Unusual Joy

Easter Sunday

Colossians 3:1-4

John 20:1-18

Well, here I am.  And here you are.  We’re here.  Why are you here?  What brings you here?  What is it you want?  What are you hoping to find or discover?

We began today’s service with a call, “He is risen.”  And the response, “He is risen indeed!”

In the Apostles’ Creed, which we recite together often, we confess, “I believe in Jesus Christ, [and that on] the third day he rose again from the dead”.

 

So on one level, we’re here to take part in an ancient, enduring, defining celebration of the church – that God is victorious, that we have a future, that light is stronger than the dark, that hope is stronger than despair, that God’s life is more powerful than death.

But many of us are here for another reason, which is a little harder to name or define.  We want to experience something bigger, better, and more beautiful than what we usually experience.  We wonder whether there is more light and love and beauty hiding in our lives than we usually notice.  We wonder whether there is more energy and passion in our daily routines than we normally settle for.  And if so, how can we find it, open ourselves to it, and get more in touch with it?

John’s gospel account of that first Easter morning shows us people like us who woke up expecting that day to be like other days.  They were slaves to the normal, the habitual, the expected, the taken for granted.  Their friend and leader had died on Friday.  And after waiting through the Sabbath on Saturday, Mary Magdalene comes to finish preparing the dead body for a proper burial.

But nothing in this story is where it should be.  The characters in the story keep finding things missing.  Mary goes to the tomb in the garden early on Sunday morning while it’s still dark.  She expected the body to be there, where she saw it placed late on Friday.  But the heavy stone that sealed the entrance had been rolled back.  She doesn’t leap for joy.  She doesn’t start singing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today!”  She isn’t thinking the impossible.  She’s still plodding along in the usual.

She runs and tells the disciples that “they have taken the Lord out of the tomb” (v. 2).  It is perfectly appropriate for us to be rejoicing today.  But we also ought to notice that the gospel account is more about confusion than rejoicing.

Did you notice the attention the gospel gives to the scene witnessed by Peter and the unnamed disciple?  The younger, quicker unnamed disciple wins the footrace to the tomb.  Then finally out of shape Peter huffs and puffs his way there.  We’re told that they saw the grave cloths lying in place, and the cloth that covered Jesus’ head lying neatly by itself.  Why include these odd details?  Are we to imagine that the newly raised Jesus awoke and first neatly folded his clothes like a diligent employee at the Gap?  Or is it perhaps that this detail is the first clue that all our normal assumptions are to be suspended.  This story begins as a story about a moved or stolen body.  But it is headed somewhere much more unusual. 

This is a story that asks us to open ourselves to the unusual and unexpected.  The closer you look, the more unusual the world appears.

During a trip to south Florida when I was young, I discovered an interesting class of fish known as “wrasse.”  Most species of the wrasse fish are hermaphroditic – they’re born with both male and female reproductive organs.  (Actually, this is true for more mollusks, worms, and fish than you might realize).  So these fish live in harems – there is a larger, aggressive adult male who leads and defends a school of smaller female fish.  But guess what.  When the male becomes unable to lead or just dies, one of the females from the harem morphs into a larger male and begins to lead the harem.  You can thank me for this National Geographic moment later.  But the natural world is full of astonishingly unusual things like this.

We learned recently that the economy is more unusual than we realized.  Michael Lewis published a book called “Flash Boys,” about the rise of high frequency or computerized stock trading.  We all have images in our head of the New York Stock exchange in NYC.  And we’ve seen stock brokers yelling and making signals to one another on a floor covered with notes and paper; they’re on the phones buying and selling stock.  Only, that’s not the way it works anymore.  There isn’t one central stock exchange.  There are eight or ten (one of the biggest is the BATS exchange, in KC).  And those traders don’t have jobs anymore.  Because computers and software do all the trading in milliseconds.  And Lewis’ main point is to explain how investment banks and hedge funds pay for special access to these exchanges, so they can execute their order just a millisecond or two faster than other institutions.  What difference does a millisecond make?  Well, billions and billions of dollars difference.  What a strange world we live in!

Astronomers keep reminding us what an odd universe we inhabit.  They use massive telescopes to look for evidence of what happened in the very earliest sliver of cosmic time.  And they are now closer than ever.  Powerful telescopes allow astronomers to observe gravitational waves that are billions of light years in length – waves called “ripples in the fabric of space time.”  And these waves are evidence of a process called “inflation” that got the universe started about 14 billion years ago.

