Rosedale United Church

“Dancing With The Stars”

Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011
Rosedale United Church
(Jeremiah 31:1-16, John 20:1-18)

Doug Norris     Click to open audio recording

So, what a time we’ve had here so far!  Bright flowers and stirring music and deep prayers.  Soon, time to go back out.

You may have some plans for later on.  Easter festivities.    It is said that one of the common fears of preachers is that while we’re up here talking, the folks in the pews are actually thinking about what you need to do when you get home and did we remember to set the timer on the roast and are the in-laws coming at 4 or at 5 and so on…

So my job for the next 15 minutes or so is to be more interesting than the arrangements of your dinner.  The bar is set low.

I hope you do have some good things ahead for later today – it must please God when our longstanding religious holidays give us a reason to gather the folks, pinch the cheeks of the babies, murmur over our losses, and so on…

The narrative of the Scriptures so often has a plan for later on.  For what might come next.  Impossible dreams.

We’ve just heard one of the classic messages from the prophet Jeremiah – Mary Lee read it  :  Again I will build you up, again you will dance, again you will take up your tambourines and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers…

it  must surely be what we are so often hoping will be a plan for the time ahead.  It must surely be what Jesus understood as the Kingdom of God.

Some years on Easter we hear the same message from Isaiah 25-  a feast is coming – rich food, meat with marrow well, aged wines…   A feast is coming, a time of delight, a time for peace among nations, soon, again, we will dance

Now, the ancient prophets were not naive, not foolish about conditions in the real world – they just understood that if we speak often enough about how it could be we might get that picture stuck in our heads and begin to live toward it.    “Words make worlds…”  If we tell each other that old passage often enough – we will at least know what our possibilities look like.

An end to hunger and a time of delight and a place of peace –   There’s a plan for something to do next.  Hold that thought.

Here’s a fairly scandalous idea.   If I may.  Jesus didn’t actually come back to life.

I don’t mean, by this, that Easter isn’t true.   Got to be careful here, I understand this.

I want to fairly quickly push past the traditional ‘did it really happen’ question, though it is of course a question of great interest.  In the ongoing debates with skeptics and atheists, the coming back to life of Jesus is usually named as one of the silly things that Christians believe, one of the patently impossible things Christians say – as a kind of test of faith – making it harder and harder for moderns to stay on board.

When this question comes up of course some people are very interested in what a preacher might think about it.  Some maybe want to catch me saying incorrect things.  Some want permission, perhaps, themselves, to doubt, to be puzzled.  And, allowed to be puzzled, to stay in the faith with all the other puzzled people.

I said before that Jesus didn’t come back to life.   His people saw him,  on that Easter day, but He wasn’t coming back into his life- he was on his way to something else.  He was leaving them.  “Yet a little while”,  he had said, “and you will see me no more…”

He had been teaching, and healing and generating social unrest and building a community and he was a very present and loving friend, and he came back into none of this.   It was over.  The story is very realistic.   Dead is dead.

Wouldn’t that have been a real resurrection?   To get his life back ?  To step back into Galilee, brush the dust off his robes, and pick up where he left off?

On Thursday evening this week after the Taize service here a dozen of us stayed on and upstairs we watched the movie Jesus Christ Superstar – a classic, and maybe we’ll make this an annual event.  One of the most poignant songs in the movie comes late in the story, when it is clear that Jesus is headed for his death, and Mary Magdalene sings :

I’ve been living to see you. Dying to see you, but it shouldn’t be like this.
This was unexpected,  What do I do now?
Could we start again please?

Jesus must have had more to say – there were certainly more people to feed and to heal – his work wasn’t done!   Could we start again please?

Lazarus got his life back.  Remember the story of Lazarus?   Isn’t that a real resurrection?  You’ve read that story in John’s gospel.  He was dead and now there he is in the story again, back living in the house with his sisters, putting out the trash and cutting the lawn and all the other things he used to do.  Could we start again, please?

