EASTER DAY - EX FACTIS JUS ORITOR

IT'S HARD TO DO RESURRECTION SERMONS in Central New York. Easter doesn’t usually burst forth on time with blossoms and buds and the burn of warm spring days. Mostly we get overcast and rain or sleet or even snow. Not exactly the stuff to raise one’s vernal spirits. But not this year; this year we’re all up and running with joy in our hearts.

Across from the rectory, the wetland is alive this morning with the white noise of peepers spiked by squawking geese. Nature is returning to life, Central New York style that is, until the next snow storm. There’s always this possibility. We live with the unexpected when it comes to weather in Central New York. Our plans are constantly on hold, always waiting to see what the facts will be on the ground.

Perhaps this is our best connecting point with today’s message of resurrection: our ability to see and interpret the facts on the grounds. Get inundated by as many snowfalls as we do in a typical year, year after year, and you learn to read the weather like a Storm Center pro. Maybe this is our special gift in the spirit, the innate ability to read the facts on the ground and know which way the wind is blowing, an ability lost to city and suburban residents but part of our ongoing rural life here in Central New York.

Beware, though, being smart and practical can be a stumbling block to the spiritual life especially when it comes to resurrection. Fix your mind on always knowing the facts on the ground and you’ll miss half of life’s joy: the laughs, the ironies, the sorrows, the wonders of being alive to the unseen spirits, the messengers of God’s presence in the world around us.

This is what I love about the gospel of Luke’s Easter narration. Forget about the weather outside and think only of a small group of practical minded women who can eke out daily subsistence from the least of the land in hard times. These are the women whom Luke reports coming to the tomb to prepare Jesus’ body for the grave, doing what women once did commonly before we sanitized death and made it a separate commercial business. These women are life hardened but still alive to the spirits of life and of the living God: they know how to birth a baby, care for the sick, feed a family, love their people and bury a body.

Let’s follow these women this morning as they enter the storm of the resurrection.

“But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.”

They come expecting things to be as they have always been in the moment of preparing a body for entombment. But everything is different. The facts on the ground have changed. The stone is rolled away. The tomb is empty. The linen wraps are lying on the ground but there is no body to be found. These women are life hardened as people tend to be who live close to the earth. They are bright and strong in the way of the world. Yet like sensitives who have the inkling of a powerful unseen presence, they are perplexed.

What matters as we listen to the facts unfolding before the women at the empty tomb is not that we suddenly exclaim the mystery of faith as it has evolved over the intervening millennia . . . or that we start shooting darts at the mystery of faith because it doesn’t fit into our current scientific beliefs . . . but that we stand with these women and enter the moment of their faith discovery.

This is an opportunity for sudden awareness of new knowledge, what we in the practice of spirituality call the Aha Moment. Like Sherlock Holmes we must look with eyes and minds open to the new clues on the ground and allow our thinking to follow the facts.

At first the women are perplexed . . . things were not as they expected . . . but then they have a quickening insight and remember what Jesus had told them. Prior physical knowledge informs and advances their understanding toward a whole new spiritual reality, the spiritual reality of the resurrection, resurrection which could not happen without the physical death of Jesus. This is what he had told them, what Peter the Fisherman had at first refused to believe or accept.

Doubt and denial is also the reaction when the women return from the tomb and tell the apostles and other disciples the new evidence on the ground. There is a rapid process of new knowledge taking place in this gospel narrative, and it is so familiar as to be taken for granted. The process goes like this: important new information is followed by negative reaction before the information is finally accepted and received. Scripture at this point reads -

“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.”

Peter, the apostle who first heard the messianic purpose of Jesus and refused to accept what Jesus meant, hears what has happened to Jesus at the tomb, and connecting these new ideas with what he had learned previously “went home, amazed at what had happened.”

I am not asking you this Easter morning to swallow two thousand years of evolved Christian faith and understanding hook, line and sinker. I am only asking you to stand with our patron Peter and his fellow disciples Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the other women at the empty tomb. Open your eyes and minds to what’s happening in the context of the facts and prior knowledge of their times and come to your own conclusions. My conclusion and that of many others over the centuries is this:

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.