The Border

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 04.21.13

Scripture Lesson:  John 10:22-30

Where are our borders?

I’m not talking here about the boundaries of the United States of America, like our fiercely defended border with those dangerous socialists to the North.   Oh the People’s Republic of Canada seem mellow and easygoing, with their bilingual signs and their flannel and their “army.”   But one of these days, if we do not stay alert, we will awake one morning to find all of our road signs in kilometers, and our grocery store shelves stocked with liters of milk.  Such is the face of tyranny.  

Constant Vigilance.

I’m talking about our borders, our boundaries as living beings, the edges of ourselves.  What is it that is us, and what is it that is outside of us?  Where does the “I” that I am begin?   There’d seem to be an easy answer to that one. 

The boundaries of the self are the boundaries of our bodies, we might say.  Fingers and toes, flesh and bone, this is where we begin and end.  And that might be so.  

But when my older son was a toddler, we would go for walks in the neighborhood with his little brother safely ensconced in our vast, buslike double stroller.  He would run out ahead, tearing down a hill with the wild abandon of tiny obliviousness.  When he fell...as he often did...my bones would ache with the fall, as if I myself had fallen.

So maybe not.

Or perhaps it is our knowledge, the memories and the thoughts that are the tendons and sinews of our minds.  Or that indefinable thing we call our souls, that peculiar light behind our eyes.

And yet every single element of us comes from something else.  The proteins and minerals and ever-gathering fatty deposits that comprise us are drawn from the world around us.   Those thoughts in our minds?  Most of them come not from us, but from outside of us, from our teachers and our friends and family, from our observations of the world.  Even the language we use to frame our thoughts is not ours.

And this experience you are having now, right now?  Is this “me” you are encountering?  Is my voice in your ears me?   My vocal cords are vibrating the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere of our tiny blue-green world, which is vibrating a complex set of structures in your inner ear, which is sending signals to your brain.

And the words we share, which let you understand what I am saying, is that part of me, or is that part of you?  We are distinct, but we are also deeply and fundamentally interconnected and interdependent.  We are all woven together into God’s astoundingly complex creation.

When we forget that, it is a terrible thing.

On Friday night, at the very same moment that SWAT teams descended on a neighborhood in Boston, I was scanning through a Twitter account.  It was @J_tsar, the account of the same the young man who lay bleeding in a boat in a Boston homeowner’s back yard.  Here, spoken into that cybernetic mediating space between us, were the thoughts of a man who had paralyzed a city, who had killed three and maimed hundreds.  

Reading Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s tweets was frightening, because it was not the raving of a madman.  He doesn’t talk about hatred, or ramble on about vast conspiracies or about how the CIA has planted a transmitter in his brain.

It was disturbingly, horribly normal.   He banters with friends.  He complains about studying.  He passes along humorous tweets and links.  He gets into a conversation about Game of Thrones.

Yet somewhere underneath that veneer of normalcy, something had horribly broken.  There was no change in tone, none at all, the day after the bombs he and his brother planted tore the flesh of hundreds.  It was an act he did as casually as a malicious child might pull the legs off of an insect.

How can human beings be so closed to how we are woven up together, so oblivious to the effect we have on one another?   And yet we are.  We do not see, or feel.  We do not get it.

Those around Jesus didn’t get it, either.  As John’s Gospel tells it, they had pretty much no idea what he was talking about.   The fourth Gospel is something of a paradox.  It is both the simplest and most straightforward story of Jesus, and the most theologically challenging.

It’s simple because the language used is remarkably basic, the kind of Greek that students of Greek are grateful to be reading.   But it is also remarkably complicated, because that language is used to cast a narrative of Jesus that wends and winds its way through some of the most difficult spiritual and theological concepts in all of the Bible.   

It’s like reading a paper on quantum waveform collapse written by Dr. Seuss.  

