But…
Luke 24:1-12
Click here to view the full sermon video for Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022 entitled "But..."
Tucked into this so-called “idle tale” of the women who find an empty tomb and see two men in dazzling clothes with an improbable announcement is a small but critical word. It pops up six times in twelve verses. It isn’t nearly as fancy as words like kerygma, metanoia, or kenosis- words pastors pay a lot of money to learn in seminary. To be honest, it’s such an ordinary part of everyday speech that you might be a little incredulous at the suggestion that it holds the very key to our salvation. The word, as you may have guessed from the sermon title, is ‘but.’
That’s how Luke introduces us to the culminating event in the Jesus story. Up until this point, Luke had been barreling along the road to Jerusalem with Jesus. For nearly fourteen chapters, since he first foretold his own death, Jesus has been on a collision course with Jerusalem and the explosive mix of religion and politics that would leave him hanging on a Roman cross until he was dead. Were we to stop there, the story would make for an edifying, if tragic, cautionary tale about how even the best of us are crushed by the powers of this world. “Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments. On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.” Oh the final irony, they rested on the Sabbath, the day over which their executed teacher had so often sparred with some of his opponents. The end. Fade to black. Only that isn’t where the story ends, because the very next word is, ‘But.’ You may think you know this story, says Luke. You may think this is just one more in a series for stories about someone good, someone prophetic like Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or archbishop Oscar Romero, a teacher and leader who inspired other to rise up only to be killed for his vision. “But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb.” They came to the tomb with those very same spices they had prepared for a dead man, only to find the tomb empty. It is, as Austin Seminary President Ted Wardlaw puts it, a defiant conjunction; defying death, defying the powers of this world that would have every story end on a cross, or at the end of a sword, or a cruise missile, or simply with the exhale of a person’s final breath. It turns out that the history of the world hinges on this tiny, defiant word- ‘but.’ Several years back, a friend shared a story with me about something that happened as she and her six-year-old son we making their way through C.S. Lewis’ classic book, The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe. This was well before the big screen movie came out with its spectacular visual effects. They were reading though an old copy of the book, one chapter per night at bed time. Scattered throughout the book were the original drawings by Pauline Baynes. One night, they began reading the climactic chapter entitled, “The Triumph of the Witch.” In it, the Lion Aslan surrenders himself to the White Witch, taking the place of Edmund Pevensie who had betrayed his brothers and sisters. They were reading along and turned the page and there, in one of the illustrations, was a picture of Aslan, stretched out and bound hand and foot upon the stone table. Poised above the helpless lion was the White Witch, a knife in her hand. The boys eyes caught sight of that picture and he said, “mom, we need to stop.” Okay, she said, asking if he needed to go to the bathroom. “No,” he said, “we just need to stop.” The image on the page told him all he wanted to know about where the story was heading. As she told me about all this, she concluded that this is what the world looks like for those who only know a story that ends on Friday. It is a story that gets told and retold in every age, and it has a very cynical plot that finds its way on to t-shirts and bumper stickers: life sucks, and then you die, or he who dies with the most toys wins. It is a story that feeds on the passivity born of those preordained certainties sold to us as, “just the way things are.” Then those women, bearing their spices for a story that had already been told thousands upon thousands of times arrive at the tomb only to discover the stone rolled away. And that tiny, defiant conjunction announces itself again. “But when they went in they did not find the body.” Slowly, it begins to dawn on them and us that something we can’t quite put our finger on has changed. And before they have a chance to collect their thoughts and consider what it all might mean, they are met by two men whose appearance is so startling and out of the ordinary that they fall down in fear before these dazzling figures. In the middle of their fear, which is undoubtedly mixed with confusion, we hear it again. “but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Then, as if to reinforce their point, that tiny word of defiance takes another jab at the old story of fear and despair. “He is not here, but has risen.” Finally, we begin to understand through the fox of our premature certainty, through the haze of fear and a story that has dominated our entire lives until now, that this is something new, this is something beyond the predictable powers of this world.
Pastor Heidi Neumark spent 19 years at Transfiguration Lutheran Church at the corner of East 156th street and Prospect in the South Bronx of New York City, in a neighborhood filled with the predictable stories of defeat and despair. Leaders and officers in her congregation included former addicts and undocumented immigrants, the unemployed and recently homeless. During Holy Week one year, this congregation decided to reenact in a passion play the whole sweep of Holy Week, from Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to his resurrection that first Easter morning. They began by borrowing a live donkey, and led by an actor playing the part of Jesus, they paraded around the block of shabby storefronts and run-down apartments shouting, “Hosanna!” When they got around the block and back to the door of the church, the procession encountered a street protest against police brutality. It was fitting, as Jesus and the protestors, the congregation and the street crowds, the cries of, “Hosanna,” and the cries of outrage mingled together in a swirl of movement and noise. Someone passing by, fearing trouble, even called the police, whose arrival brought even more color and drama to the event. Somehow they made it inside the church where the rest of the play unfolded. Jesus was tried, condemned and executed. But, then the women came from the tomb early in this morning of the first day of the week with an amazing word of an empty tomb and the astounding news, “He is risen!” The actors playing the disciples remained true to their assigned parts, expressing disbelief and confidence that this news from the women was but an “idle tale.” At that point the script called for three members of the congregation to stand up and bear witness to the truth of the resurrection. “I know he is alive…,” each one was to begin. The first was Angie. “I know that he is alive,” she said, “because he is alive in me.” She went on to tell about how she had been abused by her father, how she fell into despair and alcoholism, became HIV-positive. But, then she responded to the welcome of the church, then she started attending worship, then a Bible study, and bit by bit she rose from the grave of her life. Now she is a seminary student studying to be a pastor. “I am alive because Jesus Christ lives in me and through me,” Angie said, her face aglow. “I am a temple of the Holy Spirit.” The two other witnesses stood in turn, each reciting their part in the script: “I know that he is alive…” Then that portion of the play was done and it was time to move on. But, others in the sanctuary began to rise spontaneously. “I know that he is alive,” they would say, “because he is alive in me.” Homeless people, addicts now clean, the least and the lost, stood one by one. Nothing could stop them. “I know that he is alive,” they shouted. If you want to know what the good news is all about, if you want to know why we go to all this trouble, if you are hungry to know God’s answer to the stories that this world is so fond of telling- stories of defeat, stories of despair, desolating stories of death- you need look no further than this tiny, defiant word that is God’s Eternal Word on the matter. Not defeat, but victory. Not despair, but hope. Not death, but life. Such a small word, and yet if we will hear it, if we will let it become the story of our lives, we will find it is not an idle tale after. We may just find that we know, we know he lives, because with that tiny word he is alive in us. Allleluia, amen.