Easter Power (Rob Gieselmann, April 8, 2007)

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleluia.

Easter is so much fun, especially with children. Egg hunts and chocolate, spring flowers and jelly beans. But, of-course, Easter is much more than painted eggs and fluffy bunnies. Easter is the highest holy day, the apex. The Mountaintop of Christianity.

Someone once said, pretty much everyone has observed a miracle in the nighttime sky. What miracle have you seen? Shooting stars, eclipses, comets, the Northern Lights –

In Maryland, my kids and I lived out in the country, in a house next to old St. Paul’s Church, a little colonial church on 19 acres. One dark December night, we were driving home from town, the back way, on Ricaud’s Branch Road. As we came around the last bend before the Church, a shooting star streaked across the black sky in front of us. It headed for the church, and then disappeared behind it, as if on purpose, reminding me of another celestial miracle at Christmastime, the one that led wise men to worship.

I wondered at the shooting star over the next several weeks, I was amazed, at creation, at the great I am, the Almighty who suspended Orion and Pliedes in the heavens. Please, don’t misunderstand me. I’m talking about mystery, not astronomy. Not science.

I am amazed at the mystery of it all, the nighttime sky, the universe. I’m betting that if you will watch the heavens on any clear night, you, too, will see mystery. And when you do, you may rightly ask, does the God of the heavens, actually see you – little you, a tiny blip in the middle of it all ...

And maybe God asks the same question about you: Can he see me? For all the stars and science of it all, can he see me?

From so far away, God and us, eyeing each other warily, as mutually distant cosmic wonders.

About one hundred years ago, Archibald Rutledge rode a buggy through a Carolina forest. A fierce thunderstorm blew through; lightening struck a pine tree about twenty feet away.

His horse was thunderstruck and went berserk. The horse galloped fiercely and fearfully through the forest, as fast as he could, across gullies, over rocks, until finally the horse pulled Archibald and the buggy between pine trees standing too close together. The buggy caught; the horse broke free, leaving Archibald by himself.

The storm was still raging, and Archibald couldn’t tell where he was. Archibald looked all around to get his bearings, and when he looked back to the West, he noticed a small break in the clouds. Between the clouds, he saw shining ever so brightly, the evening star, “in dewy-silver solitude.” The evening star hanging alone in the midst of the storm.

Archibald realized, “This storm is an imposter. It is momentary. The sky is here, and the stars; all shall be well.”

And I am wondering, as I look at you this beautiful Easter morning, ”What is the ultimate reality in your life?”

We endure multiple storms. These storms are like little deaths, life is full of little deaths. Didn’t someone say, “I am dying all the day long?”

Marriage or relationship trouble, divorce, financial problems, family discord, loss of a job, the death of a pet or a friend or a parent. Or cancer, or sickness or disability.

All deaths. All fierce storms.

Death and storms, death and storms, appear for all their bluster and thunder and threatening flashes of light to be ultimate reality. But don’t you see, they are mere cardboard cutouts, false fronts, the movie set for a Western, the saloon and jail and general store – mere plywood fronts.

No reality whatsoever.

Good Friday is like that. Jesus’ death was like that. Appeared dark and threatening, appeared as reality, but (get this) Easter was also at the Cross. Good Friday, a cardboard cutout. That’s all.

Death in all its forms is just that, a cardboard cutout. Or, as Archibald says, “The storm is the imposter.”

Rabbi Harold Kushner posed the question, “Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People?” He wasn’t the first; the question is age-old, but he articulated a wonderful answer.

First, God doesn’t design the bad things, and second, God walks with you through them. Or, to use my metaphor, God does not see you distantly, only from afar, as you imagined, but here, face to face, intimately. God knows you and loves you completely. And does not design bad things for you.

But Rabbi Kushner’s answer has always struck me as incomplete. I know. I have walked through the valley of the shadow. And I’m here to tell you, when you’re in that valley, God’s presence isn’t enough.

Easter at the Cross is the only answer.

The reality that the Tomb will end empty. God as angel rolls the stone away; there is no corpse. There is no death. Death was an illusion, the cardboard cutout, the imposter storm.

In other words, death, your ultimate death, and the little deaths, are not reality. Easter is the ultimate reality.

It won’t always be like this, life won’t always be like this, suffering and pain won’t always be like this. Jesus is alive, and so are you. The caricature that is death is defeated.

The only remaining question is this: Can you see it? Or more to the point, Can you see God, or is God still off in the heavens somewhere?

Do you see God and not death as the cardboard cutout? Or do you see death and not God as the cutout? The God of power and life and removed boulders is waiting for you to notice. Will you?

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!

Amen.

Copyright 2007