As is often the case with John, it’s also both abstract and strangely concrete.  John’s Gospel excels at offering up some specifics to place us in the scene.   We get a few little telling details about time and place.  When was it?  It’s winter, we hear, but not just that.    We narrow the window down.  We know that it’s a festival, the “Festival of Dedication.”  What was the Festival of Dedication?  That’s another way of saying it was Hanukkah, which at that point was a relatively recent celebration.

Jesus is in the temple, we hear, but again there is more detail to place us in the scene.  He is in the “Portico of Solomon.”   That was along the Eastern Wall inside the temple, but that doesn’t help the ninety-nine point-five percent of us who don’t have a clue what a Portico even is.  Having looked it up this week, I can share with you that it’s like a long covered walkway, with a roof supported by columns.

People are walking with him, and they ask him to clear up whether or not he is the Meschiach, the anointed one, the promised king of Israel.   “How long will you keep us in suspense,” goes the New Revised Standard Version, but what they say, translated literally, would be “Until when will you hold our souls?”  That was an idiom, or a saying of the day, and it most closely means: “When will you stop annoying us?”  It meant that they found what Jesus was saying tantalizing, teasing, frustrating, and maddening.

Jesus replies very simply, but perhaps in ways that didn’t clear things up much for his listeners.  It was back to talk about sheep, and eternal life, and that strange way that Jesus had of talking about himself and the God he called Father.

What is strangest and most challenging about the way Jesus describes his relationship with God the Father is that he seems to intentionally and repeatedly blur the distinction between himself, His creator, the Holy Spirit, and us.  You think you’ve got a handle on it, and then suddenly, you’re holding something utterly different.

Back in seminary, one of my professors, Dr. Sharon Ringe, had a way of describing this relationship.  Sharon called it the Johannine Knot.  John’s description of Jesus is knotted all up in John’s description of the Father, and with the Spirit that moved between them, and with us.  Everything is connected, and you think you’re following one strand and suddenly realize you’ve attached yourself to another.  

Jesus is holding something that can’t be snatched out of his hand, and so is his Father, and what does that mean?  It means that Jesus and God are so connected as to be essentially the same thing.   I and the Father are One, he says.  Two distinct things, and yet the same thing.  The boundaries between the two are completely blurred, which undoubtedly only deepened the annoyance of those around

They share the same will, the same purpose, the same essential nature.  You can find ways to distinguish them, of course.  Our language is great at serving up ways to define one thing over and against another.  Our capacity for creating neat categories for things helps us make sense of the world.   We create borders, tight lines of demarcation that frame us and structure the world.

But as we learn to compartmentalize and divide, we can lose sight of the bonds that hold us together.  We allow ourselves to fold in on ourselves, and from that place we view those around us not as part of that great story God is speaking into being, but as objects.  As nothing.

That dark bitterness defines the zealot and the absolutist, and it is one of the most consistent spiritual sicknesses.  We see its fruit in the actions of those who do not admit to the humanity of those around them, who are willing to bomb and kill, oblivious to the truth of what they are doing.

The Tsarnaev brothers did not see those connections.  And just as the works that Jesus did testified the truth of who he was, so too do their actions testify to who they had become.  Blinded by racist, or nationalism, by tribal identity or by simple selfish greed, human beings inflict all sorts of horror on one another.

Do we?  We do not murder, and we do not maim, God willing.  But as we live and move in the world, we must continually challenge ourselves to see those connections.   We must, if we are to be Christ’s flock, be always aware of how we are part of one another. 

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Kick ‘Em When They’re Down

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.14.13; Rev David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Acts 9:1-20

When I was a lad, I was a small lad.  In eighth grade, I was spindly and asthmatic and pale, and got most of my exercise from reading and daydreaming.  Hey, turning pages burns calories.  Three calories an hour, sure, but you’ve got to start somewhere.  

Going into eighth grade, I was just about five foot one, and weighed 95 pounds if I was carrying a 20 pound bag of potatoes in my backpack.  That meant, unsurprisingly enough, that I was potential bully-fodder.  Mostly, I got around this by being almost entirely invisible.  When you were as skinny as I was, that was easy...just stand sideways, and the light just flows around you.  I had so little mass, I was like an anti-black-hole.   When other boys can...and do...pick you up with one hand, it’s a little hard to impress the ladies.   

