Resurrection Reactions

Resurrection Reactions 032716

There’s a Monty Python skit which says, Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!  Well, nobody expects the resurrection either.  Not really.  Not in any transformative way.   We expect music and lilies and colored eggs, but resurrection?  Really?

 Society, and even the church, have domesticated lots of sacred stuff, notably hospitality and resurrection.    We’ve made hospitality a social grace and resurrection a public holiday.

What makes resurrection hard to believe?  (answers varied from ‘can’t see it’ to ‘breaks laws of nature’)

I suspect, frankly that nobody, truth be told, much wants resurrection either…I mean, if you can’t count on the dead staying dead, what can you count on? (got this line from sermon resource, probably David Lose)   It would just leave taxes.  And since people who believe in resurrection change their whole life paradigm, well,  that’s just downright ridiculous, so we should keep the old ways of thinking, thank you.  At least we know what to count on.

And it’s a Good Friday world.   Terrorism evokes all the worst in us, and fearmongering seems to be the current American paradigm. 

So we cower behind our own stones of disbelief, doubt, or skepticism, unaware that God has already blasted them away and we haven’t noticed.   Blinded by our privileges, and by our prejudices about such a mystery, we cannot see the possibilities, and go through life assuming we’re our own saviors.

So its not surprising there are all those same different resurrection reactions in Luke’s version of the story.   I wonder where you find your spiritual life in this story:

First, the women are perplexed.  That’s putting it mildly.  Their expectations have been blasted into space.   Then they’re frightened by an apparition of some kind….no kidding, it would scare me too if I came here this morning expecting one thing and a couple of guys appeared out of nowhere  like they were advertising Oxyclean! 

But seriously, it is frightening to be confronted with things outside our control that we just don’t understand.

But then they were challenged…..challenged to remember….remember what you’ve heard and experienced before this day….remember when you had hope, remember where you have known resurrection and transformation and new life. Even just think daffodils!

So then they shared what they’d seen, only to hear laughter as the men’s reaction. Gender prejudice was alive and well then, just as now, if a certain California tennis executive is anything to go by.

Then there’s the reaction of skepticism, but unlike many of us they don’t get stuck there. No, they decide to explore it for themselves.  Doubt and uncertainty are an essential, real part of a faith life, let me assure you!  And it’s exploring that moves us forward.

What an image for our spiritual lives…..perplexed by some things, challenged by others, willing to share but often laughed at.   Or we do the laughing in our skeptical fear of new ways of looking at things.

You see, resurrection does happen.  There IS a new paradigm being offered by God through this inexplicable experience.

Life is more powerful than death, and love is more enduring than tragedy.

Imagine what would happen if we lived as if we believed that.

Powers of prejudice would be blasted open and revealed and revealed for what they are

Stones of fear would be named and boom, new possibilities open up

The entrenched ways of doing politics and church and family and religion would be up for grabs, and boom, the rejected are accepted, the low lifted up, the useless given meaning….because life and love, not hatred and prejudice, have the last word.

When those women turned their back on the old empty tomb and faced towards a new possibility, boom, hope took hold.

I can’t explain it; I don’t understand it, but I don’t need to.  I see it.

Life is more powerful than death, and love is more enduring than tragedy.

I see it when people begin to understand the hearts of others, especially the enemy

I see it when we turn our backs on retaliation and move forward with alternatives

I see it at gravesides when tears and laughter flow together because of the trust that life is eternal as well as temporal

I see it in a millennial who begins to question the consumer paradigm of social media, and seeks the possibility to do good it offers….

I saw it this week in Ann, who told me her own resurrection story……..

Inexplicable.   I don’t understand it; I can’t explain it, but it’s real.  It’s true.  It’s powerful.

And it’s high time you, and I and the church stopped cowering and started acting as if we believed that

Life is more powerful than death, and love is more enduring than tragedy.

May each of us know it, live it, and share this resurrection in our own Good Friday worlds. 

Go, and release life.