Scared to Life

Luke 24:1-12
But on the first day of the week, in the earliest moments of dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body.
While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in brilliant clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and they bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but rather he has been raised. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Humanity must be handed over to sinful people, and crucified, and on the third day rise again.”
They did remember his words, and they returned from the tomb and told all of this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary – the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words were to them as a idle tale and they did not believe them.
But Peter got up and ran to the tomb. Stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths lying by themselves. Then he went back, amazed at what had happened.

Well, we have come through the snow and through the wind. We have started the week with palm branches and we ended it with broken branches. We have walked the journey of Lent and we have gone through the drama of Holy Week and the story of Jesus' crucifixion. And today – look at how beautiful we are – with our lilies and our smiles and the altar all decked out in white. Today must be a special day. And it is.

But the message that I want to give you today is a scary story. It's not Halloween scary, but it is scary in its own way. And what I want to say this morning is really very simple. If you lose your place while I'm speaking or if you nod off sometime during the next three hours this is really all that I have to say today: If you are sick and tired of being scared to death, maybe it's time to be scared to life. If you are tired of being scared to death, maybe it's time to be scared to life.

Now what could that possibly mean? Well, I think what we know what it's like to be scared to death. A lot of us live with that feeling for most of our lives. Fear is our constant, unwelcome companion. Fear haunts the soldiers patrolling the streets of Baghdad and Kabul, never knowing if they will be facing a roadside bomb. It also haunts the residents of those cities who go to the market, never knowing, never trusting that all is well even as they go about the daily tasks of life because it all can end with an explosion. Fear is the state of life in the Congo and in Darfur where at any moment rival armies or gangs could overwhelm your village.

But it's not always that dramatic. All it takes is for a doctor to say, in the calmest of voices, that something strange has appeared on a scan and we are gripped by fear. When you get your first driver's license, teenagers, that is not usually a fearful day for you, but for your parents...it is a scary day. When the bills come due or April 17 rolls around...when a loved one is gripped by an addiction they can't overcome...when your boyfriend leaves you...when your girlfriend dumps you...when you wonder if you can find a job...when you wonder if you're losing your touch...your grip...your basic abilities...when you feel out of control...I know you know what it's like to be scared to death.

It was a familiar feeling for those disciples that we read about in the Bible. They came into Jerusalem with Jesus hoping that he was going to turn the place upside down, but when it actually started to happen they weren't so sure they liked it. Some of them must have winced and said, “O, Jesus, don't go too far.” When it all turned and it began to be clear where this was headed – to a cross – some of them ran away, some of them denied Jesus, and when Jesus was sealed behind the stone of his tomb, they were sealed behind the doors of a locked room. The disciples knew what it was like to be scared to death. They expected it. They lived with that. They saw what happened when people tried to defy the ruling authorities. There were crosses lined along every major roadway hung with the bodies of rebels.

Death was what they spent a lot of time thinking about. What they weren't prepared for was life. And that's where this story takes a turn nobody expected.

Now first let me say that I know there's a lot of dispute about this story. It seems like every year when we get to Holy Week there are cover articles on Newsweek and specials on TV all questioning some aspect of the resurrection stories. This year was no different. James Cameron, the director of Titanic, put his money and his prestige behind a television program on the Discovery Channel that tried to prove that a tomb found in Jerusalem contained the bones of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The evidence was very flimsy and ended up proving absolutely nothing but he attracted a lot of attention from people who still believe that this thing we celebrate every year at Easter must be too good to be true.

And really who could blame them? Maybe you're one of those folks, too. Sometimes it's me, too. What Easter asks you to believe is something that wouldn't pass muster in a history or a science class. So what makes us Christians claim that this is a story so true that it's worth staking your life on? What is it that we find here that we don't find anywhere else?

When we look at the gospels we notice something right away. They each have distinctive features that may make us wonder if they have seen the same thing. You know there are four gospels and the first three – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – generally tell Jesus' story in the same way. Biblical scholars call these the synoptic gospels. Synoptic comes from a Greek root that means to “see together” and they generally see things the same way. The baptism, the feeding of the multitudes, the crucifixion – all these are told pretty much the same in these three gospels.

But then you get to the resurrection and here the details are unique in each one. As Mark tells it, three women come to the tomb, find the stone rolled away, meet one man who tells them that Jesus has been raised, and then run away and don't tell anyone what they've seen. In Matthew, the Jerry Bruckheimer of the gospel narrators, there are all kinds of pyrotechnics. There is an earthquake, an angel descends from heaven and rolls away the stone, there are guards watching the tomb who are paralyzed with fear, there are two women who are told that Jesus has been raised and then Jesus himself appears to them.

Does it surprise you that we have such different stories. It's really not that surprising to me. After all, you know that when we are telling stories of things that are important to us the details we give are often very different from what other people remember. I took a group of college students on a mission team to the Texas-Mexico border once. What I remember from that trip are encounters with customs agents each day as we crossed over into Mexico to work on a new church, a memorable trip to the beach where I discovered that the Rio Grande didn't even empty into the Gulf of Mexico anymore since it was drained of water for irrigation before it ever got there. Those are the kinds of things I remember.

But if you ask other people on that trip they will remember different things. One student found a piece of her calling there and when she tells the story of that trip it was an encounter with God that meant things couldn't be the same afterwards. Two other students fell in love on that trip and later got married. The way they tell what happened that week is entirely different again. We were all on the same trip but if you asked us what it looked like...what it meant...even what happened...you will get some very unique stories.

