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Jesus With a Spade (Easter Sunday)

JESUS WITH A SPADE

EASTER SUNDAY

TEXT: 20:1-18

The Easter story as told by the Gospel of John is a busy one. There is a lot of activity around the tomb of Jesus and a large cast of characters-friends, admirers, disciples, angels. There is even a foot race. What better way to demonstrate this than to have the Pilgrim Gospel players bring the passage to life for you.

A lot of planning goes into our Easter service-arranging the bulbs on the altar, making sure there are enough flowers for the children to stick in the cross, rehearsing the choir, the drama team. But things can still go wrong. Like the what happened at a church I heard about. The choir started the Easter procession, singing "Up from the Grave He Arose" marching in perfect step down the aisle. One soprano was wearing new three-inch stiletto heels and feeling pretty snappy. She forgot about the grate that covered that hot air register in the middle of the aisle and the heel of one shoe sank into the hole in the grate and stuck. She was a quick thinker and slipped out of the shoe and continued marching down the aisle.
A helpful tenor, thinking she'd like her shoe for the anthem, without missing a beat, reached down to retrieve her shoe. Unfortunately, the whole grate come up with it; but the man kept marching without a hitch, holding the grate before him. The bass behind him wasn't so lucky. Singing lustily, he stepped into the open register and disappeared.
Just as the hymn ended with "Alleluia! Christ arose!" a voice was heard from the vents under the sanctuary ... "Get out of the way 'cause I'm coming up now!"

THE RESURRECTED CHRIST ~ KING OF KINGS OR GARDENER
You never know where Jesus' voice is going to come from. Could be the Bible, the wonderful Easter hymns, it could even be a heating vent or a sermon. In today's scripture, the voice of Jesus is heard in a graveyard.

Easter is such a grand day, focused on the glorious and triumphant. In the hymns we transport Christ to the heavens. The titles we give him prove his power -King of kings; Lord of Lords; Risen, conquering son. But the Gospel reading undercuts that exhalted language. "Supposing him to be the gardener ..." There are no Easter hymns about Christ holding a spade instead of a scepter. In a famous painting of this scene, Mary stretches her arms to Jesus. He is dressed in a glowing white robe and a golden aura shimmers around him. He floats. What was the artist thinking? There is no way he could ever have been mistaken for a gardener.


But most of the narratives about Christ's appearance to his disciples after his resurrection, are modest stories. In one, he squats on a beach, cooking up a fish breakfast to serve to his friends. In another, he walks along the road for hours with two disciples. Their conversation is so low-key, they don't even know him until miles later when they've stopped to eat supper together. Christ comes unexpected and in ordinary ways.

THE RANDOMNESS OF EASTER
I'm sure you've been hearing this year about how early Easter is. It's one day shy of the earliest possible date. Easter is a "moveable feast" determined by the phases of the moon.1 It can occur over a range of 35 days. Some years we can ask people to pick flowers from their garden to decorate the flowering cross. In years like this one, when the frost has barely left the ground, we have to buy our flowers. I like this randomness of Easter. It underscores the unpredictability and strangeness of the resurrection story.

John gives a lot of hints in his gospel that after Jesus dies he will rise again. But it is clear that neither Mary nor the disciples expect it. Mary comes to the tomb just to sit there and weep. When she discovers the body is missing, both she and the disciples assume that grave robbers have stolen it. This was included in the gospel intentionally since when the early witnesses started telling stories of Christ's resurrection, their opponents tried to discredit them by accusing them of stealing the body and hiding it. That's why the detail about the folded grave clothes is included- no grave robbers would unswaddle the corpse and take time to fold the clothes. On the other hand, it is equally odd to imagine God, after raising Jesus from the dead, saying, "And be sure you fold your clothes neatly before you leave the tomb." See what I mean about strangeness?

JESUS APPEARS WHERE WE MAY NOT EXPECT HIM
Mary was not expecting to find the Lord of life among the tombs and is surprised when the gardener reveals himself to be Jesus. This resonates with me this year when Easter doesn't look like Easter either.

