O Splendor of the Father’s light That makes our daylight lucid, bright;
O Light of light and sun of day,
Now shine on us your brightest ray.
True Sun, break out on earth and shine In radiance with your light divine;
By dazzling of your Spirit’s might,
Oh, give our jaded senses light.
The Father sends his Son, our Lord, To be his bright and shining Word;
Come, Lord, ride out your gleaming course
And be our dawn, our light’s true source.
This poetic Easter prayer was written by a deeply spiritual man named Ambrose in the fourth century. This Easter morning is a brand new day. And the Risen Christ is the radiant morning star whose brilliant light heralds the dawn and comes to be “our light’s true source.” Alleluia! On this glorious new day, we enter, once again, into the joyous mystery of the bodily resurrection of God’s anointed messiah, our savior Jesus Christ.
We pray, with Ambrose, that the Holy Spirit might give our jaded senses light and help us to see and be a living member of the gleaming, forward course of the Risen Christ.
A group of women lead by Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James arrive with fragrant spices early in the morning and after finding Jesus’ tomb empty are approached by two beings in dazzling garments who ask them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?” On that first Easter day, those grieving women were confronted with a question about looking. They were looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. They do not find what they are looking for. It was all so very confusing.
All of you got up early this morning and you made the necessary preparations to get here and be in this house of worship on this the holiest day of the Christian year. What are you looking for on this joyous new morning?
If you are not too sure what you are looking for, how will you know it when you do see it? Are you looking in the right places of your life? Are you prepared for Resurrection?
Last week the International Space Station passed over Kentucky just after sun down. I understand that around 8:30, if the skies were clear enough where you were looking, there was a chance that, with a pair of normal binoculars, you could’ve seen this marvel of our space program in the western sky. I got my six year old daughter, Elizabeth, all excited about this possibility. She ran to her room and got her small binoculars. Once outside, I pointed her in the direction she should be looking. The moon was almost full and the night was pleasantly warm. I was not really sure what the space station would look like that far out in space. At best, we would probably just see a collection of small blinking lights. Standing there in the yard, I began to realize that this Space Station flyover was probably going to be rather unremarkable. It was just cloudy enough to make seeing space craft lights thousands of miles away almost impossible. I kept looking around. Nothing.
I was so intent on trying to figure out the right place in the western sky for us to be looking that I had not noticed that Elizabeth was not even pointing her binoculars at the sky at all. Elizabeth was excited to have zeroed in, with her binoculars, on a chirping bird on the point of our roof. Later she was looking around the yard through the wrong end of the binoculars and was laughing with delight. Then she saw a bat darting around our chimney. For a moment, we watched the bat’s jagged flight. I would smile at her every discovery and then glance up to scan the horizon for the International Space Station. Nothing.
Looking back down, I told Elizabeth we probably were not going to see it. She was hunched over, walking slowly, looking at the grass with her binoculars. She didn’t really care about a space station. (She later told Martha that daddy kept her up past her bedtime looking for aliens.) Looking through the binoculars, she said, “it looks like where the wild things are.”
Suddenly, I was stirred from my foolishness, and turned my attention to all of Elizabeth’s innocent wonder of the front yard at dusk. After the cold and snowy winter that I thought would never end, almost over night, the grass was now green and the trees were budding. The days were getting longer. In the middle of my Lenten disciplines, spring had slipped up on me. New daffodils were swaying in the warm evening breeze. I pulled Elizabeth against me and told her it was time for bed. In that moment, my heart was full and pounding with love for my little girl on that beautiful evening.
For the most part we, like Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary, look over and over, in the wrong places for the wrong things. "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has been raised.”
The women who arrive at the tomb on that new morning find it empty and they are perplexed. But then their looking is redirected away from emptiness toward faithfulness. And filled with this dawning sense of God’s miraculous activity, they go to tell the eleven disciples, but instead of receiving this news with wonder and joy, “these words,” we are told, “seemed to [the disciples] an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”
You see, just like those disciples, we think too much and we talk too much. We feel too little. And we listen too little. We ask for proof instead of asking for wonder. After all, a crucified God, bodily resurrected from the dead is not logical and does not make good sense to us. We might find the meticulous science of a space station exploring the unknown universe amazing. Looking with wonder at flowers through the wrong end of the binoculars is, well, child’s play.
In these moments of our adult skepticism we might remember that Jesus taught those who came to him searching for meaning, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
The Easter story is about correcting our vision of ourselves and of the world around us. It is about looking for the entrance to the kingdom of God. What are you looking for? Where are you looking? Are we missing the mysterious dimensions of the forest because we are so over focused and obsessed with a single tree or a small clump of trees? Are we missing the glory of the God manifest in birds, bats, flowers, six year olds, the full moon and the blessing of every living thing because we are consumed with our individual worries, frustrations, disappointments, and fears? Christ Jesus is raised from the dead to correct our vision and liberate us from everything that conspires to kill our souls. And in response we must sing, “Alleluia!”
Without the corrective lens of the Resurrection we go on blinding ourselves and blinding others over and over again.
This morning we approach a cold empty tomb. With trepidation, we bend over to look inside. What do you see there? What are you hoping to find there? Many are looking for proof. Many want to somehow lay hold of a historical Jesus. Maybe we need some police tape and a chalk line, a DNA sample that can be processed under a microscope, or a few photographs in order to roll away the stone of ambivalence and disbelief that blocks our hearts? Even if some material evidence could be scraped up, the tomb would still be empty and cold. The Risen Christ will not be found in a stone tomb of death. And so, again, just as on that first morning, our looking, our vision is redirected. "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has been raised.” God’s “bright and shining Word” will always be found among the living.
So if we are not to be starring into a cold empty tomb for Jesus, where should we be looking? The key is in the other direction that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary are giving on that first Easter morning. “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again." Then they remembered his words.” They remember that Jesus told them that Resurrection from death was the way it was going to be for him and for us forever. Believe or not. The One who was God, who was with God in the creation, will never be held down by death. And not only that, the Good News, the only Good News, is that His Resurrection happens to free us from fear and death.
That first morning, those faithful women are invited to remember all that Jesus had told them and meant to them during his ministry in Galilee. And Luke tells us that they remember. They remember. They remember how he touched their lives and opened up a new way for them to go about living in the world. They remembered how deeply he had loved them and how he told them that there was more to this life in God’s love than they could possibly imagine. In a moment, they snap out of it and remember that he turned their lives upside down. They had been reading Jesus and now their stories, their souls, were united with his. Remember, remember, remember.
This is what the Easter story is about. Easter discipleship is about reading the story of our life alongside Jesus’ story. Disciples of Jesus read, pray over, and cherish the life giving story of the Gospel. It is a life long, life giving, journey. You might give it try. If we do not have a transforming story of Jesus’ love and forgiveness in our lives that we can remember and that we can read alongside our own story then the stone will stay in place and our hearts will be cold, fearful tombs of self-absorption, skepticism, frustration, and even resentment.
All of us gathered here today are called by the Risen Christ to be Easter people. Easter people do not hang around the cold tombs of skepticism, ambivalence and complaint. We are Resurrection people. Look around: see, taste, hear. The Risen Christ will be found among the living. Pay attention to the deeper parts of your living. Today is a joyous new morning. You can be a new person. Christ is Risen and we are risen with Him. Alleluia!
O Splendor of the Father’s light That makes our daylight lucid, bright;
Come, Christ Jesus, ride out your gleaming course
And be our dawn, our light’s true source.
AMEN
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