Archives for April 2012

a sermon on Luke 24:36b-48 for the Third Sunday of Easter
preached on April 22, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s a wonderful word that every Presbyterian needs to know: presbyopia. It’s a strange word, closely related to Presbyterian and presbytery and presbyter, but it doesn’t mean that you’ve been afflicted with being Presbyterian – that’s just general craziness! Presbyopia is also known as farsightedness – the condition where you can’t see things clearly up close even though you can see far away just fine. Presbyterian and presbyopia both come from the same root meaning “elder” – just as we Presbyterians are governed by so-called elders, so presbyopia – farsightedness – sets in with age. But since as of tomorrow we will have four 90-year-olds among us, I don’t dare talk about age today!

I bring up presbyopia because of what it does to us – we can see far away just fine, but everything right in front of us is fuzzy. It’s a bit like what we hear about happening to the disciples in our gospel reading this morning from Luke. The disciples had walked with Jesus for three years, but it took Jesus’ death and resurrection – and a lot of distance from those events – for them to really clearly see what was going on. They were still pretty close to it all on the night of the resurrection that is the stage for this story, but by then they had started to get enough distance to get a sense that something special was going on. They had heard several reports of the resurrection, and according to Luke, at least three people had seen Jesus. So as they all gathered together and started exchanging their stories of that first Easter day, Jesus appeared among them and proclaimed, “Peace be with you.”

This was not what anyone expected. They might have known that something special was going on, but they didn’t have enough distance from things to have clear heads. They knew that some people had seen Jesus that day, but they hadn’t had enough time to really begin to figure out what a resurrected Jesus might look like. And they were understandably a bit afraid of what the consequences of all this might be – Jesus had been executed because at least some people thought that he thought that he was the King of the Jews and posed a threat to the Jewish leadership and Roman rule, and those parties would not respond well to news that somehow the crucifixion didn’t “take.”

So when Jesus showed up among them that first night, they were understandably afraid. They thought they were seeing a ghost and had no idea what to do next. But Jesus didn’t run away in fear. He invited them to set aside their fears and to embrace his new presence among them. He showed them his hands and his feet and suggested that such a presence could not be a ghost. The disciples were becoming joyful as everything that they had heard about the resurrection was shown to be real, but they still didn’t see clearly what was right in front of them. They didn’t connect everything that he had taught them along the way with everything that had happened over the last few days. They didn’t know what to do with the experience of watching their friend suffer and die – and then suddenly reappear in their midst.

But Jesus knew just what to do to help them bring things into focus. He kept things pretty ordinary. He asked them for something to eat and had a piece of broiled fish for dinner. And then he started teaching them, just as he had done so many times before. This time as he taught, he tried to help them see things more clearly. He recounted what he had told them before, “that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” He explained how scripture called for the Messiah “to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.” He called for them to proclaim this new way to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem. And he instructed them to always bear witness to everything that they had seen in his life, death, and resurrection.

Finally, as they got further away from all that they had experienced, the disciples began to see clearly everything that had been fuzzy and uncertain in the midst of the moment. Their presbyopia finally kicked in, and they could start to understand what they had seen in the resurrection of their friend.

Presbyopia is not usually viewed as a good thing. Nobody likes wearing reading glasses or bifocals! However, a little distance opened up the story of Jesus for the disciples – could it be the same for our own experiences of faith and life? Sometimes distance helps us to see and understand things better, to put different parts of the puzzle into the bigger picture over time, to bring things into better focus just like we do when we move something away from us to see it more clearly.

Now this is not always the case. Sometimes distance can actually make things less clear for us. Sometimes our memory fails us and we aren’t able to remember well enough to see when we get too far away from what we have experienced. Sometimes we are deceived by something that looks like something entirely different when we see it at a distance. And sometimes the past becomes less clear as we move away from it because we prefer to see it all through rose-colored glasses and remember only the joys we have experienced and not the sorrows that were also with us along the way.

Nonetheless, when we find that right distance from our past experience, just the right amount of presbyopia, we can see things more clearly with greater distance, let time bring understanding, and step back and look at how everything fits together.

At some level, I think this is our call as a church – to get far enough away from what we are seeing so that we can see it clearly. It’s all too easy to look back and only see what we want to see, to remember a past that was very different but not necessarily better, to think that the numbers that once defined us should be our mark once again, even to get caught up in the less-than-pleasant details of the present and let them bring us down. But in the resurrection Jesus calls us to take a step back and see more clearly, to look closely at where we have been so that we can see the possibilities for where we can go, to trust that what is ahead can be as joyful as the past we remember, and always to keep the big picture in view whenever things are changing all around us. So I think Jesus calls us to a bit of presbyopia sometimes, to demonstrate the wisdom of the elders that keeps the bigger picture in view, to not be afraid to look a good bit away from ourselves so that we can see all the things that God has done and is doing, and to be open to the possibility that we might just have to step back or even wait a little while longer to see things more clearly.

