Yr. A, John 20: 1-18 The Audacity of Hope March 23, 2008
Easter Sunday

Jesus lives! Jesus is Lord! Those sound bites sum up the Easter message – we could just sing the last hymn now and head for the Easter buffet table. But we came this morning hungry for more than chocolate and colored eggs. I came because I believe that ‘Jesus lives’ and ‘Jesus is Lord,’ but year after year I also come asking “What does that mean?” For over 2000 years, the puzzled faithful, the curiosity seekers, and the unbelieving skeptics only in church to please family, all have come through pre-dawn darkness, cold biting winds, and occasionally warm spring sunshine, to hear about Jesus’ resurrection, to hear about a man who would be at best a mere footnote in human history, were it not for the continuous telling and living of Easter stories.
Archibishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams described Christians celebrating Easter as “standing in the middle of a second ‘Big Bang’, a tumultuous surge of divine energy as fiery and intense as the very beginning of the universe.”¹ Yet, the first Big Bang, in which the first micro-, nano-, 10^-35 seconds of the universe springing to life is still opaque to the gazes of even the most intelligent and perseverant physicist-cosmologists. So it is with the resurrection, an incomprehensible mystery, that where there was only despair and death, now there is life and hope. Resurrection is beyond mind-boggling; like the ‘Big Bang,’ we see only its ‘after-effects’ – a tombstone rolled away from the grave’s entrance, women running in fear, discarded linens, then Jesus appearing but not recognized at first by his closest followers.
Some Christians believe that you can only call yourself a Christian if you agree that the empty tomb and Jesus’ subsequent appearances are true in the most literal sense, so that any man or woman on the street would have been able to verify the nail marks and the spear hole in his side, rather than just his dearest companions and friends as we hear in the gospel readings. Other Christians allow that differences in eye-witness testimony familiar to trial lawyers explain the discrepancies between the four gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection – one angel or two at the tomb, which Mary(s) visited the tomb, whether Jesus appeared only in Jerusalem or in Galilee, etc. Still other Christians believe that the Easter stories are parables that are deeply true, even if the facts couldn’t be captured on videotape, as it were. Jesus in life revealed the parable of the kingdom of God on earth. The resurrected Jesus is the same, yet somehow Jesus is different, in ways that are impossible to understand rationally, but become known as we live in Jesus’ way. Easter is God’s great reversal of the guilty verdict and death sentence dealt upon Jesus by the empire. Whether we allow for parabolic truth (as I do) or insist upon literal truth, we, like Christians of all times and places, wrestle with the personal and the political transformations that the Easter resurrection inaugurates. What does it mean to profess this Easter morning – Jesus lives! and Jesus is Lord!?
We set the stage for this question with John’s post-resurrection account. Even on the very first Easter, there were no eye witnesses to God’s activity in the darkness between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Instead, Mary Magdalene discovered an empty tomb. The only evidence that Jesus’ dead body had lain in the tomb were the wrapping cloths laid aside in the tomb. Most specifically, the head piece, aka the veil ‘was rolled up in a place by itself.’ John identified Jesus throughout his gospel as the new Moses for the world. Remember, Moses had worn a veil so that his shining face would not frighten the Israelites, but he removed it in the presence of God. Likewise, John imagined Jesus (the new Moses) leaving his face veil/grave covering behind permanently as he was taken up to see God’s glory face to face. Peter and the beloved disciple both saw this evidence, but neither fully understood what it meant.
Only Mary Magdalene underwent full personal transformation to Christian faith on Easter morning, after she followed Peter and the beloved disciple back to the empty tomb. Even Mary did not recognize Jesus at first, not until Jesus called her by name, as the Good Shepherd calls his sheep by name. What Jesus had promised the disciples before his arrest in abstract language - “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” (John 14:20) has now come true – the disciples are Jesus’ brothers and sisters, they are all children of God the Father together; they already share in Jesus’ eternal life. Eternal life is about life after death already in this world, as well as the heavenly world. For Mary, weeping changed to joy; hope replaced despair when she heard Jesus say “Mary”. Jesus sent Mary to his and her brothers and sisters to tell the good news. On the back of one woman, a lowly woman who would not have counted as a legal witness, rests the news of life. She, the first apostle, went and told – “I have seen the Lord.” On Easter evening, Jesus visited them in the locked room, he breathed the Holy Spirit and sent them all out to be the community of beloved disciples, known for how ‘they love one another.’And so the story has passed down through the ages and around the world. Jesus lives! Jesus is Lord!
