Heathmont Uniting Church

Sermon Heathmont Uniting Church 16 April 2017 Easter Day Luke 24.1-12 Rev Nigel Hanscamp

A Prayer for illumination May the light that flooded that empty tomb, Illuminate our hearts this day

Hold us in our Doubt, until our Doubt makes a friend of Mystery and can leave behind the Need to Understand.

Stir our hearts to not regard other’s faith as idle chatter or nonsense until we know its value to the speaker and ourselves.

May we find our place in this story, May we know ourselves resurrected.

…amen

“While the men were in hiding, Women delivered the greatest news the world has ever known”.

1 Sadao Watanabe is a Japanese artist, and uses Japanese folk art to portray biblical stories. In one of these, titled Mary the evangelist, Mary is pictured talking to the 11 disciples, telling them of the empty tomb: One woman facing 11 men. She has her finger, a long index finger, in a pose like she is telling them off, or insistently telling a story to people who must hear. The apostle Peter has his hands together in a traditional Japanese gesture of greeting. The other men are all in various states of ‘hands down’, shoulders slumped or eyes averted. And there’s an angel in the top left corner, sitting in the tomb, looking over the top of the empty grave clothes at the disciples with a look in his eyes like, you had better believe her!!

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

… The Women: Luke talks of the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee. He also says that they believed as they remembered what Jesus had said would happen – they themselves had been present to hear him say these things. These women are not incidental to Luke’s story of Jesus (nor indeed any of the 4 gospels.) They have been with Jesus through his ministry, often sitting or standing in the background. They have seen and been mystified by the miracles, heard the parables, and looked into the eyes of people who have had their lives transformed.

They take their lives into their hands, then, to go to the tomb of a man considered a criminal by the Romans. And, for their loving perseverance and courage, these women are rewarded with the honour of being entrusted with the most important news in history. Some writers have called them, history’s midwives of hope. And so they are … and examples for us of what we are called to do – to birth hope in the lives of others.

The news from the women at the tomb was the greatest hope that the world has ever known. And yet what did the disciples call it? "Nonsense." And “An idle tale”

Hope unbelieved is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history in the process of being changed. (Jim Wallis) The ‘nonsense’ of the resurrection became the hope that changed the Roman Empire - and ultimately the world. Hope is how transformation takes place, personal and social transformation. And resurrection hope has proven itself life-changing, and continues to do so.

2 Reframing our world: Julia Esquivel is a Guatemalan who lived for many years in exile in Geneva, and later in Mexico. For years, under many dictators since 1954, the people of Guatemala watched as thousands of Maya and other indigenous people were murdered – and hundreds of villages wiped off the face of the earth. Esquivel lived for yeas as an activist, poet and minister in places of poverty and struggle. However after threats and harassment by police, and escaping kidnapping and assassination, she fled her home country in 1980 for Geneva.

While there, she wrote of the ongoing struggle, of hope and of the strength of the movement for change in a long poem titled “they threatened us with resurrection.” (1980)

Her poem recognizes those who have died in the struggle for justice for the poor in her home country, those threatened with their lives - and those who died. However instead of seeing death as a despairing, unhope-ful threat, Julia transforms the struggle by naming it as a gift of Resurrection – hence the title of her poem, “They threatened us with resurrection”.

Here is some of what she wrote: It isn't the noise in the streets that keeps us from resting, my friend, nor is it the shouts of the young people coming out drunk from the "St. Pauli," (Taverna) nor is it the tumult of those who pass by excitedly on their way to the mountains.

What won’t let us rest and sleep are those who have died - an army who are actively witnessing our ongoing struggle; (For) those who have died transform our agonies and fertilise our struggle.

What keeps us from sleeping is that they have threatened us with resurrection! because every evening though weary of killings, an endless inventory since 1954 yet we go on loving life and do not accept their death!

… because in this Marathon of Hope, there are always others to relieve us

3 in bearing the courage, the strength necessary to arrive at the goal which lies beyond death…

They have threatened us with resurrection, because they do not know life (poor things!).

Julia finishes with this … "Join us in this vigil and you will know what it is to dream! Then you will know how marvelous it is to live threatened with Resurrection!

To dream awake, to keep watch asleep, to live while dying, and to know ourselves already resurrected! “ https://muse.jhu.edu/article/41552

Resurrection – a change of perspective: Just as love is a threat to fear and power, so life can be more threatening than death. And so Resurrection asks something from us; It asks, it invites, it cajoles us to change our perspectives on life and our world!

We can easily get used to ways of death like cynicism and sarcasm, which provide a consolation that everything is allowed to be bad!  a lack of hope and vision;  the so-called “end of the church”;  a propensity to say “no” before we might say “yes”. This is why children are an antidote to the ways of death. They will play Xylophones through a Good Friday service (!), And when someone suggests playing a game they will always say “yes” immediately, without hesitation - and drop what ever they are doing - especially if what they are doing is homework or dishes! Their instinct is to trust, to love, to declare things unfair without excusing bad behaviour by saying “he’s always like that” or “he’s having a bad day”. Children remind us of ways of life.

Life and resurrection thrust us back into involvement in our world, and living with the realities of Beauty and Pain, Love and Suffering … rather than cynicism which holds us back.

4 Sarah Bachelard is pointed in this regard; http://benedictus.com.au/pdf/threatened_by_resurrection_110415.pdf "There’s so much invested in death. No wonder it makes resurrection, a glimpse of life not run by death, deeply threatening. Resurrection asks something of us”, she says. “It’s to discover that we have been caught practicing an expectation of death, not life.”

Resurrection is disruptive, disturbing and unsettling. It is even a threat. That’s why even the disciples - or at least 10 of them - called the story of the women “an idle tale”, a nonsense.

In resurrection there is not excuse to hold back from risking; For resurrection assumes that God can make life happen in unexpected ways. That’s not to say that resurrection makes death and suffering go away, but that it throws open the door to participation in what Julia Esquivel calls “a marathon of hope”.

While the men were in hiding, Women delivered the greatest news the world has ever known.

We are invited to join them. “… to know ourselves already resurrected”.

-amen-