I do not miss middle school.

Bullying has been around forever, but there’s always this hope we might one day figure out that it’s not something worth doing.

That had been the hope back at the dawn of the internet era.  Remember that?  It was going to make us considerably more connected.  It would transform us, this sudden and explosive ability to know whatever we wanted to know, whenever we wanted to know it.  There were no limits, and we’d electronically teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, as we all got to really know one another as fellow human beings.  

Back in 1996, at the dawn of the ‘net era, there was an article in Wired Magazine by M.I.T. sociologist Sherry Turkle.  Turkle was studying the remarkable new word of internet interaction.  It was going to set us free, she argued, to express ourselves in new and exciting ways.  We could be any person we wanted.  We could cycle through all of the aspects of ourselves, freed from the limitations of our social world, able to fully be ourselves no matter what.   It would be social network heaven, as we all sat with our laptops pointed to MySpace and learned to truly appreciate one another and our differences, singing cybernetic kumbaya to one another through the ether.

Where it ended up was rather different.  Late last year, a decade and a half after her initial research, Turkle published a book.  It was called: “Alone Together.”  For all of her hopefulness at the dawn of the internet age, Turkle has now experienced the reality of our ‘net life together.  What she argues is that in our connection we’ve become not more but less self-aware.  Instead of facilitating real communication, it makes it easier for us to lose ourselves in communications that are more frequent but less substantial.     And instead of finding our way to a more gracious self, we’ve become something rather different.  Not more human, but somehow less.

What have we become?

In one difficult example from this last week, there came the news of the death of the son of megachurch pastor Rick Warren, Warren of Purpose Filled Life fame.  He’d struggled his whole life long with depression and mental illness, and having purchased a handgun from an unlicensed online seller, he took his life.

What was more challenging, following this death, was the outpouring of online vitriol against Warren and his family.  There are few things more terrible than the loss of a child, and you would think the one basic and fundamentally human response would be sympathy.  And yet, with the polarization that tends to be the defining characteristic of net culture, online forums soon filled with insults from both left and right.  Warren was criticized for his stance on gays and lesbians.  He was told that his son was in hell because Warren was insufficiently rigorous in his theology.   From that peculiar certainty that arises from being anonymous and able to mask your identity behind a veil, there are human beings who feel empowered to lay into someone they disagree with, particularly as that person struggles to cope with a tremendous personal tragedy.

It’s part of that strange compulsion human beings often feel, a desire to destroy another, particularly a vulnerable other who has opposed us, when we encounter them in a time of weakness.

That tendency was being actively defied today in the portions read from the Acts of the Apostles.  We have today a tale from the heart of a faith that tells us not to destroy our enemies, or to crush them when they are vulnerable.  

Here we are, just a couple weeks out from Easter, and the story we’re hearing is from the second part of Luke’s Gospel.  We’re past the point of the life of Jesus, and now deep into the narrative of the early church.  One of the main protagonists of that story is just about to step into the limelight:  Saul of Tarsus.

Saul, or Paul, as he would soon be called, is perhaps the single most influential figure in Christian history after Jesus.  Without his passion, gifts, and remarkable skill in teaching and translating the message of the Gospel to the Greco-Roman world, Christianity would very likely have never moved beyond being just another sputtering offshoot of a bizarre monotheistic tradition in the Ancient Near East.  

In fact, when Saul enters the story, Christianity isn’t even called Christianity most of the time.  In the Book of Acts, which recounts the early expansion of Jesus-folk in exhaustive detail, they don’t tend to be called “Christian.”   That term is used only twice, in Acts 11:26 and Acts 26:28.  Luke’s preferred term, which likely reflects a preference in the early church, is “The Way,” which we find a half-dozen times.

Primal Christianity was not an institution, or an organization.  It was a movement, and the term that was used to describe it reflected that.  The Way.  It’s about a path you follow, and actions you take.

