Dumbest. Question. Ever.

I Corinthians 15:19-26

Luke 24:1-12

I’m glad you’re here.  I don’t mean I’m glad that our sanctuary is full on Easter Sunday.  I just mean that I’m glad that we’re together as we do our best to listen, one more time, to the news that Jesus Christ is risen, and living.

If this isn’t true.  If this isn’t deeply, meaningfully true.  If this doesn’t get at some profound mystery at the heart of the universe, then we are engaged in a scheme of grand exaggeration.  There is absolutely no sense playing at religion or faith or church if we are not here as those gathered by the living Christ.  The only reason to be here with gladness and hope is to be here in response to some kind of experience in which we feel called or pulled or enticed or invited into a new world by something or someone splendidly alive.

So a lot is at stake for us.  And yet I stand here without any good arguments.  I fully admit, I can’t prove this to you.  I can’t convince you that “resurrection” happened.  I can’t make sense of it, or make it believable.  All I can do is tell you that I have experienced it as true.  All I can do is confess that for me and for many people I know – (now some of the people I know are gullible fools of course, but a few of them are thoughtful and trustworthy) – for us the living Christ is more real than tables and chairs.

I apologize for a sermon title that is disrespectful at best, blasphemous at worst.  But I can't help it.  The question asked by the two dazzling men of the women at the empty tomb was . . . well . . . a really dumb question when you think about it.

"Why do you look for the living among the dead?" they ask.

What did you expect them to look for?  They saw him die on Friday.  They cannot be blamed for living with disappointment and despair.  Neither can we.  There is a lot wrong with the world.  There is a lot wrong with us.  It's not at all obvious that life is shot through with the glory of the risen Christ.  How can it be true that the crucified Jesus is now the "living" one?  How can one dead and buried now be among us as a lively presence?  

The women who made their way to the tomb early that morning are listed rather late in the story (v. 10).  A few of the women are named, including Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James.  But Luke also mentions “the others with them.”  So perhaps there were six, or eight or ten.

Luke has already told us about these women.   Jesus traveled with the twelve male apostles, but also with “some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases:  Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna, the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna, and many others” (8:2-3)

Here is a group of women for whom Jesus made all the difference in the world. “Cured” is the language Luke uses.  Some were cured of evil spirits.  Others were cured of assorted diseases.  Mary Magdalene was in an especially terrible bind – her life twisted out of shape by not one but seven demons.  Whether demoniacs or diseased, each of these women were sidelined from normal life.  They were human beings barred from healthy connections of care and support with their families and communities.

The women who came to the tomb were women cured and healed.  But Luke adds one more detail about these women.  “These women were helping to support [Jesus and the apostles] out of their own means” (8:3).

These women responded to their healing by using their resources to provide for Jesus and the apostles in their travels.  These were women with resources.  We don’t know if they were wealthy, but they definitely weren’t poor.  Joanna’s husband Chuza was the chief of staff for Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee.  Clearly they had sufficient means to support Jesus’ traveling entourage.  So it’s not surprising that these women were the ones to provide the costly spices and cloth for burial.  Nor is it surprising that these women would express their affection by caring for Jesus’ dead body.

But like these women, we too have experienced gladness and excitement that didn’t last.  Life has let us down.  Our hopes for vibrant and exciting and meaningful lives have dried up.  And so we come here today not expecting much.

We have been duped or let down too many times.  And we won’t let it happen again.  We don’t trust people who make grandiose promises.  We expect to be lied to by political candidates who tell us they’ll fix everything.  We expect to be lied to by marketers who tell us their product will make us happy.  We expect to be bored by the drudgery of our daily obligations. 

Even the cultural festivity of the Easter holiday can’t quite fill us with hope.  Some of us got out of school or work on Friday.  Eggs have been decorated and hunted.  Easter baskets have been filled.  Hams have been baked (stick with ham – I tried to roast lamb for my family a few years ago and I was the only one who ate it).  The cross out front has been decorated with fresh flowers.  The stage here lined with beautiful lilies. 

And yet none of it can quite convince us that life has pivoted away from struggle and sameness into a new direction of hope, healing, and gladness.  The bombing in Brussels is simply the latest in a long string of terrorist attacks, linking back to Paris, to many places in Africa, and to 9/11 here in the US.  The world feels unsafe, as if it’s unraveling towards chaos and violence.  And no amount of impressive technology can quite relieve us of our unease.  The economy is unfair.  Jobs are hard to come by.  Marriages are stressful.  Metrics for health and well-being are in decline, especially in communities like ours.  “Why are WE here, looking for the living among the dead?”  Because life trains us to trim our expectations, and to guard against too much hope.