In the week or so after my father died, 6 years ago, I had a vivid and very comforting dream.  That I had walked back into the hospital room and a nurse was there and she said ‘actually he’s looking a lot better now’ and he sat up and it looked like he was feeling fine and was going to be OK after all.  And I knew even as I had the dream that it was not real but the idea of it was like a narcotic to rest in for time, while my heart caught up with reality…   Could we start again please?

We have a strong inclination for continuity.  For things to stay the same  – change unsettles and  frightens us.  This is why death is so often an insult to our hearts and souls.  We lament the deaths of those around us because we weren’t ready for the map of the world to be changed.  We were quite prepared to stay in those relationships for a long time yet.   And we move with such difficulty into what might come next.

Edna St Vincent Millay :

“I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind.
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely,
Crowned with lilies and laurels they go,
But I am not resigned………
And I did not approve.”

Easter, at it’s most simplistic, is the belief that God does have the power to make it all like it was – to undo death.  In fact we sometimes speak of it as the defeat of death.

I’m not a psychologist but I think this might be a juvenile state of mind.  To deny, to wish for no change, to pretend it is all as it was before.

I think the kind of Easter we actually get is much richer – not to mention more realistic.  Easter does not pretend there was never an awful Friday – it says ‘even though, and in spite of that day, that dying, here is how it goes now…’

Beyond this trauma, there is more life to come.  “In the bulb, there is a flower, in the seed, an apple tree…”  (Natalaie Sleeth)   But we have to go through this change, through this valley to get to it.  He’s not coming back – our loved ones don’t – but we find that we are in fact able to live again, and thrive, and there is life in us.    Again I will build you up, again you will dance, again you will take up your tambourines and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers…

Whatever it was that they experienced on Easter Sunday morning, angels and visions and empty tombs – it shoved them around the corner and they understood that Jesus was gone, and then, they understood that they still had his life, his power in them, and a spirit with them, to lift lives and speak courageously and so on they went.

If there’s something to learn from all of this, I’m interested in knowing how we move ahead when it is not all the same as before.   To learn what comes next.

When what we had planned is no longer on the menu. There’s an Easter.

Barbara Brown Taylor, quotes, in her latest book, a novelist, Reynolds Price, who barely survived a cancer and wrote about it – a book called ‘A Whole New Life’.   “Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need is to be told ‘you’re dead’.  Now, who are you going to be tomorrow?”   (B B Taylor “Leaving Church” Harper 2006)

You’re dead.  Now, who are you going to be tomorrow?

Is it possible that this is the underlying question in the whole Biblical narrative?

Who are you going to be tomorrow?

To a dilapidated group of former slaves grumbling their way through the wilderness with a stuttering Moses leading them – God puts the question – Who are you going to be tomorrow?  Because I need a community of people who will be a light to the nations… That’s your calling.

To a defeated people – ancient Israel – who had been grand and powerful but who had let greed obscure their compassion and had trampled the poor and the whole thing crashed and now, in exile, Jeremiah and Isaiah put it out there – we are as dead as anything ever was but look what could still come – Dance feast and delight and peace – Who are you going to be tomorrow?

To the woman at the well – almost defeated by a string of bad relationships and almost ground down by the scorn of her peers, Jesus says – look what you could have – Living Water!  I don’t care what you’ve been doing – you’re dead – now, Who do you want to be tomorrow?

To the son who ran off and the tax collector slowly losing his soul and the travelers who walk past the wounded man on the roadside, to the stuck religious leaders and to the thief on the cross beside him – who do you want to be tomorrow?

We are caught up in all kinds of hard stuff, and we have not all been nice people and there is more discouragement available than the eye can take in – and the gospel is stunning in its assumption that these Good Fridays are never the last word – they cut me down, Jesus says, in our hymn, they cut me down and I leap up high – I am the life that will never ever die.

Meet me where you live, he says.  And we’ll talk about tomorrow.