Once the great theologian Marcus Borg wrote “I sympathize with clergy who preach about Easter to the same congregation for several years. Of course, you say what you think is most important the first time. So what do you say the second time and the third time and more? Do you avoid saying what you said the first time so that you don’t repeat yourself? But wouldn’t that mean leaving out what you think is most important because you’ve already said it? Or do you proclaim it again, even if in somewhat different words?” And the parallel joke to that is the old one about the holiday church attendee who only came on Christmas Eve and Easter who said to the pastor good-naturedly on the way out of church, “Thanks, Reverend, I enjoyed it, but I think you might need a new play book. You used that story about the empty tomb last year!”

So, yes, I will proclaim the same thing I have said every single Easter Day of my preaching life, which is the most important thing– and yet, you will hear something different because when you have faced into the tombs of death and lingered in the boneyards of the heart, it changes you when morning comes. It just does. One of the many things I love about the old Easter stories is that they begin while it all still looks like night. The sentence rendered in English, “While it was still dark, Mary came to the tomb… actually in Greek reads, “It was in the deep dawn when Mary came to the tomb.” Deep dawn–those pre-morning hours, before the light rises. Deep dawn is my favorite time of day. When I was growing up, I lived in my dad’s old homeplace we affectionately called, “the farmhouse” though our romantic vision of “farm” in reality included only 3 acres, two horses, and a vegetable garden. One of my jobs as a teenager was to feed the horses in the morning. Always, it was dark, so I would lean into the wall to steady myself as I eased down the narrow stairs, feeling for the door after pulling on my boots, coat, and gloves, and glancing out at the opaque sky, covered with stars. One horse was white and sort of glowy in the gloom of the barn’s one light bulb, and he’d whicker a greeting, his breath rising from his flared nostrils like smoke from a chimney. I’d warm my face in his neck and gulp in his scent, watching the dawn come up, hearing birds calling up the day light. You’ve got your morning memories, maybe on a farm, too, or in a city or suburbia, driving home from work if you’ve been there all night, going out for a run or making your way to the end of the driveway for the paper, even before coffee. Easter is all about morning. Morning reminds us that every 24 hours, we get a do over, a mini-miracle, a new day. But the oh-so-familiar Easter stories start in the shadows.

The Gospel writers always point out the parts in the Jesus stories that like our Easter sermons remain the same as before—that, starting in the shadowy morning, the first day of the week, post-crucifixion, Jesus’ living presence and his teachings are still experienced in the hearts and lives of those who follow him—love and joy and wisdom still known in the ways that were like when he physically walked the hills of Galilee and sojourned by the sea, and ate with outcasts, and partied with his friends and challenged the powers—in the loving ways he lived before he got murdered by the state. AND the Gospel writers definitely show that after the crucifixion, nothing is the same, both. Out of the shadows of the painful past, the timid are given new courage, the deniers are forgiven, followers who once were ignored, have their names spoken, “Mary!” And ever since, it has been the same invitation, the same joy, the same possibility for us to realize in our own experience the miracles of the Easter season—in the bud there is a flower, in the cocoon a hidden promise, that we are forgiven, that we are the beloved, that like Mary in the garden, our names are spoken!

These stories invite us into spring miracles that happen even in our death-dealing culture—miracles that cannot be defeated by it. Our invitation is to remember and to live the truth that because Love wins, we are to embody the Christ-reality—we are to make certain the good news is enfleshed—that those who once were disenfranchised find a new belonging, and those silenced are given a new hearing and the lonely and afraid are invited in and sheltered and good news is shared. Healing happens and life is changed, and this good work gets done, in the old stories by the followers who are changed, now by us—for they now think of themselves as Easter people, empowered by their living experience of an obscure prophet whose portraits from the morning after always depict him with visible scars in hands and feet and side. Changed by love. That’s the old and new message of Easter, filled with hallelujah and hope and possibilities and laughter. Which reminds me… One day, after Easter, Jesus was walking by the Pearly Gates, when St. Peter asked him to watch the gates for a few minutes. Jesus agreed and in a few minutes he saw an old, old man approach. He walked very slowly, had a halting gait, and long white hair and beard.

“How did you spend your life on earth my son?” asked Jesus.
“I was a simple carpenter for sixty years” replied the old man.
“And what do you hope to find here in heaven” asked Jesus.
“I hope to find my son” said the man
“Well there are millions upon millions of people here, how will you find him?”
“I’ll recognize him by the nail holes in his hands and feet,” states the old man.
Jesus does a double take, thinks for a moment and says, “Father???”
The old man looks at Jesus and says, “Pinocchio?”

See, I told you–you would hear something new this year, in the old Easter story. You have never heard the word “Pinocchio” in an Easter sermon ever before, am I right? And it is fine, you know why, because that too is a story about how Love can change everything. Can make us real, scarred up though we may be with nails or ignorance or lies or fear or worry or just all the ways life builds us up and lets us down. Love is about new life, Easter, too. It is a story filled with a significant amount of long nights of the soul. Power over, greed, betrayal, small and big loss, death, damage, fear and failure. There’s the death of hope, death of body, death of the life that was before. This story. Yes, what is the same about this story every year is that we can see the pain in it, the confusion, the fear, the waiting, the worry, the profound disappointment. In the Easter story, Mary stumbles in the deep dawn in the boneyard by herself, where she must have felt angry and sad and helpless as she stood weeping by the empty, desecrated grave of her friend. You may have felt that same amount of significant long night of the soul, and the stories of faith say, that after the night, is the morning and it will be the morning of hope when we will hear the message of life and love again. And have the chance to live it in our own experience. Mary sees Love embodied, hears her name in a new way, runs to tell Jesus’ closest male friends, who decide they’ll take over the story from the ladies, and though the rest of the story says that these guys totally believe Mary’s story, actually they run back to the upper room, lock the doors for fear of the authorities and put out the guard Rottweilers in the yard. Just kidding—no mention of Rottweilers, but Jesus does have to push through the walls and the locked down doors in order to invite them to the changes of the new life he has created. Meanwhile, Mary is weeping in the garden, still in the significant amount of deep dawn time but finally, finally hearing her name.

Our Easter stories are the same—still we sit in our lives in significant night before the dawn with boneyard stuff to deal with. There are our deaths of the life we had imagined for ourselves or others we love or the people of the world in need, or for the Earth herself. This story, what I love about it, is that every year it is the reminder not to give up and pack it in—it is Spring! It is Easter on Earth—it is the spiritual and physical story of new life out of death. The living restless, re-creating One cannot be buried, sealed up, stopped, and we are invited to reclaim spring of the soul—to remember that energy is never lost, that even within our scariest boneyards of the heart, still and against all hope, life is reborn, rocks are moved out doorways, and love lives again. Life and death and death and life.

Redbud trees, friends. You can have your Easter lilies and all the gorgeous flowers in the world, but our redbud trees are the quintessential sign of Easter to me because even when it is still cold, pink flowers. And sometimes simultaneously, tiny bright spring green leaves begin, shaped like a heart, and long, bean-like seed pods and inside the pods, new baby trees wait, held in tiny green wombs and sometimes all of this is on the same tree at the same time—flowers of hope, dried, dead pods from before, and new green hearts. Because this is the way of it—Easter on Earth. Life, death, death, life, always, side by side, within us. Outside us. The Easter stories ask us to seek life, to live fully the life we have been invited to—to follow, even imperfectly, the way of Jesus in personal involvement with one another. To love as we have been loved. It’s the same, every year. Hallelujah. Amen.

April 21, 2019

John 20:1-18

Shelly Wilson