Saul’s relationship with the Way was a difficult one.  In the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, we have heard that Saul numbered himself as an opponent of the church.   He viewed himself as a zealous defender of his faith, and from the heart of that zeal, he felt that it was in his interests to drive out a heretical movement from Judaism.

That wasn’t just Saul.  That attitude was considered to be a virtue among first century Jews, as deeply as it is considered a virtue among political “true believers” today.   In the Catholic Apocrypha, which is just a sequence of Jewish religious books from the first century before Christ, the book of 2 Maccabees 6:13 says that “...it is a mark of great kindness with the impious are not let alone for a long time, but punished at once.”   There’s a collection of sayings included in the Dead Sea Scrolls, written by the Essenes, a group of deeply religious Jews at around the time of Christ, we hear that a mark of the righteous man is that he “...bears unremitting hatred toward all men of ill repute.”    Sounds a bit like talk radio to me.

And Paul certainly did that, right up until the moment that, while on the road to Damascus, we hear that he had an encounter with Jesus that changed him.  He could no longer see.

He found himself in a strange city, helpless and vulnerable and lost.

And there, a follower of the Way named Ananias lived.  We know absolutely nothing about this person.  We just know that he followed Jesus, and that’s all.  Ananias received a vision, and that vision called him to go to a fellow follower’s house, where Saul of Tarsus would be waiting for him.  

Ananias is a little bit reluctant.  Jesus followers were running scared at the time, being persecuted and attacked for their faith.  He knew Saul, knew Saul had power, knew that he...despite the oppression known by the Jewish people...had made it his business to harm and oppress those who saw deep hope in Jesus.

And he was particularly reluctant because of what he was asked to do.  In the vision, he is not told that now is his chance to sneak up on the blinded and helpless Paul, give him an epic wedgie, and then leave him with a “Kick Me I’m Stupid” sign taped to his back.

Instead, he is told that he is to go, and lay hands on him, and pray over him for his healing.

He struggles a bit with this vision.  “Really?  You want me to help that guy?”  But he does just that, and Saul was made whole.  Here’s a complete nobody, approaching a vulnerable enemy.  In his act of mercy and forgiveness, the course of history is changed.

It is our tendency, as human beings, to strike out when we feel weak.  We find the weaker person, the vulnerable person, and pour out our frustrations on them as a way of trying to affirm our own power.  We mock them, or criticize them, or exclude them, or make a point of ignoring them.

That’s the way we’ve lived, for thousands upon thousands of years.  But what it is not is the Way that Jesus taught and walked and lived.

And if we have the audacity to call ourselves disciples, in both the real and the virtual world, then it is also our Way.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Breathe In, Breathe Out

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

04.07.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 20:19-31

We breathe in, we breathe out. It’s a simple and basic part of our existence, so simple that we don’t really even think about it. 

Well, actually, the last week or two we have been thinking about it.  It’s Spring, and the world is a joyful riot of life.  The morning begins with the flutter of birdsong with the rising brightness of the sun, followed by the glorious sound of our dog hacking and sneezing. Our every breath brings in those floating flecks of pollen, which embed themselves in our red itchy eyes and coat our scratchy sinuses and phlegmy throats.  We did say we were eager for spring to arrive, right?

But breathing itself, when the air isn’t filled with tiny spiky balls, well, we don’t think about that.  it just happens.  And it happens a whole bunch.

The muscles of our diaphragm contract, and pull air deep into our lungs. The muscles of our diaphragm relax, and the air is released. That action happens between 8-15 times a minute, around 17,000 times a day. We do it mostly without thinking, without thought, and we do it a lot. 

We can control it, sure. You can breathe really really fast...but if you keep that up, you’ll hyperventilate and pass out. You can stop your breathing entirely for a while......but that ends up having the same effect. For breathing to work, we have to take the air in, and give the air out. We receive it, and we send it. We send it out, and we take it in. If we don’t, we die.

