In-Between Easter

Matthew 28:1-10

It doesn’t really feel like Easter right now – to be standing here alone without all of you;

without the festive crowds, bright flowers and trumpets we usually enjoy.

It doesn’t feel like a celebration of victory, of life triumphing over death.

And yet, of course, it is.

If you are watching this now, in this strange April of 2020, carefully apart in our homes instead of gathered together in church, it IS a victory of life over death,

a victory of love over danger,

that we are coming together in this strange new way to experience Easter.

And this experience of Easter is probably, for most of us, a lot more like the experience of Easter recorded in the gospel story than it is like the other Easter Sundays of our lives.
Many of us are much closer in our hearts, right now,  to Mary and the other Mary, slipping into the burial place early in the morning, hearts aching with their loss, wrapped in a messy confusion of the emotions of grief: sadness, anger, frustration, weariness, an achy sort of guilt, a sharp-edged emptiness, an unpredictable indifference to things that once mattered most.

Today, the restrictions and risks of a world struggling to evade and survive a pandemic virus bring us into the Easter gospel in a different place than the lilies and trumpets, the festive crowds we more often see on this Sunday morning.

Usually, we enter the story from the end, from the fullness of joy that the risen Christ has brought salvation and hope and eternal life. Today, I feel us stepping into the story from the middle; from that place where we have heard that Jesus is risen; that God has upended death and reinvented life, but we haven’t experienced it yet.

Mary and the other Mary stand with us today, in front of the tomb, still unsteady from the earthquake brought by the dazzling messenger who shocks the earth and brushes aside the immovable rock sealing Jesus’ tomb.

The angel’s message has been delivered:

He is not here. He is risen as he said. Look at the place where he was, and then go tell the others to meet him in Galilee.

They’ve heard the good news.

There’s an emptiness before their eyes that implies that God’s promises are fulfilled, that salvation is completed.

But they haven’t seen Jesus. They haven’t seen and touched and felt this truth.

It’s the Easter of in-between.

We’ve heard the good news, too.

Heard it many times, some of us.  Heard it really for the first time, others of us.

Heard God promise resurrection and transformation and eternal life, and all of the salvation that is so utterly beyond our own power.

Heard a messenger – a friend, a preacher, a book, an angel – tell us that it is accomplished, that God has DONE all that was promised, and more that we couldn’t expect.

But for many of us, probably most of us today, that completed salvation hasn’t become real in our own lives.

Our friends haven’t been restored to our reach and touch; our lives still face into unexpected kinds of emptiness and loss – absences of comforts, joys, loved ones, gatherings, jobs, schools, places that we love.

Now, you may not be experiencing Easter exactly the way I am. That’s true every year. Every year, in the bright crowded festival, some of us are facing into the empty tomb, or still weeping at the cross. This year, some of us are as truly rooted in joy, completion, and the triumph of God as we ever could be in a crowded, bright and flowering church.

But as a community – as a congregation, a people – this year we, with Mary and Mary, are in the Easter of that suspended uncertainty between being the promise being told and the miracle being real.

We do not yet know how it will be to see and touch the risen Christ, to touch the reality of God’s promises with our own over-washed hands, to feel the full healing embrace of our bodies in Jesus’ real, risen, arms.

And that – that suspended moment between being told and being real – is Easter, too. That uncertain, unbounded space between hope and completion, between amazement and relief, is just as Easter, just as full of the triumph and joy of God as the bright familiar festival.

This is the Easter that reminds us that joy doesn’t have to wait for loss or grief to end; that assurance and uncertainty can mingle in our souls without erasing either one; that triumph and heartache can each make the other richer and more profound.

This is the Easter that reminds us that God’s action can be known in emptiness and doubt and wonder, not just in completed miracles. God’s loving work can be met in the blank and open space of an empty tomb, and in that echoing, uncertain space, we can still shout “Alleluia!”

When Mary and Mary run from the tomb, in fear and joy, launching themselves from this suspended moment that we share, they meet Jesus on their way.

And Jesus’ first word to them is “Rejoice!”

It’s a common enough greeting in that time and place, but it’s chosen carefully. Not to deny the anxious wonder of the moment, the heartache of finding even the certainties of death yanked from under us, the unpredictable transformation of our most important relationships. But to call God’s joy out of the depths of our hearts right in the middle of all that is uncertain, incomplete, changing and worthy of grief.

So go ahead, on this very different Easter day, and shout out “Alleluia!” with all the strong uncertainty your voice can manage. Sing about the triumph of God with deep conviction and celebration, or sing about the victory of life with tears in your eyes if that’s how it goes today.

Eat all the chocolate.  

Laugh, and fall into God’s arms in grief the way you fall into the arms of love held out by friends and family at funerals. Go ahead and cry with heartache and anger and frustration, and also dance with the celebration of new life.

Setting free all these expressions of holy joy, and all the raw honesty of our sense of loss and uncertainty will make us present to God and participants in God’s promise, make us part of the Easter story this day and year and lifetime.

Your whisper or shout of “Alleluia!” on the threshold of an empty tomb, our song of celebration while change shakes the earth around us – these are channels through which God’s promises weave themselves more deeply into our world.

This Easter – strange as it may be – is where God acts to heal and redeem and transform this world in love, even before the miracle feels real to us.

So stand with me, today, on the threshold of emptiness and hope, and whisper, sing, or shout:

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Amen.