Risen and Still Rising

Easter Sunday - Risen and Still Rising <–- Audio file link - A sermon based upon Matthew 28:1-10

Good morning and welcome to the resurrection! I’ve you’ve not been with us all week, you’ve missed the celebration of a remarkable life in Jesus on Palm Sunday. On Maundy Thursday we heard the call of Jesus to be servants to one another and make deeper relationships with one another even in the midst of difficulty. Good Friday, watched in horror as those in religious and political power used their authority to have him brutalized and killed. And Yesterday, we sat vigil in prayer grieving and still reeling from the horror. And this morning at sunrise, we greeted the empty tomb where we saw that Christ seeks to involve us in his resurrection and does so with grace and compassion.

But now, we are in the thick of it all. Jesus is risen. Mary and Mary have the task of telling others. And Jesus even comes to them personally to tell them that he will come to them in Galilee. In each of the Gospels, this story unfolds slightly differently but they all have certain things in common. Christ promises to reveal himself again and does.

So, what do we make of all this? I think the first thing that must be said is that we have a hard time making sense of resurrection. It’s no wonder people both inside and outside of the church fight over whether it’s a myth or real event or even a hoax. But not understanding isn’t the real problem here.

What I think what bears scrutiny is why is it we have such a hard time wrapping our minds around resurrection? If we could understand, we wouldn’t have such difficulty figuring out what it means to our faith. And I’m not talking about skeptics. I’m talking about people of earnest faith who believe that the resurrection is a gift from God to all people. And I am willing to bet that most of us in this room have a hard time with it in some way or we have at some point.

We have a hard time with it because it’s so often beyond our common experience. I mean we struggle to conquer the little habits and “lesser sins” in our lives so how can we truly connect to a story of a risen Christ who crushed sin and suffering? We try. We try a lot and we work hard to make sense of it but at the end of the day, we find ourselves struggling with the same old flaws and sorrows. So, if Jesus was raised as a triumph over death and suffering, why do we struggle so much to experience it ourselves?

And that’s where we’ll start today. This morning in the sunrise service, we looked at how Christ approaches us in resurrection. We said that even when we don’t understand or can’t recognize Christ in our midst, Christ is faithful and reaches to us, and calls us forward with grace and compassion. But it’s just still so hard to see him and internalize what he has to offer.

Maybe that’s just it. Maybe we don’t understand what he’s offering for us to receive it. Maybe we need to expand our understanding of what resurrection is if we’re going to experience it more fully and with less doubt and despair.

So what is resurrection? Well, it is a raising of a body from the dead. The bible offers many stories of such events. But it’s more than just that. In Jesus’ case, it’s the raising and being made whole after being violated and brutalized by those in power. Jesus’ death and resurrection is an event of triumph and says that those who would try to squash the truth and life cannot succeed! The truth and life found in God’s love are so abundant that they live on and on and on.

So another thing we need to hear about resurrection in Christ is that it’s ongoing. Now, ongoing can mean different things. It can mean that something changed and that change still holds or it could also mean that something started changing and the process of change is still happening. I raise this distinction because I think it has bearing on why we have such a hard time internalizing Christ’s resurrection and what that ongoing resurrection means in our own lives.

I think the tension between Christ’s resurrection and our own difficulty understanding it is because Christ’s resurrection is one where something changed and it will always be that way for him. However, because we still live in the brokenness of the world, our experience of resurrection is one where a change starts to take hold in our lives but it’s a process that doesn’t come to completion until we’re fully in God’s loving arms.

So, what am I getting at? Well, I think it means that when we look upon the raised Christ, we really should be in awe because what has happened and is still happening in him is amazing and beyond our reach to fully comprehend in this time and place. We only catch glimpses of it through the body of Christ in the world. The reason the body of Christ functions with such mystery and wonder and beauty is because it’s purity is beyond our reach even though we participate in it as we are.

But this also means that we are a people both fully redeemed and still being refined. We are in the process of resurrection and it’s an ongoing venture that takes time and work. Our savior serves as a model while we’re fast at work trying to put the pieces together.

In the reformed tradition, we say that we are always both “being and becoming.” I always liked that phrase. It says that we are God’s beloved children as we are and more than adequate yet we have far more we could become here and now if we’ll be open to the pathway of resurrection.

But what does this really mean to us? Well, I suspect that we are our own barriers to experiencing resurrection more than anything else. Because we are not experiencing the one time miraculous event of Jesus but rather a process of resurrection, we don’t see the bigger picture of what is going on in our lives. We lose patience or faith or energy or hope. And, simply put I think we have to have grace and love for ourselves here and now just like God does. And if we have grace and love for ourselves and others, we’ll hear the calling to grow further in the body of Christ and continue becoming that fully resurrected spirit in Christ.

But what does it really mean? It means that we all have those places we struggle, those flaws that haunt us. We all have wounds from experiences that have not healed and continue to make us vulnerable to reacting out of pain and fear. Those are the things we must have grace and compassion for in ourselves. God already does. But do we?

When we struggle with depression or other ailments of the mind and spirit, how gentle are we with ourselves? When the pain and fear that illness bring takes hold on us, do we stay open to the love that the body of Christ offers? When our security is threatened, do we keep our hearts open? When lose someone, do we let ourselves be vulnerable? When we fall on our face over and over and over again with the same struggle whether it’s dishonoring our body or having a self-centered spirit, do we keep looking to God or do we condemn ourselves, denying our value and worth in God’s eyes. And when the unknown is in our midst, do we stop to see if it might be Christ or do we look away in fear?

Do you want to know what Christ’s ongoing resurrection looks like? Ongoing resurrection is the person who bears the pain of an abusive past or maybe even the present and still gets up with hope that healing can happen. Resurrection is the person with cancer who says I’ll not go through this alone because the healing I find in those who love me equals or exceeds the healing I get from these treatments. Resurrection is the family that keeps growing and changing and dealing with everything that comes up because being a family is hard and takes daily renewal. Resurrection is the person who loses a loved one and honors the love they shared by carrying that love forward and sharing it with others.

Do you want to see the face of resurrection? Look around this room. Look at the faces of people around you. Look at this group of people who have lost several pastors in 10 years and been betrayed and wounded yet you still come here with faith and hope in the living Christ. Hope that healing will be yours. And faith that it’s not the pastor that makes this church, but the people. That, my friends is resurrection lived. It’s lived in a process that has ups and downs but new life woven into every part of it.

Sisters and brothers, resurrection is loving and hoping and living in the face of the brokenness. It is knowing that the risen Christ will keep working through and around us. It is being both redeemed and still being refined, being and becoming. Each and every day, we are taking part in the process of resurrection and new life

As we go from here celebrating our risen Lord, may we also seek and take part in the ways Christ is healing our lives into resurrected glory. May we claim God’s love and healing so that we can experience it. And may we live the resurrection each and every day. Amen.