"Resurrection Vision”                                                  Easter–April 4, 2010
John 20:  1–18                                                           The Rev. Dr. Beth Braxton

I am going to start with a sexist remark–I just want to say that right up front–Here it is–“Men can’t see very well.” Most women know this. Have you ever heard, “Honey where is my hat–my old captain’s hat?”

“It is in the garage on the tool box,” you reply. He goes to the garage and you hear another call–“It’s not here.” You know that means–you are wrong–now where is it? Did you put it in the hall closet?

So you stop what you are doing and go to the garage–look on the work bench and hand him his hat!

OR Looking in the refrigerator–“Hun, where are the pickles?–Darn, we are out of pickles!” which means why have you let us run out of pickles. And you go to the refrigerator and you look in the door of the frig and you hand him the pickles!

How many women here have had this experience?

Okay, I will admit difficulty in seeing also. I was with my sister last month; she is an ornithologist and avid bird watcher. Just taking a walk out of her neighborhood down by a river, she stops and says, “See the hawk; red-tailed hawk.” I could not see a thing until she gave several different directions and the hawk finally flew. It must have been two football fields away! She is incredible in spotting birds.

Seeing is tricky business. On this past Friday I was hanging the banner BJ Postlewaite, our resident artist Communications Manager had selected to hang for Good Friday worship. I said to Cindy, who was helping, “Well, What is this?” It just looked like black material with metallic silver shapes scattered over the black. Certainly dark for Good Friday, I thought, but…so? “Back away,” said Cindy. I re-focused, and there I saw the head of Christ! Wow, powerful!––I hope some of you noticed.

Has someone shown you a card that seems to have some scrambled black and white letters on it? You look at it, and it is hard to recognize any familiar letter of the alphabet. But when you focus on it again, you see the word “JESUS.”

The resurrection story in the gospel of John has many references to seeing. The writer is stressing the importance of vision. This is the message that Mary gives the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” As O. Wesley Allen points our in his book on the resurrection there is no knowing; there is no believing without dramatic seeing. Mary saw that the stone had been rolled away but she did not know where they had taken Jesus. The disciple whom Jesus loved looked in the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there, but not Jesus. Then Peter arrived, and saw the clothes lying in separate places. The beloved disciple followed, and saw the linen cloths and believed. Just what he believed is a bit unsure, because John says that, “For as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead”. Perhaps he believed that the body had been stolen. Then Mary looked in the tomb and saw two angels sitting at the head and the foot where Jesus’ body had been, still she did not know where they had taken the Lord. But when she saw Jesus she did not know it was Jesus at that moment, but when she does realize it is him, she becomes the first evangelist to return to her fellow disciples with the witness, “I have seen the Lord.” For she then she knew–Christ is risen!

HE IS RISEN INDEED!

But is wasn’t easy at first for Mary to get to this point. She goes to the tomb that early Easter morn. When she saw that the huge stone at the door of the tomb had been rolled away, and that the tomb was empty, she immediately saw what had happened.–Obviously the body had been stolen. Someone had taken the body of Jesus, and even when an angel appears and asks her why she is weeping Mary still says that someone has stolen the body of Jesus.

It is not until Jesus appears to her himself and calls her my name that she really begins to see. Even then, she at first thinks that the risen Christ is a gardener. Mary just can’t get out of her mind that she is in a cemetery, a place of death and loss. She can’t refocus her eyes, even when an angel, even when the risen Christ is standing right in front of her!

Then there is the disciple Thomas who we read about further on in this 20th chapter of John’s gospel. When he hears the report that Jesus’s body is missing and that Jesus has appeared to some of the disciples, he says unless he sees the wounds, be will not believe. After all, the one believable thing is that he was crucified; he died; and he was buried with large holes in his hands and feet and side. Then the risen Christ appears to Thomas and tells him to touch his wounds, and Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

It wasn’t so much that Thomas refused to believe. He believed, but he believed in what he could see. And what he could see was failure, cruelty, death, and loss. Mary was the same. Until Jesus called her by name, her vision was out of focus. Until the risen Christ asked Thomas to touch his wounds, Thomas could not see.

