Easter Sermon for Friends Congregational Church
“Rolling Away the Stone of Forgetfulness”
Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon
Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008
John 20:1-18
What is so special about Easter Sunday? The church opens its doors every Sunday throughout the year, but this day is the one where people darken the church’s door in droves more than any other Sunday.
But why is that? There are other Holy days in the Christian calendar that we get excited about. Christmas comes to mind, but Christmas day, the day when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, rarely falls on a Sunday.
Most recently that was in 2005 when Christmas fell on a Sunday. But our attendance wasn’t through the roof. I understand that a mega-church here in town even closed on Christmas day because it fell on a Sunday. Go figure.
But Easter is the big day. It’s the one Sunday a year that is more highly-attended than any other day of worship. So, why do we come here?
Every Easter we do this. It’s like we’re my favorite Muppets, the old guys in the balcony, going, “Tell me again why we come here?”
We might be here just because that’s tradition. It’s what we’re supposed to do, but that’s just not enough. What’s behind the tradition? Do we come here for drama and spectacle? Do we come here out of guilt or obligation? Do we come here for Easter Egg hunts and Easter brunches?
No matter how you slice it, we come here partly for a reminder. We need a reminder of the story of Christ’s resurrection. We know what Easter is all about, but for some reason we need our annual reminder of that message. We need a memory jogger.
That’s what we called them when I was in the fourth grade: memory joggers. But memory joggers were not as festive or fun as our Easter celebrations. If you ever forgot to do your homework, then you got a memory jogger. The other kids would turn in their assignments, and if you didn’t have your homework to turn in, the teacher gave you a piece of paper that made note of the assignment. You had to sign that piece of paper and then rip off the white sheet for the teacher to keep. The yellow copy had to go home with you for you to get your parents to sign. Then you’d return the signed yellow copy of the memory jogger along with your belated homework assignment.
Memory joggers were pretty effective. Easter seems to be effective in the same respect. There is a tinge of obligation behind our being here on this particular Sunday. And we even go home with a little piece of paper that reminds us of this day: your worship bulletin or the cross-shaped ‘Alleluia’ message.
It seems to me that on Easter Sunday we come here in greater numbers, maybe dressed a little nicer than usual, toting our Easter bonnets and baskets, and possibly bringing along a family member who’s visiting, because for this one day of worship, we suspend our disbelief so that we can be reminded of the story of Jesus’ resurrection.
If that’s the case, then it seems like this grand day is kind of a wasted opportunity for Jesus Christ. Christ doesn’t need for us to suspend our disbelief. Christ needs for us to have faith. God needs for us to remember and have faith.
The generic message of Easter is one of cosmic triumphalism: Jesus has died for my sins, descended to hell for me and is now resurrected and sitting at the right hand of God so that I have inherited eternal life. But that individual concept of resurrection is seldom applied to one’s actions or daily lives. We seldom if ever live in remembrance of the resurrection.
That makes it easy to keep Easter in a box. That makes it easy to keep the resurrection in a tomb. But our true Easter begins only when we roll away the stone that keeps us more dead than alive. And the stone we might all need to roll away this morning is our forgetfulness.
This kid I knew a few years back told me he was going to be baptized, so I went to his church that morning to support him. It was this nondenominational church that met in an auditorium that seated a few hundred people. And the preacher was a well-dressed relatively young guy. His message was simple: it was all about the death and resurrection of Jesus, and about how if we believe in him that we’ll be raised from the dead just like Christ. It wasn’t Easter, so I was waiting for the punch line on this sermon—some different kind of spin.
He launches into his message and he says with mild excitement, “Jesus was crucified. He died and was buried in a tomb, and everyone thought that death had the final word on Jesus, but Jesus proved them all wrong when he rose from the dead to be with his Father in heaven for eternity.” The congregation cheered. The preacher took of his suit jacket, and I thought, “OK, got it. Now what?”
He continued, this time a little louder, “Now, when we give our hearts over to Jesus, then we live forever, too, just like Jesus.” The congregation cheers again, and then the preacher takes off his vest. And I’m thinking, “OK, we’re really going somewhere now.”
So, he says, “When we die, death doesn’t get the final say on us because Jesus has the keys to the kingdom of God and we’re all going in that door and living forever!” The crowd cheers again, but I’m starting to wonder where this is going. And then he rolls up his sleeves, so I’m thinking, “OK, this is it. He’s going to drive the point home now.”
But he says, “Let me get a volunteer.” Someone walks up to the stage and he tells the guy to lie down. Then he preaches the sermon over again and uses this guy to illustrate the it. He explains the resurrection by having the guy jump to his feet.
Now, I’m not trying to discredit the message, because churches have different ways of sharing and celebrating the Christian story. But I felt like that sermon didn’t go anywhere. I heard the message loud and clear, but I kept waiting to hear how I apply that message to my life. Where do I put the resurrection in my daily living? How do I put Christ’s victory over death into action all the days of my life? As Johnny Cash would say, “What on earth will you do for heaven’s sake?”
The problem is that we can’t take stock in the resurrection of Christ. We can’t remember it. We know the story, but we forget it again and again and again. So we’re left with a dormant faith that is all about being reminded at Christmas of the birth of Jesus, and being reminded on Easter of his resurrection.
Well, sisters and brothers, I want to ask us this morning, how many reminders do we need? And what good is a reminder of the Good News that Jesus has put an end to death as we know and fear it if we sit down to Easter dinner and forget it?
Let’s take a page from the disciples, my friends. So the story goes that Mary Magdalene alerts Simon Peter and the other disciple, as the Scripture says, to the news that Jesus’ body is not in the tomb. So, the two men race over there to see what she’s talking about, and they find the strands of cloth, the linens strewn about the place where Jesus’ body had been laid. They see that and they leave.
