Preacher's Post 9.0

Submitted by Executive Direc... on March 24, 2008 - 4:46pm.

The Word: Easter

Quotable Words:

"Do Not Be Afraid."

Preached Words:

A Sermon for Easter Vigil at Trinity Episcopal, Santa Barbara

Audio HERE

Creation bursts forth from chaos, the sun and the moon are hung in the heavens, a pillar of clouds points a pathway to freedom, the waters part, exiles are given new homes, new spirits, fresh starts, great earthquakes and white angels roll away great stones.

These are bigger-than-life stories we hear tonight, stories first told around campfires on cold desert nights. Our ancestors told stories, as all people did and do, to explain their world, to describe their beliefs, to name their identity. They told these stories so that they could know themselves to be people who traveled from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom, from exile to home, people promised hearts of flesh from their hearts of stone, people promised life in the face of death.

That’s why we tell them on this night, the most important night of our year. These are not just once-upon-a-time tales, they are true stories told from the dawn of time to dawn on the third day and ever since: these are true stories about us, about each one of us.

Our own stories don’t have quite the Cecil B. de Mille special effects, of course: no walls of water, no angels in white shoving at big tombstones. But we know truth when we hear it: we know those times of bondage and those breakthroughs to freedom, those times of exile, cut-off, longing to be home. We ‘get’ that metaphor about stony hearts, and we know what it feels like to soften, even just a little.

We know what it’s like to hear someone say “do not be afraid.”

Because we know what it’s like to be afraid. We know fear better than we know these stories, because we live in a climate of fear. We swim in it, we breathe it, we suck in great gulps of it. We can’t help it. Every time we click on the TV, every time we flip open a magazine or a newspaper, we get a new version of fear: it might be an ad on the evening news for some new drug; it might be an ad about a 3 a.m. phone call, it might be the news itself: a new campus shooting, a new food packing plant recall, a new bank collapse, a new TSA alert…the list is way too long.

We live in a time when fear fuels decisions from Washington to Wall Street , and advertisers tap into the insecurities we wish we’d left behind in junior high school. And we all have those fears we dare not speak out loud while we wait for the other shoe to drop, wait for the next phone call or trying to make sense of the last one.

And yet here’s a story—a whole bunch of stories-- that say “do not be afraid.”
We tell them tonight because we need to remind ourselves that we don’t have to be afraid. That’s why they told the stories in the first place. The first ones to tell the Easter stories—Magdalene and the other women, and then the men—they told each other not what they’d seen—that didn’t make sense. They told each other what they had heard: do not be afraid. These words were a code of sorts, something like scraping a secret signal in the sand.

To say “do not be afraid” in the early church meant “watch what’s happening here”: God is here, doing a new thing—just like ‘in the beginning’, that garden story; just like back in Egypt, when we were slaves; just like in Babylon, when we’d given up hope. It’s happening again, in our day.

‘Do not be afraid’: It’s the greeting of the angel to young Mary in Luke’s story, the greeting of the angel to Zechariah, the greeting of the angels to the shepherds in the hills of Bethlehem, the greeting of Jesus to his disciples time and again, on the lake, on the mountaintop, again and again.

‘Do not be afraid’ was first-century code-language to proclaim that God, the great liberating and life-giving God of their ancestors, (not the death-dealing divine-king Caesar-god of Rome) God always brings life out of death.

And so in Matthew’s story of the garden, we see the empire of Rome brought to its knees by an Easter earthquake, a tomb cracks open. The Roman guards are stunned into silence, but Mary Magdalene is given a new voice. Do not be afraid, the angel says. Go and tell the others.

She and the other Mary, as Matthew tells it, go quickly; they leave their plan to anoint the dead, they leave the place of the tombs, they are filled with fear but also great joy. Imagine that. Their fear doesn’t vanish, but somehow joy sneaks in, a little bit of warmth to take the chill off their shiver of fear. Enough warmth to fire their hope, enough warmth to get their legs moving.

And they begin to run; they run smack into Jesus. And what does he say? Do not be afraid. Go, keep running, all the way out to the Galilee, out there in the world where I said I would be, remember:
out there, when you break bread together, I will be there;
out there, when two or three of you are gathered, I will be there;
out there, whenever you give that cup of water, whatever you do for the least, I will be there. I will be there.

Don’t be afraid, go out there. You have work to do. You have a story to tell, a story to live. You will see me there. That’s my place now. Go and tell. Go and tell.

And we know they did, they did take the story of Jesus out to the Galilee and that story kept on going, crossing borders and boundaries and centuries, a story that couldn’t be stopped.

That’s what brings us here tonight. We are the inheritors of this story.

Somebody told this story to us. Somebody showed this story to us, when they showed us their love, when they let us know they loved us, when they listened to us, when they showed us their courage, when they kept on going against all odds, when they showed us their vulnerability, or their generosity. That’s how this story keeps getting told in our world.

So the question for us tonight is: Can we tell this story? Can we live like this story is true? Can we tell it to these little ones being baptized tonight, to Misha (and his older brother Sasha,) and to Elliott? Can we tell them this story like we mean it? Can we let in enough joy to take the chill off our fear? Enough warmth to fire our hope?

Can we really believe the Easter story; can we let Easter into our bones? I don’t mean assent to a musty church doctrine; and I don’t even mean accept a newer rendering of the story that suits our de-mystified, rational, politically correct and intellectually superior post-modern minds.

I mean believe the Easter-changed lives of Magdalene and the others:

I mean believe the spirit that swept through that group of people and kept on pulsing through them, generation after generation after generation, the Spirit that couldn’t be contained in a church hierarchy or suppressed by any Empire.

I mean being willing to risk what they did, to risk their very lives. To risk, at the very least, the comfort of the familiar, to let go of control and grasp hold of grace.

I mean hearing way down inside that voice say ‘Do not be afraid’, and running down that road to our Galilees.

I mean running out to meet the One who said “you will see me there” and see him again for the first time:

in the child who needs your clarity,
in the elder who needs your time,
in the colleague who needs your honesty,
in the public debate that needs your values,
in the voting booth that needs your integrity,
in the mirror that calls you to be who you are:
somebody who is scared to death maybe, but somebody who’s heard these stories,
somebody who dares to hope, and to run, right on out there to Galilee,
somebody who’s let a little Easter into your bones. AMEN.

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