"Wholly Holey Holy"
April 8, 2007: Easter Sunday, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org

Scripture:
Luke 24:1-12
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women who had come with him from Galilee came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared for his body. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again." Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. 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.

"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen."

Sermon:
So it's Easter again, Easter with all the trimmings. The choir is here, singing like angels, leading us in our favorite alleluia-laden Easter hymns. The special guest musicians are here, as well, lending their considerable talents to brighten our celebration. Extra greeters and ushers and communion servers have been recruited to help handle the holiday crowd. And the flowers are here—God knows the flowers are here! Lilies and daffodils and tulips and hyacinths by the arm load, all pollinating their little hearts out, flowers donated by the members of this congregation in honor of or in memory of their loved ones on this special high holy day.

Still, it feels as though something's missing. But what? Let's listen again to the first part of our scripture reading for this morning, and see if you can figure out what it is:

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women who had come with him from Galilee came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared for his body. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen."

Were you listening? Did you catch it? So I've got a special prize—wait for it!—I've got a special prize for the first person who can raise their hand and tell me what, or who, is missing from this particular Bible passage morning. Anybody?...

That's right. It's Jesus. Good job! Come on up here and get your prize... Now, I wanted to give you a life-size statue of Jesus sculpted out of chocolate, but they were fresh out of them at the corner market, so I had to make do with this little chocolate cross. Enjoy.

So unlike the Gospels of Matthew and John, where Jesus appears to the Maries and the other women disciples right there in the cemetery garden, unlike even Mark's Gospel, famed for it's Hemmingway-esque brevity, where at least Jesus is named, Jesus is missing entirely from Luke's version of these Easter morning events. Sure, he's talked about in the third-person—"the women who had come with him from Galilee," "He is not here," even "the body"—but otherwise, Jesus is strangely absent. I mean, we all know it's Easter, and the tomb is supposed to be empty, but we generally expect Jesus to at least put in an appearance, wave, sign a few autographs. But this empty tomb really is empty, utterly echoing empty. "HELLO?... Hello?... hello? JESUS?... 'esus?... 'esus?"

Which sort of leaves a great big hole in the middle of our Easter worship, doesn't it? "He is risen!" "Who is risen?" "You know, him... that guy" "Which guy?" After all, it's true: despite all our alleluias celebrating of his resurrection, Jesus is conspicuously absent here. It seems the guest of honor has gone missing. And not just here, today, on Easter, but in the on-going life of the church. Those two great symbols of our faith, the bare cross and the empty tomb, together form a kind of giant question mark, punctuating the Jesus-shaped hole at the heart of the community. Every Sunday—in our worship, our hymns, our prayers—we are confronted with that very question: Where in the world is Jesus the Christ?

For some folks today—for many, in fact—Jesus' absence, not just here in these few verses from Luke's version of the Easter story, but the larger issue of Jesus' continuing absence out here, in the everyday physical world in which we live, leaves a great big uncomfortable hole in the middle of the entire Christian faith. The question of his absence and particularly the lack of any incontrovertible evidence of his physical resurrection are like a black hole in the spiritual lives of many, many people today, a black hole from which not even light, or truth, or faith can escape. The cross and the tomb, the question mark simply looms too large. It seems the lights are on at over at the church, but no body's home.

But nature abhors a vacuum, as does the human psyche... and the marketplace. So, faced with Jesus. continued absence, secular entrepreneurs have been quick to step in and assuage those did-he-or-didn't-he anxieties by replacing that uncomfortable question mark with a much more satisfying period by producing a body. Witness The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown.s multimillion copy, multibillion dollar, multimedia retelling of a medieval myth about Jesus. supposed very bodily relations with Mary Magdalene. And in only the last month, blockbuster filmmaker James Cameron, of Titanic fame, has thrown his considerable powers of publicity behind a new documentary film about the discovery by archaeologists in 1980 of an ancient tomb in Jerusalem bearing the names Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, among others. Not one for sensationalism, we know, Cameron is calling his film "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," and he showed up at a recent press conference in New York bearing a coffin he claims modern-day CSI-style DNA-testing proves belonged to Jesus, the Jesus himself.

Of course, spiritual entrepreneurs in the church have moved almost as fast in the equal and opposite direction to satisfy the same yearning and settle the question posed by Jesus' absence. Down through the centuries, parties in the church have sought to physicalize Jesus among his followers, to come up with artifacts, bits of a body of evidence, so to speak—oddly enough, all in order to defend the central claim of our faith that He is risen! He is risen indeed. As early as the 3rd Century, Saint Helena, mother of the Christianizing Roman emperor Constantine the Great, scoured the Holy Lands for relics of the One True Cross. Medieval knights followed in the footsteps of their literary heroes, Arthur and Galahad, and went questing for the Holy Grail. And who hasn't heard of the famous Shroud of Turin, that length of linen enshrined in Italy since the 16th Century as the actual burial clothes of Jesus, marked indelibly by the cosmic energies released when he was resurrected that first Easter morning?

