The power of Easter is when the truth of the old, original Easter intersects with our life, your life, my life.
Jesus’ life was to bring good news to the human condition, the human spirit. So often, we like Jesus original followers want to shape his message to fit our own limited understanding of the realm of God. We want a “get out of hell free” pass, or a non-expiry free pass through the Pearly Gates
This Easter morning let’s consider the power of Jesus’ resurrection, and
the power of resurrection for our own lives. Life has lots of empty places, big voids. Astronomers have discovered a big empty place in the cosmos. This hole is gigantic, nearly a billion light years across. Inside there are no planets, no stars, no galaxies, no gases.It’s just a whole lotta nothing. An empty place. An empty space, The empty tomb of space.
The gospel story of Easter morning that has the most emotional impact is the one from the writer John. It grabs the heart-strings because we can hear and feel Mary’s emptiness. She’s already suffered the sorrow of crucifixion, now she goes to pay her respects and to do her duty of caring for the corpse of her best friend Jesus. And she comes face to face with a huge void, a big empty place.We’ve all had this dawn experience: It happens
When you give your heart to someone who doesn’t accept the gift.
When you learn a sport, practice hard and still don’t make the team.
When you study and pursue a profession only to find you hate your work
When you create something beautiful, and find out no one’s interested
When you try to resist temptation, but then give in again and again
When you jump to a new job and then lose it in downsizing
When you put money into a home only to see your equity disappear
When you retire from a career and wake up with nothing to do.
When you lose a spouse to illness and find yourself all alone in the world
These are massive voids, huge empty places in our spirit and soul.
Our reaction to the empty places may be what resurrection is all about for each of us.
One reaction to the emptiness, the loneliness is to build walls around the emptiness, so no more hurt can touch us.
Another reaction is to stay so busy with all the busyness, activity and stuff of modern life that we are rich in things, but poor in spirit and soul.
By building walls of protection, or by attempting to fill our lives with things and busyness, we are in danger of creating our own tombs. We end up not finding fulfillment for our deepest needs of spirit and soul need. It can be a deadly disruption of our life when we realize our unrealistic expectations are not going to come true and that bad things do happen to good people.
Jesus’ life and ministry was an invitation for people like us to come out of our tombs and live life to the fullest. Jesus invited Mary and Martha’s brother Lazarus to come out of his burial tomb. Jesus did not barge in a poke his body with a stick. He stood outside Lazarus’ tomb and invited him to “come out and live.” The choice was Lazarus’.
I believe that the good news of Easter is that we are invited to get out of the tombs in our lives. Because the Christian spiritual path is a journey, we will need to pass through a number of empty tombs on our way to resurrection life. The cliché about “getting outside the box” is an Easter message—the box being our own boxes of deadness, lack of energy, lack of fresh air and stale old fears, angers and resentments.
What’s the good news of Easter this year? If you want to move past the massive void in your life, if you want to get out of your tomb, then there are 3 choices we can make:(1) believe in the power of resurrection; (2) Acknowledge that the human heart is an infinite abyss like the huge hole in the cosmos, until our emptiness is occupied by the Holy One; and (3 Follow Jesus into the future of the new consciousness.
Remember it takes faith to open the door of our tombs. An Arab chief told a story of a spy who was captured and sentenced to death by a general in the Persian Army. This general had the strange custom of giving condemned criminals a choice between the firing squad or the big, black door. As the time of execution drew near, the spy was brought to the general who asked: “Will it be the firing squad or the big, black door?”
The spy hesitated for a long time. A tough choice. He chose the firing squad. Moments later the shots rang out confirming the execution. The general turned to the aid and said, “They always prefer the known way to the unknown. Yet, we did give him a choice.”
The aid asked, “What lies beyond the big, black door?”
The general replied, “Freedom.I’ve only known a few brave enough to take it.”….It takes courage to walk out of our tombs.
It also takes effort. There’s a story about a young, amateur naturalist who saw a butterfly struggling to get out of its silky cocoon. Its chrysalis had almost completed its transformation from caterpillar into a butterfly and was just about ready to break out of the cocoon.
The amateur naturalist watched fascinated as the miracle unfolded. Then he did something not very wise. He took out his pocket knife and cut through the fibrous coating so the butterfly could get out without a struggle. The butterfly emerged and for a little while it flew around for a little while, but it was a very weak butterfly because it did not have to struggle in making its transformation journey…It takes effort to break free of our death spaces, our tombs.
I’m not sure about the historical facts of Jesus’ resurrection. The facts are contradictory among the gospels. But I have ultimate faith that there was a resurrection. Why? Because I read and know about the results. Jesus friends and followers had their lives transformed. Holy Saturday and Easter morning saw them hiding together, afraid and guilty. But Jesus appearance among them and his call for them to follow him got them going with a Spirit bigger than their fears and doubts, and we will revisit that story in 50 days of how they began to change their world.
In my first 3 years in ministry in Bethlehem, Pa. I had a call to be on the pastoral team of a congregation that was next to a small, liberal arts college. The college did not have a chaplain, so I was asked to serve as interim, part-time chaplain. A first year female student came to my office with a heavy sadness. She had a heavy heart and tears were often in her eyes during our conversations.
She was returning home to her home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina for the Easter holiday—which that year coincided with spring break. Her first year of college was almost over and in her mind it was a disaster. Her grades, her friendships, her activities were all dismal. Her only ray of happiness lay in the fact that she would soon see the Atlantic ocean which she loved dearly.
Her’s was not a strong family, but her grandmother met her at the airport with a hug and they drove to her home in complete silence. As they pulled in the girl, Janey’s only thought was to get to the ocean.
It was well after when she got to the ocean shore. What happened next is best described in her own words in a letter she wrote to me: “I just sat there in the moonlight watching the waves roll up on the beach. Slowly, my disastrous first year passed before my eyes, day by day, exam by exam, week by week, and month by month. Then suddenly, the whole experience fell into place. It was over and past. I could forget about it, but I also did not want to forget what I was learning.”
“The next thing I knew, the sun was rising and as it did so did my feelings, just as a wave peaks before it breaks. That morning I too arose from the dead places in my life.”
“It was as though my mind, heart, body and soul were drawing strength from a power from the ocean, and something even bigger. All my old goals, dreams and enthusiasm came rushing back. I rose with the sun, drove back to grandma’s and we had breakfast together.”
After she returned to school, Janey picked up the broken pieces of her year and fitted them back together into a new and better picture for her life. As Janey shared in a college chapel talk, “In the short span of an Easter vacation, I died and rose again. For the first time in my life I grasped the practical meaning of Easter resurrection.”
May we too embrace the grace and power of Easter!
May we too allow that grace and love to touch us this Easter.
