PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Luke 24:1-12                                                                          WHAT  CAN  YOU  SEE?
Easter Sermon April 4, 2010:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

          Today we celebrate God’s resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead on Easter morning:  it’s a real, spiritual event.  It is the center of the Christian faith, the proclamation of our liberation, the opening of the door to life.  But we can’t help it:  we have to ask modern questions about the resurrection, like this:  If you were to get into a time machine and go back to that day, twenty minutes before dawn, and set up a video camera, could you record the resurrection on videotape?  This is basically the same idea as the Shroud of Turin, that cloth that’s supposed to be bearing an ancient likeness of a man with wounds in his hands and feet and side.  Is the Shroud a snapshot of the moment of resurrection, like our videotape? 

          No, I don’t think so.  Modern people think about proving things with science, but science has been around for only four hundred years.  It’s a modern way of thinking:  our standard of judgment is very young.  We have to read the Bible with other eyes.

          None of the Four Gospels gives us a description, like a snapshot, of what happened to Jesus in the moment of resurrection.[1]  The Christian proclamation of Easter is a simple announcement:  “Jesus Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Hallelujah!”  The Bible and the church through the ages go right to the point:  “He is not in the tomb:  he has been resurrected by the power of God.  And this is our redemption.”  And we celebrate.

          So the question isn’t whether you could have videotaped the event.  The question is about you:  What can you see?  No video, no molecular analysis of the Shroud, no scientific “proof” is enough.  Only what you yourself can see is enough to make Easter.  So, Christian, what can you see? 

          In Luke’s telling of the resurrection, the first time the word “see” appears is after the women left the tomb, after the angel showed the grave clothes, after the announcement was made back in the upper room where the disciples were hiding.  It’s Simon Peter who sees:  he ran to the tomb, stooped down and looked in and saw.  Other Gospels tell about Mary Magdalene thinking she was talking to the gardener (she wasn’t seeing), and the guards who passed out.  It takes some looking to see.  It took the apostles forty days to learn to see, because seeing is not about scientifically testing a body, it’s about you and what’s inside you.  The apostles were sent into the world as eye-witnesses, but they and their successors (the church) right down to our own time are still talking about every one of us coming to see him—to see that the resurrection is a real, spiritual event, and that it changes us.  What can you see? 

          It’s a question about your own inner eyes, not about some dusty old history.  You are the one under the microscope, so to speak, not Jesus.  Do you have “eyes for invisibles”?[2]  Yes, you know he is risen because you have seen him, too.  You see him “in, under and through” the Bread and Wine of Communion.  He meets you on the road you walk. 

          One Sunday as the deacons were passing the trays of bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper along the rows of the congregation, I noticed something unusual.  He was a long-time member of the church, and everybody thought of him as a good Christian; but that Sunday when the deacon handed him the plate of bread he just passed it to the woman sitting down the row and didn’t partake.  When the wine came to him he did the same thing.  There was something in his life, maybe something in his marriage, or in his relationship with his boss; and in this moment of Communion he had met Christ in a different way than before, and he knew his own guilt; so he communed without partaking.  And when church was over, he made a phone call and went to see his boss, and got it straightened out.  That man could see.  What can you see? 

          If you can really see, you’ve beheld the breaking-in of God into the common pace of human history on this one morning:  when the bored guards expected only the disciples to show up and try to steal the body.  A bolt of lightning from heaven a messenger of God, the seal crumbles, and the dead man is transfigured into who he really is and comes forth forevermore.  Can you see him?  The Apostle Paul, who was not among the disciples at that time, later wrote about what he had come to see:[3]

But what about all those graves out in the cemetery?  Several years ago I served a church that used to be a country church, and it had a cemetery out back; and on Easter the graves were beautifully decorated.  One member came in from the parking lot, looked out there and shook his head.  He said, “I have more friends out there than I do in here now.”  But Paul saw that Easter changes everything about my death and your death, and the death of  the one you love:  death has been destroyed,[4] as he wrote in Romans chapter eight:[5]

You see, Jesus isn’t under question here:  it’s you and I who are under question.  Jesus not only promised that his disciples would see him in Galilee:  he promised to us all,

“I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

We don’t test the resurrection:  the resurrection tests us.  It’s a question of our ability to see.  What can you see?

          As modern people, even though we are Christians, our first tendency is to put the whole story under and electron microscope to see if the story stacks up with the evidence.  That’s backwards.  The proclamation that God has raised Christ from death on Easter morning is a real, spiritual event.  The question to be raised is about us—what we can see. 

          Shari quit college in the mid-1980’s because she got a job offer that paid well, and it was back in her hometown.  She needed to be home to watch out for her mother.  You see, Shari’s father was an alcoholic, and he never tried to overcome it. He was what they call a “mean drunk,” and that put his wife in danger.  So Shari came home from college and got an apartment, and brought her mother to live with her.  You don’t have to look very hard to see what was in her heart—to see love. 

          I’ve told you some things about the love and the stress between my brother Dick and me.  We were no different from a lot of brothers—and sisters—even brothers and sisters in the Bible like Jacob and Esau, or James and John.  When Dick was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer I tried to communicate my care and concern, but he wasn’t at a point where he could accept it.  But that summer when I went to visit our mother, he came over and we talked.  We stood on the deck for an hour, just talking brother to brother.  He talked around the issues between us for a long time, and then he told me he was proud of my work.  That was a surprise—he had lived his whole life for himself, and didn’t flinch from telling you so.  On the deck that day he began to talk about his feelings.  I’d never heard that from him before.  He opened up his heart to me.  It’s amazing when you see transformation in a brother you love.  Our mother later told me that he had also reconciled with his two sons and his daughter.  He was a new man, and you could see it.  He had a new life. 

          Jesus Christ is risen from the dead for you.  This is the gospel of our redemption.  Of him, the great Albert Schweitzer has written these words:[6]

What can you see?

AMEN