The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the 3rd Sunday of Easter
15 April 2018
Readings:
Acts 3:12-19
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48
Psalm 4
We spend 95 days of our church year preparing for and celebrating Easter, and another 39 Sundays remembering the events of Christ’s last supper, death, and resurrection in our weekly celebrations of Holy Eucharist. In our seminaries and religious communities, daily Eucharist fills in the rest of the year as 365 days of Eucharistic celebration recall the mystery of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as it stands in testament to God’s eternal and undying love for us.
As Godly Play describes it, the Easter Mystery is so big and so deep that we need time to prepare for it, and even more time to enter into it. Put simply, resurrection is hard.
What does it mean?
Over the course of the Easter Vigil, Easter Morning, Easter Evening, and the readings each day of Easter week, last Sunday, and today, each of the Gospel stories of the day of resurrection has been offered for exploration and prayer.
In fact, this morning’s reading has come up three times since Easter evening.
Luke’s telling of the day of resurrection begins at early dawn when Mary of Magdala, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them bring spices to the tomb where Jesus was laid in the final moments before Sabbath began on Friday afternoon. They had come to complete the work of anointing Jesus’ body for his permanent burial, to close a chapter in their lives that, up until three days prior, had been filled with expectations. All of the hopes dreams, and messianic expectations they had built up were suddenly gone. Ripped from them and nailed to a cross where they died with Jesus. They came to lay those dreams and expectations to rest only to find the stone rolled away, and the tomb empty. Joined by two angels, they were told the astounding news that Christ was alive.
They took the news back to Christ’s followers, who were in disbelief. Peter was next to visit the tomb and was astounded to find it as the women had described.
Luke tells of three appearances of Christ on that first day. The first news of Jesus’ appearing to anyone in Luke’s telling is on the road to Emmaus, where Jesus walks with the two travelers. Caught up in their sadness, the death of their own expectations, the loss of their friend and leader, they walked right next to him as he explained the prophecies concerning messiah to them, but it wasn’t until they invited him to stay with them and finally sat with him in fellowship that he became known to them in the breaking of the bread. Returning to the road immediately, they hurry all the way back to Jerusalem to tell the rest of the disciples of what has happened, only to hear that Christ had also appeared to Peter.
Picking up with the story in today’s reading, suddenly Christ is right there in their midst. In shock, wonder, fear, and astonishment, the one in whom all of their expectations had died three days prior was in their midst bidding them peace. He assures them that he is really there with them in flesh and blood. He even eats some broiled fish as if to prove that he is neither a ghost nor a collective figment of their distress. In their fear, doubt, and perplexity, they seem to have no idea what to do in this moment.
What did this mean? What does it mean for us? It would take the disciples no less than fifty days to come to terms with what Christ’s resurrection meant. At the very start, as we hear in Christ’s penetrating questions from today’s gospel, it meant getting over the fear and doubts attached to the expectations of three-year’s discipleship that had been crucified along with Christ. Resurrection didn’t simply mean that Christ was alive, it meant the transformation of faith and expectations; and that transformation took time.
The older I get, the more I have been faced with the reality that expectations get in the way of experiencing the realities of life. Christ’s followers expected him to be the messiah that everyone had been anticipating. When he allowed himself to be taken into custody and killed, their worlds were turned completely upside down. Three days later, the women went to the tomb expecting to find and anoint a body that had not drawn breath in three days. They left in astonishment. Peter went to the tomb expecting the women’s unbelievable story to be explained away. He too left in astonishment. The disciples on the road to Emmaus expected simply to share their sadness with a stranger with whom they could share the hospitality of a meal and a warm place to stay the night in safety. Recognizing Christ in the breaking of the bread, they too were Astonished. They hurried all the way back to Jerusalem to add their stories to the stories of the other disciples, where they all expected to be the only one bringing unbelievable news to the community only to find themselves all quite suddenly and astonishingly in the company of Christ himself.
