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.