Our lungs are partnered with our heart, which functions in a similar way. The oxygen taken in by our lungs enters our blood, and needs to get out to the body. Our heart is like the heart of any other mammal, and has four chambers. The left atrium receives oxygen rich blood, and the left ventricle sends that blood to the body. The right atrium receives the oxygen-depleted blood back, and the right ventricle sends it back to the lungs. All this happens without our thinking, 72 times a minute, 2.5 billion times over an average lifetime. Receiving and sending, sending and receiving. It’s absolutely necessary if we are to live.

Breathing and sending and receiving are at the heart of what Jesus was proclaiming in today’s post-Easter passage from the Gospel of John.  This little chunk of John’s Gospel is full of intriguing stories, like, for instance, the description of the doubts that Thomas felt and Christ’s response, as He told us what it meant to believe. 

If you read it closely, you might also notice that this was probably the point where some early version of John’s Gospel actually ended. Take a look at the last two verses, at John 20:30-31. 

“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

Those verses read like the conclusion of a book. Why?  Because at one point, they probably were.  It wraps things up, telling us that there were other witnesses to Christ, and telling us why John’s Gospel was written. Of course, after that, we get a whole ‘nutha chapter.  It’s just part of John’s open ended approach to the Gospel.  This Gospel admits there are other accounts out there, other stories and other parts of the truth about what Jesus taught.  

What most likely happened as the Gospel was pulled together was that after the writing was done, John’s community discovered another story, one containing some of the “many other signs”...that was remembered later.  And so we get John 21, which also ends with the same invitation to embrace more of the story.

“There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

But what I want to raise up about this final section of John’s Gospel has everything to do with breathing in and breathing out. The story comes after the resurrection, after Mary had met the risen Jesus in the garden. It’s John’s post-Easter story, but when we encounter the disciples, we don’t find them happy and uplifted and never wanting to see another chocolate bunny again. Instead, they are frightened and isolated, huddled behind locked doors and unwilling to move out into a world that has just taken the life of the rabbi that they loved.

Suddenly, Jesus is among them. He just is, right there, in the flesh. Though they’ve closed ranks, he works his way among them. They are, understandably, overjoyed.

But his arrival isn’t without purpose. First, he offers them his shalom, his peace. Then he tells them that peace will be with them a second time. Having promised them peace, he presents them with a challenge. They’ve received him in. They’ve been filled with rejoicing at his impossible presence.

So he tells them this: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” He has found them holed up, locked away, and he wants them out in the world. This is, as John’s Gospel tells it, the equivalent of the Great Commission in Matthew’s story, when Jesus tells the disciples to get out there and baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Get out there. Be sent, as I was sent. 

And then Jesus breathes on them. Breathes on them?  It’s not something that we’d usually expect someone to do when they’ve asked us to do something.  I mean, seriously.  When I want the boys to do their chores, I don’t say, “Go clean your room....hhhhhHHHHaaaaaaaa.”  Although given how much that might freak them out, perhaps I should consider it.

Giving marching orders? Sure. Giving instructions? Fine.  We’d expect that. But Jesus breathes on them.

In the Greek that John’s Gospel uses to tell the story of Christ, of course, the words for “breath” and the words for “spirit” are the same.  Pneuma, it is, in Greek.  So out flows Christ’s breath, and it carries with it the words “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Having given them the breath and the spirit, Jesus then makes a radical statement. He tells them that they have been charged with the ability to forgive or retain sins. That’s an odd mirror of such passages as Luke 7:49, where people can’t believe that Jesus would have the audacity to forgive sins himself. But remember, right here Christ is sending them, just as he was sent, using the same Spirit, the same breath, the same hope, the same Gospel.

Just as He also sends us. That is a difficult thing to grasp here, even if we are sorta right in the middle of a church. I mean, here we are on Sunday, as always. We’re doing the stuff we do, singing and studying and praying and worshiping and then hitting McDonalds afterwards. We listen to passages like this and we think, great!  Good for them. Good job guys!  Go to it!