Everything they thought they knew had died with Christ. Here was a radical and confusing new beginning. Nothing was tidy. Nothing was as they expected. What suddenly opened up was frightening, alarming, and a much greater reality than what they had foreseen.
I was speaking with a friend this past week about those moments in our lives that only make sense to us in retrospect—how we can look back at what seem to be chance meetings or comments and see the way in which these moments have served as guideposts in our lives and have come to define the paths we’ve taken and the people we’ve become. The past couple years of my life leading up to coming to Calvary had been full of expectations that gradually fell, one by one, as the mysteries of life continued to astonish and occasionally terrify me. I started Holy Week in 2015 by flying to Berkeley to defend my dissertation. I passed the defense, but suddenly all of my expectations came crashing down around me.
Since I knew I had ran out of funding for my doctoral program, I set a schedule that previous fall, by which, if I could just keep up with it, I would graduate that May, which would then make me qualified for the forty… or ninety jobs I had to begun applying for in October. It would be demanding, but it was possible and tidy.
Having kept up my schedule from the fall, I completed my dissertation, but approached the defense unsure of how it would be received since my committee had been unable to keep up with the schedule they agreed to in the fall. As I said, I began that holy week by passing my dissertation defense on Monday of Holy Week, but the reality was that I wouldn’t be able to receive feedback for my revisions until after the filing date for graduation. Graduation had become my Jerusalem. It was the tidy ending leading to the next stages of my expectations. Those expectations died on Monday of Holy Week.
As the disciples try to explain to others in today’s reading from Acts, what it all means is far more than we can see from where we are in our present need for our own resurrection, our own transformation. With the death of our expectations, the resurrection brings awe, trembling, uncertainty, doubt, and fear. It is not a comfortable or even immediately reassuring place to find ourselves. Everything has been turned upside down. Everything has been made new.
Christ’s life and ministry hasn’t changed. His teachings haven’t changed. The work and ministry he called his disciples to hasn’t changed. But the expectations have just gotten a whole lot more complicated, more real, and more frightening as the witness entrusted to each of the disciples has taken on a profound new depth and significance.
As John puts it in today’s epistle, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are!”
John stresses that we are children of God NOW. Right here. Right now. Today. What we will be has not yet been revealed. We can’t wait in wonder, in doubt of whether we are qualified or worthy to carry God’s love into the world, for some future time when we will be more than what we already are here and now. Here and now we ARE children of God. What that means at the very least is that we are called into the untidy work of letting go of our expectations as we seek to live as Christ’s hands and heart in the world. We are called into transformation through the realities that are more frighteningly complex than we hope they will be, yet which hold infinitely greater possibilities than we can see as we try desperately to plan for our futures.
For my own part, this means that the untidy realities of not having a diploma in hand until the next time the trustees signed them in October of 2015, and of not having a job for next year, which allowed for a myriad of new possibilities that I couldn’t see with my heart focused on my expectations. Instead of starting a full time job as a professor, I started a job as interim Priest in Charge at St. Paul’s in Fort Collins, I took a job for the summer at Camp Galilee, I heard about the position here at Calvary, and, with no more expectations to guide me, I had to step out in faith—terrifying as it was—only to find myself called to this amazing family where I have found home.
Transformation of expectations—whether thousands of years ago with the resurrection of Christ, or today with some differently terrifying realities that we face as individuals and as a community—are hard work.
Christ is alive. Everything has been made new. It is a shocking, frightening, transformative, and awe-inspiring revelation. As Godly play so aptly captures the truth of it, it will take us some time to enter into the mystery of this new place.
“Why are you frightened?,” Jesus asks the disciples in today’s gospel. “Why do doubts arise in your hearts?” Essentially, what is in the way of your transformation?
May these weeks of exploring the mystery of the resurrection offer us the space to not only celebrate love’s victory over death, but to be transformed in our faith by what it means for our God to call to us from beyond our expectations.
Amen.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.