These days, though, it seems more and more churches are getting around the unsettling absence of our founder by insisting that somehow they and only they have the real Jesus, that because of their nearly 2000 years of tradition or their exacting literal interpretation of scripture, they have come to know the mind of Christ so well, so completely, they might as well have his body on ice in the back room, like Walt Disney. Again, the question mark is replaced by a very, very full stop. This sort of fundamentalism, whether Catholic or Protestant or non-denominational, is essentially an act of pastoral misdirection, meant to alleviate the anxieties of the faithful and the skeptical public by distracting them from that essential Jesus-shaped hole in our midst. "Pay no attention to that man who isn't behind the curtain," they insist, "Just listen to us. We'll tell you everything you need to know."

But despite all the substitutions and the sleight of hand, all the wishful thinking and the wanting it so bad, that hole remains. The cross and the tomb and the question mark remain. And, friends, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must confess: we don't have the body of Christ here at United Church on the Green, either. I'm sorry to disappoint, but, as the Easter angels themselves declared, "He is not here." We live with the question mark that confession implies every single Sunday, even this Sunday.

And that's okay. Oh, I admit, living with the questions is sort of hard to take—a little more hard-and-fast, black-and-white certainty sure would feel good from time to time—but in the end it's okay; after all, I believe that, as followers of Christ, we aren't supposed so much to have his body, as to be his body. I mean, if we had his body here, we'd be a tomb, right, not a church? And why should we go looking for the living among the dead? As church, we aren't called so much to be dead sure, as to live faithfully in the midst of the uncertainties of our world, even our uncertainties about the wonderfully puzzling and frustrating and tantalizing resurrection of Jesus we celebrate today.

Standing here on Easter morning and looking back over the Lenten road which has brought us this far, O am reminded of the story of the Transfiguration with which we embarked on this journey. Do remember that? Jesus goes up on the mountain to pray with the disciples, and while they're up, the disciples see Jesus walking and talking with Moses and Elijah and—just like that!—everything clicks into place. Suddenly it all makes sense, everything Jesus has been saying, everything Jesus is. So ever-over-eager Peter jumps up to say, "Whoa, it's a good thing we're here, Jesus, so we can build a shrine where you and these mighty prophets can remain forever." But before the words have even left his lips, it's over. Moses and Elijah vanish, and that bright shining, utterly concrete, utterly convincing mountaintop moment passes away, leaving Peter and the rest of the disciples to follow just plain ol' Jesus back down the mountain and back out into the muddy, mundane world once more if they want to learn more.

Which is what we have to do, too, if we want to learn more. Friends, Jesus is not here. Easter proves nothing if not that Jesus cannot be nailed down once and for all, even here in the church. This church is not a shrine to the dead, but a way-station for the living, a rest-stop for pilgrims like us who seek him, who seek to understand what this means: "He is risen, he is risen indeed!" If we want to know more, to experience more, we have to go looking for Jesus, and not in artifacts or easy answers, the dry and dusty relics of history, but in the crazy tragic, sometimes almost magic, awful beautiful world around us. We must look for the resurrected Jesus, the face of God turned toward the world in love, in the faces of those we meet day by day and even in ourselves, in simple acts of love, in experiences of healing, in moments of grace, in the everyday work of justice and peace. The angels were right: If we truly seek the living, we must look among the living.

Which is no easy task, to be sure. But to my way of thinking, our questions keep us honest. Our uncertainty, our holy skepticism, that Jesus-shaped hole in our midst keeps us humble. Or it should, because if we admit that we do not have Christ—as in, to have him and hold him and stroke him and just squeeze the life right out of his little body—we must admit that we don't have all the answers, either, or all the power. No, even here in church—heck, especially here—the questions keep coming and they keep us on our toes. They keep us from becoming the very same sort of white-washed tombs Jesus accused the Pharisees of his day of being—you know, pretty and clean and clear on the outside, but dead on the inside. The questions keep us looking past the myriad idols of this world, looking for the true, the living God.

The questions keep us honest, and faith keeps us moving. When that black hole threatens to swallow us up, when that question mark blocks the path ahead, when we are tempted to settle for a false full stop, it is our faith in a God who makes a way where there is no way that enables us to move forward. Faith turns that question mark into a comma, giving us room to breathe, room to maneuver. Faith in God's grace gives us the forgiveness we need to step out in faith, to live as seekers after truth, to try on some answers, and, if they turn out not to lead us toward the living, loving God, to step back, collect our thoughts, and try again.

That is what we do here in church week after week. We come together here after a week's worth of questing after these persistent, perplexing questions to share our stories, to bind up one another's wounds and encourage one another along the pilgrim way that leads, we believe, to the life that really is life. We gather around this odd, Jesus-shaped hole in our life together, just as the women gathered around the empty tomb that first Easter day and stare into the darkness and wonder what wonders God has in store for us. For that is God's promise to us in Jesus, who was dead but is no longer: not certainty or safety or safety, but more, more life, abundant life, meaningful life. No, friends, we do not have Jesus. But faith enables us to believe that maybe, just maybe Jesus has us. And thanks be to God for that.