|
First
Reading
|
Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
| Acts 2:14a-36–41 |
Psalm
116:1–3 |
1 Peter 1:17–23 |
Luke 24:13–35 |
The stories of Easter are stories of people being surprised by joy. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James expect the worse. They cannot imagine anything else. They go to the tomb, and find it empty. Two messengers say, “Yes, of course it is empty! Jesus lives, so don’t go looking for the living among the dead. Run, tell the others what God has done.” Then something Jesus had said, fell into place and they wondered if it could really be? Naturally the other disciples thought the women were talking nonsense. Peter went and saw for himself the empty tomb, but didn’t know what to make of it. Finally, two of the disciples set out for the village of Emmaus, and on the road, the risen Christ appeared to them. As Christ talked with them and even sat down and ate with them, the disciples knew they were in the presence of someone very special as their hearts burned within them; but, it took a long while before they recognized who was among them and before they accepted God’s wonderful surprise. Rushing back to Jerusalem the same night, the two disciples told the others what had happened, and suddenly, Jesus was there in the room with them all, but again their fear kept them from recognizing the Risen Christ as he really was. Jesus said to them, “Here, touch me. I am not a phantom. I am real.” Several days after, the Gospel of John records an encounter as the disciples are fishing in Galilee. A stranger appears on the shore, cooking breakfast. The stranger calls to them, and they respond, but none of them dare ask Jesus who he was. We can picture them saying, “No, it looks like him, it sounds like him, but it just can’t be, not here, not now. It would be so wonderful, but no.” It was still so hard to accept the joy of the resurrection.
Now don’t be so hard on the early disciples. A similar thing happened when the Christian community in Jerusalem got word that one named Saul, who had been so active in opposing the Gospel, had been totally turned around and was actively spreading the Gospel. Instead of saying, “Wow! Praise the Lord!” they thought, “Oh, no, it couldn’t be true. Nothing that good could happen. No, we just can’t believe that. That’s only stuff the Jerusalem Inquirer prints in its headlines.”
Easter is not a combination of the best of our hopes; it is a new act of God’s love that has come to pass. It is not something that is going to happen, it has already happened. The risen Lord is walking on our roads, is cooking meals on our lakeshores, is entering our locked rooms, and is changing the directions of peoples’ lives. The task of Christians is to witness to the new possibilities the resurrection brings. In a sense, the church frequently finds itself in a time warp between discovering the empty tomb and fully recognizing the risen Lord in the world. How often we are so slow to believe, even when signs of the resurrection are right in front of us.
The good news of the Easter season is Jesus is risen; it’s been done. We don’t have to figure out how to do it. The critical side of discipleship is not what we must struggle to obtain and earn, but what we are invited to share and give, keeping in mind the great gift we have been given.
Admittedly the world is in such a rat race, where the star system is the only system and it’s either burn up or burn out. Yet people of the resurrection don’t have to accept the world’s closed definitions of alternatives, don’t have to accept narrow, dead-end futures that are conditioned on the rat race of the present, and don’t have to be bound by self-serving ideologies. We, as people of the resurrection, don’t have to be afraid of ridicule and don’t have to apologize because our standards are different than the world’s standard of “get as much as you can, but just don’t get caught.” Sometimes the selfishness and sin of the world are formidable, but the world desperately needs to be surprised by a lot more than its own dreary myopic vision.
Today we will baptize two sisters, Kira and Erin. Baptism is one of the primary signs of the new life that God offers us. Baptism is God’s reminder to us that we all, young and old, are welcomed into God’s family. I know that Kira and Erin have active imaginations, as young children should. That’s great, for the imagination of an open mind is a great asset for discovering the revelations of God’s grace. In baptism, we pray that all may have an inquiring and discerning heart and the gift of joy and wonder in God’s works. That’s precisely what the lessons of the Easter season try to convey to us . Go, therefore, into the world. Be of good courage, be ready and expect to discover and be surprised by the joy of the risen Christ.
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
