Easter Day 2010 |
St James’, Peace River |
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Easter is either a nice story, or a world-changing event. From the perspective of two millennia, we can read what the Bible has to say about the empty tomb and see it from a safe distance. We can tame the story and hear it as being about life being renewed, a cycle inherent in the nature of things, that what dies gives life. That's made all the easier by a calendar which – in the northern hemisphere at least – observes Easter at the time when the death of winter gives way to the life of spring. But that's not what Peter and John were thinking about at Jesus' tomb. That's not what Mary Magdalene experienced when she recognized a familiar voice coming from someone she assumed was the gardener. In those first insights into what really happened to Jesus, their world turned upside down and inside out. It turned out that when God said, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth” - he meant it! On our journey through Lent, and especially over the last week as we've told and acted out the story of Jesus' death, we've been pondering what it would mean to have a totally fresh start. In that, we are no different from those first disciples who followed Jesus. They all had their personal issues, and they were all looking for a way to begin life again. They also understood that the world they lived in was trapped in a cycle that only the most optimistic and foolish would describe as positive – again, not too different from us. And they heard Jesus talking about a new way. A way of forgiveness for individuals, that would set people free and at the same time invite them to commit their new freedom to serving and loving each other. A way of transformation for society, that would break the cycles of violence and poverty, and turn the structures of power upside down. Who knows how they imagined it would all take place? But I bet their imaginings weren't too different from what we would imagine. Some of them might have thought of a dramatic correction, a revolution in how things were done. Others might have thought in more peaceful terms of a world in which everyone would just try really, really hard to be kind and good and do what is right, following Jesus' teachings. But none of that is really a new start. None of that takes seriously the reality of human life, the messiness of the world we actually live in, the sheer orneriness of human beings like you and me who, with all the good will in the world, still fail to do right by one another. We need that new start, but it's not going to happen by just spinning the cycle in a different direction or at a different speed. We need the cycle to be broken altogether. We need the new heavens and new earth that God promises. We need to begin again. And that's what happens, one Sunday morning in a garden outside Jerusalem, when some frantic friends run to figure out what has happened to Jesus' body. In different ways and at different times, it dawns on them that this is the new beginning. This is something that has never happened in all the world, before or since. This is resurrection: this is new life, not just for Jesus, but for us all. The strange thing for them is that new life doesn't mean leaving everything behind after all. Mary is still the one out of whom Jesus cast seven demons. Peter is still the one who denied Jesus three times on the night of his arrest and trial. James and John are still the blustery sons of thunder who thought it would be neat if they could call fire down from heaven to burn up their opponents. And Jesus is still the one who was nailed to the cross and had a spear thrust through his side. History doesn't get erased. It's not that kind of new start – perhaps because, if it was, we would just slide into the same mistakes, the same problems, the same cycle all over again. Instead, history gets transformed. And I don't mean history in the sense of a list of events in past times. I mean our own, personal, histories. We are who we are. The new life, the world-changing event of Easter, is that Jesus has died and is alive again in our stories. In the life story of each of us here, and of every person who has ever lived, there is a new path for us to walk on. Whatever we've done, whoever and wherever we've been, the cycle of payback doesn't have the last say. Death doesn't have the last say. God has created new heavens and a new earth. God has shown us the way to a new world that doesn't rely on us trying really, really hard or being foolishly optimistic. In this new world, people are still ornery, the world is still messy, real life is still real life. But those sheer facts of life, instead of being limitations on what we can achieve, are now the most glorious realities. The orneriness of people is what makes it so amazing that God can, and does, love us so much, so much as to live and die and rise again for us in Jesus. The messiness of the world is what makes it so exciting, so stimulating, so worthwile to be part of God's work of redeeming all that has gone wrong and will yet go wrong. And the hard reality of life is what makes it all meaningful. This is not a fairy tale story in which we can pretend they all live happily ever after. This is real life, and we discover God's new world by living it. Think about the rough spots in your life, and ask what new thing God is doing that you can't see, or even imagine. Think about the failures and betrayals you've experienced, because that is where God comes into the picture with something brand new. Relationships that are broken or ended; habits that are impossible to cast off; the reality of illness. Think of the systems that we are caught up and that many of us are trying to change: workplaces, institutions, public attitudes and behaviours – where human beings are destructive to each other and to our world, and nothing we do seems to have any power to change that. This is where God says, “What you cannot imagine, will happen. I am creating new heavens and a new earth.” All that's asked of us is to live the unimagined new life. That's no small challenge. The first disciples were more than a little dazed in the immediate aftermath of discovering the Resurrection. Living a new life in a new world is disorienting to say the least. But the reality of the world God made gives us a rock to stand on, even when it's an embarrassing reality. Living into our own forgiveness, living into the work of forgiving others. Loving the unlovable. Opening up our own faults and flaws to God's redemption. Healing and being healed, living and dying with wholeness and holiness. These are the ways Jesus' first disciples made their mark, changing their world and beginning the movement of Christianity that we are still part of. And it's no different for us. God opens the same path for us in the resurrection of Jesus. He asks us, and empowers us, to do impossible things in our turn – not in some imaginary storybook world but in our real lives. What we think of as our limitations, our flaws, all the reasons God cannot succeed with us – those are exactly the places where God meets us like Jesus met Mary in the garden, speaks our name with love, breaks the cycle of failure and offers us new life. *
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