"An Unseasonable Resurrection" San Williams, UPC
Matthew 28:1-10
Easter has come early this year. Our hardworking choir members barely had time to put their Christmas music away before they started rehearsals for Holy Week and Easter. If you can’t remember a time when Easter came this early, that’s because the last time Easter fell on March 23 was 1913, so only those 95 years or older were around for it. And the next time Easter will be this early is the year 2228—that’s 220 years from now. So celebrating Easter on this early date is quite rare. This year, ready or not, we’re experiencing an unseasonable resurrection.
Maybe that’s a good thing. You know how we all tend to associate Easter with the natural order of blossoming flowers and spring-like weather. In Central Texas, despite the early date, we can still make such an association. But this is not the case with those gathering for Easter services in some parts of the country. In the upper Midwest worshippers will not be wearing little spring sandals but snow boots. Not white gloves and dainty Easter bonnets, but mittens and earmuffs. For them, Easter will truly feel untimely. I say this early date for Easter may be a good thing, though, because it helps us realize that the resurrection is not dependent on, or even directly related to, the natural turning of the seasons.
Yet the early date on the calendar is not the only reason for thinking that the resurrection seems unseasonable. Another reason is the strong current of anti-religious sentiment now blowing across the cultural landscape. Various scientists and philosophers have been directly attacking all religion as false and destructive. Recent books, such as God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, have been on the best-seller lists for months. You may have seen that Mr. Dawkins spoke here in Austin last Wednesday, to an audience of 1200 people, and he is reported to be drawing standing-room-only crowds at college campuses across the nation. So given such a climate of skepticism and hostility, proclaiming resurrection goes against the prevailing intellectual winds.
And there’s yet another way in which resurrection strikes us as unseasonable. We’ve endured such an unending winter of human brutality, violence, war and environmental degradation that we’re numb to the possibility of something radically new breaking into our lives and world. We've been five years in Iraq now, and there's no end in sight. Already 4, 000 American soldiers are dead, with many times that number of Iraqi citizens killed or maimed. And who would have thought that, in the year of our Lord 2008, the torture of other human beings is not only acknowledged, but officially sanctioned by our nation’s government. In this climate of entrenched brutality, proclaiming resurrection sounds unseasonable, to say the least.
And on a more personal level, some of you came to Easter morning bringing with you the chill of some disappointment, the long night of a depression, or what feels like a protracted season of grief. For all these reasons and more, we’re here this Easter morning with an unseasonable word to proclaim.
But in truth, resurrection has never been in season. We read in Matthew’s gospel that, as the day was dawning, the two Marys went to see the tomb. That’s all Matthew tells us--that they went to see the tomb. Visit the grave. Do whatever it is people do when death has intruded and taken over our lives. While there are notable differences in the Bible’s four accounts of the resurrection, all convey the sense that the resurrection was an intrusion, an unexpected event. The first disciples are variously described as startled, surprised, fearful, and even disbelieving. After all, what they came to see was only a tomb. They no more expected to experience a resurrection than we would expect bluebonnets in December.
Yet it is in this atmosphere of disappointment and death that Matthew injects the word “Suddenly.” That is, unexpectedly, surprisingly and without warning, an earth-shattering reality broke in upon the disciples. Of all the gospel accounts of the resurrection, Matthew’s account is the most dramatic. He uses explosive, cosmic images commensurate with the world–transforming event he is attempting to proclaim. Tom Long has written that Matthew pictures the resurrection as “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 armed guards fall on the ground like frightened children. But the angel tells the women that they do not need to be afraid; “I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised form the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.” Later the women encounter the risen Jesus, who repeats the angel’s message: “Do not be afraid.” We’re hearing about lives that are being redirected from fear to hope, from death to life, from sorrow to great joy. The news of the resurrection always comes suddenly, always disrupts our captivity to futility and finitude. You can be sure you’ve heard the good news, not when you can adequately explain the resurrection, but when you find hope restored and when you are no longer afraid.
In January 2002, a massive wet weather system moved into Central Mexico, with unseasonably cold temperatures in the low 20’s, causing the unprecedented death of the Monarch butterflies that migrate to Mexico from Canada and the United States each winter. Tens of millions of monarch butterflies at the two largest over-wintering sites in Mexico died in catastrophic numbers. The entomologists who gathered there to estimate the death toll looked out over gray carpeted acres of decaying wings. In order to measure the depth of the dead, they reached down through the decaying layers of butterflies, and, at about eight inches' depth, they discovered a layer of living Monarchs that had been protected from the freezing rain by the ones that had died. Buried beneath layers of death they found hope for survival and a future for the species. Just so, Matthew describes how God reached through layers of death—betrayal by Jesus’ friends, the brutality of crucifixion, an air-tight tomb, a guard of soldiers— through all of it to give us a future and a hope.
Just since last Easter, our world has experienced multilayered depths of death-- from continued deaths in Iraq to unimaginable suffering in Darfur, from forest fires in California to a cyclone in Bangladesh, from catastrophic oil spills to melting ice caps, from a college campus shooting spree in Virginia to a college student house fire in South Carolina, from individuals to families across our pews. Yet the good news of resurrection is that God has the power and the love to reach though all the layers of death, to open a door to new life.
In his poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” John Updike urges us not to make resurrection a metaphor, “sidestepping transcendence,” but to “walk through the door.” Let’s do just that. Walk through the door that resurrection opens for us. Such an invitation is not so much mental assent to a doctrine as a transformation of our will and our heart. It invites us to restructure our lives toward God’s ultimate goals of justice, peace and reconciliation, to love our enemies and serve our neighbors. The stone has been rolled away from the tomb of death. We are now free to walk through the door.
Yes, Easter has come early this year. But that’s okay. Resurrection isn’t tied to any season. Whether we’re in the dead of winter or the scorching heat of summer, whether you are living in the springtime of life or in the autumn of your years, we can experience the great joy of resurrection—hope reborn, fear vanquished, the door to new life opened. Such is the blessing of Easter… no matter the season.