Easter ~ April 8, 2007 ~ A sermon preached by The Rev’d Erl G. Purnell at Old St. Andrew’s Church, Bloomfield, CT
Acts 10.34-43; Psalm 118.14-29; Colossians 3.1-4; Luke 24.1-10
And so, the first day of the week dawns. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James return to the tomb. They were among the “women who had come with him from Galilee.” They had been in the Jesus-parade the previous Sunday. They had heard Jesus teach all week long. They had witnessed the crucifixion on Friday.
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” two human-like spirits ask them. “He is not here, but has risen.”
Phew! Now that’s an attention-getter early on a Sunday morning. “He is not here, but has risen.” The tomb is empty.
For Mary Magdalene, for the other women, for the eleven, for Jesus’ many disciples, everything has changed. The world is different. The focus of their lives is gone. Jesus is dead … and yet, the tomb is empty. Jesus has risen.
Last summer, when I turned sixty, my birthday was celebrated by flying a Bücker biplane with Wolf Trautmann, a retired Lufthansa Captain. I had wanted to fly an open cockpit biplane since I was a kid. Maybe it was because I was completely enamored of those World War I movies with the pilots dashing to the flight line and bumpily taking off from grass runways at make-shift aerodromes. My grandfather—we called him Grandfeathers—had been one of those brave, young men in their flying machines. Indeed, he was only the sixty-eighth Naval officer to earn wings of gold. Maybe it was because I, too, was privileged to pin those same wings on my own Ensign’s uniform fifty-three years later. And maybe it was because of my favorite piece of writing, the epic poem High Flight penned by my mother’s boyfriend, John Gillespie Magee.
OH! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
In any case, I had always wanted to fly a biplane and my kids gave me that chance. The reason I’m telling you this on Easter morning is because standing by that Bücker biplane on the tarmac and later at 1,000 feet I was awed by the tension needed to hold everything together.
Those early aero-planes were made of wood and canvas and held in tension by steel guy wires criss-crossing between the upper and lower wings. The tail and elevator, also, were kept in place by wires. Like that Bücker biplane, Easter and the empty tomb are about tension and holding everything together.
On July 2nd, when I “chased the wind along, and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air,” I could feel in my hands and feet the myriad forces lifting and pulling and pushing on and in and at and through the Bücker. It was the impossible happening. And, I mean that. Every time I have ever taken off in an airplane or a helicopter—thousands and thousands of times—the impossible happens. Oh, I can tell you about the aerodynamic forces of lift and drag, but for this aviator, “hovering there along the delirious burning blue at wind-swept heights,” I am in complete awe and utter disbelief.
“He is not here, but has risen,” Luke’s two tomb-sitters say. The question today is about the resurrection, isn’t it? Personally, I cannot understand the empty tomb intellectually. In part, because each Gospel suggests a particular and differing version of the Easter story and its meaning. Which am I to believe? Moreover, because the physics of bodily resurrection are pretty difficult to work out for my modern mind, I suspend my disbelief about any sort of literal resurrection and simply allow the stories to wash over me.
In a quite different way, however, I can and do experience the empty tomb. The resurrection, in my experience, is theological realism at its most dynamic. By this I mean that Jesus continues to live, in a non-corporal yet powerfully visceral way. The Jesus of the resurrection is not confined, and quite real, even to the point of my knowing his presence in the here and now. Have you ever felt the presence of Jesus? I have and I know others who have also. I experience him as quite real, not among the dead at all, but among the living like you and me. This notion, this experience, expresses the impossible paradox—that Jesus lives.
There is something more. If you were very lucky, you may have met Daniel Corrigan, sometime bishop of Colorado. I did. It was in 1982 at Adlynrood, a retreat center in Byfield, Massachusetts run by the Companions of the Holy Cross. For me, the final Eucharist of that retreat, with Bishop Corrigan celebrating, was the most powerful liturgical experience I’ve ever had. At Bishop Corrigan’s invitation during his homily, Christ came among us on that Sunday morning. All I can say is that the experience was real and quite extraordinary. Others thought so, too.
This week a friend pointed me to an article recalling Bishop Corrigan’s wisdom. He was once asked, “Bishop Corrigan, do you believe in the resurrection?” The Bishop, who was among the most progressive preachers and theologians of the mid-twentieth century, answered immediately and in a most certain tone, “Yes, I believe in the resurrection. I've seen it too many times not to.”
A mistake so many Christian seekers make Easter morning is to sit quietly in the pew and doubt any notion of resurrection, perhaps thinking, ‘Yep, and it’s because the resurrection is too big a stretch for me that I don’t worship regularly.’
Daniel Corrigan’s “Yes, I believe in the resurrection. I've seen it too many times not to” holds the tension between the impossible and the compelling. Let me be specific. There is a woman I know who, some years ago, had little to live for. She had been badly abused and in time fell into prostitution, mental illness, and even tried to take her own life. Today she lives a good and faithful life of Hope. It’s the resurrection that has happened. We make a big mistake to focus only on Easter’s empty tomb, for, the Easter morning resurrection of Jesus simply teaches us to look for resurrection to happen in our own lives and those of others.
Yes, we face the tension of paradox on Easter morning? Dead but alive. Do we need to suspend our disbelief that somebody who has died is actually alive? Or, is the resurrection really about an even greater truth, an ineffable knowing? Dare we trust that all is well with Jesus and that even we, still in our corporal existence, can and do experience the presence of Christ, the “cosmic Christ,” to use Matthew Fox’s term? Isn’t it true that the resurrection was not just a one-time event, but occurs over and over again?
The paradox of the resurrection plants seeds of new and unending life for those willing to water and feed those seeds. This is not blind belief that I’m suggesting, but opening to the presence of God in the being of the resurrected Christ. The resurrection proclaims: all that Jesus did and taught and stood for still lives. The face of God among us is still present in the living spirit of Christ among us. Easter, in other words, expresses the transcendent truth of who Jesus was and is … and … that in Christ, God is indeed with us now and always.
You might ask, ‘So what?’ For many, many people over the millennium, the joy and wonder of this ineffable knowing Christ comes through stillness and prayer. It also comes in flying a biplane. My point? The risen Christ is in the very fabric and tension of life. Not far off, not up there in the distant reaches of space. But here. Right next to you and in you. The resurrection is about the giving and receiving of Christ’s love between us. In and between us, Christ lives. This is true, at least for me, because, you see
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
But, you don’t have to be at 1,000 feet in a biplane on your 60th birthday to have this experience. The presence of God in Christ is in your grandchildren’s smile; in the healing touch of a nurse; in the exchange you have with the check-out person at Stop & Shop; in the voice of our choir; in the thank you note you wrote last week; in our fellowship and adult education; in the ride to church offered and received; in the bread and wine we share; and most especially in the Peace we offer one another, that Peace of God that passes all understanding.
Blessings for a happy, happy Easter.
Amen.
High Flight, John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Copyright © 2007. Erl G. Purnell
All rights reserved.
