Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Easter 2015; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: John 20:1-18
As we’ve moved through Lent, through these forty days that lead up to Easter morning, we’ve moved through an extended time of preparation, one in which many of us have set aside carbs and chocolate and delicious hoppy beverages, and taken up forty days of prayer. Ardent, deep, sustained, prayer. “Dear Lord, please make the spacetime continuum move a little faster so that I can get back to carbs and chocolate and delicious hoppy beverages. Please.”
And lo, here we are at Easter.
That journey through this season has merged in with a time of conversation about a single part of the Christian journey...that simple, basic, fundamental prayer that Jesus taught, one that completely encapsulates what he taught and how he asked us to relate to one another. The Lenten journey blended in with our wander through that short prayer, merging in with one another as seamlessly as cars merging onto 270. Well, hopefully more seamless than that.
The journey through that prayer began in months ago, step by step, sense unit by sense unit, week after week, has ended right here on Easter morning, which I totally meant to do. I mean, sure, it meant y’all had to try to figure out why I’d preach an entire sermon on the letter “K,” but such are the skills they teach you in seminary. And Sesame Street. Amazing, how much overlap there is between the two.
So today, we wrap up our holiest of seasons with the very last word of the prayer, that word that Jesus probably didn’t actually say when he taught it to both disciples and crowds.
It’s a word so common in prayer that we mistake it for punctuation, just a little embellishment at the conclusion of something that we’re mumbling our way through. Which is a pity, because what it is is a statement of hope and affirmation.
AMEN, it goes, and it’s one of those words that managed to somehow wander from the Hebrew not just into English, but into every language it encountered. In the Christian Bible, it’s one of the few words that goes unchanged when we wander from the Torah and the Prophets into the Gospels and Epistles. Aleph Mem Nun, it goes in Hebrew, only, you know, backwards and with those funny little dots and squiggles under the letters. Alpha Mu Epsilon Nu, it goes in the Greek, like some particularly religious sorority.
Hebrew has given that word to just about every language, where it means the same thing: “Let it be so.” “Let that thing that I have just heard be true.” It is a simple word of deep affirmation, which makes it exactly the word to both end a prayer and to end this holy season.
It is an affirmation of not just what has been heard, but of what is hoped for.
And this morning, we need to register that, because we find ourselves once again in John’s Gospel for the story of resurrection. It’s a familiar story, one that plays its way out just about every year at this time. Like that short prayer, the story can become so familiar that we lose sight of it. If we lose sight of it, it ceases to shape us, the story becomes rote. It is the thing we say because we are saying it,
Here, something that was completely broken is suddenly and inexplicably unbroken. A story that had moved in a familiar direction--defeat, despair, and collapse--suddenly moved another way.
Even if it’s right there in front of us, we no longer affirm it. How do you say AMEN, to something that you don’t really let resonate with your soul? How do you say AMEN, if the story being told is not somehow your own story?
That story, this morning, begins with the return of Mary Magdalene, one of women who comprised the inner circle of those who chose to shape their lives around the strange rabbi from Galilee. She travels to the grave, and encounters not a sealed tomb, but a stone rolled away, wide open and empty. She comes back running, shouting out that the tomb was empty, not certain what it meant. Two hear her cry, and rush back with her to the grave.
Peter, of course, who in John’s Gospel is earnest and well-meaning but a little bit clueless. With him runs “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” This is important for John’s Gospel, because this disciple--one who goes carefully and intentionally unnamed throughout the text--is the one responsible for the whole Gospel. “John” is just a guess, made by the early church. Why is this disciple more loved? We don’t know. But we do know that on that morning, as this Gospel tells the story, this unnamed person and the beloved disciple ran to the tomb. That nameless one found it open, and...unsurprisingly...they didn’t barrel on in. They paused, and collected themselves, and while they caught their breath, they watched as Peter just barged right on in.
This is the Peter we get in John, a guy who randomly throws himself from boats elsewhere in the Gospel.
The Beloved remains outside for a moment, and then enters.
What we hear is that “he saw and believed.” They’re not entirely sure what it is they’re experiencing, but they’re ready to let it shape how they will come to understand the world. Though the encounter stretches them, they are nonetheless willing to encounter it from that limited understanding and embrace it.
Where there had been death, there was suddenly...something else. Where there had been weeping and sorrow, there was...something new. That disciple Jesus loved did not yet know exactly what that meant, or what that looked like. But he trusted, and was willing to offer up an affirmation, a simple AMEN to the resurrection promise we proclaim this morning. It’s a willingness to stare into the face of a world that seems so often only about brokenness, and to affirm that things can be made new, that lives can be remade, that hopes can be rekindled.
That is the purpose of this story, every year we tell it.
It is a story that insists, despite the seeming crazy of it, that there is something beyond the darkness of whatever tomb we find ourselves inhabiting.
Instead, our renewal in body and spirit comes from God, who we know through Christ and his teachings. It comes from God’s own Son, living a life filled with God’s own Spirit. In the hopeful wonder felt by the Beloved Disciple, and in the joy felt by Mary we have a taste of what that truly new life is like.
What we say, on this day, is not just that we affirm the story that we’ve heard. We affirm what that story means for all of us as we set ourselves towards the days to come.
We say AMEN, let it be so, to the indwelling of real newness. We say AMEN, to the change that transforms our view of the past, helping us heal those places where we just can’t imagine it might ever happen. It is a story that when we say AMEN to it, alters our actions in the present, shaping our lives to the form of life Jesus lived out and taught. It is an Amen that sets a bright hope to guide us towards resurrection.
On this Easter morning, find that place of promise, as it lives in you, and say, let it be so.
On this Easter morning, live this joy with a new heart, and let it be so in your every moment.
He is risen. Alleluia, AMEN.
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