EASTER SUNDAY THE RESURRECTION OF THE LORD 

Acts 10:34a, 37-43 | Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9

Oh God, who on this day, through your Only Begotten Son, have conquered death and unlocked for us the path to eternity, grant, we pray, that we, who keep the solemnity of the Lord’s resurrection, may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit, rise up in the light of life.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

I remember, when I was growing up as a young boy in the Catholic community of — well, it was in many cities, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati.  Anyway, I remember so vividly that the feast that I knew was the most important feast in the whole tradition of being a Catholic was Christmas, because it was so festive and so wonderful, and there was Christmas trees, and there were presents.  It was just like — I got so excited when Christmas was coming, and it was all about, though I didn’t really think about it that much, to me it was about presents and the tree and all that.  But it really was about the birth of Christ, the coming into the world of this figure, the Messiah.  So it was about somebody else’s birth that we were celebrating, and now I look at the way I see Easter.  And obviously Easter is the greatest of all the Christian feasts, and it’s not about the birth of Jesus, but it’s about your birth and my birth, rebirth into a world of clarity and a world of beauty and a world of understanding and insight.  And this mysterious thing called the insight into who we are and who God is and why we’re here in the world is so clearly depicted in this feast, and it’s so rich and powerful that my challenge this morning is to try to capture what was at the heart of this whole thing that Jesus has revealed to us in this moment of his death.  It’s so crucial to understand it, and the beauty of the weeks of Lent is that we have had these beautiful gospels.  And when you realize that they were used in the early church to awaken people to the most powerful gift that God has given to us through this figure, Christ — and that’s a new life, the light of life. 

At the heart of it is an issue about sin, and I love the way the first reading ends, when you’re listening to the Acts of the Apostles, and that’s the actions of the disciples after they realized who Jesus was and what he was teaching.  And it’s all summarized at the end of that reading you just listened to by saying what he’s done for us is he’s given us this most incredible gift, the forgiveness of our sins.  The forgiveness of sin, that is the heart of the message of God, and the gift of the Feast of Easter is that this wisdom of how to deal with our weaknesses and sins is explosive if you understand it.  It changes everything.  So let’s look at the first of those five gospels, and it’s about the definition of sin is missing the mark.  And so we see Jesus as a human being setting the mark for his life, and he realizes that there are many marks that you can choose.  One is self, one that makes self the most important thing in your life.  Take these stones and turn them into something comforting like bread, because I’m starving.  And he said, “No, I’m not going to make that the goal of my life, a comfortable life.”  And then he’s tempted with the way the world works and its power over people.  He says, “No, I’m not going to use the gifts that God has given me to be a person who gets as much out of the world as I can for whatever reasons I need it.  I’m not going to be involved in power over people.”  Now, so what is it that he’s then revealing that is his target, his mark?  It’s interesting.  It’s not so much an idea as a person.  He said, “The mark that I have is to listen to the word of God that is there for me, that lives inside of me, that’s all around me.”  And when he speaks, that is what I want to be, the core of my life.  I want to listen to that voice, and I want to follow it.  So he says, “It’s truth, the truth that comes from my Father.”  Then of course the devil, or whatever evil that is, he basically says, “Okay, well then, at least test it.”  And then you get this wonderful response from Jesus.  “No, no.  This isn’t something you test to see if it’s real.  No, you believe in this voice.  It’s the voice of God.  It’s the voice inside of you that tells you what’s right and wrong.”  It’s a beautiful, beautiful invitation into an inner world.

And then the next reading shows what Jesus is going to say that is necessary, or maybe it’s the result of this commitment to an inner voice of God inside of you, and that’s transfiguration is the event.  And what it is, is you’re looking at Jesus revealing himself as one who’s received this gift of God’s voice inside of him.  It’s become such a part of him by the time that the transfiguration happened, because that happened late in his ministry.  He’d already announced to his disciples that he was going to die, and so they had to be supported, I guess, in some way.  And so he takes them and shows them something about what it means to listen to this inner voice, and he said, “It’s enlightenment.”  Enlightenment, that’s the goal of God’s relationship with you, and in the Old Testament, it seemed that obedience was the goal.  But here Jesus is revealing, “No, look.  It’s not obedience to a law outside of yourself.  It’s opening yourself to a voice inside of you that awakens you to the truth of who you are.”  And so you see this image of Jesus just radiating this light, this insight, and then Moses and Elijah are there.  That’s the law and the prophets.  It’s like Jesus saying, “Look, there was a time when you had to follow a law, and the prophets were there to hold you to that.  But I want you to let go of that.  Instead of obedience to a law, I want you to listen to a voice inside of you.”  Amazing.  The transfiguration is a shift from outer obedience of your will surrendering to another authority and going inside, and the beautiful thing about that is Jesus saying, “The law is written on your hearts.  It’s no longer out there somewhere.  It’s inside of you.” 

