2009-04-12 - "Isn’t It Incredible?"

"Isn't It Incredible?"
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 12, 2009 (Easter Sunday)
Text: Luke 24:1-12

The stage was prepared, the lines had been learned, the music had been rehearsed, and we were ready to perform one of the greatest musicals that had ever been performed - by teenagers! It was my first directing performance, and as a schoolboy, I had around me a number of students from churches from the United Church in the Fredericton area of New Brunswick. We were going to do a performance of that great Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. There was anxiety and tension in the air. This magnificent musical would be presented at Gibson United Church for the first time. We were ready! It was going to be awesome!

Many of you know the story of Joseph in the Bible. If you don't, he had a father called Jacob, who gave his son Joseph a magnificent coat with many different colours on it. But, Joseph had some brothers who were jealous and envious that Joseph had been given this coat of many colours. And so, they set out to kill him. However, one of the brothers felt that was too harsh, and that rather than kill him, they should beat him up, throw him by the side of the road and leave him to be taken away to another land by a caravan of travellers. They took this coat of many colours with blood on it back to the father and told him that Joseph was dead. What a great story!

So, we came to the climax. Joseph was beaten up, and we had made this great, big cistern out of papier mache and we threw Joseph into it. It was tiny, rough and uncomfortable. The Midianites were supposed to appear on a cart and take him out, but nothing happened! For several minutes, Joseph just sat there in pain, crumpled up in a papier mache can. Finally, he was exasperated and he said, “Would someone get me the heck out of here?” There was a rustling in the back, the curtain opened up, and the Midianites appeared with a cart. They pulled it onto the stage, just two of them, put Joseph on the cart, and went exactly one metre before a wheel fell off the cart and went right across the stage into the audience. One of the Midianites screamed at the other, “I told you to put that flipping bolt on, didn't I?” - and this was miked for everyone to hear! The performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat went downhill from that moment on.

Afterward, there was a cast party, which was held by the United Church minister, who very graciously took me and the production team to his home for tea. His name was The Reverend George Barrett, and I will always remember him fondly. He said to us,

Don't worry about the chaos that occurred, because there is something you might not know, and that is that the story of Joseph is, in many ways, a precursor to the story of the Exodus, where the people of Israel were in captivity and brought to freedom. Many believe it is a precursor to the exile, imprisonment, and final liberation of the people as they returned to the Holy Land, and most people believe it is a precursor to Easter, where Jesus was dead and buried, but came back to life.

He continued, “All I can say is that I hope that happened to this performance today!” Then he added, “But, don't worry, because there is a line in the Joseph story that says, ‘Where you had meant me harm, God had done something good.'” Even in the chaos of that moment, the hope was something good and redemptive would come out of it. People would know the biblical story.

So it is with Easter. Amid the chaos and death, in the midst of the confusion and conflicting accounts, God still does something powerful with this story. We have just gone through a week in which we have remembered Jesus in Gethsemane, when he was alone and abandoned by his disciples and at his most sad and melancholy. We have remembered the Upper Room, where Jesus discovered who was going to betray him, and that someone would deny him three times.

On Good Friday, we were here in this place with hundreds of people, and a cross was brought down the aisle. Christians of every denomination from this area gathered to remember the crucifixion of Jesus, and how that crucifixion is the source of our unity and hope. Yet, it is the symbol of death and destruction. We have gone through the chaos, we have gone through the death, we have gone through the loose ends, but now we need to find something more, for we are confronted this day with an empty tomb, we are confronted with a living Lord, and we are confronted by messages that speak of something magnificent happening. This is the moment in which, out of the chaos, we ask this question: “Isn't it incredible what God can do when fear and love collide?”

