Sermon: Breaking and Entering

This sermon was preached at St. Lydia's on Easter Sunday, 2010.  The text is Matthew 28:1-10.  You can find it here.

I wonder if you’ve ever attended a wedding that felt like a funeral?  The couple was lifted on chairs, fed one another cake, kissed when someone dinged a spoon on their champagne glass, but all you felt was the searing pain in your heart of loss and separation.  The celebration around you was a strange and disorienting counterpoint to the pain you were feeling.

 

Or have you ever gone to a funeral, and found yourself, instead, at a wedding?  Mary Magdalene and her companion, Mary, woke up in while it was still dark outside that morning, dressed quietly, and set out just as the sun rose at the horizon.  They woke up to visit a gravesite, to sit with their cheeks against cool, damp stone, in silence and in shock,

and after enough time had passed, to let out the guttural, wailing sounds of lament that were building inside them.  They went to mourn after the death of a friend.  A death that was bloody, violent, extended.  A death that seemed to almost tear them apart from the inside.  So as the morning dawned, they went to mourn.

 

Emotions are almost never pure.

Our mourning is tinged with relief,

our joy tinged with panic,

our fear tinged with possibility.

 

The resurrection is made of joy.  But mixed in, as part of that joy, it is made of something else as these women set out to mourn their friend.  It is made of confusion, of disorientation, of exhaustion and of fear.  They came to lament, but find the earth shaking

as the stone rolls away from the tomb.  “Don’t be afraid,” the angel cries, “I know that you are looking for Jesus, but he is not here.  He has been raised.”

 

We came looking to mourn, but instead we are terrified.  And for a moment, maybe more than a moment, we almost want it to not be true.  For death is familiar, is known.  The tomb is a comfort, unchanging and safe.  But resurrection, life that cracks open the tomb that breaks death, is terrifying.  To shout, “Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed!” is to cry that God has broken us open, to new possibility, perhaps when we would have rather just cried.

 

Author Sara Miles speaks of her unlikely conversion experience to Christianity in her book, “Take this Bread.”  She writes,

 

“Early one winter morning, when Katie was sleeping at her father’s house, I walked into St. Gregory’s…I had no earthly reason to be there.  I’d never heard a Gospel reading or said the Lord’s Prayer.  I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian – or, as I thought of it rather less politely, as a religious nut.  But on other long walks, I’d passed the beautiful wooden building, with its shingled steeples and plain windows, and this time I went in, on an impulse, with no more than a reporter’s habitual curiosity…

 

“We gathered around the table.  And there was more singing and standing, and someone was putting a piece of fresh, crumbly bread in my hands, saying “the body of Christ,” and handing me the goblet of sweet wine, saying “the blood of Christ,” and then something outrageous and terrifying happened.  Jesus happened to me. 

 

“I still can’t explain my first communion.  It made no sense.  I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over, painlessly, from behind.  The disconnect between what I thought was happening – I was eating a piece of bread; what I heard someone else say was happening – the piece of bread was the “body” of “Christ,” a patently untrue or at best metaphorical statement; and what I knew was happening – God, named “Christ” or “Jesus” was real, and in my mouth – utterly short-circuited my ability to do anything but cry…

 

“Why did I feel as if I were being entered and taken over, completely stirred up by someone whose name I’d only spoken before as a casual expletive?...I wanted that bread again.  It was a sensation as urgent as physical hunger, pulling me back to the table at St. Gregory’s through my fear and confusion.”

 

 

God happens to us.  In Sara’s words, we are “entered and taken over,” in an experience that leaves us confused and fearful, God happens to us, and we almost want it not to be true, because it means that everything, everything changes.  And we don’t even really get a choice.

 

The women at the tomb weren’t looking for their lives to be unalterably changed that day, they only wanted to mourn their friend.  But instead they found themselves at a wedding when they were dressed for a funeral, and in a moment that was dizzying and disorienting, they were told that they better get moving, because what they were looking for sure as hell wasn’t in that tomb.

 

Whatever it is  you’re looking for,

stop looking in the tomb.

 

Like Sara Miles, weeping week after week as she took communion, we too are entered and taken over by God.  It’s easy to think the confusion and the fear is a byproduct,

but it’s the confusion and the fear that’s at the center of it all.  Fear that’s at the center of that moment when the earth shakes and God breaks us open.

 

Don’t be afraid, the angel says, but we must be, as we stand paralyzed, the impulse to cling to the tomb is strong.  Don’t be afraid, the angel says, and somehow we let go, and start down the road.  And in all our fear, all our confusion, as we go looking for Jesus, our great fear in tinged with great joy, our mourning turns toward dancing.

 

 

We finish the sermon together at St. Lydia’s.  Please share a story from your experience that’s emerged from this text.