So may we always be able to look back and see the risen Christ clearly among us so that we can be ready to open our eyes to everything that is ahead and see him journeying with us and going before us to make all things new. Thanks be to God. Alleluia! Amen.

a sermon on Mark 16:1-8 for Easter Sunday
preached on April 8, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As a child, I was a big fan of a series of books called Where’s Waldo? The goal of each book was to locate a figure named Waldo in the midst of the strange and varied scenes on each page. While he was always wearing his trademark red-and-white-striped shirt and blue pants, Waldo often blended into the world amazingly well. Sometimes he would be hiding just behind a tree so that you could only see his face and maybe just a bit of his shirt. Other times his trademark colors would somehow blend in to a very different background so that it was hard to spot him. Every now and then he would be strangely smaller than everything else around him so that you couldn’t see him so well. And the most difficult scene was when he ended up in a world of Waldos, where everyone looked exactly the same as he did and there was only one very small mark that revealed the real Waldo. When you finally found him amidst whatever scene, it was so obvious – and you could certainly easily find him again! – and yet that process of looking for him was incredibly fun and addictive and frustrating.

When we read this morning’s gospel proclamation of the resurrection from Mark, sometimes I feel like we have the beginning of another book series: Where’s Jesus? If you look in the pew Bible, you might notice that there are two other endings to Mark, but the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of this earliest gospel end the Easter story exactly where we did, with the women fleeing the empty tomb in fear – and no sign of Jesus.

These women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, were the last faithful ones in Mark’s story. All of Jesus’ other followers had deserted him along his way to be crucified, so they were the only ones left to prepare his body for a proper burial after they had kept the Sabbath. As they went to tomb on Easter morning, they were worried about how they would get in, because they knew it had been gently sealed with a large stone, but soon they found that getting in was the least of their fears and worries.

When they arrived at the tomb, the stone had already been rolled away, and they were able to walk inside without any trouble. But just where they expected to find the dead body of Jesus, they found instead the very alive presence of a young man, dressed in a white robe and sitting to the right of where the body should have been. They were alarmed, Mark says – though I suspect that this is a bit of an understatement. When you go to a tomb, you expect to find a body there – nothing less, nothing more. Instead, though, these three faithful women found a whole lot less and a whole lot more.

The young man, knowing that the first question on their minds was, “Where’s Jesus?” spoke to them in hopes of calming their fears and anxiety:

Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.

Now the young man’s words may seem reasonable to us, but the women didn’t seem to be comforted by them. This was the last straw for them. They had watched their friend and teacher be condemned by the religious authorities of Jerusalem and executed at the hands of the Roman Empire. They had seen all his other disciples run away in fear, uncertain of what might happen to them. And now they were confronted by a strangely empty tomb and an unusual young man who met them there – and so they too fled in terror and amazement, “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” They weren’t in the mood to play a game of “Where’s Jesus?” on that first Easter morning – they wanted to complete their obligations, anoint the body, and move on, so when Jesus wasn’t where he was supposed to be, dead and in the tomb, they gave up, went on their way, and said nothing to anyone.

Even though the women didn’t want to play, it seems like Mark’s gospel demands that Easter begin with a game of “Where’s Jesus?” For some people, this is an incredibly dissatisfying end to the story – there’s no proof here that Jesus was actually resurrected, no sight of his living body, no sign that he appeared again to his disciples, no final commission to his followers to carry his message out into the world. For me, though, I think there’s something wonderful about this ending – and not just because it leaves me asking “Where’s Jesus?” and so reminds me of those Where’s Waldo? books I loved as a child! Instead of offering a clear and distinct picture of exactly what the resurrected Jesus looks like in the world, Mark leaves us with the promise that Jesus has gone ahead of us and the command to go and seek him out. The tomb is empty – Jesus is not there, he’s on the loose! – but exactly where and how we will encounter the risen Christ is a mystery.

It’s something like a divine game of Where’s Waldo? We may have an idea of what Jesus might look like along the journey, and we know that he is not in the tomb, but we aren’t always sure exactly where he is and so must pay very close attention to all the signs that he leaves us along the way in hopes that we might catch a glimpse of him. Sometimes it is easy to find Jesus in the crowd, and sometimes we may have to keep looking for a long time, but the promise is that he is always there, going before us into the Galilees of our world to make all things new.

So if we’re going out from this Easter morn to look for the risen Christ in our world, what will he look like? Will he be wearing some trademark white robe, with long flowing hair and a halo? I honestly doubt it! The risen Christ is far more likely to appear to us in much more everyday attire, in a brief moment of grace offered by an ordinary person on the street, in the presence of friends and family who help make us more completely who God has created us to be, in the cries of those who long for someone to walk even a little way with them, in food and drink shared with friends old and new, and even in the most routine and mundane moments of our lives. We are likely to find him in expected and unexpected places, on Easter Day and into the Easter season and far beyond, walking before us and beside us, comforting us in the face of joy and sorrow, transforming our world in ways beyond our understanding and comprehension, and inviting us to imagine a world defined not by death but by the power of God that makes all things new. And even when we struggle to see the risen Jesus, we are compelled to keep looking everywhere we go until we catch even a glimpse of him, because even the briefest sight of our risen Lord reminds us that he continues to go before us to make all things new in our world.

So as you celebrate this Easter, may you know the presence of the risen Christ, and may you find him in the midst of your world each and every day, transforming death into life as only he can do, until he comes again in glory to make all things new. Alleluia! Amen.