Mark 16:1-8
Easter Sunday 2012
O happy day for us
all! O family day! O faithful day! It’s so good to be gathered here as God’s
beloved and forgiven children on this especially sacred day of worshipping our
Lord Jesus Christ. It has been quite a
journey over the past several weeks.
We’ve journeyed through all of the repentant solemnity of Lent. We’ve contemplated the inner-anguished,
other-focused passion of Jesus at the Last Supper and on Good Friday. Blessed be, now we’ve arrived here, entered into
the uplifting and miraculous joy of Easter once again. With all the beautiful, powerful, God-glorifying
reminders of our Lord’s redeeming love that this day hosts, I have to wonder what
we are all going to do in the days and weeks and months to come to keep up this
faithful celebration …
One thing I’ll be
doing in the coming days and months – as will a good many of you, I trust – is
celebrating the new major league baseball season that has just sprang into
action. Belonging to and following Jesus while also being fanatical about the Philadelphia
Phillies is part and parcel of who I am this time of year! Being a Christ-believer and being a
baseball fan of any team are not mutually exclusive activities. In fact, I find baseball can teach us a
thing or two about our walk with and celebration of the Risen Lord.
Consider this example
from the 2011 movie, “Moneyball.” It’s
not a documentary, but it is based on the real tale of the tight-budgeted 2002
Oakland Athletics. In their aftermath
of a 2001 playoff loss to a great championship team with a seemingly
unrestricted budget and a very famous name, a few of the A’s star players joined
other organizations. Faced with very little
money to lure bonafide baseball stars to keep the team competitive, the team’s
General Manager Billy Beane turned to a radical statistical analysis of
essentially no-name talent to rebuild.
It’s not the success-on-a-shoestring-budget
theme that has drawn my faithful attention for this Easter morning,
however. What stands out is the scene
in the movie when Beane, played by Brad Pitt, is being shown a minor-league
game video by a Yale graduate he’d hired, played by Jonah Hill, to help with
the analysis. In it we see actual baseball footage from a
burly minor-league player named Jeremy Brown.
We watch him swing the bat, hit the ball, and Mack truck his way toward
first base. He reaches the bag, and then
turns the corner to run for second base.
That’s when he takes a huge and hugely embarrassing tumble. He then quickly scrambles on hands and knees
back to touch first base in order to be called safe. It is, as we hear in a line from the movie,
“all of his nightmares coming to life.”
Just as some relief
seems to settle in, the opposing team’s smiling first baseman leans down to try
to tell him something and his first base coach does the same in a wild-arm
motioning way. It takes him a few seconds, but the he is able
to receive the good news message that these two were eagerly conveying to
him. From the moment he put the ball into play,
he’d totally missed something big that happened. He’d hit a homerun and hadn’t even realized
it! With this good news fully received, he then gets
up, strides into a classic dinger trot, and with a sheepish sort of grin and a
couple arm pumps, crosses home plate to the cheering arms of his
teammates.
This is a compelling,
heartwarming scene to watch. It’s a
grand moment of joyous, victorious achievement. Yet it was almost undone. It was almost undone by that all too human
lack of awareness, stumbling and scrambling.
In the movie, this scene
functions as a metaphor lesson about leadership and how to successfully play a
game. For us, for us present-day
real-world followers of the Risen Christ, I suggest it’s a metaphor lesson
about discipleship and how we should live out the real and relevant Good News
of this holy love in our world.
Let’s go back to our Easter
morning play by play from Mark’s always-in-a-hurry-to-get-to-the-big-point
Gospel. Did you notice the all too human lack of
awareness, stumbling and scrambling in this biblical scene? Did you pick-up on the rather nightmarish human
response to what should have been a fully noticed and joyfully responded to
dream come true?
