Great story.  Steve Lympus’ mom called her 4-year-old granddaughter this morning and said, “Maggie, Jesus is risen!”  To which Maggie calmly replied, “Yep.  He’s out!”

By the time we get to Easter Sunday, I am seriously ready.  It seems like I’ve been in this dark, quiet place for these six weeks.  Some of you have fasted from particular things for six weeks, and by Easter you’re just tired of it. Our worship services have been quieter, lots of reflection during this Holy Week, and then the somber tone of Maundy Thursday and the darkening of the sanctuary. 

So this morning feels to me like that part of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens her door and steps out of her tornado-blown house and the whole movie explodes from black and white to color.

It makes me feel like we should do something different, break out of the ordinary…even here in worship!  So let’s do this…even if you never do in worship, let’s raise our hands, c’mon, raise them high!  He is risen!   Move them around!  He is risen!  Amen.

Wonderful!  The next time somebody asks me:  Is Bethany that Presbyterian church where people raise their hands in worship, I can say, “absolutely, everybody does!”

Will you stand as we read from the 20th chapter of the gospel of John?

The Word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God.       

Hey, Jesus has been in the news this week!  Someone at the Seattle Times must have suddenly looked at the calendar and said,

“Omigosh, Easter is just 10 days off,  2 billion people in the world will be celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we’d better run something about Jesus!  What’s in the file drawer?” 

So they pulled out two things and stuck them in the paper. The first was an allegedly scientific article theorizing that when Jesus walked on water on the Sea of Galilee, he might have actually been walking on ice and it only looked from certain angles like he was on water.  Now, there hasn’t been ice on the Sea of Galilee in modern times, but these scientists think there could have been a time in the 1500-2500 years prior when there was, and if there was and it happened to be about 30 AD, Jesus might have been on the ice.  I won’t say more about that!

The second article in the file drawer was about the “discovery” of the Gospel of Judas, supposedly a ground-breaking find of new information.  I hate to disappoint you, but the Gospel of Judas is about as helpful and accurate as The DaVinci Code!  We have dozens of old manuscripts that were rejected in the earliest centuries of the church as inaccurate and misleading—the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Paul, the Gospel to the Egyptians…some of them have Jesus flying around in the air like he’s Superman! 

The Gospel of Judas was rejected in the 2nd century.  It is a supposed secret conversation between Jesus and Judas, and the “secret information” that Judas received from Jesus about the secret true God, not the inferior one the other apostles prayed to.  And, for good measure, this gospel includes how Judas could end up with his own personalized star in the sky. The problem is…Jesus came exactly to rid us of all the “secret knowledge,” to make God plain and clear for everyone.  If you want to know the secret, read John 3:16: 

“For God so loved you He gave His only Son…,”

there’s the secret!

If we want to seriously consider Jesus Christ this morning, we’ll have to look beyond the newspaper.  More must be said…about resurrection.

When I sit at my desk at home in our bedroom, the window looks out on our neighbors’ front yard, and there’s a flowering cherry tree there.  For most of the year the branches look dull and lifeless.  But right now there are so many blossoms on it that a pink glow filters over to our window; it’s full of life.   Usually in the springtime we Christians say,

“See!  it’s a metaphor for resurrection!  Resurrection is like blooming springtime!” 

And then somehow the flowers start to get merged in with bunnies, the bunnies merge with the “peeps” and they both merge with chocolate, and spring becomes a paler and paler metaphor for resurrection.

Usually about this same time of year, someone also has a new theory about the death of Christ.  Maybe the crucified Jesus was just asleep and injured, not actually dead.  Maybe he was in a coma and just needed a nice, cool tomb to revive.  Or maybe he was never actually put in the grave.  Or maybe there wasn’t a huge rock in front of the tomb.  Maybe maybe maybe.

John Updike, the well-known American author once wrote a poem called Seven Stanzas for Easter, and in it says,

“Make no mistake: if He rose at all, it was as His body…It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent.” 

Updike’s poem continues:

“Let us not mock God with metaphor; analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable…let us walk through the door.  The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache...”   

Clearly, More Must Be Said…about resurrection.

