Show me your resurrection! Great Vigil of Easter 2019 The Rev. David M. Stoddart

Luke 24:1-12

The Great Vigil of Easter

I read about an encounter once between a Christian scholar and a Buddhist monk. The Christian wanted to tell the monk all about Jesus and what Christians believe about Jesus, and asked him to read the four Gospels. And the Buddhist monk, who was eager to learn about Christianity, read them.  And afterwards, he came to discuss them with this scholar. The Christian was all prepared to delve into the Gospel narratives and talk about their historical veracity and explain what exactly happened and why. But the Buddhist was not interested in any of that. His first comment was, “I loved reading this! Show me your resurrection!”

I think that comment offers a profound insight into the nature of our faith and sheds light on what we are doing here in the darkness of our Easter Vigil. When the women arrive at the tomb and find it empty, the angels say to them, Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. He is not here. The women do not linger at the tomb. When Peter comes to check it out, he doesn’t hang around for long, either. The first believers made no fetish of the empty tomb. The disciples didn’t build a shrine there, they didn’t take curious tourists to show them the tomb and explain what happened there. What matters is that it was empty. Jesus was not there: he was already moving on ahead of them — to the Emmaus road, to Galilee, and out into the whole world. It wasn’t until the fourth century, after Christianity became an established and socially acceptable and institutional religion, that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built over land that some people believed to be the site of the tomb. It was only then that pilgrims started to pour into Jerusalem and venerate the site. But, you know, the message is still the same: Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.

The Great Vigil of Easter is an ancient liturgy. Two thousand years of tradition lie behind what we are doing tonight, which of course contributes to the beauty and richness of this worship. But for all that, this is not a backwards looking liturgy: all the readings reveal a God who is constantly moving forward: creating a universe, setting people free from bondage, breathing life into dry bones, saving, healing, redeeming. So let’s be clear: we are not here to indulge in nostalgia. We embrace this ancient liturgy precisely because it reminds us that God is always doing something new. We will not find the living among the dead; we are not going to linger at that empty tomb any more than those women did. The Risen Christ is calling us now in the present moment and leading us into the future.

But that, ironically, is often what makes it hard for people to experience resurrection in their lives. So often we cling to the past; like the Israelites pining for the fleshpots of Egypt, we long for things to be the way they were, even if they enslaved us. Jesus recognizes this very human tendency. In Luke’s Gospel, a man says he will follow Jesus but first just wants to bury his father, and Jesus says to him, Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God (Luke 9:60). That sounds harsh to us, but it conveys the truth. If anything holds us back — old habits, comfortable patterns of living, dysfunctional relationships, smothering family ties, regrets, sins of the past, anything — Jesus tells us to let it go and follow him into the future. As he says to another person who wants to linger in the old ways, No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God (Luke 9:62). That is not a condemnation, but a statement of fact. God doesn’t live in the past. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.

That monk got it right when he said, “”Show me your resurrection.” He intuitively understood that the resurrection means Christ is at work among his people now. And of course he is: I see it all the time. I see it when a grieving widow discovers new ways of living and loving; I see it when an addict gets clean and begins a new life; I see it in the full acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and in the movement towards racial reconciliation; I see it whenever people are growing spiritually, whenever people are open to new understanding and new ways of being and serving. At one of our recent Wednesday healing services, a woman came forward and asked me to pray for more joy in her life. Yes! In so many ways I see the Risen Christ.

So if we come here tonight only to remember a past event, we will miss the point, and more importantly, we will miss the Risen Lord. If someone said to you, “Show me your resurrection,” what would you show them? Where are you experiencing new life? How is the Risen Lord trying to help you let go of the past and move into the future, God’s future for you, which is always good? How are you living as a resurrection person? Those may be easy questions for us to answer or they may be hard ones, but they are the questions we need to ask ourselves if we seek to actually know Jesus Christ. For we do not proclaim that “Christ was raised;” we proclaim “Christ is risen!” We will not find him among the dead — only among the living, among us. And we will know how to recognize him: he will be the one leading us into the future, leading us forward to healing and wholeness and new life and ever greater love — in this world, in the world to come, and forever.