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Trinity Presbyterian Church

Rev. Craig Hunter

April 8, 2007

Preaching the Resurrection

Luke 24:1-12

I came into the office this last week on Tuesday to a pleasant sight. Sitting against the back walls of my office were the new bookshelves that Jack Haynes had constructed for my books. For the last several weeks, I have had huge piles of books lined up against the walls. I have a bit of a book problem, you see, to go along with my chocolate almond ice cream problem and all the other problems that make me the wonderful person that you are growing to know and love. Anyway, I took advantage of the bookshelves to put away my books and give a bit more order to my office.

Shortly thereafter, however, I discovered the problem with the bookshelves. The problem with the bookshelves, you see, is that they remove one of my excuses for having such a messy office. To this point, I have been able to say, "Oh, it will look better when I get the books off the floor." But now that the books are off the floor, and it is still a bit of a mess, what's my excuse?

I am not a particularly disorganized person, but my things are sort of scattered around. I have a cross-stitched sign that says "Creative Kids are Rarely Tidy." Ironically, that sign got buried in the mess and I recently had to look for it. Usually I can find what I am looking for without too much of a problem, but every now and then I have a hard time, I look through this pile and that, I walk around scratching my balding head, and I just can't seem to find what I am looking for. It is quite frustrating.

Well, that is sort of the way I felt this week in preparing for this sermon. I had a hard time finding any inspiration, any ideas. I looked here, dug a little there, but nothing. I read the Scripture lesson, I walked around, I scratched my balding head, nada. Nashi. Rien. Mei you. Yok. Nichts. I'm out of languages, but I think you get the idea.

Earlier this week, I expressed my frustration to another member of the staff, who shall remain nameless. I said, "I feel like a 90 mile an hour fastball is heading right towards me, and this is the big time, this is Easter, this is the time to hit a home run, and yet I got nothing, nada, I don't even have a bat. It's a terrifying position to be in. To which that nameless member of the staff, Beth, offered this priceless advice -- just preach the resurrection.

Just preach the resurrection. Oh, yeah, of course, why hadn't I thought of that, as if it were that simple, as if that somehow writes the sermon for me. Just preach the resurrection. When I spoke to my parents this week after they returned home to Florida, my father said the exact same thing. Just preach the resurrection.

Eventually it finally dawned on me that one of the difficulties with quote unquote "preaching the resurrection" is that even the gospel writers don't preach the resurrection. What I mean is, none of the gospel writers talk about what happened in the resurrection event of Christ, or how it happened. We have no actual description of it. Nor are there any witnesses. In our lectionary text for today, our Easter lectionary text, the resurrected Christ doesn't even put in an appearance.

Indeed, what haunts me about this text is that the first evidence for the resurrection is not in any sighting of Christ, nor in any activity of Christ, it is not as if they see him standing outside the tomb. Rather, the first evidence of the resurrection of Christ is in the absence of Christ. It is Christ's absence that makes the women and Peter wonder what the heck is going on.

Why is that, I wonder? Why doesn't the resurrected Christ wait around inside or outside the tomb? What does the tradition of the empty tomb tell us about what God is doing, about who God is?

If you think preaching the resurrection is hard, try preaching the empty tomb.

Imagine with me that Christ had been waiting inside or outside the tomb. In my mind, that kind of shifts the focus a bit. It makes the tomb a rather important destination, and a journey to the tomb sort of a pilgrimage to see Christ, an opportunity to sit in wide-eyed wonder at the feet of the resurrected one. The resurrection at the tomb becomes the ending point, the trophy event of Christ's ministry. By going there, we can remember how once upon a time Christ conquered death, and that memory recharges us, it gives us strength to go back into the world. Over time, I can even visualize someone setting up a few tents, perhaps putting up a few signs to show the way, a few advertisements in the paper, and before you know it, Jesus and the tomb have become a tourist site.