But passages like this aren’t meant to be heard as referring to some long distant time, or as being intended only for the ones gathered there in that room. They are spoken just as directly to us. It is we who need to receive them, we who need to know that we are sent, we who need to feel the warm sweetness of that breath upon our brow.

And if we can allow ourselves to be grasped by that truth, then we have to ask ourselves...having received this Spirit, having been entrusted with this Spirit and this calling...what are we supposed to do?

What we cannot do is hold it in. We can’t just receive and receive and receive and not send it out ourselves, any more than lungs can fill themselves with air and not breathe it out, or a heart can fill with blood and not send it on. Holding it back, keeping it to ourselves, trying to grasp it and keep it...none of these things can lead to our own spiritual life. If we receive only, and do not act and send...we’ve missed the point.

And our culture drives us to miss the point.  We are consumers, after all.  We are told to take, to have, to devour.  The taking is easy.  We breathe in easy.  

How do we breathe out? Being willing to share our faith, to speak it and breathe it out into the world...these things are important. But we also have to be able to live and act in such a way that those who hear us talk about our faith know that we aren’t holding back.

Take, for simple instance, Christ’s affirmation that we are empowered to forgive. Sure, we can also retain sins, keeping a meticulously detailed Excel spreadsheet of all the ways that we have been wronged or slighted or disrespected. We can do that. Problem is, most of us were doing a great job of that before Jesus came along. Human beings have that one down pat.

Do those around you...and *particularly* those you’ve gotten into disagreements with, who are on your bad side...have any idea that you’ve been given the power to forgive? We’ve all received that forgiveness ourselves, from the one whom we crucified...all of us...with the nails of our selfishness and the hammer of our hatred. But do we give that forgiveness out in return...or do we sop it up like a heart that refuses to beat, or a chest that refuses to breathe?

Breathe in. 

Breathe out.

It’s as simple as living.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Great Restart

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams, Easter Sunday 2013

Scripture Lesson: Luke 24:1-12

In this technological age, I’d like to pretend that I have amazing technical skills.   We increasingly seem to need those technical skill for pretty much everything we do.  Humanity has moved well beyond the “me rub stick make fire” stage, although honestly, having tried that, it’s not anywhere near as easy as it looks.

With our magic devil boxes now absolutely everywhere and doing absolutely everything,  we are both amazed at their wonderful magicalness and fearful of what happens when they no longer operate.  How could we find our way anywhere without Googlemaps telling us where it is?  How could we survive even a moment if we couldn’t artfully share our morning bowl of Froot Loops with Instagram?

Honestly, if our Playstation had punked out over this last week with the boys at home, I don’t know if my family could have survived.  

Which is why it’s unfortunate that while I might pretend to have technical skills, but I actually don’t.  I’m basically a technical one-trick pony.   That trick:  Turn it off.  Wait a minute.  Then turn it back on.

If my phone is acting up, I just hold that little button until it clicks off.  Then I sit there and quietly count to thirty, anxiously concerned about any emails/texts/Facebook messages/tweets I might have missed in those vital thirty seconds.  When I turn it back on, nine times out of ten, it’s just fine and dandy.   The same thing works for our computer.  And for our Wi Fi router.  It even works for our car.  

Toyota Priuses...Prii..are hybrid technological marvels, as complex internally as an Apollo space capsule.  Yeah, it’s not a Lamborghini Veneno or a Full-kit Apocalypse Ready Unimog.  It’s the perfect suburban transportation appliance, meticulously engineered for 99.9675% of reality, for commuting and errands and laughing right on past that gas station.  But every now and again, for no apparent reason, the button that’s supposed to activate the navigation system decides it wants to be the button that selects Country and Western music on satellite radio.  It has not yet decided it wants to change our destination to Nashville, although I expect when we end up driving robot cars everywhere, that will occasionally happen.  

The fix for this problem?

