Can you feel the joy? Almost taste it?
That’s something I love about Easter morning – there’s
a brightness and a joy to this day that lifts my heart and the corners of my
lips whether I’m ready for it or not.
We’re lucky, you and I, to know that when we come to church on Easter morning we are coming to joy, because this story
didn’t start out simple and predictable, or all that happy.
Nearly two thousand years ago, in the pale
morning twilight, Mary Magdalene and The Other Mary went quietly to visit the
tomb of their dead friend and leader, the one who had made God so present in
their lives.
Fresh in their grief, all unprepared, they
tumble into startling drama:
Earthquake!
Lightning!
A dazzling angel, who tosses aside the massive
rock sealing the tomb, and then casually sits
on it, while the governor’s best soldiers go catatonic
in shock.
Special effects are marvelous in movies and TV, but they are damn scary to live through. I imagine the Marys must be burying their faces in each
other’s shoulders and waiting to die,
when the angel calls
out, announces resurrection, coaxes
them to view the empty tomb, and speeds them off to carry the news.
No wonder they “ran from the tomb in fear and
great joy!”
Mary and The Other Mary have been tossed into a
new world,
one where all the certainties are gone,
earthquake is par for the course,
death is not death,
and they
– the often overlooked women – they are
responsible for reshaping the minds and hearts of the other disciples with this
news so that those disciples can go to Galilee to meet the risen Christ and
begin a whole new life that changes the world.
Are you
ready for that?
Mary and Mary surely weren’t ready,
but that’s resurrection.
That’s Easter.
That’s actually what this joy is all about.
It’s about life-giving changes that turn
everything we’ve expected upside down.
Easter happens, more or less predictably, every
spring in the church’s calendar.
But Easter happens, too, in our own lives and
world from time to time.
An unexpected opportunity that sweeps you to a
new home halfway across the country or the globe.
Babies happen.
And ice cream.
Yes, ice cream.
Anyone here like ice cream?
So you’ll understand why a particular news story
caught my attention last week when it was headlined by a new and different ice
cream shop.
This particular ice cream shop is in Butare, a
provincial capital in Rwanda. And
this month Rwanda is marking the 20th anniversary of the genocide
that devastated that country. For a period of just over three months in 1994,
sanity and relationships shattered and death took over, as eight hundred
thousand Rwandans died – mostly the minority Tutsi population, but also
thousands of Hutu who opposed the genocide while its kill-or-be-killed atmosphere
prevailed.
It’s a devastation I can’t truly imagine, a
national death that spelled the end of everything
for so very many people. More shock and grief and desolation, probably,
than even the Marys carried to Jesus’ tomb.
But Easter happens in the midst of that horror,
too.
More slowly and painfully than the fast special
effects Matthew offers from that dawn in Jerusalem,
but after that horror comes the challenge of new
life,
with all the certainties upset,
and an opportunity to change the world.
Even with ice cream.
This shop in Rwanda started from a conversation
between American entrepreneurs and a Rwandan woman with a dream of assuring her
struggling neighbors that life is
sweet.
Now the shop - the only ice cream store in Rwanda - is staffed with women who’ve
learned to promote reconciliation and bend expectations as survivors of the
genocide, and are they are facing the massive cultural challenge of teaching
Rwandans to eat ice cream.
One of the shop’s employees remembers her first
taste of ice cream. It reminded
her of the hailstones that fall on her home, she told the reporter, rubbing her
jaw as if in pain. “I wondered if it was dangerous,” she said.
That’s Easter.
Like ice cream,
it’s sweet, bright, dangerous joy that knocks
down custom and expectation and requires us to reshape our lives, even our
world, around abundant life.
You see, ice cream is as alien to Rwanda as
resurrection is to death.
In spite of a warm climate and a general love of
milk, ice cream is new and shocking.
And then there’s the fact that in Rwanda, unlike
in Lombard, you can’t sit out on the corner or stroll down
the block from the Dairy Queen licking at your cone. It’s a culture that simply doesn’t eat in
public. Munching in the street is
rude, embarrassing, or shameful, like burdening all your neighbors with your
private needs.
But you know ice cream, right?
You know the power of the simple physical joy that comes from
the bright, cold sweetness – at least if you lick, and don’t chomp or gulp your
way to a headache!
Ice cream joy is a gateway drug for resurrection
and abundant life.
The manager of Inzozi Nziza (“Sweet Dreams”) is
quoted as dreaming of the renewable joy that can come with opening Rwandan
culture to this sweet, startling treat.
“We would like to change the culture,” she says,
and describes eating ice cream as freedom from fear, an opportunity to enjoy
the abundance of life.
Ice cream is the bright, simple symbol that life
has delight in the midst of struggle.
Ice cream cones are a symbol of a deep change, of a kind of freedom to
express abundance and joy that matters tremendously in the long-lived pain and
devastation that Rwandans have experienced.
For the shop’s manager, the sight someday of Rwandan
teenagers walking down the street eating ice cream cones will be the sign that
“real peace is here to stay.”
That’s Easter.
Resurrection.
Rwandan ice cream.
Bright simple joy that’s part and parcel of an
earthquake of change,
the leading edge of lively abundance,
a sweetness that
challenges the certainties of death, but demands that every other certainty change,
too.
Can you taste that, like cool milky sugar on
your tongue?
Will
you taste that - taste abundant, Easter
life - the next time you open a pint, or lick a cone?
Like Mary and Mary at the tomb, like the women
of Inzozi Nziza,
God challenges us, today, to let go of all the
certainties,
to plunge forward into earthquake and the
unexpected,
to use our freedom and joy to reshape our hearts
and minds, and those around us, so that we’re ready to meet the risen, living
Christ in ordinary Galilee,
ready to change the world.
That’s Easter.
That’s resurrection.
And it’s a lot like ice cream.
Bright, simple, risky, joy that knocks down all
custom and certainty, opening our world to abundant life.
Can you taste it?
Alleluia!!
How Rwanda's Only Ice Cream Shop Challenges Cultural Taboos NPR, All Things Considered, 10 April 2014
Genocide In Rwanda, UN Human Rights Council
Inzozi Nziza, Blue Marble Dreams
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