Three steadfastly
loving companions of Jesus had decided, or been assigned, to properly attend to
his lifeless body in the tomb with anointing spices. They went even though they had no clue about
how they were going to get beyond the boulder that sealed the grave. As we
reflect on this conundrum, we should wonder why they were not remembering Jesus’
own direct words and promises about his rising again (please re-read Mark 8:31
on your own). He’d certainly suggested that boulders and
death itself were no obstacles to this. After
witnessing his execution, were they so drenched and drained in sorrow and despair
that they were not able to trust in Jesus’ promised word? Where was their faithful expectation of Good
News being fulfilled?
We might think they
were reminded of this upon their arrival, as they saw the boulder had already
been absolutely rolled away. Mark
doesn’t tell us their reaction. He only
mentions that a mysterious, white robed young man greeted them. The description of him does inspire us to
think about an angel. This bright
figure then speaks very matter-of-factly, saying, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was
crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they
laid him.” If you are at all
visual and imaginative like me, at this point in the reading you actually find
yourself looking at an empty space inside a cave of some sort. Jesus’ loved ones are then suddenly and
swiftly told not to keep staring, not to stop and stay there in the vacant, conquered
tomb. In a tone that suggests they
really should have realized this, they are told to get out and go tell the Good
News of Jesus fulfilling His promise to rise and go on ahead of them all. Hovering above or beside them, however it
was, the herald was commanding and clear – “But go! Tell!”
However, seems the
angelic coach could not inspire them to get up, get out and get ahead to catch
up with their Risen Christ. These understandably
sorrow-filled, shocked followers of Jesus could only tumble in faith and then scramble
back to first base. Back to a place
they could grasp better. Back to where
they could call themselves safe.
What is it about
sitting with our errors and misperceptions that can feel more secure than
taking risks and moving forward as God calls us to do?
Maybe they just
couldn’t believe their eyes … there in that body-less tomb and all. Maybe they just couldn’t believe Jesus was true
to His Word … his being the Son of God and Savior and all. Maybe they were petrified by what Easter truly
means … the world having changed forever and for the better that day and
all. Maybe they just didn’t fully
realize and accept what Jesus had done for them … the victory over sin and sorrow
and death and sin-induced stumbling and scrambling and all.
That’s what He did,
though. For them, for us. Jesus may have physically, humanly stumbled
on the way to the Cross, but his holy, liberating love played safely through the
divine plan. He did so for the sake of
opening all paths to forgiveness and reconciliation with God and with one
another. He did this so we would radically believe and
diligently follow His life-winning love all the way home to heavenly life here
and beyond.
Faithful friends, it does
not matter how many times we may not be fully aware of this, how many times we
stumble and scramble backwards in our sin.
The holy truth never changes that Jesus has gone ahead of us, has secured
our spiritual sanctity, and is always waiting on us to follow Him in a
victorious trot.
It’s a significant
part of my calling to be like the encouraging, reminding, sending voice in the
empty tomb and to be like the coach telling you the homerun – the resurrection
-- has happened. It’s also a significant part of your calling
as Christians to do the same for one another. The journey with Jesus, the mission of
calling ourselves and others to the safe home of God’s goodness and grace, will
continue in the next 364 days and beyond.
We all just have to work on keeping ourselves aware and actively engaged
in our life together as Resurrection people.
This life was
beautifully described long ago by St. Augustine. He was a church leader back in the late 4th
and early 5th centuries, in a place that is modern day Algeria. Humorously enough, back then it was called …
ready for this? Hippo. Augustine of Hippo has given us encouragement
in Christ to see life in a new way. Pay
attention to the movement mentioned in the following quote from his book The
City of God – “We shall rest and we shall see, we shall see and we shall love,
we shall love and we shall praise, in the end which is no end.” A
more contemporary writer reflects on this and adds, “Within the resting,
seeing, loving and praising there is an inexhaustible adventure of new and
ceaseless discovery. Such is the heaven
for which we were created.”[i]
Such is the heaven for which we were created,
have been redeemed, and are now sustained in the Holy Spirit. O happy day for us all! O family day! O faithful day! Jesus is Risen! We are forgiven! Forever loved! Amen.
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