Well, I could have an engineer spend sixty hours running a complex diagnostic assessment of both software and hardware.  Or I could turn off the car.   And six times out of ten, when I turn it back on, it’s fixed.  That does for the car what it does for all of our complicated but-not-quite-sentient machines.  Shutting completely off returns things to their most essential state.  It clears out whatever processes have gotten corrupted or fragmented or broken.

But for human beings, that’s not usually an option.  When we become corrupted or fragmented or broken, if you power us down completely, we don’t turn back on again.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that when we retell the story of the Resurrection on every Easter Sunday, we have so much trouble wrapping our heads around it.  Really stepping past our pasts just seems impossible.  

How can we not be who we’ve been?  That seems beyond us.

It feels as impossible as that wild story that was brought breathlessly back to the disciples in Luke’s retelling of the resurrection.   Luke has carried us through this season, recounting his story of the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem.

From the false triumph of his arrival in Jerusalem, things went rapidly south.  There was betrayal and arrest.   He was brought before the religious authorities, and then the power of the occupying Empire, and then the local authorities.  Each was broken in it’s own way, but each had that paradoxical power to make things right by beating them into their own broken version of rightness.  

And faced with this subversive who sought no power, who refused to raise his hand in violence, who taught that violence was its own reward, they chose to use violence to destroy him.  Those who’d placed their hopes in Jesus watched their broken world get a vastly more broken.

But today is not about that brokenness.  We sang and told that story on Friday.  The sabbath Saturday passed, and then a group of his disciples went to the place he’d been buried.   Luke’s story is filled with women, always mingled in with the disciples, even though the culture of the first century did not view women as equals.  Being less equal, women tended to get stuck with the dirty work, dealing with the mess of birth and babies and death.  

So it was the women who went, bearing spices and perfumes.

This wasn’t because they were planning on making some spicy schwarma, or that they were going out and were wearing Calvin Klein’s Judean Obsession.  It was because they expected the smell of decay to fill the tomb.

This was to be expected.  That’s what it looks like when we physically break.  We stay broken.  Our bodies fragment and fall apart.  But it is true of our souls, too.  We can stay broken.  We can be trapped in hurt, consumed by anxiety, rotted away by anger and bitterness until we dissolve into the stench of our own sorrows.

But when they encountered the tomb, it was not what they’d expected.  What they found was nothing.  The tomb was open, the stone rolled away, and there was nothing there.

And then, suddenly, there were two men there, each wearing clothes that evoked a strange response. Terrifying clothes?  I’ve been known to wear outfits that were terrifying on occasion.  Just ask my wife, or anyone who’s seen me wear white socks with dress shoes.  But the men who appear at the tomb are wearing clothes that mark them as otherworldly.

The message they convey to the women is a simple one...a reminder, of all the times that Jesus had told them that what he was about was not the power that the world knew, but something utterly different.  The world’s power, the power of temple and Herod and empire, that only deepened the darkness.

That was not what Jesus was trying to accomplish.

He accepted all that brokenness, taking it all in, until he was himself shattered by it.  He took it as far as a human being can take it, to the place of death itself and then beyond.

On that Easter morning, and on this one, and on every one, we tell ourselves into this story to remind ourselves that in Jesus and through the life he taught every single one of us to live, we are given the opportunity to turn our lives into something utterly different than they’ve been.

Every broken thing, every fragmented piece of mess that has set itself deep into us, all of those do not have a hold over us.  Those old patterns have only the power we give them, defining us only as we permit them to define us.

It’s hard for us to believe it, trapped as we are in our old ways of viewing the world.  We hear that report, and we can’t quite get ourselves to accept it.   How can that be?   It’s an idle tale, said the disciples.  It’s just dreaming.  It’s just rose-colored glasses fantasy.

It is easy to fall into that way of being, to refuse the new, to close off the possibility that things might change for the better.

But Easter morning is our celebration of the great restart. 

On this day, we are reminded that we do not have to dwell in the darkness of that tomb, or to wander forever in our places of loss and bitterness.  The newness of God’s creation rests before us, and we have been set free to embrace it.

He is risen.  Hallelujah.  AMEN.