Today's text tells the story of the women coming to the tomb on the first day. They come with spices in hand, which was their custom, for you bring spices to prepare a body for burial. It is a sacred sign, a sign that you are leaving a beautiful aroma in the place of death. But as Luke rightly accounts, they had to come a day later than they had anticipated, because the day before was the Sabbath and you couldn't do anything on the Sabbath. They had to wait for the first day of the week. They came to the tomb expecting to find Jesus' body in it. They were expecting to find death and a body to prepare, but they didn't. They came to the tomb and found it empty. They found that the body that they were looking for and getting ready to bless and dedicate was no longer present, and they were shocked.

I have never seen this captured in art more beautifully than in a magnificent painting by a man called Jacques Tissot. He was a French painter in the 19th century and, in many ways, his painting arises from his own story, out of his own faith and his own struggles. You see, Jacques Tissot had been the darling of many of the illuminati and the wealthy in 19th-century Paris. He had painted great paintings and was known as one of the up-and-coming artists, but he decided to join a commune of people during the Civil War who would support each other in Paris. During the Civil War, many of those who were in the commune were arrested and killed. In fact, 20,000 people were executed. Those who were not executed were forced into exile. Jacques Tissot, leaving behind his friends, fled in 1872 to England. There he set up shop. His name was well-known and he became known as James Tissot. He began to paint many of the beautiful ladies of London society. He fell in love with one who was his model, one with whom he had an affair. Before they could get married, this woman contracted tuberculosis and died an awful death. James Jacques Tissot was devastated; he didn't know what to do. His beloved was gone.

In 1886, he decided to go to the Holy Land. For a year, he travelled to all the great biblical sites and as he did so, he captured them in paintings. He found that his faith welled up within him, and when he got to the stories of Jesus, and the last moments of Jesus' life, he produced his greatest paintings of all, and one them is when the women come to the tomb. Tissot was brilliant! The women do not approach the tomb front on; they come from the side. You can see the fear and love on their faces in the original painting. They have no idea what they are going to see when they turn and look into the tomb. They are ready to see death, but they see it empty. They are ready to see a body, but they are confronted by angels. They are ready to have the aroma of a dead body to put spices on, but rather they see Roman soldiers scattered on the ground. Their fear and all the anxiety of seeing a body dissipates. The love that they have for Jesus is confused, so much so that in the Greek, the words used to describe how they feel mean “perplexed.” They have no idea what is going on. Those who first saw the empty tomb were not people who had it all clearly organized and worked out. Rather, they were people who came out of love and came out of fear, and they found an empty tomb, and they were confronted with these incredible words: “Why do you look for the Living One among the dead? Why do you continue to look here?”

In Tissot's painting, there is this incredible, shadowy figure in the tomb. It is hard to know whether it is the risen Christ or the angel. But, they came looking for a dead body, and they found life. Isn't it incredible what God can do when fear and love collide? Isn't it incredible what God can do when death and life collide?

All we have observed for the last month is death and destruction: Jesus talking about his imminent death, Jesus being presented before the crowds, Jesus being put before the Sanhedrin, Jesus being accused before Pilate, Jesus being nailed on to a cross, Jesus being brought down and put into a tomb. It seemed that everything was dark and empty. It seemed that death had won the day and that there was no life. But, how wrong everyone was!

It reminded me of something that happened last Sunday afternoon in a soccer game between Manchester United and Aston Villa - you knew I had to get this in at some point, didn't you! David and I were sort of back and forth on the phone, giving an explanation of the game, and our dear Manchester United was losing. All seemed lost! There were about seven minutes to go, and they tied it up. But then, the announcer said that people were starting to leave the stadium - they were going home. I was thinking that they were idiots - they have no faith! Then, in injury time, with less than a minute to go, a 17-year-old Italian player who had never played before scored the winning goal for Manchester United. Glory, glory alleluia! David reminded me that I didn't have that faith 10 years ago in another game, but that is beside the point. Had you left the game at that moment when it was just even, you'd have missed the glory. You would have missed the greatest moment. If you miss the resurrection of Jesus Christ, if your faith is only based on the cross and Good Friday, you miss the glory! You miss this magnificent moment in which death is defeated and life is victorious.

