Alleluia! We've lost Jesus!

Luke 24:1-12

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

I love doing that.
Love the joy and the noise and the affirmation that God has acted.
I’d shout that all day if I could get you to shout back every time.

But what if, this morning, I’d greeted you instead by saying:
Alleluia! We’ve lost Jesus!!
(Because we have, you know.)
And we don’t know where to find him, Alleluia!

That’s the Easter gospel in a nutshell:
the story of that Easter morning some two millennia ago in Jerusalem, when a group of women went to anoint the body of their friend and teacher.

Those women took spices and ointments, and went to the tomb prepared for grief, and work, and what we’d now call closure –
the chance to come to terms with the end of the story.

And the tomb was empty.
The place where they had seen Jesus laid – seen with their own eyes – was empty. Abandoned. Jesus was not where they had left him.

And the dead, as you very well know, don’t get up and walk out for a cup of coffee.

(That moment, standing and staring into the empty tomb on Easter morning, new life probably felt a lot less like rejoicing at a long expected birth, and more like the shock of realizing you’re pregnant when you definitely planned not to be.)

How did this happen? they must have wondered. Where is he?
What are we going to tell his mother?!

And at that point, angels enter the story. Two men in dazzling garments who ask,
Why do you look for the living among the dead?

It’s a moment when you might wonder if you’re losing your mind: He was right here. I know he was. (Don’t I?) We left him here just a day ago. I know we did. (Didn’t we?)

**
What do you do when you lose something important?

I know what I do.
First I panic, just a little bit.
My keys were right here. Who has them?? what will I do without them??

Then I remember what my mother taught me:
The guiding principle of finding what we’ve lost is to remember:
Where did you last see it?
to retrace our steps, in the hope of finding something where we left it.

Last week we lost the cross. The wooden cross that we bring out on Good Friday, to focus our prayers.
It wasn’t where it usually waits, year to year, so Frank Samela and Jack Holley and I – together and separately – opened all the closets and climbed up and down stairs and looked behind every door.

Eventually, I remembered where I’d last seen it:
covered in God Sight Lights at our vacation bible school last June. And sure enough, it was in the place I hadn’t looked among the VBS supplies.

The cross is like that. We can find it again, if we look where we last left it.
But Jesus isn’t like that.
He’s not likely, living, dead or resurrected, to stay where we put him.

Mary, Joanna and Mary had come back to the place where they last saw Jesus, but he’s not there. And the angels ask, Why do you look for the living among the dead?
Why do you look for Jesus to be where you left him?

And then they remind us,
remember what he said to you, that the Son of Man must be handed over, and crucified, and on the third day, rise again.

Remember: not where you left him, but what he told you.

The women remember.
And they leave the empty tomb and go to tell the other disciples the news.

I can – almost – imagine them saying, Alleluia, we’ve lost Jesus!
And we don’t know where to find him, Alleluia!
"But the words seemed to them an idle tale…."

It doesn’t make sense, and the Easter morning story ends with amazement. Not assurance, not understanding, just amazement.
And yet the story is full of joy.

We don’t know where to find Jesus. We only know that he is not where we last saw him.
But that itself is cause for joy, because we can’t go back to where we used to be.

All the gospels agree: Resurrected, Jesus doesn’t look the way we expect; and finds us where we aren’t looking.
Easter joy is the gut-deep knowledge that we don’t know where to find God, but that God has not lost us, and finds us when we don’t know where to look.
It’s good news, because we cannot go back to where we left him.

News, good and bad, can’t be un-heard. Words can’t be un-said, neither joy nor pain can be un-felt.
Hearts don’t un-break. Birth can’t be un-born and death can’t be un-died.

We can try to go back to the tomb, but Jesus won’t be there.
And because we don’t know where to find him, he might meet us anywhere – most certainly when we’re not looking.

Luke tells a story of that first Easter Evening, when two disciples are chewing over the mystery (of the missing body) with a stranger who teaches them the scripture they’d long since heard.
Then at dinner, they recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread
and then he’s gone.

It’s good news that Jesus won’t stay put.
If he were always where we left him, Jesus wouldn’t be where we need him next.

And from this moment on, no pain or boredom or joy or wonder
is empty of the possibility of finding God
or, more truly, of God finding us.

On Easter morning, in Easter life,
the empty tomb stays empty, God cannot be grasped, Jesus will never again look like we expect, and we still say “Alleluia!”

We praise God because not knowing where to find Jesus means that we do not have to solve the mystery to find the joy.
That we do not have to fix the broken pieces to be made perfect;
that we don’t have to hurt less (or more) to be filled with love.

And that is good news, indeed.

So, Alleluia, my friends:
Alleluia, we’ve lost Jesus
and we don’t know where to find him, Alleluia!

That’s the Easter news:
amazement, and joy, and the gift of God finding us when we don’t know where to look.

(And that’s what we said to begin with, isn’t it…?)
Alleluia, Christ is risen!!!
The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!!

Easter: Sunday April 4, 2010