Resurrection Sunday -- April 24, 2011
John 20:1 – 9
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)
I cannot sleep. I get out of bed early. I go to my room. I sit in my chair. I light the candles.
No trumpets. No loud “hosannas” from the crowds. No angelic “alleluias”. Just a silence, a silent proclaiming of newness . . . a Cosmic silence that for a moment has quieted the din of the world at unease.
To keep vigil is to wait and watch, to pray in the darkness, perhaps to pray for the light while in the darkness.
So it is this morning.
Every life is wired for resurrection. It is part of our DNA, part of how we are put together as humans. It may be yet another aspect of the God-seed within us, that as God is fully completely life, so too we are wired for life, for resurrection.
For all of our talk about “life,” about newness and transformation, butterflies and fluffy bunnies, it may be this life that we resist most of all. At least when it first breaks upon us, when the stone is first rolled aside, it doesn’t feel like life at all. It feels threatening, overwhelming, too much to handle.
That’s why I stand at the door of the tomb with the unnamed disciple. The door becomes a threshold, the liminal space into which I am invited where everything is in question and everything is up for grabs. Inside is an all-things-are-possible world, and I’m not sure I can handle that kind of world. It may be too large for me, to expansive for me. It may be a place where I am not “King”. To step into that threshold means the shaking of life to the foundations.
It may be easier to deal with a dead Jesus whose noble ideas live on than a living Jesus who reorients life down to its very structure. To go into the tomb, to find that he is not there, would invite me to let go of the way I see life, the way I relate to God, others and the world, the way I see myself.
So I stand at the door. I’m not so sure I want to go in.
This much I know from my own experience: Singing Easter songs and reading “alleluias” and hearing inspirational Easter sermons don’t mean a thing – their power and influence will be gone by the time you reach for the second slice of ham over lunch today – if you are not able to identify in your real life this pattern of death, then waiting, then new life . . . if you cannot see the way that, within your actual experience, attitudes and relationships and dreams and your own spirit has died . . . and then you’ve grieved, waiting and watching for what would come next when it felt like absolutely nothing would come next . . . and then the slow emergence of something new, some new life, a dream, a relationship, a calling, a vocation, a complete reordering of your world, a newness so large and complete that you wonder how you existed before without it.
Somewhere, at some time in your life you have gone through this pattern, probably many, many times. Indeed, everyone reading these words is at some place in that movement right now.
I stand with you at the threshold of the tomb, my friend.
I, like you, am wondering if I have the courage to enter in.
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)
I cannot sleep. I get out of bed early. I go to my room. I sit in my chair. I light the candles.
No trumpets. No loud “hosannas” from the crowds. No angelic “alleluias”. Just a silence, a silent proclaiming of newness . . . a Cosmic silence that for a moment has quieted the din of the world at unease.
To keep vigil is to wait and watch, to pray in the darkness, perhaps to pray for the light while in the darkness.
So it is this morning.
Every life is wired for resurrection. It is part of our DNA, part of how we are put together as humans. It may be yet another aspect of the God-seed within us, that as God is fully completely life, so too we are wired for life, for resurrection.
For all of our talk about “life,” about newness and transformation, butterflies and fluffy bunnies, it may be this life that we resist most of all. At least when it first breaks upon us, when the stone is first rolled aside, it doesn’t feel like life at all. It feels threatening, overwhelming, too much to handle.
That’s why I stand at the door of the tomb with the unnamed disciple. The door becomes a threshold, the liminal space into which I am invited where everything is in question and everything is up for grabs. Inside is an all-things-are-possible world, and I’m not sure I can handle that kind of world. It may be too large for me, to expansive for me. It may be a place where I am not “King”. To step into that threshold means the shaking of life to the foundations.
It may be easier to deal with a dead Jesus whose noble ideas live on than a living Jesus who reorients life down to its very structure. To go into the tomb, to find that he is not there, would invite me to let go of the way I see life, the way I relate to God, others and the world, the way I see myself.
So I stand at the door. I’m not so sure I want to go in.
This much I know from my own experience: Singing Easter songs and reading “alleluias” and hearing inspirational Easter sermons don’t mean a thing – their power and influence will be gone by the time you reach for the second slice of ham over lunch today – if you are not able to identify in your real life this pattern of death, then waiting, then new life . . . if you cannot see the way that, within your actual experience, attitudes and relationships and dreams and your own spirit has died . . . and then you’ve grieved, waiting and watching for what would come next when it felt like absolutely nothing would come next . . . and then the slow emergence of something new, some new life, a dream, a relationship, a calling, a vocation, a complete reordering of your world, a newness so large and complete that you wonder how you existed before without it.
Somewhere, at some time in your life you have gone through this pattern, probably many, many times. Indeed, everyone reading these words is at some place in that movement right now.
I stand with you at the threshold of the tomb, my friend.
I, like you, am wondering if I have the courage to enter in.
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