We try our best to bring the resurrection of Jesus Christ down to ordinary, everyday, understandable terms.  That’s what metaphors do, help us hold and manipulate and use something, get it under our control. But the problem is, we can’t reduce resurrection down.  And actually, in this case, we need to go the other way.  Instead of us changing resurrection, we need to let resurrection change us. 

The Resurrection is and always has been extraordinary, totally unique and mind-boggling.  We can’t explain it or control it.  The one characteristic that comes through consistently in all four gospels that record the resurrection of Christ is the experience of those who witnessed it:  absolute shock, terror, wonder and amazement.   We can’t make it less than that.

Just look at John’s story.  Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb before daybreak, and sees the moved stone.  She can’t believe it!  She turns and runs!  Heads to Peter and “the other disciple” (whom we think is the gospel writer John), and they race each other like a couple of eleven-year-olds running after the ice cream truck, down to the tomb. 

John arrives first, but screeches to a halt at the entrance, peering inside.  Peter, huffing and puffing, labors up moments later.   I’ve always wondered if they sort of slammed into each other, like some cartoon or Three Stooges skit, looking, trying to figure it out.  Peter goes in and in a daze sees Jesus’ grave clothes still there but no body.  Then John goes in.  They are in shock.  It doesn’t fit any category they know of.  It is beyond them.  They stagger back to their homes.  Maybe they tried to find a metaphor, a picture, an explanation from their life that would fit this situation, would get their minds around it.  But nothing worked.  More must be said…about resurrection.

I told some of you a story a while back about a girl named Carly who had a canoe accident in the Wenatchee River back in 2000.  She was trapped under water for 45 minutes.  When they finally pulled her out, she was of course not breathing, nor did she have a pulse and her body temperature was 72.  The paramedics, everyone thought she was dead, but finally after all that time, she miraculously began to breathe again and she survived.  And when a friend of Carly’s was asked about it, she said.

“She was dead, and now she’s alive…and what could be cooler than that?!” 

It’s a good story.  Perhaps we are getting a little closer.  But more must be said…about resurrection.

Mary Magdalene had been at Golgotha.  She had stood at the foot of the cross and seen her friend, her Lord crucified.  Dead.  She had seen Jesus’ body put into the tomb.  She had seen the huge rock rolled into place.  She had no illusions.  He was dead. And she wept, and wept and wept.  Even the appearance of angels could not stop her weeping, because it didn’t change the fact that Jesus was dead.  She was numb. 

And then Jesus appears to her.  Alive.  Not a ghost.  A person. Calls her by name, “Mary!”  Talks to her. And now she turns and runs back to tell the others again.  There’s a lot of scurrying, running around here in this story, and there should be! It is, after all, resurrection.

Look at what happens every time that someone in the gospels meets the resurrected Jesus.  People are terrified.  They fall to the ground. They are struck silent.  Peter jumps out of a boat into the sea and swims to shore.  And the scripture stories keep using these same words, over and over: amazed, startled, alarmed, great joy, wonder.

Jesus was raised from the dead, never to die again. But it’s not only that Jesus was raised from the dead.  What does it mean?  What does resurrection mean for us? More must be said…about resurrection.

All of my grandparents have passed away in these last few years.  The first of them to die was my grandpa Clarence, who lived with my Grandma Ruby down in Oregon.  When Clarence died,  Grandma Ruby was there with him in their house.  They were both in their eighties, having been married for sixty-some years.  Some of Ruby’s adult children were with her that night as well.  And when they carried Clarence’s body out of the house for the last time, the last time Ruby would ever see him, she looked at him and said,  rather surprisingly,

“Good Luck!”  

Resurrection IS about eternity.  But it is about more than just wishing us luck, or giving the hint of a possibility that the future holds more beyond death?  Resurrection is about eternity.

Many of you saw the movie Crash.  It’s a really interesting, provocative movie about relationships and prejudices between people of various colors and ethnicities in Los Angeles.  Provocative, not necessarily satisfying.  But in one particular scene an immigrant shopkeeper feels he has been cheated by a locksmith.  Enraged, he finds out where the locksmith lives, and goes and parks out side of his house and when he comes home, the shopkeeper confronts him angrily.  He pulls out a gun and is waving it around.  He has snapped.  At just the wrong time, the locksmith’s adorable little girl runs out the front door of the house, and jumps into her dad’s arms just as the shopkeeper fires the gun. 

