Easter Sunrise Sermon for Red Rocks

I had the freezing-cold honor of preaching to 10,000 people last Sunday at the 64th Annual Red Rocks Sunrise Easter service.  If you'd like to watch the video of it you can do so here http://72.35.76.65:3737/ccceaster Sermon starts at about 53 minutes in. If you have a Mac you'll need this to view the video http://8help.osu.edu/784.html

 

 

I’ve often wondered what people in America think when they actually read the story of Jesus rising from the dead for the first time. There’s simply no way the story could adhere to their expectations. I imagine them reading and re-reading it, shocked that they can’t find a single mention of bunnies or rabbits or painted eggs or white sales at Macy’s. Because let’s be honest,  that is what our culture thinks Easter is about.  Easter in America is really just an excuse to eat chocolate and buy new bedding, and each year we pretend that we can’t really just eat chocolate and buy new bedding whenever we want, which I think is so adorable of us.  But honestly the church’s presentation of Easter isn’t less odd.  For many churches Easter is another word for “church show off day”…when we spiffy up the building and pull out the lilies and hire a brass quintet and put on fabulous hats and do whatever we have do to impress visitors. It’s kinda like the church’s version of putting out the guest towels.

And don’t get me wrong,  I love chocolate and I love fancy music  I mean...if I could possibly listen to the Alleluia Chorus while eating a Cadbury Egg I’d be in heaven.

But this all has very little to do with the actual Gospel story because the gospel story is not fancy, its, downright messy. See, Easter in the Bible may be the greatest story ever told. It’s just not the story we usually choose to tell, because its not a story about new dresses and baskets and flowers and candy and spiffyness. Really, it’s a story about flesh and dirt and bodies and confusion and its about the way God never seems to adhere to our expectations.

Because think about it, Mary Magdalen stood there at the empty tomb that morning while her expectations of what was possible collided full force with the God of Abraham and Sara.  Her certainty that she knew how this whole Jesus thing was ending slammed right up against the full force of God’s suffering and redemptive love and though it was nothing short of divine revelation in the flesh Jesus still didn’t look very impressive, not in the churchy Easter sense.

See, when Mary Magdalene stood at the tomb she didn’t encounter some perfected radiant glowing spiritual Jesus that first Easter morning.  Seriously, no offense to gardeners but Jesus couldn’t have been looking all that spiffy and impressive if she mistook him for a gardener: And I like to think that Mary Magdalene mistook the resurrected Christ for a gardener because Jesus still had the dirt from his own tomb under his nails.

Now, I’ve been in a whole lot of churches and I gotta say, In most of them there is no dirt under the nails of the resurrected Christ. Because we’ve had to clean him up to look more impressive at Easter. And my theory is this:  I think it’s because we go straight from Christmas to Easter, we go from the sentimentality of the Baby Jesus to the glory of the resurrected Christ, Santa Claus to Peter Cotton Tail, so quickly that we don’t bother with the messy important parts in-between: namely, what Jesus taught, how Jesus lived and how Jesus died. So, since there’s basically 10,000 of you guys just sitting here this morning, I thought I’d fill you in on the messy parts real quick…

See it starts here: Once upon a time, the God of the Universe was basically fed up with being on the receiving end of all our human projections, tired of being nothing more to us than what we thought God should be: angry, show-offy, defensive, insecure, in short, the vengeance-seeking tyrant we would be if we were God. So, at that time, over 2,000 years ago, God’s Loving Desire to really be Known overflowed the heavens and was made manifest in the rapidly dividing cells within the womb of an insignificant peasant girl named Mary.  And when the time came for her to give birth to God, there was no room in our expectations – no room in any impressive or spiffy or safe place. So this God was born in straw and dirt. He grew up, this Jesus of Nazareth, left his home, and found some, let’s be honest,  rather unimpressive characters to follow him.  Fishermen, Tax collectors, prostitutes, homeless women with no teeth, people from Commerce City, Ann Coulter and Charlie Sheen.  If you think I’m kidding…read it for yourselves.  These people were questionable. So, with his little band of misfits Jesus went about the countryside turning water to wine, eating with all the wrong people, angering the religious establishment and insisting that in him the kingdom of God had come near, that through him the world according to God was coming right to us.  He touched the unclean and used spit and dirt to heal the blind and said crazy destabilizing things like the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and sell all you have and give it to the poor.

And the thing that really cooked people’s noodles wasn’t the question “is Jesus like God” it was “what if God is like Jesus”.  What if God is not who we thought?  What if the most reliable way to know God is not through religion, not through a sin and punishment program, but through a person. What if the most reliable way to know God is to look at how God chose to reveal God’s self in Jesus?  