And so we come here with the women, wanting more healing, more connection, more meaning in life.  But not expecting much.  And then we hear from the dazzling men that we were wrong.  Our low expectations are understandable, yes, but they’re wrong.  He isn’t here.  He has risen.

You have to be careful with wild things.  In 2003 during a sold out Sigfried and Roy magic show in Las Vegas, Roy Horn was attacked by the tiger they used for the act.  This was a 380 pound white Bengal tiger they had raised from the time it was a cub.  The seven year old animal had performed 2,000 times without incident.  This night, for reasons still not known, the huge animal attacked Horn in front of a live audience, knocked him to the ground, then dragged him from the stage by the neck.   (I see some of you headed for youtube on your phones right now!)  Luckily, Horn lived.  Despite a thorough investigation – no cause or triggering event was discovered.  The tiger was not hungry.  It was not distracted by a woman’s beehive hairdo in the front row.  And no one had sprayed it with a chemical that made it aggressive.  Maybe it was a wild animal that grew tired of doing tricks to entertain people.

If you want to see orcas perform at Sea World, you better go soon.  Sea World recently announced the end of their orca breeding program.  This generation of killer whales will be the last in a theme park.  This is surprising, given that there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in park fees and Free Willy merchandise.  Sea World stopped capturing orcas in the wild decades ago.  Since then they have been breeding them in captivity.  Twenty three of Sea World’s orcas were bred and born there in the theme park.  But they will be the last.  Sea World is getting out of the orca business following the 2013 documentary Blackfish, which alleged that orcas suffer terribly when confined in theme parks.  The documentary came out after an orca named Tilikum killed its trainer in 2010.  The initial press release from Sea World stated that the orca was distracted by the trainer’s pony tail. But when the video was released, it was clear that the pony tail wasn’t the issue.  The orca lunged aggressively and grabbed the trainer by the left arm and dragged her to the bottom.  Maybe it was tired of being captive, swimming in circles to entertain people.

Some of you know this already.  But there are auctions around here where you can buy exotic animals.  Not farm animals like cattle, horses, goats, lambs and pigs.  Exotic animals.  Weird stuff.  Like snakes and rare birds.  I was talking to a friend who’s a farmer and he said his wife likes to go to these exotic animal auctions.  At one auction, she bought two llamas.  She called him on her way home and said, “Guess what?  I just bought two llamas!”  “But you don’t know anything about llamas or how to raise them,” he said.  “Well, no one was bidding and I got them for next to nothing.”  She brought them back in a trailer, put them in a cattle pen and came inside the house.

“You better get online and figure out how to take care of llamas,” he said.  And so she did.  And one of the first articles she read said that llamas can jump.  And so you need to have high fences to keep llamas.  She was reading this to her husband.  And he said, “Well that would have been good to know before you brought them home.”  And she walked out the door to check on them in the pen.  They were gone.  You can’t keep llamas in regular cattle pens.

It would be wonderful if I could point you to some specific miraculous healing as a sign of the risen Christ’s ongoing healing work.  But I can’t.  It would be wonderful if I could argue that the grit and persistence of Jesus’ followers proves that their lives are lit from within by the living Christ.  I probably can’t.  But you at least have to consider the real possibility that every kind of healing that happens is an expression of the risen Christ’s ongoing work.  And you at least have to consider the real possibility that the only thing that keeps people going when they reorganize and realign their lives toward humble and sacrificial love is the encouragement and strength that comes from the living Christ.

There is a wildness to the risen Christ.  And there is a wildness to these gospel stories of resurrection.  They raise the possibility that this one crushed and crucified is now risen and alive.  And if true, he is utterly out of our control.  If he is among us now as the living one, then his work of curing the sick and healing the possessed and welcoming the poor continues in the faces and hands and lives of his followers, regular people like us.

Christ will not stay where we put him.  Christ isn’t dead.  The real worry is that we are – dead to hope, dead to joy, dead to new directions in life.  The real worry is that we will become either too busy or too skeptical to experience healing in ourselves and others, and stumble through life unaware of the risen, wounded healer who is the source of all healing.  The real worry is that we never quite bring ourselves to rejoice, and never quite give ourselves fully to that rejoicing.  To that deep gladness that emerges in those who can sing, “Hallelujah!  Christ is risen!”