What does it take for us here in the 21st century to see? What does the brain do with things that don’t fit into previously experienced patterns? What if our seeing is limited to what we expect? Maybe some of you saw the article in this morning’s Washington Post Outlook section about Jaime Escalante, the math teacher, subject of the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver?” No one could believe that his students in the poor East Los Angeles High School could pass the AP calculus exams! It was not what they expected! They could not see it–it wasn’t what they expected? What is our seeing is limited to what we expect or what we have the courage to see? Or only what can be proven? What enables us to see? What is it that grabs our attention and turns our eyes in the right direction and brings everything into focus?
I know many of you will say that this two thousand year old miracle story just doesn’t make sense to our twenty-first century minds. “I can’t see it!” you say. We know dead means dead; none of us has had an empty tomb sighting recently. Truth be told, some of us gather here because we always come to church on Easter, but we don’t expect things to change. We don’t expect to see anything new.

Well, Easter doesn’t change anything; Easter changes EVERYTHING! Resurrection is a whole new orientation, a whole new way of seeing life. Everything is changed! And what enables us to see this?

For Mary and Thomas, it was the risen Christ. Jesus did not leave them to their own devices. He did not expect them to build upon their past experiences. He did not rely on their misperceptions, but rather he came to them. He spoke to Mary; he encouraged Thomas to touch his very body. And here is the punch line–HE TURNED THEIR GAZE AWAY FROM WHAT WAS EXPECTED AND ACCUSTOMED TOWARD WHAT WAS BEING REVEALED. Maybe, as William Willimon says, that is why we call Christianity a revealed religion. You can’t see it until it is revealed, given to you, told to you. When one has experienced the gifts of the presence of the Risen Christ, then one’s eyes get in focus.

A woman who has been visiting our church stopped by to talk for a moment this week. She has had a significant trauma in her life. And she has had every reason in the world to believe that there is not a God who cares. But this week she said to me, “I have always felt that I had to manage everything for myself. Now I am trusting; this church has meant so much to me, so many have reached out to me, Many here have given witness to her. You could have blown me over with a feather, to think a year ago that I would have been sitting here saying this about the church. She concluded by saying, “Every day is a miracle!” The risen Lord has come to her through some of you!

The Lord is risen! HE IS RISEN INDEED!

Many of you know this Lent that I along with eleven other members of Burke Presbyterian and four members of Congregation Adat Reyim, our sister Jewish congregation, went to Mississippi to help with the re-build after hurricane Katrina. If someone asks me today–how was the trip? I would say it was a spirit filled–God event! I might even say it was a resurrection experience. When we came to our last day of work, having completely painted–prime and two coats the whole house AND lay tile over most of the 900 square foot house, we sang a song we had written to the 60 year old single woman who is going blind about her “mansion on the hill” which is what she was calling this small bungalow that she soon would move into. She was overcome in tears by the gift, as were a few of us.

Then one of our Jewish brothers, who had introduced himself at the beginning of the trip as “not very religious” asked if he could read something. He read the most beautiful thank you to the group explaining what this trip and the work had meant to him. He does renovations here in Fairfax, but had not given his time and expertise for the poor. Since he has been back, I have received a couple of emails from him, one which says I have two other guys who want to go on the next trip. What an evangelist!––I haven’t even put my photos on the computer or written a reflection and he has already recruited others to go on another mission trip. Now I know it would sound scandalous to say, and don’t any of you go rushing over to Rabbi Aft to tell him about my Easter sermon, but I believe that this person (as all of us did) experienced the risen Christ through the community of the group–even with his theology that says he is still waiting for the Messiah. God was coming to us and we all experienced new life in that community! It’s all a matter of how you see it!

As one theologian so aptly said, “You can’t explain a resurrection. Resurrection explains us.” The truth of Jesus, tells on the faces of the surprised disciples who witnessed it, who saw it, on the face of the woman in my office, on the faces of those who went to Mississippi.

