Easter Sunday 2019 Lessons and Sermon

A reading from Acts.

Peter began to speak to the Gentiles.

I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation, anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.

You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ.

He is Lord of all.

That message spreads through Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced.

How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power.

How he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.

We are witnesses to all that he did, both in Judea and in Jerusalem.

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.

But God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.

All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name, the word of the Lord.

A reading from Corinthians.

But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being.

But each in his own order.

Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power.

For he must reign until he put all his enemies under his feet.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.

So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, They've taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.

Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb.

The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.

He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings laying there, but he did not go in.

Then Simon Peter came following him and went into the tomb.

He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself.

And then the other disciple who reached the tomb first also went in, and he saw and believed.

For as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead.

And then the other disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb.

As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.

They said to her, Woman, why are you weeping?

She said to them, They've taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they had laid him.

When she said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

Jesus said to her, Woman, why are you weeping?

Whom are you looking for?

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you've laid him, and I will take him away.

Jesus said to her, Mary, she turned and said to him said to him in Hebrew, Rabuni, which means my teacher.

Jesus said to her, Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.

But go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, I have seen the Lord.

And she told them that he had said these things to her.

The gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

This is a story that I doubt is new for any of you.

It is one we return to each year, and I suggest to you that we have an opportunity not just to remember something that we heard last year or the year before, or on a flannel board when we were children in a Sunday schoolroom somewhere, but rather to follow the women and be surprised by what resurrection meant then and the resurrection God would bring in our lives today.

Surprise.

So consider the ones who love Jesus the most, the ones who were around him for three years, were utterly bamboozled by this event.

He had told them over and over and over and over again, and they just didn't get it.

Now you can have empathy for your children.

And now we can have empathy perhaps for ourselves.

There's something really fascinating here about the resurrection and the mistakes.

I think there's two bits I would put before you today.

One is that Mary does not recognize the risen Jesus.

She mistakes him for the gardener.

She thinks the risen Jesus has taken away the Jesus that she loved.

Not only does she not recognize him, she's mad at him.

She thinks he's the gardener.

I have gardeners.

They roll up in my house on Wednesday, and within 30 minutes they have mowed and weeded and they've egged and they've blown everything off.

She sees the resurrected Jesus and thinks he's the guy that mows her grass.

She doesn't recognize the resurrected Jesus and the people that exist to do her chores.

Friends, I would tell you, we make this mistake every day.

And when I was in seminary, I had this teacher of a class called Pastoral Care.

I don't love what he did, but I'm going to tell you, we studied and studied pastoral theology and care.

I learned how to do premarital counseling in one class.

One?

I don't mean the whole semester, I mean one.

I learned how to do funerals in one class.

Heady stuff.

Boy, I was ill prepared for this job, I'll tell you.

The final exam came.

Boy, I was ready, except there was one question.

What's the name of the woman who cleans the building?

Now we'd seen her every day, of course.

I don't agree with the pedagogy of punishing me for not knowing on that exam.

Point taken, we had never stopped to see the resurrected Jesus Christ in someone who served us.

Did you notice that when Mary has this interchange with the gardener, she's not even looking at him?

The scriptures say she turns to him.

Boy, how many times have I gone to HEB and been on my cell phone at the checkout?

And we miss the resurrected Jesus right in front of us by people who do their work.

Whether it's for minimum or maximum wage, and we say, you are the worker and I am the customer, you are the gardener, you're the checkout person, you're someone there to serve me.

Thank you very much.

So do your service.

We're too busy with the lessons we've been given on TV and commercials, and how important our time is to think that Jesus would show up and a servant.

And how funny isn't that?

Because Jesus' whole ministry is that the one who is above all is the one who is the servant of all.

This might be a challenging message for you.

Good.

I hope you will follow it and listen to it this week and have the courtesy, myself included, to handle your conversation on the phone before you get to the checkout window.

Or if it surprises you to say, I'm very sorry.

It was an emergency call.

I didn't know who was calling.

And in so doing, worship the resurrected Christ.

Then there's this other little bit here that Mary does.

Not only does she fail to resurrect it, to recognize the resurrection Christ in front of her, she's disappointed with him.