These two disciples, these faithful followers of Jesus, these guys who had walked with him and talked with him, and heard his provocative teaching and witnessed his healing miracles; these guys—the ones whom Jesus informed about how he would be betrayed, killed, buried and resurrected on the third day because he was the Messiah, the Son of the most high; these guys look at the linens in the empty tomb, and what do they think? They think the body’s been stolen.
They’ve had a bad weekend, OK? They’re master is taken from them and they have to keep quiet while he’s publicly killed, and now the salt in the wound is that his body’s been stolen. Not resurrected…stolen.
How quickly they forgot the blessed assurance that Jesus gave them that everything was going to be OK. How quickly they forgot Jesus telling them things like, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many dwellings; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”
They forgot everything—everything that Jesus ever taught them, told them, assured them. But not Mary. Mary Magdalene is our example today. She’s our key to the Easter story, because Mary stands up to her forgetfulness. Mary, when she’s devastatingly sad and now shocked and scared at the empty tomb—Mary defies her forgetfulness and goes back into that tomb; and Mary sees the angels of God. She defies her forgetfulness, and she sees the risen Christ.
But the disciples are still frozen with fear—all of them—hiding behind locked doors, trying to piece everything back together now that their worlds have fallen apart. So, Jesus has to come back to them to jog their memory. The resurrected Christ comes to these forgetful former followers who left him for dead, and who betrayed every confidence and assurance Jesus ever gave them. Jesus returns to these guys and says, “Hello, my friends! Shalom! Peace be with you!” Then they got it. Is that what we need, too?
Oh, I get it! That’s what I’m supposed to do! What you did is what I’m supposed to do! I’m supposed to give as I have been given to, serve as I have been served, love as I have been loved and never look back. I’m supposed to live not out of obligation or guilt, being tugged and nagged by reminders of what I was unworthy to receive; no, I’m supposed to live in eternal remembrance of what was freely, selflessly given to me so that others would experience the same, and then another, and then another.
You might have your own relationships and stories from your past that gave you a taste of that blessed assurance that Jesus Christ leaves with us all—people who’ve touched your life in some way as to say, “Hey, worrywart, it’s going to be OK. You’re going to be OK.” Have you forgotten?
Sisters and brothers, it’s time for us to remember. It’s time for us to defy our forgetfulness and remember those pieces of assurance in our lives that point to the grace of God and the new life of Christ. We don’t need any more reminders. Reminders are a waste of God’s time. Reminders are missed opportunities for the Good News of Christ Jesus. All we need to do is remember. Remember and have faith in that remembrance.
Remember that you are beautifully made, unconditionally forgiven, protected in all your ways by the angels of God, and loved by the one who has conquered death once and for all, Jesus Christ.
So, why do we come here on Easter Sunday? Do we come here out of guilt or obligation because we’ve forgotten how to follow Christ? Do we come here because we’ve forgotten the old, old story of Jesus and his love? Let’s pray that isn’t the case, because we don’t need any more reminders.
Here is why we come here on this Easter Sunday and always. We come here for encouragement and empowerment, for we can do all things through the Divine Love that strengthens us. We come here to celebrate our faith; sharing our stories, sharing our gifts, sharing our faith, sharing our very lives with one another as Christ did for us. We come here to remember and to build our lives on that remembrance.
Because if we come here for mere reminders of what Christ did for us, as it’s often phrased, then the message stays in here. It stays locked up in the church. If we come here for redundant reminders of the Easter story, then that’s as good as it gets. It never moves forward: this Good News that Christ has conquered all of our fears, troubles, worries, stresses, doubt, and even death itself.
Easter cannot be a means to an end. The story is not meant to be kept in this place for a day, it’s meant to be shared with the world by how we live our lives: in remembrance of that Good News.
So today, let us defy our forgetfulness and roll away the stone of the church door and let God’s gift of the Easter story do what it was intended to do. Let that old, old story be shared with the world through the church, not just to the church, so that everyone who is hurting, everyone who is alone, everyone who is afraid, everyone who is afflicted, everyone who is cowering under the empty threat of death would hear the blessed ‘Shalom’ of Jesus through our loud shouts of ‘Alleluia!’
Today, let us roll away our own stones of jealousy, self-deception, and fear about where our lives are headed; the grudge stone, the resentment stone, the vengeance stone, the debt stone—roll them all away, because we don’t need anymore reminders that the death and resurrection of Christ is about making all of those things empty, pointless, unworthy of who we are: beautifully made, unconditionally forgiven, eternally loved, and protected in all our ways by the angels of God.
Living our lives by constant reminders makes us hamsters on a wheel, only going so far and never moving beyond that point. What a waste of our selves. What a waste of Christ’s time. What a waste of the Potter’s handiwork. Let’s move beyond that point and instead live our lives in remembrance of the Easter story.
If we live by remembrance, by faith in that remembrance, then we have no reason to fear the pointless human rationality of death. If we live by remembrance, then we can hear Jesus’ words as instructions, not pie in the sky aspirations, when he says, “No one has greater love than this, that they lay down their lives for their friends.” We are those friends, good people.
We come here to learn together how to be those friends that Jesus’ laid down his life for, not only in this place, but out there. So, no more reminders, dear ones. It’s time to defy our stones of forgetfulness and roll them away for the sake of progress. God’s world can’t wait any longer. Christ can’t afford for you to keep your gifts on a shelf. You might be the very angels that the Psalmist is talking about when he writes that “God will send his angels concerning you in all your ways, and they will watch over you so that you do not dash your foot against a stone.” As Christ served us, let us now go in remembrance and serve others. We’ll learn more about that next week. See you then.
Happy Easter, and amen.