SERMON OF APRIL 4, 2010
 M. Bruce McKay
 Pilgrim - St. Luke’s United Church of Christ
Mission: Possible – “Living the Easter Mystery”
 Isaiah 65:17-25, Luke 24:1-12

In a radio broadcast in 1939, Winston Church explained the behavior of Russia by saying: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
Well, that pretty much sums up Easter as well – Easter, you might say, is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
Now I could preach a 3 part sermon looking first at the riddle of Easter, then the mystery of Easter and finally the enigma of Easter.  Aside from that taking us well into the afternoon, when many of us are planning to be enjoying a nice Easter dinner, it isn’t all that appealing for other reasons as well.
Talking about Easter as a riddle diminishes its place in the Christian year and its prominence in our lives.
Talking about Easter as an enigma, despite the appeal of the alliteration (Easter enigma), leaves us looking at a word that isn’t easily understood and at a word that is outside the traditional language of the church in describing this holiest day in the Christian year.
So that leaves us with the mystery of Easter – a word that is often attached to today’s celebration.
We talk about the “paschal mystery.”  Borrowing the Hebrew word pesach, meaning Passover we connect the mystery of the resurrection with the mystery of God’s liberating love at working freeing the Hebrew slaves in Egypt.
The mystery of who God is and how God is at work in the world is more familiar than discussing the riddle or the enigma of who God is and how God is at work in the world.
So this morning I’d like to explore with you the mystery of Easter and what this mystery has to do with how we live our lives.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines mystery as “anything that is kept secret or remains unexplained or unknown.”
The message conveyed by the women was that the tomb was empty and that Jesus had risen from the dead.  This message wasn’t kept secret.  “They told all this to the eleven and to all the rest,” Luke tells us. 
Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them made known what they knew. 
So in that sense, the Easter message wasn’t mysterious at all – since it wasn’t kept secret and it wasn’t unknown. 
What was mysterious about the Easter message is that it was unexplained.  The women were at first perplexed and then terrified by the unexpected and unexplained news that “he is not here, but has risen.”
Hearing the women proclaim the Easter message – hearing them preach the first Easter sermon – the men who had followed Jesus first responded to the words of the women by calling them, in our translation, “an idle tale.”  Other translations are more direct, describing the first Easter sermon as “empty talk,”  “a silly story,”  “a foolish yarn,”  “utter nonsense,” and “sheer humbug.”
Perhaps this was because the messengers were women and the Mishna, a collection of Jewish teaching, said, “From women let not evidence be accepted, because of the levity and temerity of their sex.”
 
