Living Through Earthquakes

Matthew 28:1-10

March 23, 2008, The Day of Resurrection

Many years ago there was an Easter card that said:

Easter…
A day of renewal,
A day of hope,
A day of rejoicing,
Followed by a week of egg salad!

When we think of Easter like that it tends to catch the modern essence of Easter as a nice holiday and we certainly like the idea of living after death, but mostly we like to think of the time with family and friends. If you think about it, like Christmas, we have really domesticated Easter with the services, the egg hunts and bunny rabbits, and the new clothes and special hats. But think about it for a minute. We have been celebrating Easter for almost two thousand years. In that span of time Christians have gathered on an annual basis on the first Sunday after the full moon after the spring, or vernal equinox. That time when the center of the sun is directly above the earth’s equator. On top of that, when you consider that we hold our worship not on the Jewish Sabbath, but on the Lord’s day, the day of resurrection, each and every Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So, in a sense Christians have celebrated Easter over 100,000 times! I guess you could say then that Easter is a really big deal.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, Easter is not a really big deal; it is the biggest of all deals. Daniel Clendenin, a Christian essayist, writes about this:

I love Easter. After two thousand years of barnacle-like incrustations, institutional failures, grotesque betrayals, familiarity that breeds casual contempt, idiotic counterfeits and watering down the astringent wine of the Gospel, Easter calls us back to a full-throated message that God sent.

“Easter calls us back to the full-throated message that God sent!” We might ask what Clendenin means when he says full-throated message? I think there are two parts to the answer. Part one says that God raised Jesus from the dead thereby vanquishing death’s ultimate hold and power. This is how most people view the Easter message even though they might not use those words. Part two of the answer is that we can experience God’s power over death, not just after we die, but, perhaps more importantly, right now in this life before death!

Because the message of Easter is so radical, it is no wonder that the author of Matthew describes the resurrection in the particular way that he does. We hear that on the first day of the week after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary go to the tomb. Perhaps it is just to sit there and reflect on the life of Jesus and to be quiet in their thoughts and remembrances. Matthew does not mention them planning to anoint the body, but to see the tomb. We can imagine that they are sad and quiet, lost in their own thoughts, remembering stories he told, events he participated in. We’ve all done it when we visited the grave of someone we knew well, the mind kind of goes into automatic memory mode. Perhaps they share with each other their thoughts in quiet voices so as not to disturb the new day.

In such a frame of mind we can imagine they were ready for almost anything, anything at all, except for what they found. Matthew says they get there and suddenly there is an earthquake, an angel comes and rolls back the stone and sits on it. Seeing the two women the angel declares that he knows they are looking for Jesus, who had been crucified, but that he is not there – he has been raised.

The author of Matthew uses such earth shattering language in his account because it is the only way he knows how to share the shock and awe of the event that has just taken place. To hear this as an account of a real earthquake is to miss the point! The women were not just startled because things were not as they had expected them to be. This wasn’t like looking into your rear-view mirror and seeing the flashing lights of a cop car behind you. It was, to use a highly sophisticated phrase, a case of where these women were “completely blown away!” What they had previously known and believed has now been shattered.

I love what the Rev. Tom Long once said about this passage:

“The call to worship on that first Easter was not a cheery Good Morning! But a shattering earthquake that rippled a seismic shock through history and signaled that the fault lines of human history had shifted dramatically toward grace and hope…The earthquake is a drum roll signaling a dramatic act of divine power.”

This story should leave us with a shock to our systems. It is not just a nice story and then a week of egg salad, and get on with our lives. It is not about thinking of sweet thoughts and the greening of our lives with the beginning of Spring. That is the Reader’s Digest, milquetoast version. There is nothing that is nice, sweet or interesting about this story that the author of Matthew tells us this morning. It is about the raw power of God breaking into our lives with life when we expected death. It is enough to break up even the most hardened crusts of cynicism, disappointment and despair.

Remember the Adventures of Tom Sawyer where Tom, Huck Finn and Joe Harper set forth down the Mississippi river to become pirates? Everyone at home believes them to be lost or dead, and so the town has a funeral for the three of them on Sunday morning. After Sunday School the people file solemnly into the sanctuary where the minister gives a moving eulogy of the three boys, and the people are in tears. Then there is a rustle in the back of the balcony, and the back door creaks open; the minister wipes his eyes with his handkerchief, looks up and stands transfixed. Here come Tom, Huck, and Joe walking down the aisle. They had come back and had been hiding in the balcony observing their own funeral service. The people rush to embrace them and everyone breaks into a doxology.

We, like those people, must break into a doxology every time we are all set for a funeral in the daily workings of our lives, when death gives way to new life by the power of God. The late Rev. Frank Harrington, once the pastor of the Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, talked about the problem of living life in a rut. He said a rut is just a grave with the ends knocked out. Eternal life is living like life starts in the rut/grave where you are lying but opens up to life in all directions. Again this is by the power of God. Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

Another way to think of this is to think of Easter shocking us into seeing a different road map than we are accustomed to. It’s as if we are used to looking at a large road map and thinking “I wonder how many dead-ends are on here?” Easter calls us to question ourselves and instead rejoice in all the roads we see and where they can lead.

Those roads are there all of the time. We see them in ourselves, we see them in others. When the power of addiction is overcome, when failures are transformed, when broken bodies are given new life, when anger is conquered by reconciliation, when walls between people come crashing down, the earth trembles. A song of love fills the air rather than a funeral dirge. Life wins! Hope wins! God wins! Again and again and again, Jesus’ resurrection means God cannot be contained in any tomb. Let this wonderful surprise jolt you out of your complacency, stir you up once again to choose life, to choose God’s ways over death’s ways.

When Barbara and I were in seminary we worked with the youth group of Strathmore Presbyterian Church in Louisville. We did real sunrise services – they were at sunrise! We also did not do your normal, nice quiet sunrise services. We worked for the shock factor, or maybe I should say we worked for the earthquake factor. It is a dangerous thing to put seminary students in charge – they have something to prove! The service was held outdoors in a city park and we began it just before the sun came up, with mournful music. We had teens walk in wearing drab clown outfits. They carried a big box, which they proceeded to open. In it they found a cross, a package of nails, and a crown of thorns. They passed out the nails to the people as one of the youth began pounding nails into the cross. The two clowns then started to leave dejected when another clown came forward and stopped them, and then with great exuberance went to the same box and began to pull out bright clothes and makeup. All of the youth put on the brightly colored clothes and began to paint big smiles on the faces of all of those who would let them. As the sun lit the sky they went to big black plastic mounds that were tethered around the area and opened them up to reveal brightly colored balloons to everyone. We had people write an Easter message on cards which they attached to the balloons and then we let them all go. (This was before we knew of the danger balloons posed for birds and other animals.) Then we all sang Jesus Christ is Risen Today.

I have never been to an Easter Sunrise Service like that since then – come to think of it I have not been to a real sunrise service at sunrise since then! What that service did was to get the shock of Easter – the earthquake quality of it - across in a memorable way.

The writer of the lyrics for the hymn The Day of Resurrection said it so well in the last verse.

Now let the heavens be joyful, let earth her song begin,
The round world keep high triumph and all that is therein.
Let all things seen and unseen, their notes of gladness blend,
For Christ the Lord is risen, our joy that hath no end.

I hope you all will feel the earth roll in your life today and in the days to come as you experience the wonderful shock of the news “He is risen!” And enjoy the egg salad this week!

Amen

© 2008 Rev. Dr. Thomas T. Peters