Sometimes I wonder if that isn't what has happened in the church's celebration of Easter, in our celebration of the resurrection. Coming to church on Easter is like going to the tomb with Christ in it, we pay our respects, we recharge our batteries, and then we go back out into the world.

But the story the Bible tells is a different story, it is a story of an empty tomb.

It is a subtle difference, perhaps, but nevertheless, I think, an important one. The empty tomb is a way of taking the focus off of the resurrection as some sort of supernatural event and returning it to where Christ's focus has always been, on the people around him, and his relationship to them. Christ's ministry was never about miracles as an end in and of themselves, it was about his love of others, about his life-giving service to them. Perhaps the gospel writers don't describe the resurrection itself because the how of the resurrection isn't important. What is important is what the resurrection means -- it means that Christ's ministry continues, that it cannot be stopped, that Christ is still in motion.

One thing that strikes me about the resurrection accounts, indeed about all of Christ's ministry, is how Christ is always in motion. His parents come to Bethlehem, then to Egypt, then to Nazareth, he begins his ministry in the desert, then goes to the Galilee, in the boat, off the boat, to Jerusalem, and now that he is resurrected he is soon on his way to Emmaus then to the Galilee again. This is good news, it suggests that somehow Christ, somehow the resurrection, cannot be contained in one place, it is too powerful for that, too dynamic for that, it is better than that. Thank God the tomb was empty, it means that we don't just come to the tomb on Easter, we don't just come here to church on Easter to recharge our batteries, rather the resurrection is happening all around us, we can find strength from God's presence even in the ordinary parts of our daily lives.

I would suggest that there wasn't just one resurrection that day. There were several resurrections, and I don't just mean other resurrections of the dead as referred to in Matthew's gospel. Rather, something had happened, was happening to the women who came to the tomb, to Peter. They didn't quite understand it yet, they were still struggling to come to terms with it, with what it meant, and more importantly, what it meant for them. They were rather dazed and confused, in shock and awe at what had occurred, wandering around as if shell-shocked.

I am reminded of certain Georges de la Tour paintings I have seen, or paintings by other artists, dark paintings with a single source of light that is not shown. The only way you know the light even exists is by the way it reflects on the faces of those in the painting. In our Scripture passage for today, the resurrection is rather like that, we don't see the light directly, we don't see the resurrection or the resurrected Christ, rather we only see it indirectly, in the shock and awe of Peter and the women.

In thinking about this passage and this sermon, I tried to think of some image or experience to which I could compare it. But all comparisons fall short. The resurrection is so new, so different, so unnatural and unexpected that we just can't wrap our minds or our words around it, it's like trying to wrap your arms around a giant redwood tree, you'll never make it.

But one image did come to my mind, one experience. It will probably sound a bit strange, and sometimes I think I am crazy in making this comparison, but nevertheless I will try it anyway.

You see, this text reminds me of a visit I made to a church a bit over a year and a half ago in Japan. It was built at the end of the 19th century, and at the time of its construction, it was the largest Catholic church in East Asia. This church on the island of Kyushu was built in the historic center of Japanese Christianity, where Christianity had first taken root in the 16th century, and where it had blossomed again at the end of the 19th century.

I spent several days in the city, visiting various Christian and tourist sites, including a museum of Japanese Christianity and the site where 26 Japanese and foreign Christians had been crucified in the 17th century.

The church I mentioned, the Urakami Cathedral, had once been a gathering place for many of the city's Christians. They came to worship there on Sundays, they came during the week for confession and other events. On one Thursday morning in August, as a few dozen people were gathered in the church while two priests heard confessions, a bomb exploded about 1500 feet way.

Of course, this wasn't just any bomb, this was a new kind of bomb, a different kind of bomb. And this wasn't just any city. This was Nagasaki and the year was 1945.