         Because that changes everything.  If what we see in Jesus is God’s own self, revealed, then what we are dealing with here is a God who is ridiculously indiscriminate about choosing friends.  A God who would rather die than be in the sin accounting business anymore.  A God who would not lift a finger to condemn those who crucified him, but went to the depths of Hell rather than be apart even from his betrayers. A God unafraid to get his hands dirty for the ones he loves. This, this is the God who rises to new life with dirt still under his nails.

So while the churches may try and clean up Jesus so the visitors will be impressed today, The God of Easter, the God who brings life out of death  doesn’t want to make you impressive, this God isn’t satisfied with making you good or nice. IF you think that’s what resurrection looks like, if you think it looks like perfection and piety and therefore you haven’t experienced it, you might be wrong. Because God isn’t about making you spiffy.  God isn’t about making you nicer.  God is about making you new.  And new doesn’t always look perfect, with a fabulous new dress because like the Easter story itself, new can be messy.

New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it.  New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage to not mention when I’m right. New looks like the lumpy awkward forgiveness we manage to scrounge up despite ourselves.  New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn’t live without and then somehow living without it anyway.  New is the thing you never saw coming …never even hoped for, but ends up being what you needed all along and it happens to all of us. Because as Jesus said…the world according to God is near to us. And God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and pulling us out of the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.

So by all means enjoy the lilies and chocolate and fancy music. But know that if there is anything impressive about following Jesus it’s that you are loved so powerfully by God that God has swept you up into God’s own story of death and life and life after death.  And if there’s anything impressive about Christians, it’s that we are a people who still have the dirt from our graves under our nails, while we stand here shouting Alleluia! Christ is risen.

 

 

Comments

[Mark Gruenberg]

Brilliant...this could be a great start for your next book!

[Alex]

Wow. Wish I was there to hear it in person. Thanks for posting this so I can read it again. :)

[[email protected]]

been waiting for that. thanks nadia for being real and for getting your hands dirty with christ.

[no..el]

this is an amazingly refreshing take on easter. over the years being a preschool teacher at primarily faith based schools no matter how many times i ask 3-5 year olds what easter is really all about, even if we have been talking about it all week... they still say bunnies, eggs, chocolate! argh!! from the mouths of babes the truth is told. if only it could different. thanks for doing your part to reprogram the general populations thinking on this day. blessings to you.

[Tim]

Thanks for keeping it real. Took a similar approach with my sermon Sunday... told folks if they were there to see bunnies and eggs and candy, HEB (the grocery store) is right up the road and if you hurry you might get some 1/2 off, but we're not doing that here. We held worship with the Episcopalians and used their proper for the first eucharist on Easter, with Mark's gospel. Blessed Easter.

[Meg Stenman]

Beautiful.

[Sandy Lauland]

Great message!

[Hugh]

Thank you. Here in the UK things are getting just as commercial with less and less about the real meaning of Easter / Christmas etc. I'm begining to think that we have to see ourselves in a post-Christendom society and re-think how we do things accordingly.

[Darlene Erickson]

Thanks for wonderful and new take on Easter. I will use it in our small group.
Darlene Erickson, ebenezer, Chicago

[Peter]

Thanks Nadia.

BTW,a few weeks ago, children in a local School (UK, Primary school) were asked "what did Jesus do on Easter Saturday?" One replied: "He went to hell to look for his friend Judas"

[Magdalene6127]

Ah-- what a wonderful, perfect sermon. Thank you.

[Brgulker]

My goodness, this is amazing. Amen!

[Sharon Weiser]

Excellent! Thought provoking to those of us who are involved in "spiffifying" up the church for Easter. Maybe next year we should just pull the black cloth off of the cross and altar and go forward letting people ask "why isn't the church decorated?". Of course we need to be ready with our answers.

[Dave Burkum]

"No room in our expectations." Love it! I think you just inspired my 2011 Advent preaching series.

[Brian]

Thank you! I agree that Jesus reveals God. Process theologians, open theists, womanists, etc. have been trying to say this for a while. Unforchunately, most of Western thought has argued that God is NOT like Jesus.

Here is a great quote from Alfred North Whitehead:

“When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.”

[Alastair Newman]

Wonderful, wonderful sermon. A great proclamation of the Gospel!

I love the idea of the dirt still under the fingernails of Christ, who was stil bearing the scars of his crucifixion. Resurrection (wherever we're looking for it) can never simply paper over the wounds of the past.

Can't wait to hear you at this year's Greenbelt!

[damer]

Very nicely written. Really makes think. Thank