Mark 16:1-8
Friends, Easter is the birthday of a whole new
world –
a whole new life –
a whole new way of living –
a whole new way of looking at the world –
a whole new religion!
Every year now, for some twenty centuries,
Christian people have come together at this time of
year to celebrate the single most important event of their history!
It was quite natural for the first Christians to
tie this Easter event with the traditional Passover
Celebration – which had been celebrated each year for centuries to remind people of their unique history and of their unique relationship with their God.
You understand, it wasn't until after the Resurrection that the disciple's eyes were opened and they saw for the very first time that what they had been experiencing with this man from Nazareth was indeed a whole new thing.
It was after the Resurrection that they began to call him the Christ and saw him to be the fulfillment of the Passover – the promise that had been made each year over and over again for centuries.
So they began to meet together each week at dawn to celebrate Easter –
the coming of the new time –
the new week –
remembering the fulfillment of the Passover.
In order to understand the full significance of what they were celebrating, I think we have to go back to the Hebrew poetic expression of God's relationship with people.
Again, we are all familiar with the creation stories in Genesis.
The familiar story with its rhythmical structure of seven days occurs in chapter 1.
And chapter 2 of Genesis begins another story of creation.
Now, really, both of these accounts were actually written fairly late in Jewish history –
most probably at the time of King David,
when for the first time people had the leisure to sit down and write the stories that had been handed down by word of mouth for centuries.
Verse 7 of the second chapter of Genesis appears to express one of the earliest, most primitive concepts of the Jew's relationship to God.
Here, God is pictured as a potter:
Then the Lord God formed (molded) a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed (a loud breath) into his nostrils the breath of life.
Thus man became alive! (Gen2:v7)
It seems that from the beginning,
they understood every person's breath is God-given – life itself –
for the human is critically related to Yahweh,the God that shared his breath –
the symbol for life itself.
You see, the thing that made the body alive was God.
God was intimately related to your life experience. [Therefore, a life without God was an absurd proposition.]
Actually, by the time these stories were written down (at King David's court) the understandings of God had changed somewhat.
I’ve talked about this before.
Through the years a concept of God developed that they could put in a box.
At a risk of over-simplifying it:
you may recall that they were a nomadic people, they traveled a lot –
they traveled through lands occupied by people with other religions.
They saw that these religions had their holy places:
they had holy mountains,
there were holy caves,
and there holy wells.
Well, having no geographical references for themselves these wandering Jews knew that their God could not be confined to geography.
Their God was a traveling God –
but they came to feel that he needed a home –
God needed a place to be,
a place to rest.
So they built him an ark, a throne, so he could be comfortable.
And they carried this ark wherever they went.
It became a symbol of assurance: that God was with them as long as they had the box for him.
(We have a lot of stories about people stealing the ark. So history began to be recorded in terms of who has the box – who had God on their side. God was wherever the ark was.)
This, then, became a real issue with David as he set out to bring together two nations of people – each with their own traditions and history.
David thought: The way to unite the country is to unite their religion.
So, let's build a house to put the ark in.
It will be a temple and will stand in the capital city as a symbol of God's presence in our new nation and people will always know where they can come to meet the Lord.
We'll put his box there and everyone will come to know that's where he sits!
And the temple was built, and became the house of God.
His box was placed in one end of the building and a curtain was put in front of it – the reredos.
It was called the “Holy of Holies”.
[The curtain was loaded with symbolism –
it protected the people from perishing should they see the Lord face-to-face.
It served the function of keeping God's presence shielded from the people.]
Now, all of this had become quite institutionalized by the time of Jesus.
The temple with its curtain, and the ark, was an important part of the religion.
For the Jew, there was no question what one had to do in order to be religious, to fulfill the law.
Leaders, Rabbis, spent their entire lives studying the law –
and as new situations and questions came up, they wrote new rules to amplify the old law.
The Rabbis were the authority and it was unquestioned (except maybe for a few splinter groups from time to time.).
Of particular significance is that Jesus came preaching and teaching on his own authority –
far outside the established authority of his tradition.
They would say to him:
you totally disregard our tradition.
How can you go around preaching such contemporariness?
And he would say:
It seems to me that I don't come to put an end to your traditional ways, so much as I come to fulfill the promises of our tradition.
For instance, look at me.
I live in the same relation with my Father (your God) as described in the ancient poem of our tradition.
I live and breath because God lives and breathes in me.
God is in me as long as I'm alive.