But there is one thing that is the same in all of these gospel stories. And it's the fear. It's there in Luke, our gospel reading for the morning. Luke puts us in company with a number of women, at least Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. He hints that the group was even larger. They have been waiting for a chance to visit the tomb. While the other disciples have gone into hiding, they still feel an obligation to the body of Jesus.

After his crucifixion he had been taken to a tomb donated by a man named Joseph. But because the Jewish customs of the day forbid contact with a dead body on the sabbath, the women had to wait to take spices to the tomb. So it was in the earliest hours of Sunday morning that they finally came to the tomb.

Now because it was a wealthy person's tomb, there was a large stone rolled in front of it. But the stone is gone when they arrive. Something has happened in the night. Maybe there was a theft. Or maybe something else has happened. Nobody is saying resurrection yet. Who would believe that?

So the women enter the tomb and they find it empty. In their confusion they suddenly see two men...angels they must have been. Their clothes are bright as lightning or the stars in the sky on a bright winter night. The women had been perplexed but now they are terrified. They fall down on their faces.

This is the appropriate response to angels. We know this because generally the first words out of an angel's mouth are, “Don't be afraid.” But the angels don't say that this time. Seems like they know that the women ought to be afraid.

This is the thing that Matthew, Mark and Luke tell in the same way – what it felt like to be there on the first Easter. The women in Matthew are filled with fear. In Mark they are first alarmed, then terrified, then amazed, then afraid. In Luke they are perplexed and then terrified, and later Peter comes and he is amazed. The overwhelmingly consistent message is – they were scared.

Which tells me that one of the most natural responses to the story that life as we know it has changed forever is to be scared out of your wits. We have developed some pretty good cultural coping devices for handling death. We're still trying to come to grips with life. And when an empty tomb (more so than the angel) tells us that death is not the last word to this story of our lives, that's pretty scary stuff. What do we tell the kids? What do we tell an educational system that is preparing us for a world without meaning or destiny? What do we tell our pension advisers who think that the endpoint that we have to prepare for is retirement? What do we tell our television executives who give us “Nip and Tuck” and “Extreme Makeover” and a hundred other shows that tell us, “Yes, it really is all about how you look and what you wear and, man, doesn't it stink to be imperfect?” What do we tell ourselves when we live with this still, small voice that says, “Don't expect too much. Don't get your hopes up. Don't be so crazy as to think that anything could ever be any different than it is.”

If I tell you that the whole world is wrong...is that scary? If I tell you that you've been lied to, does the earth seem to shift beneath your feet? If I tell you that we weren't able to put Jesus behind us on a cross on Friday, are you relieved or terrified? If Jesus really is the inescapable one, the one who shows us what life is all about and who we are meant to be and what God intends to do with us, how does that make you feel?

Maybe it can make you scared in just the right ways. If you're sick and tired of being scared to death, maybe it's good news to be scared to life. It means that, painful as it may be, things are going to change.

Out in Arizona there has been a lot of controversy about a new attraction that has been built on the rim of the Grand Canyon. The Hualapai native American tribe has built a glass platform in the shape of a horseshoe out over the canyon. For $25 you can walk out over the canyon and look down below your feet 4,000 feet to the canyon floor.

Truthfully, I think it's a little tacky. But I imagine what it must be like to have that view. It is impressive enough from the edge of the rim. To look down that far is to have a sense of vulnerable we are as human creatures. Our lives are so fragile. And yet the exhilaration of being in the presence of one of God's greatest marvels! Paul tells us, in talking about human beings, that we have this treasure in fragile earthen vessels, but say it another way and you know it's true that we have this treasure in earthen vessels!

In a recent article, the writer Darcey Steinke tells the story of how she struggled, as the daughter of a pastor, to make sense of the Easter story. “Since I was a teenager,” she says, “I've lived in a world mostly devoid of divinity. But now I see the sacred includes not just churches but hospitals, highways, costume jewelry, garbage dumps, libraries, the cruising area of public parks. Also pet stores, subway platforms, Ferris wheels and rain storms.” She says that she clings to her Christian faith, even in a world that is often “brutal, full of horror and violence,” because she also sees that “life is beautiful, full of passion and joy.”[i]

It is Jesus who helps us to see this about the world. Because when we leave this place this morning the things that were there before we came in will still be there. Easter morning doesn't change that. The world still turns. The wars still rage. The water still flows to the sea.

But even if things still look the same, Easter morning comes to say that they aren't. Even if some of us see earthquakes and others a hushed garden...even if some of us see angels...even if some of us hear voices and others remember promises made...the tomb is still empty. We don't know the mechanics of how it got that way. Unlike Mel Gibson, the gospels don't give us a visual of linen clothes falling to the ground and a re-made Jesus striding out the door. They're just going to show you the tomb and then show you the scared, terrified, amazed, perplexed, and overwhelmed women and then the men who saw that tomb and eventually said, “This changes everything.” And they have been giving witness to the power of this morning ever since.

You don't have to be different when you leave here this morning. But honestly, do you want to continue to live with the fear of death? Because that is a very unsatisfactory alternative. Perfect love casts out fear. That's what the scriptures tell us. And we have been given a perfect love in Jesus. And now we cannot say that there is any place on earth that is not full of the presence of God.

You don't have to be different when you leave here this morning. But you can be. You've heard the story. You've seen the community that has been formed by that story. And you don't have to believe that there's nothing new under the sun, because God knows there is. Thanks be to God.

[i] Darcey Steinke, “Something to believe in,” Salon.com, 4/7/2007, www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/04/07/easter_everywhere