I don’t know about you, but when things are bad, my motto is that misery loves company. When everything fell apart with the coronavirus, in the absence of living miserable human company, right off the bat I read Daniel Defoe’s journal of the plague year from the 1600s. When we moved into isolation to save ourselves, the severe and bizarre desert fathers, the earliest Christian monastic movement, would take me 10,000 steps farther to choosing to live one’s whole life in a 10’ square cell. Times get bad, and I want the company of detailed histories of past miseries.
On Good Friday we lingered for a bit in the silence of Jesus when Pilate asks, “What is truth?” He wouldn’t… or at least he didn’t give an answer. What I put forth in that sermon was that we humans tend to mistake explanations for the truth sometimes. Or maybe it’s better said that we too often think the truth can be reduced to an explanation.
Salvation is a present reality as well as a future hope. First Peter more aptly describes these two dimensions as one by calling them a “living hope.” When Jairus said to Jesus, “Come and save my daughter,” Jesus didn’t say, “I’ll take care of that in the after-life.” Instead, Jesus went to the bedside and saved his daughter. And he saved someone else along the way.
Have you ever come to the Easter story with a sense that we can take out whatever seems unhelpful, unbelievable, incomprehensible, or strange? And then enrich it with the meanings we think we need? I almost certainly will again before I finish this sermon. All I know to do is to come clean and ask you to agree with me that what we hope to do this Easter morning is to take our lives as they actually are to the Good News as it actually is and trust that what we are most in need of God has already knit deep within it.
This Easter season I find myself most identifying with Jesus’s male disciples. Their first experience of the resurrection did not happen through the magnificent appearance of an angel or by falling at the feet of the risen Jesus himself. Instead, resurrection came to them as they were locked away in their homes, just as you are tonight.