Easter Sunday C
Text: Luke 24:1-12
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church
April 17, 2022
Risen Today
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
“I believe in the resurrection of the body.” We say those words as part of our basic Christian creed just about every Sunday, but I wonder if we really believe it, that it is the body that will be resurrected! In the common thinking about this, when we die it’s the body that is left behind, and there’s something that’s kind of a soul only – something dis-embodied – that has everlasting life.
You can see this in our wider cultural depictions of afterlife. There are a lot of them; it’s actually pretty common for our best-shared cultural figures to make appearances after death, if you think about it: Obi-Wan does it; so does Darth Vader, for that matter. Dumbledore. Gandalf.
But notice that they all come back from the dead in some kind of gauzy, other-worldly, soft-focus and vaguely spiritual way. Then there’s Proof of Heaven book, in which that neurosurgeon talks about his operating table near-death experience and his encounters with angelic beings and his experience of what he calls “super-physical existence.” Note again that it’s not the resurrection of the body that he talks about there, but rather some way in which the body is left behind.
But Christianity has never taught a disembodied future in heaven. Our beliefs are much more radical than that. Our story is told here, with real bodies on this real earth.
Because the Easter story is that Jesus really died. He did not appear to die. He did not die in spirit; he died in body. He wasn’t dead for a moment on the operating room table having an out-of-body experience; he was dead, sealed in the grave for three days; his death was kind of an in-the-body experience. He didn’t show some “immortal soul,” some “divine spark” that lived on in him or in the hearts and minds of his disciples. That’s an old pagan understanding that has oozed over into our culture, but that’s not the Easter story. Jesus was dead. The women who came to the tomb at dawn knew this. They had seen where his body was laid, and they came on the first day of the week with spices they had prepared to anoint a dead body.
Why am I harping on this? This is important because it proclaims that what happened on Easter Day did not happen in some spiritual alternative universe, but in our world. In our world, where people weep and grieve, and are confused, and fear is real, and things end in tragedy. You can proclaim if you want that heaven is for real. What I’m saying is that the Easter story proclaims resurrection, and therefore Easter proclaims that this world is for real.
This is better than the Hollywood fantasies. The resurrection of the body, Jesus’ body … or yours … means that this world matters, now. We may not know exactly how all this can happen, how our resurrected bodies in this world are gonna look. As St. Paul says, “It does not yet appear what we shall be.” But we do believe that just as Jesus’ body was raised, so shall ours. Easter wasn’t God saying, Let me get you out of this terrible, deadly, tearful world. Easter was God saying, Let me show you what I am doing, right here!, to you and your world.
You take the resurrection of the body away, and Christianity becomes just one more method of wish fulfillment, a means of escape into some Nirvana of our own creation, ignoring this world that God made and loves, for the sake of a false spiritual heaven that does not really exist and wouldn’t be all that interesting even if it did.
But you take the resurrection of the body seriously, and you have a great resurrection responsibility laid on your shoulders. It means you ain’t waiting for someday. If you can sing today, “Thine Is the Glory, Risen, Conq’ring Son,” then you are saying that Jesus Christ really is Lord, and all the other would-be lordlets of this world are not. When we call on “choirs of angels, loud and clear, to repeat their song of glory here,” we really mean here, wherever evil still dares to challenge the reign of a good and loving God, we’ll sing that song of glory right here. If you believe “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” then get ready to witness to that the next time some entity in this world driven by hate, or cruelty, or rapacious exploitation tries to tell you that death is still in charge. That’ll be a good day for you, a day on which you get a crack yourself at resurrected life. That’ll be an Easter Day for you, that day when you raise that witness.
I notice that in Hollywood, when people die and come back, afterward, everything tends to get fuzzy, vaporous, and pink and lavender. However did we let the blood-and-guts message of the Easter story be taken over by pastels? Here in church, we don’t do Easter with pastels! Here in church, we do Easter with green and blue and red and gold and white. Here in church, we do Easter with the things of this world – candles and banners, children and old people, and above all, with music that stirs the heart and the mind and the gut. Here in church, we do Easter with real things like commitment to relationship and commitment to community. Here in church, we do Easter with lives transformed and resurrected that move out into offices and workplaces, into friendships and parenthood, faithfully into classrooms and households and onto ballfields, faithfully, into school board meetings and marriages and sickrooms and voting booths, all with the audacious resurrection claim that victory over the old, dead ways – those old, dead ways that have never got us anywhere! – that victory has now been won, and it’s a new day for God’s people and for God’s beloved world that dawns this morning. We can do all things, in an all new way. It’s like a world that’s been out of tune, a world marching to the dirge-like beat of death, finally gets back its intended lilting melody, driven by trumpets; as if the whole creation, once in the grip of futility and deadly stillness, now soars in song having been healed, reclaimed by a God determined not to leave this world behind, not to leave us to our own devices, and never to leave us without hope.
Are we going to know resurrection after death, in the sweet by-and-by? Yeah, I suppose. But we’re not gonna wait for that. Our resurrected new life begins now. Because Jesus Christ is risen … today.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!