the answer.

 

Peter and the other race to see for themselves, and see… emptiness.

They see more of the truth – that the disappearance of Jesus probably wasn’t grave robbers – the neatly folded wrappings suggesting gentle care.

The other disciple believes…something. Not everything, but something.

An answer, but not the answer.

 

Mary, weeping, seeks more.

Peers into the tomb, and sees angels.

Sees the divine hand at work, but still the absence of Jesus.

An answer: the presence of God has replaced the presence of death.
But mostly the question still: where is Jesus?

 

Finds someone who should know, who calls her by name, and then, finally,

finally,

she is found.

Jesus is here, alive, vivid, so real.

And at last, the fullness of life and love and salvation are here and now.

The mystery solved, the answer joyful and fulfilled.

And Jesus insists that there is more to come.

 

Similarly – and quite differently! – our liturgy of resurrection tonight refuses to leap straight into the bright Alleluias, but folds and unfolds the facets of God’s salvation like an origami shape.

 

In the darkness (the almost darkness) an ancient chant invokes the benefits and power of Jesus’ resurrection over a fire and a candle.

 

Back, then, to The Beginning – the day-by-day unfolding of the creative power of God – and the clue to the story of salvation (from before we needed salvation) that you and I and all of humanity is made in the image of God.

 

Then the water parts, the power of God reshapes nature and physics for a daring escape, a mighty rescue. A promise of truth that God will not let us be lost to any force on earth. But not yet our whole truth.

 

Isaiah sings God’s invitation and command to dive into abundance, to share all the overflowing gifts of God. Zephaniah calls us to sing in celebration of the victory God is bringing.

The hand of God is upon us now…and we are still waiting for Jesus.

 

Until at last the lights flash bright, the bells ring, the Easter joy bursts forth in full.

And we have arrived at the celebration of resurrection.

Jesus has risen, death is defeated, we here and now are freed from all that separates us from God.

And Jesus tells us (our liturgy tells us!), there is more to come.

 

Tonight, just like that morning long ago in Jerusalem, revelation, resurrection, and salvation unfold slowly; in different shapes and clues and directions.

 

Humans, after all, usually need to receive information, discover truth, in multiple different ways before we absorb it, know it, can act on it.

 

And, for all we throw the lights on and shout “Alleluia!” in one bright moment here tonight, Easter does not really happen in a snap.

 

We might want to, sometimes, but we really don’t go from death to resurrection in the blink of an eye.

Easter, salvation, and resurrection build up in us, in individuals and communities, layer by layer, story by story, experience by experience.

 

Mary doesn’t experience the revelation of new life without first experiencing the absence of death. Or without experiencing – and expressing to the angels, and the “gardener” – her longing for Jesus. She does not see Jesus risen until she hears all the love of God in her own name, spoken.

 

The shock, the yearning, the partial experiences all build up, to the full truth.

The wounds, his and hers, are still there – but now wrapped in the incomprehensible and glorious full experience of resurrection.

 

So tnight, we too enter into the layers of resurrection. We journey together through the stories of creation and salvation, the insistent summons to abundance and celebration, that God lays in front of us in different times and ways and places.

These stories of our community life in God are meant to weave themselves with our personal – and our shared – experiences of self-discovery, and rescue, and generosity, and protection. To wind around and through our own wounds and losses, our fears and fragile hopes, brought together here.
Until, one moment, or many times, when we hear our own name spoken in the voice of love and eternity. As we finally, slowly, repeatedly, suddenly discover that the undefeatable love of God has risen for us.

 

That Easter is ours, now and always.

That resurrection becomes real for us, around us, in us.

Inviting us to what comes next.