Still, that's the way resurrection can work. We hear Jesus speak our name in unlikely places and unexpected circumstances.
Heed that warning: "Do not hold on to me." Jesus is free now. Free from the grave. Free from time. Free to meet us not merely in sanctuaries, but in cemeteries. Free to appear in many forms.

CHRIST IS ABSENT FROM THE EMPTY TOMB AND PRESENT IN OUR EMPTY LIVES
The church through the centuries has had multiple ways to explain Christ's resurrection. The gospels and Paul give odd and contradictory messages-one story is about a very embodied Jesus who sits down and eats a meal with his friends, another about a mysterious figure who seems to pass through walls, and the epistle writer Paul, talks about a Jesus having "spiritual body" whatever that is. You see, I don't think it's that important to know exactly how this works or how Jesus is alive. It's only important to know that he is. That the Christ-potential is within us. Frederick Buechner once wrote this about the resurrection; "It is not Jesus' absence from an empty tomb that moves us. It is his presence in our empty lives."

The presence of the living Christ is available to us all the time. Did you come looking for it today at this highest of church holidays? You'll probably find it. Who doesn't get a glimpse of God's glorified one when we all break into the Hallelujah Chorus? But don't think that's the only way. The carpenter, gardener, peasant rabbi Jesus is much too wily to be captured only by Handel. He is alive in the music of U2 and John Coltrane and Mr. Rogers.

We've come to expect the presence of the living Christ in these Bible narratives-the disciples, Mary, Peter, & John are heroes to us. But they weren't heroes. They were ordinary folks like you and me. Jesus drew glory out of them. And it is no different now. We can and do experience resurrected life in our everyday encounters. Jesus draws glory out uf us too. We see it in the sympathy of a friend when we've endured a loss or a crisis, in the network of helpers that band together to provide medical intervention to a little boy from Honduras, his brave mother leaving home and family.

EVIDENCE OF THE RISEN CHRIST IN A VISIT FROM ST. STEPHENS AME CHURCH
I expect to be in the presence of the living Christ next weekend when St. Stephen's church comes to worship with us. Did God have a hand in this timing? Here we are as a nation, embroiled in issues of race-discovering again that we have miles to go before we are free of the legacy of slavery. And next week, and African-American congregation is coming up the Boston from Maryland at their own expense, to provide a worship service for us. There is redemption and resurrection in this event!

Every Easter I preach about resurrection as an on-going pheomenon, not a once-upon-a-time Biblical event. I don't think Jesus was raised from the dead so that we would be in awe of him because he is so much more special than anybody else. He was returned to life so that his life and ours could intersect. So that the same power that motivated and sustained him, could be ours. Living the resurrection every day is the point.

GOD'S TRIUMPH OVER DEATH
Yet, I don't want to slide over the fact that the church teaches that Jesus' resurrection is a sign of God's triumph over death. Last night the Confirmation Class went to the funeral home-a good pre-Easter field trip, don't you think? Mark Douglass gives our kids a tour every year and tells us all about his business-which is also his calling. Part of his presentation is always a testimony of faith. He tells the teens that it is Jesus who gives him the inner strength to be in the presence of death every day. Every day, Mark comes face to face with his own mortality. Standing in a room filled with caskets, we heard him say, "I can accept death with serenity because I trust that it is not the end and I do not fear it."

Friends, take this with you today. Like the date of Easter, Jesus moves around. He can, and does, turn up anywhere-especially in funeral homes. He's with us now, as I speak, and will be with you when you go from this place. With confidence in his abiding spirit, you can look face death without fear. And more than that, you can face life without fear. We need you to do this. More than ever, we need loving, compassionate people to lead our families, neighborhoods, our towns, and our nation on righteous paths. One of my favorite summaries of the Easter message is one by William Sloan Coffin.

"We are not called to sympathize with the crucified Christ but to pledge our loyalty to the risen one. That means an end to all loyalties to people and institutions that crucify. .... Christ is risen to convert us from something less than life to the possibility of full life. Christ is risen to put love in our hearts, decent thoughts in our heads, and a little more iron in our spines."

Christ is risen and so are you. Do not be afraid!


1 Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox.