"A Brief Recap"
An EASTER SUNDAY Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Thomas C. Leinbach
March 23, 2008 - Harwich, Massachusetts

Preaching Text: "Jesus said to her, 'Woman why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?' Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, 'Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.'" (John 20:15)

Since Christmas, I've been talking a lot about the theme of light, a theme prominent in the gospel of John.

In review, we Christians celebrate the light coming into the world at Christmas, the darkest time of the year, near as it is to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

The baby Jesus is born amidst a surrounded gloom, the dark a dominant and preeminent force. The tiny flame flickers in this darkness, as the mighty powers of the night rage and storm in an attempt to extinguish it.

We move then into the period of Epiphany, where that same fragile light is introduced to the world, represented by the Three Kings, who kneel in homage before the newly emergent light.

Then in mid-winter, I shared with you a British study that determined January 24th to be the most depressing day of the year! With Christmas celebrations now past and our new year's resolutions, begun in earnest, now all but lapsed and forgotten, we slog through, day-to-day, amidst a stolid, encircling dark.

To top it off, maybe our credit card bills have started to arrive, revealing the downside to our euphoric and costly shopping sprees. To top it off, winter has settled in, the cold and the dark dominant, as memories of long and warm days fade from memory.

But then, in Lent, a word that means "lengthen" (as in the days lengthening), we experience with each passing day the light growing steadily stronger. The forces of light reemerge, struggling mightily with the dark, offering renewed promise of that time when the sun shall triumph, banishing all shadows in its wake.

I have compared this astrological, meteorological phenomenon to what happens at Easter, when Jesus, having first entered the world as a small child, grows to full manhood to challenge and ultimately defeat, on the cross, the powers of darkness, defeating hatred, despair and death and replacing them with love, hope and life eternal. Just as the sun each spring overcomes and overwhelms the cold and dark, the cross overcomes and overwhelms humanity's greatest adversities.

Today, however, I must reject everything I've been saying since Christmas about the seasons, about how they help us to think about the cross!

In today's reading from John's gospel, we observe three people discovering the empty tomb. One is Mary, who, though she is as faithful a servant as one could hope, who gets up early in the morning before sunrise to care and tend to the grave of her beloved friend, does not perceive what has happened. Instead she thinks merely that someone has taken the body.

Similarly, Peter, as impulsive as ever, jumps ahead of the others into the now-empty cave and discovers, like Mary, that the body is gone. Yet he fails also to grasp what actually has taken place.

Finally, the "beloved disciple," John, peers into the empty tomb and knows instantly what Mary and Peter have failed to see: that Jesus has been resurrected unto eternal life.

Even after Mary enters the tomb herself and sees the resurrected Jesus with her own eyes, she still fails to recognize him, until, that is, he calls out to her by name.

So what's my point? How, in other words, does this contradict my winter-to-spring analogy as to the inevitability of the cross?

Simply put, what happened on the first Easter morning, unlike the obvious fact that spring invariably follows winter, was a complete and total surprise. Unlike the changing seasons of the year, the resurrection was not something that could have been predicted. In fact, even as Jesus tells his closest friends, including Mary, Peter and John, that he is to die and be raised again, the actual event catches them all by surprise.

What happened that day was nothing anyone could have predicted. It did not come about in "due course." It was not a part of any natural plan for this world. Instead, it was an in-breaking of the divine into the natural patterns and predictabilities of our time-bound world. It was instead an event initiated from beyond this world, from an unseen world beyond everyday knowing.

And whenever that dazzling, unseen world breaks into this one, it surprises. Always.

Take death, for instance. Years ago a childhood friend's father came down with cancer. After a couple of years battling its fury, he reached the illness' final stages. Each passing day seemed to make him that much weaker. His weight just shrank and shrank. We knew his time was near - and at any moment.

Yet I still remember the surprise I felt when a got the call that he had died. But why would I be surprised? I knew he couldn't remain in that condition forever. I knew he had to die sometime. Anyone could have predicted it.

Nonetheless, I was completely startled when I heard that he had died. The reason, I think, is because of death's stark finality, a finality that jars and confronts us with the awareness that this life is not all there is. We grow so accustomed to interpreting life solely by means of our five senses that we're shocked when their most basic assumptions prove inadequate and/or misplaced. The finality of a life suddenly lost to the world of our five senses is like a slap in the face.

It is only then, it seems, that we consider the possibility of another reality greater than this one. Only then do we seem to open up to a new awareness, one radically different from the predictabilities and patterns of this life, in the way that spring inevitably follows winter.

Mary, Peter, and even John, hadn't a clue as to what was happening. Absolutely nothing in their experience had prepared them for it. Only in retrospect could they come to sense its inevitability.

The fact is, as John's gospel attests, the divine that brought about Jesus' resurrection is a phenomenon largely hidden from us; it is a great and powerful secret, and is obvious only in hindsight. The world is blind to it, except for those with eyes to see.

For myself, I grew up in a church-going family. As a child, I was duly baptized, attended church school and was confirmed into the Christian faith. Many of my forebears, in fact, had been ministers, so it seemed only natural that I was destined to be a Christian.

I sat Sunday after Sunday in the large stone sanctuary, looking at the stained glass windows and dark wood, listening to the magnificent organ and choir, and even catching along the way a few snippets of the sermon.

But like many teenagers of my generation I left the church when I went off to college. In fact, though it embarrasses my to say so now, the first time I ever went into the university chapel on campus was with Linda maybe 10 or 12 years ago! (In case you're wondering, it's a beautiful place!!!)

With all this background and history, you might have thought I'd be a natural, if not for ordained ministry, then at least in terms of attending church regularly. Years went by without a hint of that, though. Like a lot of people, I believed in God, but God didn't really have anything much to do with my everyday existence. And the church? I had no use for it. That was strictly for hypocrites, I think I must have assumed.

But one day, in my mid-to-late twenties, as I was crossing the street going from work to McDonald's for lunch, I suddenly became aware of God in a way I'd never known before. The veil covering my world suddenly was stripped away and I saw for the first time the light hidden in-and-through the things around me. My world seemed suddenly altogether luminous and alive. God no longer seemed as merely a big idea, which is about the best I could muster at the time. Instead, God now seemed a powerful, existential reality that simply could not be denied.

During the ordination process, I was asked how I knew I had a "calling" to ordained ministry. I knew, I said, because it was nothing I'd ever set out to do, nor anything I'd ever wanted to do, either. Rather, I'd backed through every door.

I never chose to be a minister, or even a Christian. Instead, it chose me. It came from somewhere beyond my known experience. And it came to me as a total surprise.

It has long been said by Christians that it is not reason that seeks faith, but faith that seeks reason. Nothing in this world, in other words, no system of thought, no concept or idea, can prove or disprove the stuff of faith, precisely because that stuff is not of this world. Our mind is merely a mechanism that allows us to categorize and systematize what is. If our frame of reference is only of the things of this world, we will never know faith's truths, which is why neither Mary nor Peter grasped it at first.

Yet if we have known that experience of the in-breaking of the divine, that otherness to which this world is all but blind, then our minds can know of its great things and wondrous things.

Easter is that time when we are confronted yet again with the truth of God's strange and unearthly otherness. It's that time when we encounter, as did the very first disciples, the surprising grace born of something far greater and far more real than what commonly is found in this predictive and time-bound world. Throughout the ages, countless people have stumbled onto this surprise and have found in it unearthly joy, peace and love, which, ultimately, yet only in retrospect, proves itself to entirely and completely inevitable.

Amen.