Easter Sunrise
Service
April 20, 2014
In this first service I thought I
might reflect in a more general way on the resurrection. It’s not an easy thing to get at. Each year I find myself struggling with
something to say about the text. At
10:30 we will use the story from John…we just heard the story from
Matthew. I try to read the text and
think about what it – in its particularity – has to say on this most holy of
days.
But there is a kind of futility in
that…not that that kept me from trying J. One person compared the resurrection to the
sun – we know what it is because we see the effects of it all around us, but we
are not meant to look at it directly.
It’s why, in some ways, I think a worship service of poetry is more
appropriate on Easter than what we will do later on. Poetry is the medium for things that can’t be
described directly.
But I think therein might lay the
point of the resurrection. God took on
human form, and the world tried to nail God to a cross –to nail God down and in
place, as our prayer of confession says…to reduce God in to something that
could be controlled and looked at directly.
Then, the world tried to seal up God in a tomb – put God away
forever. The resurrection reassures us
that God can’t be nailed down or hidden away…no matter how hard we might try.
There are many ways we try to nail
God down – some are obvious: creeds and
dogma. But some are more subtle and
seductive – too often we exclude God from parts of our lives – we
compartmentalize God off in a tomb somewhere.
We make God so nice that we don’t believe God has a place in war – or
hell for that matter. We contain God by
choosing only images we “like”: father,
mother, soaring eagle, hen gathering her brood.
We move past images we find more troubling: fire and judge. We use our limited understanding of God to
nail other people to crosses. We want
what God gives, but reject any idea of obedience to God.
I can’t tell you how many times I
spend hours and hours carefully crafting a sermon, making sure it says exactly
what I want it to say, and someone comes up to me afterwards telling me how
much they loved the sermon, but their reason is not at all related to what I wanted
them to hear. In other words, I think they
totally missed the point. This used to
drive me crazy. But now I think, that’s
resurrection. Right? My ego makes me think that I am saying
something about God that people need to hear.
That is nailing God to a cross.
But luckily, God doesn’t stay nailed there very long – people shake me
out of my narrow thinking and remind me that resurrection is real.
If I look around me, I notice that
no matter what I do with God, God is
all over the place. God does not depend
on me to exist, or move, or live. Divine
movement in this world does not come to a halt until I have figured everything
out. And nothing – no matter how
terrible – can keep God from moving and living in my life.
I love the end of Luke’s
resurrection passage: Peter was
amazed. That seems to me to be just
about right for the posture we should have before God. It doesn’t say whether Peter believed
anything. It doesn’t say if he was
amazed/scared. It doesn’t say he was
amazed/ecstatic. It doesn’t say he was
amazed/angry. Amazed can go with all
those things. An inscrutable God will
cause us to feel all those things – scared, betrayed, ecstatic, angry, and
more.
But always we can be amazed
–surprised by the inability of the world to lock God up or wrap things up nice
and tidy.
This is what good poets know. They know you can’t lock things down, wrap
things up nice and tidy. They leave room
in poems about Easter for death. They
let secular words speak of the divine.
They find redemption in places most of us don’t look. They use what’s around us to point to
something we can’t look at directly. Then they put their words out there,
knowing they will be received and interpreted in myriad ways – which is the
point.
So that’s my early morning take on
resurrection: that God, mystery, life,
and hope cannot be nailed down or closed up in a tomb. And I think that’s pretty good news. Amen.