Give me the body, I'll take it.

Now I'm from the South.

You know, the further south you go in Florida, the further north you land, right?

I'm from North Florida.

Southern enough.

I can't tell you how many people, when I went to seminary, said to me, you know, I've seen many, many good preachers go and get ruined by seminary.

So you be careful.

Don't let them take your Jesus away from you.

Don't let them take your Jesus.

So what did we do?

We had to study and learn and write these papers, read these books about the historical Jesus, and golly, a lot of the things I learned about that guy, well, they just were more complicated than I thought.

Maybe seminary ruined me.

I'll tell you that.

It may have ruined me.

But I put to you that sometimes the Jesus we hold on to so deeply is the dead one.

Mary is not holding.

She does not want the resurrected Jesus.

She wants the one in the tomb.

Did you notice that?

Maybe you are already following the resurrected Jesus and not holding on too tightly.

Don't you see?

Jesus says, let me go.

You can't hold me because I'm bigger than you.

Instead, follow me and tell people about what you've seen.

But don't think you can hold me and keep my body.

Don't hold the dead Jesus in the center of your faith.

Follow the living one.

Now what do I mean?

When we think that God hates the same people we do, we are worshiping the dead Jesus and not letting go of the risen one.

When we think that being right is more important than being righteous, we are holding on to the dead Jesus, not the living one.

When we decide who gets more jewels in their heavenly crown, and by the way, isn't it almost always us?

We are holding on to the dead Jesus and not the resurrected one.

Now I'll tell you, I grew up in a church in which I was memorizing passages of the Bible by the time I was four.

I memorized the entire book of Jonah.

I mean all of it.

I don't remember it so well now, but I did.

Sometimes, friends, we use our knowledge of the Bible, our knowledge of the doctrine of the church to decide who is more important than whom in God's opinion.

We make ourselves God's own court, judge, jury, and bailiff.

We're so sure that we're right.

We're so sure that people who don't believe what we believe, God must like them even less than us.

Sometimes we're dead sure that God doesn't like us, but God kind of loves us, and if we do better, God will like us a little bit more, which still isn't very much.

And we clasp our fingers around something that is dead.

The resurrected Jesus says, Let me go and follow me.

Consider today that the Jesus of history, the one the disciples knew, was nowhere near as compelling as the resurrected one.

The Easter gift, I think, in the Easter burden is that if you're ever not sure whether or not you should cut somebody off from the body of Christ or put them out of heaven because they're wrong, or you should follow Jesus, who is alive and begs us to create more life.

The choice is clear today.

Choose life.

That's what God chose today.

If this is offensive to you, then I think I've spoken the gospel because it offends me.

The anchor today is that we all need resurrection this year.

This is not something that God did once upon a time and it's all over.

It's something that we're invited to live into deeper and deeper and deeper until the message resonates with us.

We heard this reading from Corinthians in which Paul says, listen, if God's only concerned about this life, then we're to be pitied above all others.

But I always think we need to hear the reverse.

I think sometimes all we think about with our faith is that there'll be heaven when we die and we forget that we're invited to follow the resurrected Jesus and the way we treat everybody in our lives and the way we treat ourselves.

I think we're to be pitied if we miss the resurrected Jesus who's trying to lead us into bigger life right now.

Unless I sound all crazy about the gardener, look at the first reading.

God shows no partiality among nations.

Boy, I show partiality to my cousins.

Forget about the rest of the world.

Are we holding on to parts of us that keep us in tombs?

Are we willing to take the risk to let go and follow Jesus into a new and bigger life?

Mary doesn't recognize the resurrected Jesus because he's different.

He's different.

Whether you've resonated with anything I've said this morning or not, I do hope you might resonate with this.

God would do something different in your life this Easter.

You may not even recognize it as new life, but God would do it for you.

Thanks be to God, Easter is not one day, it's fifty.

And whether it's something I've said or a tomb that you are clutching desperately because the newness of life is scarier than the death you're living in, my prayer for each of us, myself included, is that we would just loosen our grip some over the next fifty days and find not only new life when we die, but new life in ourselves, with our family, with our co-workers, with people we've already judged to be less than us.

The Lord is risen indeed.