|
"Dancing on the Devil's Dance Floor" John 20:1-18 A Sermon Preached By Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle
|
|
Easter Sunday, April 11, 2004 |
|
PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY 13214 Phone: 315-446-0960 |
|
Someone has said, "We live in a Good Friday world." It is not difficult to believe that. The evidence is all around us, near and far. On this Easter morning there are many who grieve the sudden loss of friends and loved ones. War and terrorism continue to claim their victims, innocent and not. On this day we look to an empty tomb, while so many tombs fill up in senseless, tragic and predictable ways. The evidence for Easter, for resurrection, would seem to be a lot thinner than the reality of crucifixion. The pagan writer Celsus complained that everybody saw Jesus die. (Crucifixions were public events, after all, and the Romans meant them as a warning to their subjects.) But, Celsus said, only a crazed woman and few fanatics saw him alive again. It is often asked why the risen Christ didn’t appear to some Roman or Jewish officials. It would have cleared a lot of things up. But if the resurrection were meant to be the kind of event that historians could prove, like they can prove that certain civilizations existed by their archeological remains, or certain events happened because of the reliability of witnesses to those events - then God wouldn’t have performed it in the dark without eyewitnesses. The old Negro spiritual that our choir sang at the end of our service on Maundy Thursday, asks, "Were you there when God raised him from the tomb?" No, in fact we weren’t. No one was. This was an event that transpired between God the Father and God the Son by the power of God the Holy Spirit. None of the New Testament gospels tells us how it happened. We don’t know if it was a warm Palestinian morning, or unseasonably cool. We don’t know if the earth shuddered when he arose or if it was as still as a baby’s deepest sleep. We don’t know what he looked like when he was no longer dead, whether he burst forth from the tomb in glory or if he emerged like Lazarus, slowly unwrapping his grave clothes, squinting in wonder against the dawn. As we read the account in John’s gospel we are struck by Mary’s encounter with the risen Christ. She did not know him at first, not until he said her name - surely one of the most moving moments of the whole Bible. Mary Magdalene, the last one to mourn the dead Messiah, transformed to the first witness to the living Lord. But that’s the second scene. It’s easy to overlook what happened before that, when Peter and the Beloved Disciple raced toward the tomb after being informed by Mary that the body was not there. After Peter ducked in and saw the linen wrappings laying there, the other disciple also went in, "and he saw and believed." What did he believe? All that an empty tomb "proves" is that the body isn’t there! But the disciple "saw" in a different way. He saw in a way that believing sees, through eyes that faith provides. John writes that the disciple "saw and believed" but he could have said it the other way around, "he believed and saw." This isn’t something we just decide on our own, as if we can simply choose to see things differently, like seeing the glass half full instead of half empty. It isn’t a matter of attitude or temperament, or of being accepting and open rather than skeptical. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is not about us - at least not at first. It is about the relationship of Jesus with God, and God with Jesus. The risen Lord tells Mary, "Do not hold on to me, but go to my disciples and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’" My God and your God. The intimacy of Jesus and the Father, the bond of loving unity, this same bond and intimacy with God is what believers now share. Jesus was risen from the dead not so life as we know it might go on and on, but so that life as we know it - life in a Good Friday world - might be transformed and made new. It’s not something that we would recognize from our own experience or our own history, just as Mary did not recognize her familiar savior. "Do not hold me," he said. Do not cling to me, but follow me. Don’t cling to your own life, either, as if by dong so you could save it. Craig Barnes writes about how his grandmother and her generation talked about death all the time, but they never mentioned sex in polite society. Now we talk about sex all the time but never mention death. His grandparents "knew better than to believe if they wore their seatbelts, avoided smoking and ate a high-protein diet they could avoid death." The point is that we are all terminal. It’s just a matter of when someone signs the certificate. Our relationships are also terminal, and our careers. "You can try to hang onto everything for a while, but what a silly way to live. Either you’re going to be worried every day about losing it all or you’ll have to pretend you won’t die. According to the disciples of Jesus, that’s an idle tale." We cannot prevent the losses of Good Friday, many of them, anyway. Easter doesn’t prevent the losses of Good Friday. But that’s the good news. Easter isn’t the happy chapter that says we can hold on to our life and our dreams. All that the disciples of Jesus hoped for what they could do with Jesus as their master and teacher and leader died on Good Friday with him. Easter isn’t the next thing, as if they would pick up again where they left off. It is the new thing that only God can give. We’ve got to stop looking for the living among the dead - "stop obsessing over the right career move, stop pressuring the kids to be perfect, stop fantasizing about what the latest diet will do for our bodies. It’s all going to die anyway, so stop." Go to the empty tomb, where there is the promise of a new life that will never die. Give to God the life you cannot keep anyway. While the resurrection may be short on reliable sources to suit an historian’s qualifications, it isn’t short on witnesses, on those who have been grasped by new life of Easter in a Good Friday world. Richard Lischer told this story: "Our friend had already done two full courses of chemotherapy and through it all had somehow managed to complete a doctoral dissertation at the University of Virginia. She had done it. To celebrate she and her husband rented a VFW hall, hired a band, and threw one of the biggest parties I’ve ever seen for the whole church and half the community. Two days before graduation her doctors confirmed that the cancer was back. The experimental treatments would begin the day after graduation. Only a few of us knew it, and my guess is we would have limped through the ceremony and canceled the party. But she had the party. And I tell you I have never heard the gospel of God’s Yes preached more powerfully than I saw it danced on the floor of the VFW. An outsider would have seen only the vintage 1960's, arthritic gyrations that we were all doing, but this was a woman of faith and she danced her Yes in the grip of the No. And that’s the way we do it. The best celebrating is done in the face of the enemy, the best dancing on the devil’s dance floor. You can’t always separate the Yes from the No but at least one person has done it definitively. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, we trust there is this distinction, and that it holds true for us." It is a Good Friday world, but we are an Easter people. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God of us all. The power of their love, to enter the deepest darkness and defeat its power to destroy, empowers all who would believe to "dance on the devil’s dance floor," to give to God the life we cannot keep anyway. Jesus Christ has risen from the dead so that we might live in newness of life. We are the witnesses! "The proof of the resurrection," as Clarence Jordan said, "is not in a rolled away stone, but in a carried away church." May you, and may we all, be carried away by the dance of resurrection life. Amen.
|
| Copyright, Rev. Dr.
Peter W. Shidemantle. All rights reserved. Permission granted for
non-commercial use.
|