Here’s just one little paragraph from the article:

“Confirming inflation . . . means that the universe we see, extending 14 billion light-years in space with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.”   That’s crazy talk!  But it’s not sci-fi.  It’s the best scientific description of the world we inhabit!

Or instead of the science of cosmology, consider the strange technology of a recently discovered material called “graphene”:

About ten years ago, researchers discovered how to make a form of graphite called graphene.  It’s basically graphite that is one atom thick.  And it’s the toughest material in the world – about 200 times as tough as steel.  But get this, it’s also flexible and light.  And it’s a perfect conductor of electricity.  So it is already possible to make a cellphone as thin as a piece of paper that can be folded and put in your pocket.  The material is so light that one ounce of graphene would cover 28 football fields.  One cubic inch of it could balance on the tip of a blade of grass without bending it.

This is probably the part where some of you are elbowing the person next to you, saying, “What on earth is he getting at?”  Well, I’m hoping to awaken all of us to the fact that the world we live in, that reality itself, is more unusual than we imagine.

Of course, if you want to, you can stick your head in the sand and avoid all this wonder and mystery.  You can block out the strangeness all around you and play the game of convincing yourself that everything is flat, clear, and known.

In some areas of life, we want certainty and precision.  When we are baking, or measuring cloth for a dress, or a joist for a deck, when we’re doing algebra or writing computer code.  All these projects call for clarity and exactness.

And yet this text we have read on this Easter day is far from clear and exact.  It is full of wonder and mystery.  It doesn’t invite us to figure everything out like a math problem.  It seems rather to invite us into the experience of living in a world more unusual, and more unusually joyful, than we would have ever guessed.

When Mary first sees the stone rolled away, she runs to tell the disciples that the body has been moved.  They run to the tomb.  The disciple Jesus loved gets there first but doesn’t go in.  Peter lumbers to the tomb late but stumbles right on inside, and sees the neatly folded grave clothes.  We don’t know what Peter thought.  The unnamed disciple then goes in and “believes.”  But what he “believed” at that point, we have no idea.  Because the gospel immediately follows that line with a caveat that they didn’t understand yet that Jesus was raised from the dead.

Apparently Mary had run back to the tomb right behind them, because when Peter and the unnamed disciple head home, she’s already standing there again.  Now she looks in again, still hoping to find the dead body.  But what she sees are two figures seated on the ledge where the body should have been.  (This is a funny picture, angels “seated”).

We’re told they’re angels, but Mary doesn’t know that.  They ask her why she’s weeping.  Her response - “someone has taken away my Lord” - shows that she is still completely unaware of what’s going on.  She then turns away from the tomb and bumps into the risen figure of the one she’s seeking.  But the comedy plays on.  She still doesn’t recognize him.  She thinks him the gardener and asks for help finding the dead body.  The gardener asks her again why she’s weeping. 

Then he speaks her name, “Mary.”  And now it appears that the comedic delay is over.  Finally, she recognizes him.  She finds the one she’s seeking.  She has what she wants.  So she reaches for him to embrace him, the most normal thing in the world to do.  But the risen Jesus says, “Don’t hold on to me, for I am ascending to the Father.”

Here we are on Easter Sunday.  And like Mary, Peter, and the other disciple, we have questions and doubts.  We want our questions answered and our doubts settled.  We want some straight-forward good news.  But the risen Jesus warns us not to grab and clutch at him.  He is risen but cannot be grabbed or clutched. 

So where does this leave us?  It leaves us with something like unusual joy.  It leaves us in a place where our expectations for what life is like have been upturned.  We don’t get easy answers or final clarity.  What we get instead is good news that meets us at the deepest level of who we are – where our questions and doubts are mixed and mingled with our joy.

Maybe that’s why we’re here.  Me and you.  All of us.  Maybe we’re here because we’re summoned here by the strangeness of life.  We’re here because we want to pay tribute to something so deep in us it’s hard to name.  Call it “the refusal to give up.”  Or, “the persistence of goodness in the face of disappointment.”  We want to bring ourselves into communion with something beautiful and powerful that touches the very deepest part of who we are.  “He is risen indeed.”