Your New Home
Dear church,
Are you ready for the big show? The Easter show, according to Matthew… Powerful effects of sound and sight set the stage. An earthquake rattles the ground. The angel’s appearance is bright as snow. The ground of normalcy shakes everywhere. The calming colors of everyday are overpowered by a bright light from heaven. For a moment it may seem as if we all, listeners and biblical characters, are transported into an entirely different form of reality. But the person that Mary and Mary Magdalene really want to see, is nowhere to be found. “He is going ahead of you,” they are told. “You will see him in Galilee.” And then all of a sudden, the missing person appears to them and greets them. Jesus, risen from the dead. Aren’t the Easter stories among the most mystifying in the New Testament?
Of course, it is also true that the most difficult to explain stories in the Bible are often the richest, most profound accounts of faith. And that is most certainly true for the Easter/Resurrection narratives. How often has the Christian faith been declared dead, done, a thing of the past, fit for the tomb but not fit for the future? Not cool enough, not hip enough, not whatever enough…
Figuratively, we stand with Mary and Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb and lament our fate. It takes the big Easter rattling of the rational ground that we stand on, it takes a huge shaking of the impoverished secular world that too many people put their trust in, - to open our imagination to the reality of Easter. It takes a flash of lightning to get our attention in a world that draws our attention to ten disasters a day and our thoughts to the impossibility of a future on this suffering planet. Against those apocalyptic scenarios of our current world and its many prophets we hear the sound of the old Christian call, announced nonchalantly by an angel, “By the way, he is risen!” He is going ahead of us. He will not be found in the past tense; but today and tomorrow, he is here. He is… Jesus Christ!
And then the angel, the representative of the yonder world, tells the women, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there, you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”
Why Galilee? Why the northernmost province of Israel, the “Galilee of the Gentiles,” as it was commonly called? Why this humble, little-known region in the province? Because… it was home to the disciples. It was their place of origin, their identity, their place of work. Jesus sends them back to revisit their own lives with enlightened eyes, to bring resurrection into the everyday world, to raise their lives and their consciousness to a new level. How well could we live, how joyful could we be, how alive might we feel if we saw the same old world with new eyes? The same old Galilee. The same old North Wales. The same St. Peter’s. The same family and its characters. The same people at work. The same neighborhood. How different would the same old movie be if we saw it with the eyes of Easter? The greatest mystics, and it doesn’t matter which religion they belonged to, teach us about the importance to see miracles in the ordinary. Abraham Heschel said, “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” The Jew Heschel captured the Easter spirit, I think.
Easter, understood rightly, brings us radical amazement. And some of us can especially relate because they have been through their own version of death and resurrection. Some people have knocked hard on heaven’s door. Maybe it was the violent earthquake of a heart attack or the flashing light of an almost fatal accident. Someone wakes up in a hospital, recovering from an almost fatal fate, seeing the world with new eyes. Nothing is as ordinary as it used to be. All of a sudden, the smallest gifts receive some much-needed appreciation. Nothing is taken for granted. And the miracles of life, the every-day miracles of life, the amazing gifts of creation are suddenly seen for what they are. Wow!
Every year we watch trees turn from dormancy to bloom, grass pops up in fresh, virgin green colors, seeds grow… nature’s version of the resurrection. We watch this every April and you tell me, does it ever get old? The colors of a magnolia tree in full bloom, the lush heads of a rhododendron bush, the pinks and whites of cherry trees, the bright yellow forsythia, does this spectacle ever get old? Not to me. I can’t wait for my bearded irises to burst into color. We live in a world of death and resurrection. And the lesson is: our hearts must not get stuck on the first act of that spectacle but forever be ready to be awakened and rattled to new life, amazed at all that we see and all that is possible. Life keeps coming back. God is never finished with us. Jesus is claiming the old neighborhood to make it the new neighborhood. He is claiming the old church to make it the new church, always a step ahead of us. Let’s catch up. “See you in your new home,” Jesus says. Amen.