It’s terrible.  It’s horrible.  And only slowly does it dawn on everyone…dad, daughter, shopkeeper, audience…that the gun had blanks in it.  She is okay.  She’s okay.

The shopkeeper goes home.  He is dazed.  He thought he had killed someone in his anger, thought he had ruined his own life and others.  But he has received new life.  He is free to live a different way.  His life has been miraculously returned to him. Resurrection is about eternity, but also, resurrection is about life here and now. 

When the Apostle Paul comments on resurrection, in 1 Corinthians 15, he says that Jesus will

“…reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.  The last enemy to be destroyed…is death.” 

The Bible scholar Richard Hays points out that the word “destroyed” used here is actually sort of military terminology that fits Paul’s thought, and might better be translated as “disarmed.”   Hays writes,

“The whole army of death has had its weapons taken away.” 

And what is death’s main weapon?  Its finality.  But now, in Christ’s resurrection, death is not final.  Christ took our sins with him to the cross, but if he just died, then the wages of sin are still death, and we don’t really know where we stand.  But when Christ was raised from the dead, it means he is able to do all that he said and all that we need.  Death is not final.  We live in the light of resurrection. 

So what does resurrection life look like?  If you travel to London, England, and go to visit the famous Westminster Abbey Cathedral, and go around the west side of the building, you’ll find there ten statues above the entrance doors.  We were able to see them last summer.  This is the “wall of the 20th century martyrs,” and among others you will find are Martin Luther King Jr., and next to him Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, and next to him Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor.  

Bonhoeffer’s story is well known.  He was a man of immense bravery, who made some difficult choices in his life.  He chose to speak against Hitler in 1933 in a radio address on the theme “a man who lets himself be worshipped mocks God.”  The address was instantly cut from the air. 

He wrote to pastors across Germany urging them to speak out in support of their Jewish neighbors as the persecutions started.  Most churches were silent.  He taught at a subversive seminary before it was discovered and closed.  He chose to return to Germany from a trip to the U.S. in 1939, even though it was clearly very dangerous, and though he had many offers to stay in safety in the United States. He helped a number of Jewish friends and family escape the country. 

He was a part of a plot to assassinate Hitler after learning of the plans for the extermination of the Jews.  In April 1943 he was arrested and put in jail, in solitary confinement.  He was later moved to a Gestapo prison, then to Buchenwald, then to the death camp of Flossenburg.

By all accounts Bonhoeffer brought a great deal of peace and comfort to many fellow prisoners at every stop.  On April 9, 1945, just days before he would have been freed by the Allies, he was led outside to a courtyard with a scaffolding and noose set up, and ordered to remove his clothes.  He walked to the platform, now 39 years old.  His last words before being hanged were these: 

“This is the end…but for me, the beginning of life.” 

This is the end…but for me, the beginning of life.

Bonhoeffer’s life, before and after death, was a reflection of the certainty of Jesus’ resurrection…and therefore his and ours.  Resurrection life is the way that we can choose to live, believing that death has had its ultimate weapon disarmed.  And so when we defend the weak, reach out to the lonely, establish a home, we live into the resurrection.  When we forgive an enemy, take the time to stop and talk with someone, dare to raise children, we live in the resurrection.  When we include in our lives those on the margins, take joy in God’s creation, sit beside a friend who is sick, we live into the resurrection.

Remember Mary Magdalene, that lonely figure standing there outside the tomb that morning.  She did not come to believe in the resurrection because her mind figured out the logic of it all, nor even because of the presence of the angels at the tomb. She believed in the resurrection because she was encountered by the person of the resurrected Jesus. When we become aware of the presence of God, here and now, in our lives, and lean into it, we live into the resurrection.

When the gospel writer John gets to the end of his resurrection story, in fact, his whole gospel, he closes his writing with this: 

“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.”  

More can be said, and more will be said.  But in the end, all that is needed is this:           

Christ is risen!  (He is risen indeed!)

Christ is risen!  (He is risen indeed!) 

Christ is risen!  (Alleluia, He is risen indeed!)

Amen.