The atomic bomb destroyed the Urakami Cathedral instantaneously, killing all of those gathered for prayer inside. Within a one mile radius from the center of the explosion, the destruction was total. Seeing pictures helps to give you an idea of what I mean when I say the destruction was total, but even then I don't think we can fully understand. Somewhere close to 70,000 people died instantaneously, and another 60,000 were wounded. In a matter of a few seconds, more than half of the city's population had been killed or wounded. Some people who had survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima were killed by the atomic bomb a few days later in Nagasaki. Outside the radius of total destruction, other buildings were rendered unusable, and the spreading fires often brought death and destruction to many of the surviving people and buildings.

It was hard for me to be there. It was hard for me to be there as an American, as a Christian, and as a human being. Perhaps what made it even a bit harder for me was that I had just spent two years of my life ministering in a predominantly Japanese and American congregation.

The world was different after the dropping of that bomb, and of its partner at Hiroshima. Perhaps everyone didn't quite understand it yet, the implications of what had happened, what was happening, hadn't fully dawned on them yet. But a new age had begun, the atomic age. For those who had survived the blast, they would forever remember where they had been when the bomb exploded. To this day, they still identify themselves by their distance from the center of the explosion.

In talking about the dropping of the bomb, I am conscious of the fact that all attempts to describe it don't quite succeed. Oh, I could describe what happened scientifically in the first few billionths of a second, I could show pictures of the mushroom cloud and of the destruction, we could hear testimony from the people that survived, but somehow each of those descriptions, and even all of them together, don't do justice to what happened. It was bigger than that, more powerful than that, more shocking than that.

Strange as it may sound, I kind of think the resurrection was like that. It was too big, too powerful, too shocking to be adequately described. You can't really describe it directly, just as you can't look directly at the sun, or at the center of an atomic explosion, you can only describe it by its effects. Like the bomb, the resurrection ushered in a new era. The world was somehow different, is somehow different. The women and disciples didn't fully know that yet, they were still wandering around shell-shocked, survivors of this explosion of God's great love. Much as surviving the bomb became central to the identities of many of those in Nagasaki that day, so did the resurrection become central to the identity of those who were affected by it, and those who are affected by it still.

The shock and awe of the women and disciples is a lesson to us. Sometimes we almost think that the resurrection was natural, we tame it, we are so eager to celebrate that we overlook the shock and awe, we forget to stand stock still in wonder at this event that has changed everything, and changes it still. Like the atomic bomb, there is something so scary, so humbling about being in the presence of that kind of power, the power of the resurrection. It is right to praise God and to celebrate the resurrection, but our Scripture passage reminds us that we are to do so with a sense of awe, of humility, and even perhaps a bit of fear towards this great and holy mystery of the resurrection.

The resurrection of Christ was kind of like the dropping of the atomic bomb, except, of course, for the fact that it wasn't like that at all. It wasn't like that at all, it was the complete opposite of that. Whereas the bomb knocked down the walls of buildings with tremendous force as you have seen in those video clips from atomic testing sites, the resurrection knocked down instead with even greater force the walls of death and sin, the walls that divide us from God and from each other. The dropping of the bomb was distant and impersonal, from an airplane high above, but the resurrection is close and intimate, it happens through relationships, in happens in the heart. To the tombs and to the dead, the resurrection brings life out of death, to the Nagasakis and the places of total destruction, the resurrection brings total life, abundant life, overflowing life, eternal life. Through the radioactivity of the bomb, it brought death and disease to people years and decades later, but the resurrection is radioactive with life. Tread carefully around the tomb, for it will change you. In subtle ways, ways that we cannot see, it brings healing and hope. Finally, whereas the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki happened once, the resurrection of Christ happens still. You can't look at it directly, there is no scientific evidence, but the resurrection happens still anywhere the Holy Spirit transforms communities into Christ's body, anywhere oppressive boundaries are destroyed, anywhere people are healed, anywhere lives are positively transformed. Sometimes, by the grace of God, the resurrection even happens in and among us, in places such as this.