From Easter morning (Sunday, April 21, 2019)

Reading:  Luke 24:1-12 

The four Gospels tell four different stories of the resurrection of Jesus, each highlighting different parts of the experience.  All agree on one thing, though – the utter amazement of the followers of Jesus at his resurrection, and the time it took for them to comprehend and to share in the new life into which Jesus invites them.

Death and resurrection.  And trying to figure it out.   

That’s what this week – Holy Week is about.  It’s what the season of Easter is about.  And really it’s what all of our life and all of human history are about.  Trying to figure out, and to live within the God-given gift of death and resurrection.

It is a gift of God.  The disciples on that first Easter morning thought Jesus was dead.  It seemed the powers of the world had won, Jesus was dead in the tomb, and now instead of being followers of a living lord they were just curators of a body and guardians of a legacy.

Except God was not content to leave him there, let him stay dead where his followers had laid him, and let them off the hook that easily.  God was not content to see Jesus wrapped in a shroud for the rest of history, preserved by the disciples as they last knew him.

There was too much to do.  Places to go.  People to see.  A kingdom of justice and right relations to keep bringing to the world’s attention.  So many ways yet to live out God’s good will for all the Earth, God’s desire for reconciliation, God’s special care for the poor and the weak, God’s vision of shalom within and for all creation.

It’s like what Jesus told his disciples the night before he died.  In my Father’s house, he said, are many dwelling places, and I am going to prepare a place for you.  On one hand we read this a comforting promise about a new home with God after we leave this life, and we read it at funerals and gravesides.  But it also helps point us to the fact that the work and life of God and Jesus in this world are not finished with his crucifixion in Jerusalem, that there are and always will be more places yet in that time and all times for people to see him and walk with him in holy mission and ministry.

Things do not come to an end.  There are many dwelling places of the holy and of the kingdom in this world.

Dwelling places of the holy.  All over the world.  All the time.

We all know in a very short while – maybe just a few years, what the headlines will be about the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, one of those dwelling places.  When they start the rebuilding, restoration and renewal, it will be lines like “Rising from the Ashes,” “Like a Phoenix” and “The Resurrection of our Lady of Paris.”

And they won’t be wrong.  For many in Paris, in France and in much of the Western world, the burning of the cathedral was like a death.   People quietly watched on their TV’s, and on streets near the cathedral people stood in silence for hours – a silent crowd sharing shock and grief as the structure was consumed by great spiraling flames.  Some began singing hymns of faith that maybe they had not sung for years.  Many prayed.

A few days later a French cultural historian spoke of the cathedral fire as “a brutal wounding” of “one of the beating hearts of France, of Europe, and of Christianity.”  Just think, he said, of how celebratory events  were made all the more magnificent by it; how none of the brutality and stupidity of humanity that swept through France in the last century seemed to touch it; how the cathedral stood as a testament to the presence, the strength and the persistence of light in the world.  So right from the start, the question is not if or whether the cathedral will be restored, but only when and in what way it will be raised again. 

Also last week there was a BBC story on Facebook (thanks, Val, for posting it!) about Afghani scholars and craftsmen working to reconstruct as many as they can of the 1200 statues of the Buddha that the Taliban destroyed in Afghanistan – literally smashed to bits.  The destruction of those statues is as deep a wound and as tragic a grief, and their restoration as fervent a hope to the people of Afghanistan and others around the world, as the death and resurrection of Notre Dame is to us. 

Death and resurrection is what it’s about.  In so many ways darkness resents and rails against light and tries to overcome it.  Light suffers injury and accident; that’s the way of the world – crucifixion of God’s light and love.  Yet light persists and endures, and not only endures but is strengthened, deepened and widened; that’s the work of God and the spirit of God in us – resurrection always in some way of the truth, the way, and the light of God’s love.

And it’s more than just rebuilding and restoring of what was.  That first Easter morning was not just a simple reunion of Jesus and his followers.  Not just a happy reconnection of teacher and learners, and then simply carrying on from where they’d left off with nothing changed and nothing different. 

No, first there was nothing but emptiness and wondering.  A mysteriously opened and tragically empty tomb.  “What does it mean, and where on earth is he?  He’s not where we thought he was.”

There was the linen cloth left behind, discarded.  “Huh!  I guess he didn’t need the shroud we got for him.  Maybe doesn’t want to be tied up and limited by what we thought he needed.”

And then for a while nothing more than just a reminder of the promise that sometime somewhere they would see him again, that he would meet them and walk with them again, somewhere beyond the dying and the destruction. “Really?  And just where and how will that be?”

The gift of resurrection is not always easy, like the United Church in Newmarket found out.  For who knows how many years the church there was a sprawling, grand heritage building and sacred space to many people and groups in the community.  A little over five years ago, it burned to the ground – a terrible grief.   And now it is resurrected – an eventual joy.

And being resurrected, it’s not just restored.  Not just remade the way it used to be. There’s the same foundation of faith in God and God’s Christ, and the same sense of mission and ministry that inspired and animated the old structure.  But there was also an intense time of self-examination and growth and change, so the structure now is vastly different in form and function from what used to be, and is ready to live out God’s age-old will for the new and different life now ahead of it.  Rather than just waiting for Christ to come back to join them again in a fixed-up tomb, they left the tomb themselves and went to where he was waiting for them in the world of their new day.

As will be with the cathedral of Notre Dame.  When it is rebuilt it will not just be a replica of what it used to be.  In the same way as 12^th and 13^th-century monks and scholars, stone masons, wood-workers, architects and artists were inspired by the divine among them to create the first cathedral, in our time todays’ architects, masons, artists and big and small sponsors and patrons will join together to raise up a work not just of simple restoration but of inspired resurrection.

And the statues of the Buddha will not – cannot, be the same as the old.  They will be restored as much as possible, but they will also bear marks and scars of their brokenness, and signs of their re-creators’ work and craft.  And this is what makes them grow in power and meaning, to be resurrected and not just replicated.  They will stand as a sign of living and ongoing commitment, the expression of a community of faith and inspiration as strong today as was the community that first brought them into being.

So it is with all churches and communities of faith, all believers and persons of holy spirit who know death and dead ends, and live into and towards resurrection and new life. 

And maybe here we get really to the heart of what death and resurrection are about.  Not buildings and statues and structures, but believers, persons of holy spirit like you and me and others in the world who make of the world what it will and what it won’t be. 

In a way, death and resurrection are not even so much just about Jesus, as about us and whether we find our way into the story or not, know death and resurrection in our own lives or not, open ourselves to be dwelling places of the risen Christ in the world right now or not.

It’s about the opening of the tombs we make and find ourselves in. 

The rolling away of the stones we put in place. 

The casting aside of the linen cloths and burial shrouds that we think we need, that just tangle us up. 

The remembering of the promise that he comes to us and we will see him along the way, and that he calls us again to follow him.

Death and resurrection is what its’ – what we’re, about.