Luke 24: 1-12:Born to Live (April 11, 2004--My First Easter Sermon)
It is a cool spring morning…the mist hasn’t yet lifted when the women make their way to the tomb… There are no men with them. Maybe it’s because traditionally it was the women that tended to the bodies of the dead…or maybe the men were still too afraid. Too afraid that Jesus’ fate would soon be their own…. So they remained in hiding…
But there was work to be done… and there was a last chance for these women who loved Jesus… these women who had followed him for as long as the 11 remaining disciples had….to honor the memory of their teacher, their Lord. These brave ones made their way through the mist…and found…an empty tomb…
Luke says they were perplexed….what a tame word….They were worried and disappointed and maybe angry, but mostly they were afraid…of what? that someone had taken the body? That they would be denied one final glimpse at there beloved Jesus? Who knows…because before they even have a chance to react…the messengers are there…asking the oddest question… “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
What an absurd question…hadn’t these strange men been here Friday afternoon…. They were….and they saw….Jesus was dead….why mock their pain? How cruel…
But the messengers don’t stop with the question….They remind the women that Jesus had been saying for weeks, months, all the way back in Galilee before they began this Godforsaken trip to Jerusalem that he would die and be raised on the third day…
And the women remember… and it is enough for them….they do not need a miraculous appearance—though that will come soon…they need only be reminded of Jesus’ promise…and they believe… though the men cowering back in their hideout will need more convincing…They believe…the Son of God…is alive again.
I’m betting that if we took a poll here today of the hottest topic in religious circles this Lenten season….almost every one of us would mention Mel Gibson’s movie…The Passion of the Christ…the blockbuster epic film that presents Mr. Gibson’s unique take on the events of Good Friday and, ever so briefly, Easter morning.
Many of you saw the movie…D______ and I saw it together about 6 weeks ago…but even those of you who didn’t see it I’m sure heard about it…the ads….the reviews…the controversy over Gibson’s punching up the biblical narrative with the visions of a medieval nun….the controversy over whether the movie is or is not anti-Semitic. What I’m betting most of you didn’t see was the promotional materials the producers and others sent to the churches…For three solid months starting before Christmas, I was getting mailings and catalogs, and even a DVD with interviews and previews….and offers to sell us everything from post cards to bookmarks to bulletin covers…to 20 foot banners…. And most of them had one slogan on them…the pithy catch phrase that was on one of the main posters for the movie….”born to die.”
I’ve mentioned to a number of you that this is probably the most disturbing thing about the movie to me….That someone would seek to boil down the life and ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ with a slogan that most of us associate with James Dean…
Don’t get me wrong….I think that we must always remember that you don’t get to Easter without Good Friday first…but ask yourself….would we be here….would the church of Jesus Christ have been the single most influential force in the formation of what we understand as the modern world….would we be the joyful people of God if all we had was Good Friday?
Friends, we are an Easter people…We proclaim that Christ risen from the dead is God’s announcement that the forces of death…and sin…and fear…and the millions of other human evils that nailed Jesus to the cross HAVE ALREADY LOST…That God’s love…that God’s will that we have life and have it abundantly ultimately triumphs over death…because in the resurrection of Jesus Christ all of THOSE forces are shown to have no lasting power.
And so, while I still think it is a mistake for anyone to turn Jesus into a slogan….if you are going to pick one…surely “born to live” makes more sense that born to die….
If Jesus was born to live…the messengers by the tomb make sense…Listen, they seem to be saying….remember he told you…there would be death….but then there would be life again… It is the living that is the key….and who would seek the living among the dead?
What does it mean if Jesus was “born to live?” First of all, it makes Jesus life…his teaching, his ministry, his actions of justice and his concern for the poor and the oppressed…his proclamations on love as THE dominant ethical standard….all of those things that gave meaning to his living…now Serve as a roadmap for us and how we should live….
And IF Jesus was born to live, surely that means that there is something important and Godly…something profound and something divine….to be done here….in these fleeting moments—no matter how many years—between the cradle and the grave… If Jesus was born to live…then Life has meaning here and now….not just in that distant tomorrow that is our eternal life…And that is true of every one of us… IF Jesus was born to live…then because we are alive each of our lives is equally precious…and the taking of a life---of any life, be it Christian or Moslem, Iraqi or Israeli, Hutu or Haitian, American or Arab, murderer or mother---the taking of any life, is a tragedy before God…
And if Jesus was born to live…and we have been given this great gift…the gift of life as well…surely that means we have to live it…to see each day as the gift that it is, not merely as one less day we will be here…or one day further away from some golden era in our past. Surely it means that we are to grab a hold of each day’s opportunities….opportunities to love that spouse or child or parent or friend….opportunities to care for that sick man or that hungry woman….opportunities to help that precious life free herself from the chains of addiction….to help mold that boy into a loving, compassionate, nurturing adult….surely the gift of life is a call to grab hold of those opportunities—and give ourselves over to them…and to the God who inspires them…This ‘living’ thing….it’s a stewardship issue… We have been given a gift…what will we do with it?
And then there is this whole matter of Resurrection…If Jesus was born to live…what does it mean that the one that was dead is alive again…the one that had the very life crushed out of him by the hands of fear and hate and death… is alive…and not just alive…he is gone from the tomb….out among the living….leaving behind the trappings of death…
What does it mean to those of us who stand in our own empty tombs this morning…not quite sure what to make of it all…perplexed by what it all means? Can we see resurrection in ourselves…in the new lives of faith we have been granted? Can we leave behind the trappings of death in our own lives… leave them behind in the shadowy gloom of yesterday and walk free of them into the light of the new dawn…
The resurrection to which Easter calls us -- our own -- requires that we prepare to find God …to be surprised by God… in strange places, in ways we never thought we'd see and through the words of those we never thought we'd hear. …It requires that we open our hearts to things we do not want to hear, to be willing to see in each stranger a possible messenger of God. For the church of Jesus Christ …it requires that we examine all that we are and all that we do…and determine if we are seeking the living Lord in practices and traditions and prejudices that are dead.
Individually and corporately, it means putting down the social phobias that protect us from one another. It requires that we clean out of our vocabulary our contempt for whoever is THEM, our frustration for "liberals" or our disdain for "conservatives." It presumes that we will reach out to the other -- to gays, to immigrants…to African-Americans, to Hispanics, to Catholics, to Hindus, to the strangers, the prisoners and the poor -- in order to divine what visions to see with them, what cries to cry with them, what stones we can move from the front of one another’s graves.

Easter is not simply a day of celebration: It is a day of decision. What is really to be decided is whether or not we will see the new lives we have been given by the grace of God…by our Living Lord…and rise from the bindings of the past—in here (indicating heart)...in here(indicating sanctuary)....and out there--into the light-giving, life giving era of the Resurrected one…the one who is already out there….allowing God's coming again to show forth in us…for surely we too….are born to live…