Now the gender of the speakers may partially explain the disciples' indifference, but not completely.  After all the women were only confirming a message that Jesus had already delivered to the disciples before he entered Jerusalem.  He’d told them on several occasions that he’d be killed and on the third day rise. 
When the women returned from the tomb with the news that his words had come to pass, you’d think his disciples would have been prepared, receptive and eager to believe. 
Instead, they yawned, checked their watches and wondered when the women were going to get dinner started.
In their view the Easter message wasn’t only unexplained, it was unexplainable.  There was no possible explanation for the tomb being empty and Jesus rising from the dead. 
Rather than see this as a mystery they saw it as an impossibility – “sheer humbug.”
But then Peter, the most impetuous and out spoken of all the disciples, ran to the tomb.  Stooping to look in he saw the linen burial clothes by themselves without the body they’d been wrapped around.  He went home, Luke tells us “amazed at what had happened.”
In 12 verses Luke records the reactions to the unexplained mystery of the empty tomb and Jesus’ rising from the dead by saying that his first followers were, “perplexed,” “terrified” and “amazed” with many thinking that the whole thing was “sheer humbug.”
So - what do you think? 
Was the proclamation of Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the other women something to get excited about?
Or should we just listen dutifully to their message and then get down to the real business of the day – admiring new clothes, enjoying a good meal, going for a nice walk?
What do you think?
Did the two men in dazzling clothes who terrified the women have it right or not?
Is the Easter message the greatest story ever told – or simply an idle tale – sheer humbug?
What do you think?
What do you believe?
When we think of believing whether or not something is true we generally think in terms of a mental process or affirmation.  We believe in our minds that a statement or a story is true. 
But when the Bible talks about belief, it doesn’t mean believing in terms of affirming an idea, a doctrine or a teaching.  In both Greek and Latin the root word for “believe” means “to give one’s heart to.” (Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, p. 137).
Our “heart” is our self at its deepest level.  The “heart” of Christianity is the Good News that Christ has risen. 
Is that message something that you are prepared to give your heart to – or not? 
Before answering that question let’s first be clear about what is being asked.  Giving your heart to the Easter message doesn’t mean affirming a doctrine about God.  Giving your heart to the Easter message means giving your heart to the mystery of who God is and how God is at work in our world.
As someone once said, “God is 9 parts mystery and 1 part understanding.” (Quoted by Fr. Jack Ledwon)
In giving our heart to the Easter message we’re giving our hearts to an unexplained and unexplainable mystery – the mystery that God’s love, as it was lived in Jesus of Nazareth, is stronger even than death. 
That’s the mystery Jesus lived and it’s the mystery that the women and the men who followed him were invited to live as well.
The last words spoken by Henry Ward Beecher, one of our most noted UCC ancestors, before he drew his last breath on March 8, 1887 were these: “Now comes the mystery.”
In one sense Beecher was absolutely right.  He was about to enter the mystery that follows our life on earth.  In another sense, he couldn’t have been more wrong, because, as a follower of Jesus, he’d spent his adult life living the mystery of who God is and how God is at work in our world here and now.
Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to live the Easter mystery by giving our hearts to the love of God revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
We can’t live this mystery without entering it – here and now as well as then and there!
Hal Recinos is a Methodist pastor, seminary professor and friend who I got to know before coming to Buffalo.  He grew up in East Harlem.
When he was 12 years old, his 14 year old brother Rudy was kicked out of their home.  Hal was close to Rudy, so he left with him.
They slept in buses at the Port Authority and soon got involved with drugs.  The lived for months on the streets of New York.  Hal eventually found a family that took him in.  He went back to school and then on to college and seminary.
Rudy’s story was different.  He never stopped living on the streets.  He became the “mayor of his block” in the South Bronx.   Hal and Rudy stayed in close touch with each other through the years.  Despite living very different lives, they often got together.   On Easter Sunday, 25 years ago, Hal was serving the Church of all Nations on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.  After worship, early on that Easter afternoon, Hal took the subway to the Bronx to visit his brother.  They ate an Easter dinner and told stories about the good times they’d shared.
When Hal got home that night the phone rang.  Rudy was dead.  He had died of drug overdose.
Talking with Hal a few weeks later he said, “You’d think last Easter would have destroyed my faith in the resurrection.  But in fact, it’s deepened it.  From now on, whenever I remember the mystery of Christ’s resurrection, I’ll remember Rudy.  Whenever I think about all we went through together I’ll remember that love always has the last word.  I can’t help but make God’s justice more than just a dream and the resurrection more than just a past event.  I can’t help but do all I can to make the love of Jesus the last word in my life.”
This Easter Sunday, whether he’s preaching or not, Hal Recinos is telling the Easter story by living the Easter mystery.
We can love completely without complete understanding.  (From A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean, p. 112)
We can testify to the truth of the resurrection by living as Jesus lived, loving one another as he loved us – sharing meals with enemies, offering hope when all seems hopeless, and challenging the powers that be with the power of God’s justice-seeking love.
The apostles first dismissed the words of the women coming from the tomb as an idle tale – sheer humbug. 
But they would go on to stake their lives on the mystery that Christ had risen – the mystery that somehow God’s love was stronger even than death.
They did this by living the love they’d known in their relationship with Jesus of  Nazareth.
We do this by living the love we’ve known in our relationship with the Risen Christ.
In Greek, the word apostles means “those who are sent.”   They were sent by God to offer testimony – the truth of which was revealed in their lives – in their loving one another as the one to whom they testified loved them.
The apostles and the women at the tomb were sent, as we are sent, to live the Easter mystery as disciples of the Risen Christ. 
The truth of the resurrection is revealed the lives of those who live its mystery.
Giacomo Puccini wrote several famous operas, including Madame Butterfly and La Boheme.  In 1922 Puccini was diagnosed with cancer.  He decided to write one more opera entitled “Turandot.”
“But suppose you die?” asked his students. 
“Oh,” said Puccini, “my disciples will finish it.”
In 1924 Puccini died, without having finished Turandot.  The premiere of this opera took place in Milan at the La Scala Opera House, under the baton of Puccini’s best student, Arturo Toscanini.  
The performance proceeded until at one point Toscanini paused and said to the audience, “Thus far, the master wrote…and then the master died.”
Toscanini then picked up the baton and shouted out to the audience, “But his disciples finished his work!”
We finish the work of our Master by giving our hearts – our lives – to the Easter message.
We finish the work of our Master by living the Easter mystery –
The unexplained and unexplainable mystery that love is the victor and the end is life!
The unexplained and unexplainable mystery that that nothing in all creation, including death itself can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!” (Romans 8:38-39)
The unexplained and unexplainable mystery that the tomb was empty and Christ has risen!  
In the first several centuries of Christianity, the standard greeting that disciples used on Sunday morning was, “Christ has Risen!”  And the response was, “He has Risen Indeed!”
Let’s try that this morning…
Christ has Risen!
He has Risen Indeed! (Response)…
Alleluia!
Alleluia! (Response)… 
Amen!  Amen! (Response)

 
THE EASTER STORY
 According To LUKE
 24:1-11 (12)
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.  They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body.
While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.  The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, but has risen.  Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again."
Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.
Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles.  But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.
(But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.)