Acts 10:34-43

Psalm 118:14-29

Colossians 3:1-4

LUKE 24:1-10

Let Us Choose Life

Anyone here want to be resurrected?

Not merely made 10% nicer. (That’s sometimes all people think the Christian faith offers.)

Not merely made richer, thinner or younger-looking (maybe, and just for a while if at all). Those are the kinds of things people, especially in America, spend enormous energy, time and money seeking. Some get some of that – for a brief time. All eventually die. And not all even die contented, or die having helped anyone else, or die with any hope for any life beyond death.

Resurrection, on the other hand, is the ultimate “extreme make-over.” It was so extreme that the first person to experience it, a carpenter-turned-rabbi from Nazareth, was not initially recognized by some of his own followers. But perhaps they were blinded by their own limited notions of the possible, as we might have been in their places.

Resurrection made Christ alive – not as a figure in a video game, or as a hologram, but tangible, touchable, able to eat food – and also able to appear in locked rooms out of thin air, and able to travel from one province to another without anyone seeing how he got there. Resurrection means “life squared”, so to speak – as hard for us to understand, perhaps, as it would be for a two dimensional drawing to understand what it would be like to become a three dimensional object. Or as hard for us to understand, perhaps, as it would have been for us, when we were still in our mothers’ wombs, to understand what life after birth would be like.

Resurrection means life and possibilities beyond out imagination, beyond our hopes – and beyond our own doing, beyond our own power. No wonder so many people chase get-rich-quick schemes, botox and fad diets: they have actually seen people who at least look richer, younger and thinner than they do (however truly healthy those people might really be and however worthwhile they might really be as human beings). And besides, all those and other “quick fixes” are ways we can try to be in control of ourselves and of our destinies and to try and pretend that we aren’t mortal.

The devil has set up a lot of cruel, self-deceptive jokes for us mortals; I wonder if these efforts at “quick fixes” might be some of them? We human beings may try to “save ourselves” and deny our own mortalities by buying endless lottery tickets, spending thousands on plastic surgeries and dubious treatments…instead of facing reality, admitting that we are powerless over our self-centeredness, over our sinfulness, and over our mortality, and coming to believe that there is a power greater than ourselves who can and wants to restore us to sanity and give us new life – life better than we could ever devise on our own!

Maybe first we have to feel hopeless before we accept hope. Maybe first we have to realize that we can’t lick death and sin on our own. Heck, the women who went to a certain tomb outside of Jerusalem early that Sunday morning 2,000 years ago realized that they couldn’t even roll away the massive stone from the entrance to the tomb by themselves, never mind bring Jesus back from the dead, never mind create hope for new life for themselves when they were utterly, totally bereft, devastated and despairing.

Their first gift from God was that the stone had already been rolled away from the tomb. Had it not been, they might have left not even knowing that the tomb was empty, just frustrated in their desire to anoint and ritually care for a dead body which was no longer dead and no longer there.

Their second gift was not one they recognized as a gift at first. (Sometimes it’s like that in our relationships with God.) Their second gift was the absence of Jesus’ body. At first, they didn’t think of this as a gift, never mind as good news, never mind as The Good News. We, too, expect things to be certain ways, and also the control freak in each of us wants them left the way we left them. Certainly they had every reason to believe that the dead body of their Lord would still be dead, and still be there, waiting for them to do what they expected to do. They couldn’t even imagine anything better.

But God exceeds not merely our expectations but also our imaginations.

“Two men in dazzling clothes” – we might call them angels – “stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.’”

The women ran and told the male disciples, but Luke candidly reports that “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” Then Jesus himself spent the afternoon walking with two disciples on the way to Emmaus – and only when he broke bread with them did they recognize him. They “had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” Those hopes had been destroyed, but a far greater hope was born that Easter evening. God exceeds not merely our expectations, but also our imaginations.

The eleven apostles gathered together that evening – and even when they saw the risen Christ himself, “they were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.” But God exceeds not only our expectations, but also our imaginations. This was no ghost; this was the resurrected Savior of the world, fresh from having defeated death itself, fresh from taking the sins of the whole world on his own shoulders and by so doing breaking their power over us – our own sins, and those of others.

This was the Savior of the world, risen to offer new life, offering courage, energy, wisdom, healing and community now and eternal life beyond this life to all who turn to him.

OR, people can leave the free gift of God in Jesus Christ unopened, and look for quick fixes, a totally self-centered life, and death without end. That’s an option on the table for us to consider.

Ultimately, Easter is about a choice, a choice to receive the free gift of God and ask God to begin or continue to transform us, or a choice to let Easter just mean a brief “sugar rush” from chocolate eggs and bunnies instead of eternal sweetness, and to go back to earthly pursuits which simply start death early.

Let us choose life.

The Rev. Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Monmouth Junction, New Jersey