So Easter is personal, it is about real, flesh and blood human beings in Jesus’ company living transformed lives. Mary had died to her small self, her ego if you like, and was reborn into a larger self, becoming part of the body of Christ. Easter is personal but not private. Resurrections come into our ordinary lives as relationships are healed when we thought they were permanently lost. Carolyn shared reunion with daughter Cassie, in the midst of Carolyn’s cancer and the uncertainty of physical healing. Beverly’s daughter is out of prison, working and living on her own. These families are living in audacious (daring, breathtaking, bold) hope that a sad past does not determine the future, that being a victim of dire circumstances and bad choices does not define our worth as God’s children. As we come to Easter with our own stories of past tragedies, uncertain present circumstances, we are confronted by the news that Jesus is alive and as Jesus’ brothers and sisters, we have choices to make as we hope for the future. Does our believing in Jesus lead us to live (and perhaps die) as Jesus did? Are we living confident that the God of life has the last word for God’s world?
But Easter is more than a personal encounter with Jesus; Easter brings us to the intersection of the personal and the political. Lifting up the political, that is communal, aspect of Easter should be equally important for us. The Easter good news “Jesus is Lord!” is the new covenant version of the Lord’s first commandment to the community of Israel at Mt. Sinai – “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me.” It is as hard for us to remember that Jesus is Lord when we live in an age of empire even more global than Rome was in the first century. We are as guilty of raising up false gods before us as our ancestors were, the gods of money, national security, youthful appearance and celebrity.
I borrowed my sermon title deliberately this morning – The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama’s book though I have not read it cover to cover. It turns out that Obama himself borrowed the title from a phrase used by his pastor Jeremiah Wright in a sermon. Given the uproar over Wright’s preaching, perhaps it is audacious of me to tie such political hopes in to an Easter message. I do not believe that Obama is the savior of the world any more than the Caesars were the saviors of the ancient world. Jesus is Lord! But I do think that Obama put his finger on the pulse of a Jesus gospel truth – an audacious hope, an unexpected, breathtaking, daring hope of the Lord God - that transcends secular politics and business as usual.
Closing the speech that Obama delivered Tuesday in Philadelphia, he told a story about a 23 year old white woman named Ashley Baia, who was organizing a mostly African-American community in Florence, South Carolina.
“One day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there. And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom. She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.
Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.
Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, ‘I am here because of Ashley.’
’I'm here because of Ashley.’ By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children. But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.”²

Each one of you knows who Ashley is for you – who laid the audacious claim of God upon your life. Jesus presented an audacious challenge to his world. He came preaching and living an uppity, in your face, daring hope that God is on the side of life for everyone, God is all-inclusive, in God’s kingdom, every voice counts. God speaks for the future – the children, the age of peace when every household will have a decent roof and enough to eat and drink. Cynics dismissed Jesus, then killed him when he would not be silenced. But Jesus was on God’s side, and so God raised him to life.
The Easter news that “Jesus is Lord!” should change us, right here in little old Grove, Oklahoma. We can become daring and bold in living God’s way. We can become more than card players, Sunday boaters, caretakers of our own health. We can start in this town, to ensure that children are raised in love with enough to eat and wear. We can begin here to our neighbors, and not be lonely in sickness or in health. We can dare to help out strangers passing through and to send them on to a better life.
As St. Augustine of Hippo knew in the 5^th century: “We without God cannot, and God without us will not.” Friends, brothers and sisters of Jesus our living Lord, we are called to live as examples of God’s audacious, ‘big-bang’ hope for peace, love, and justice in our world, to be Easter people seven days a week. Amen.

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