As long as I breathe, he dwells in me and I dwell in him – so, in this sense, my body is more of a temple in the traditional sense, than that building is where you go to worship and hope to find God.
This is what I preach.
And whenever the religious law encourages this understanding – it is valid – and whenever it hinders it, it is invalid.
You think you know how to be religious?
You don't!
Your organization gets in the way of your faith!
The New Testament writers took great pains to point out to us that Jesus came to fulfill the scripture –
he quotes the Old Testament and interprets the tradition anew.
His respect for tradition and history is not questioned.
Neither is his authority,
and his authority is unquestionably contemporary to his time.
Now today, ironically, most of us Christians have the same concepts and attitudes about our Church and our religion as the Jews did about their temple and their religion at the time of Jesus, don’t we?
We have fostered the concept that the church building is God's House –
we should come here hoping to find God –
and we should enter, then, with appropriate reverence
and appreciate the use of music, prayers and ceremony that will uplift our hearts and inspire our souls so our faith may grow.
There are things we expect from our religion, aren’t there? –
and there are things we are comfortable with –
and we identify those things as "traditional" when the tradition may be not really be very old.
In a real sense, my call as a laborer among God's people is to seriously come to grips with tradition (religion) that goes back beyond the past 50 or 60 years, even beyond the past 400 years, and beyond the past 2000 years –
attempting to see the contemporary situation our fathers and mothers in the faith faced,
and how they expressed themselves the way they did (and why they did it that way).
And then, facing the situation today, [the world around us in the year 2021],
attempt to react in the same manner and express the same faith –
the same hope for life –
that was expressed in those old situations.
This manner informs the things we do here in our worship service on Sunday mornings.
The Easter story is one of encouragement,
of hope,
of enabling dreams and visions of what could be –
if only....
For the story is that Jesus lived as a Son of God – God lived inside the physical confines of the man Jesus of Nazareth.
And that was the message the disciples were finally beginning to understand – until Good Friday.
[Now understand that at this point, Jesus was no different than a dozen other God-men in religious history.]
But, the significant difference comes when Jesus dies.
There, on the cross, we are told, he gives a loud cry –
all that was in his lungs comes out.
He dies.
The presence of God escapes from his body.
Jesus the man, then, is lifeless –
the body is dead
(and later disappears).
God left the confines of this "body temple."
Not only that, but each Gospel writer carefully records the message that, when this happened
the curtain in the temple was torn in two – from the top to the bottom.
God came out of the stone temple –
through the curtain.
No more to be separated and encapsulated in a box or a house.
No. He's not there any more.
He is no longer in the body of the man from Nazareth.
And he is no longer in his box in the temple!
Where did he go?
The message was – into Galilee –
back into the world where his followers lived and interacted, as he said he would.
And his disciples were to go there.
That's where they would find him.
Where he said they would:
feeding the hungry,
clothing the poor,
healing the sick,
involved in making the life around them more human,
more hopeful,
more enabling.
They were to join him in his work, and when they did, they knew and experienced the Presence of Christ – just like the old days – even better than the old days!
You see, Easter tells us of a whole new way of religion – a whole new way of religion that's new to us even 2000 years later!
The question should be put to each of us today: "Why do you come looking among the dead for the one who lives?"
You are looking in the wrong place.
If you want to see the presence of Christ today, get up!
Get out of here...
Go. Go into Galilee.
Go back home.
Look around you.
Go into your worlds and into your neighborhoods.
Go amongst your friends and family,
the people you encounter during your daily do.
Go find the poor and hungry and needy.
There you will see him.
Join him in his work.
Then, then, come back and celebrate Easter every Sunday –
because you enjoy it,
and because you can't wait to share your experiences of the risen Christ with the others in your Church.
Oh what a church that would be!
Maybe that kind of church was lost forever in the
2nd century. Maybe.
But I continue to see glimpses of it with you –
and I continue to stand before you to testify that I've seen this happening here at this church.
And although some say it is not in the realm of probability for us –
I am going to continue to work and to preach for the possibility.
For I am convinced that we are at the beginning of a whole new world...
the birthday of love and wings
where the ears of ears can awake
and the eyes of our eyes can open
and we can participate in it.
Friends, the resurrection is for you and for me –
and we can participate in it –
by living in a new day in a new way.
Alleluia! And amen!
[The congregation of Christ Presbyterian Church in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, experienced the essence of this sermon during worship on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006]