Not one of the disciples expected or wanted Easter. Death, defeat, while regrettable, are utterly explainable. It was a good campaign while it lasted. But we didn’t get Jesus elected Messiah. Death has the last word. We had hoped. But we’ve got to face the facts.

The world is in the tight death-grip of the facts.–All that lives dies; the good get it in the end. Face the facts of life. It might be a rather somber Good Friday world, but it is our world where things stay tied down and what dies stays that way. And there are few surprises. This is us. Right?

But Easter is not about us–it is about God. It is not about the resuscitation of a dead body. That’s resuscitation, not resurrection. It’s not about the immortality of the soul, some divine spark that endures after the end. That’s Plato, not Jesus. It’s about God–a God who makes a way out of no way, a God who surprises us, a God who makes war on evil until evil is undone, a God who raises dead Jesus just to show us who’s in charge.

On the cross, the world did all it could to Jesus. At Easter, God did all God could to the world. You don’t explain that, you witness it–you see it! And when you see it, you live it and share it.

The disciples were witnesses to their experience of the living Christ! For them “the Lord had risen!” How about you? Are you still weeping over the Good Friday mess??

Certainly the Good Friday mess is everywhere you turn!
Web scams on a vast scale.
The debt in the trillion of dollars!
Suicide bombers.
War, disease, poverty.
People hurting for work and others dying from over- work.
Greed!
Marriage relationships split apart or stuck in dysfunction, or emotionally abusive
Addictions to late night pornography, addiction to a prescription drug, to alcohol or shopping!

Evil, violence, pain–that is what the world is all about!–learning to stay afloat amidst the suffering and complaints and anger all around us.

Crucifixion was the inevitable predictable result of saying the things Jesus said, and doing the things Jesus did. This is what the world always does to people who threaten the world. Those are the facts!

On Easter God inserted a new fact. God took the cruel cross and made it the means of triumph. God (the same creator who made light from darkness, a world from void) took the worst we could do–all our death-dealing doings–and opened the way to life. The Lord is risen!

See–A new world was thereby offered to us. Jesus came back to forgive the very disciples who had forsaken him. The world is about forgiveness, as it turns out, not vengeance.

Can you see a God whose power raises up whatever is dragging you down, a power that can turn anger into forgiveness, a power that can turn hopelessness into meaning, that can turn strife into reconciliation, yes, a power of life that overcomes death! A power that Mary Magdalene gave witness to!

Let the risen Christ come to you–Don’t run or busy yourself in self-centered activity; Be still and look. He came to Mary and Thomas and he will come to you. Yes, I believe that because I have seen that over and over again in my ministry. I’ve read about it too.

One author writes, “On two mission trips to Haiti with undergrads there was widespread agreement that the most disarming thing about the country was the laughter of the children, along with their raucous singing. How dare they sing when their life expectancy is so horribly short? Was their laughter an escapist respite from the unmitigated tragedy of their lives or a smart rebuke to our assumption that their lives were trapped in tragedy?

As darkness fell upon Port-us Prince after the earth heaved that January night, people dance in the streets and sang hymns.”

Or are you still weeping at the Good Friday mess?

We are an Easter people in a Good Friday mess when we announce as Mary did–“I have seen the Lord.”–that Jesus is alive! Resurrection means–No life is expendable; no one can kill love; no one can kill truth, no one can kill hope. No one can put out the light! No one can stop the singing and dancing! Don’t you see?–Jesus is alive! Forgiveness lives; compassion lives; hope lives; healing lives; community lives!

It is a matter of vision, of what you perceive–do you see just a card with with some black and white letters scrambled together OR do you take focus and see Jesus! We are called not to stand and weep over the Good Friday mess, but to open our eyes, our lives to the risen Christ who is being revealed to us every day.

We are called to live as he did and to make new life out of the Good Friday mess! For Christ is risen! (HE IS RISEN INDEED!)