And then there’s the woman at the well, this beautiful story of you see this image of forgiveness flowing out of Jesus.  He is forgiveness.  He is light for those caught in the darkness of sin, and as we know, the temple at the time had nothing to do with sinners, nothing to do with them.  You couldn’t get near them without becoming contaminated.  Everything that happened to them in life that was negative was a punishment for their sins.  And so into that comes this figure, Jesus, and he manifests this new way of understanding sin and God’s relationship to sin by first breaking the law.  I love that Jesus always broke the law, and it wasn’t the law that was in his heart about — the law that God wrote there.  It was about religious rules and regulations that kept people separated and even the way religion looked at sin.  At the time of Jesus, it was always sin created separation, isolation.  Sin separated you from God, separated you from the community.  Leprosy was a great image of it.  If you were sinful, you were an outcast.  And so here comes Jesus into this environment of sinners, goes to a Samaritan woman considered to be a sinner, a woman that he was forbidden by the law to get near, or to talk to rather, and so there he is breaking rules and regulations, entering into a relationship with a woman who had no rights to anything from Judaism at the time and says, “How are you?”  And they start talking, and then she starts revealing things to him about her life.  And there’s nothing in the reaction of Jesus to the rules that she’s broken, all the things that she’s done wrong that she shares.  There’s nothing in him but understanding and compassion, and the reaction of her is so beautiful, because she goes, “Oh, my God.  I’ve got to go tell people about this person I met.  They’re from the temple, and yet they’re doing something that I’ve never seen from anybody connected to the temple.  And he’s giving me this sense of my value that has nothing to do with what I’ve done.”  It’s like something inside of her is awakened, and Jesus said, “It will come.  It’s like a well that quenches thirst and cleanses you.  The water just keeps coming out of you.”  Instead of your performance being the source of your well-being with God, no, you have already inside of you something that God is delighted in, and he wants to affirm what he’s delighted in that’s hidden inside of you, and your sins tend to cover it over or tend to mask it, and you’re acting in a way that’s not truly who you are.  What an incredible invitation on the part of the world of the temple and sin and condemnation to imagine something so radically different, so radically new.  And so you have the woman at the well story.

And then comes the blind man’s story, and what’s so fascinating about this is you see in this woman such a receptivity to this idea of forgiveness of sins.  Now you go to the blind man, and what’s it all about?  The resistance of religion, the resistance of an unhealthy religion that focuses so much on judgment, sin.  It’s almost like it reveals — the story of the blind man reveals, first of all, the resistance of the people in the temple to go beyond their narrow view of the way in which they’ve created a world for people that’s all focused on sin, meaning that the temple’s role was to name sin, set the rules, set the laws, everything that you are told to do.  You have to remember that there was a time — well, it was all about the Torah, and so the Torah was the book that the prophets had to hold people to.  And in the Torah, there is a book called Deuteronomy, and in it there are 613 rules and laws that govern your daily life.  And if you broke any of those, you were a sinner, and that sin separated you from God.  And the temple was a place where you went in order to get back to God, and so we have an institution that creates a system that you’re bound to fail in, I think, if you look at that 613 laws.  And then it controls your well-being by saying, “You must come to us and pay for a ritual that will put you back in touch with the divinity and the love of God.”  When you think about that, think of the power it gives this institution, and it’s not — this is not an image of religion.  It’s an image of basic, toxic religion.  There’s a beautiful, healthy religion that’s out there.  It’s putting on an understanding or yoking — actually the word religion means to yoke, to put on something, to carry, to be guided by something or carry something.  The thing that’s beautiful about healthy religion is it gives you a core teaching.  Like these five readings are such a core teaching as to who God is and what he is inviting us into and how he invites us to live with him and how he’s there to forgive and to draw us into light.  That’s healthy religion.  When that community you might join that’s religious is giving you the truth, there’s nothing more valuable than to be with people that can celebrate that truth together in rituals and song and in actions.  It’s really amazing.  It’s really healthy.  But when an institution resists forgiveness and somehow breeds a fear of sin to the point that it and only it can release you from that, be careful, because that’s not the intention of God, to create a religion that instills guilt and shame and fear. 

So all of these four images of the first readings come down to the big question.  What do the people who listen to Jesus believe?  The temple resisted Jesus.  That’s pretty obvious why, but even his friends didn’t fully grasp what he was talking about.  And the line of Martha and Mary, “If you’d have been here, everything would have been all right.  If you’d have been here, my brother would never have died.”  It’s like Jesus weeps at that moment, and his weeping is not because Lazarus is dead, because he knows that he’s going to raise Lazarus from the dead.  He even says to his disciples, “Lazarus is really dead, but he died so I can show you something.”  And what is he trying to show them?  Somehow in your relationship with God, when he enters into your life to guide you and bring you into the light, it doesn’t mean that he’s not going to allow negative things to happen, he’s not going to allow even sin to come into your life where it pulls you down.  He is not going to fix everything.  He’s going to let everything be as it is, and then somehow, when you surrender to it and know that it isn’t going to kill you — Lazarus wasn’t going to die because of his death, if that makes sense.  No, nothing can destroy you.  Lazarus lives, even though everything turned out not the way people wanted it to for Lazarus.  It’s like this forgiveness that God wants us to understand.  He said not only does he forgive us for all the things that we haven’t done, but we have to forgive him for everything that he hasn’t done in our minds.  “Why didn’t you take care of this, Jesus?”  Forgiveness is not just about God forgiving us. It’s about us forgiving God and even forgiving ourselves.  But it’s all about forgiveness, and once you understand forgiveness and live it fully and make it the aim of the focus of your life, you have discovered the light of life, because light is the thing that doesn’t ever — is never extinguished by darkness.  No matter how negative things are or how bad they are, when you have this core belief that somehow in everything there is the possibility of new life, then you’ve found peace, and you’ve found the thing that is the most effective focus of your life,  a God who loves as God truly loves us.   

Father, your gift is your presence, and your presence is so much more than just you living within us.  But your presence is an awakening of the best that’s in all of us, the part of us that you’ve destined for fullness and service for others.  So bless us with conviction that this gift that you’ve given us, your presence, will — will lead us into the fullness of life.  Let us never doubt it no matter how dark or how far we drift, knowing we’re always called back to you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.