I am sure the disciples, who believed in a general resurrection of the dead, would not have been surprised that Jesus would talk about resurrection. Many Jews of the time believed that there would be a last day when everyone would be raised from the dead. They believed in the general resurrection, but when the women came to them and said, “Look, he is not here. He is risen,” this powerful act of the resurrection became more than the affirmation of the resurrection of the dead. It became an affirmation that Jesus Christ is the Lord and that Jesus of Nazareth, who they had seen executed on a cross and placed in a tomb, was now alive. They, too, couldn't believe that it was possible. But, they were confronted by the women with the message that Jesus was alive, and so their faith was confirmed. The Jesus whom they had followed had been vindicated. More than Caesar, who claimed to be a son of the gods, more than those who were the pretenders to the throne of being the messiah, more than the Sanhedrin or the Pilates of this world, more than all the kings and above them all now was one person - the person they had believed in, the person they had followed and committed their lives to: Jesus of Nazareth, raised from the dead, King of kings and Lord of lords. Isn't it incredible what God can do?

Isn't it incredible what God can do when doubt and faith collide? Let's be honest about the story of the crucifixion and the resurrection. There are different accounts, and one can often get mixed messages through all of the events that were taking place. It's like a law firm in Philadelphia that decided to send flowers to a new law firm that was being established in Baltimore. They sent a bouquet of flowers and when it arrived in Baltimore, they were somewhat surprised. It was a magnificent array with beautiful bows, with a card that said, “With deepest sympathy.” When word got back to Philadelphia, the florist nearly dropped to his knees in despair, because he knew that in some funeral home somewhere there were flowers with a card that said, “Welcome to your new location.”

Amazing, is it not, that these kinds of mixed messages so often come across, even to the disciples. It seemed that all they needed to hear was “deepest sympathy,” but what the women said to them was “welcome to a new location” with your Father in heaven. We all have our doubts when we look at this messy message with its loose ends. As Jim Cantelon said in the television program, Eye to Eye when he was interviewing me on the resurrection, “No one fabricating a story to try to prove a point would leave so many unanswered questions, so many loose ends, and have so many contradictions.” But that is why I believe it is the truth. I believe it is the truth, because it is not artificially forced. Something must have blown these people away. Something must have transformed and changed their lives, and from that moment on, in shock and in awe, all they could give an account of was an empty tomb, and say, “He is risen; he is not here.”

Isn't it incredible what God can do when doubt and faith collide? Isn't it incredible what God can do for the world and how the world is never the same because of this event and the glory of the resurrection?

Reverend Cameron tells an amazing story of the only white person known to have been buried in a black cemetery during the days of segregation in the South, in Georgia, in the United States. The story is of this well-known white man who grew up in a privileged home, but as a young boy his mother died, and his father, being very wealthy and very powerful, spent very little time with the new-born son. So, he hired a black nanny called Mandy.

Mandy raised this boy. She spent nearly all her time with him. She was like his surrogate mother, vicariously expressing the love of a parent. Every morning that this little white boy got up in the mansion, Mandy would say to him, “Wake up! God's mornin' is coming! God's mornin' is coming!” This young boy grew up, and he went to university. He became a well-known statesman. But, even when he came home from college, she still used to wake him up in the morning - you know what college students are like - they love to sleep in. She would wake him up in the morning and say, “Wake up! God's mornin' is a-comin'. God's mornin' is a-comin'.”

Finally, one day, when this man had grown into a statesman, he received news as he was coming out of a meeting that his beloved Mandy had died. Devastated, he went home, and as he got to the cemetery he said to his advisors and friends,

I want you to know at this moment that I want to be buried right here in this cemetery. Before Jesus comes again, I want to be with Mandy, so on the day of resurrection when the Lord Jesus calls us by name, Mandy will be next to me, and we will be able to say again for the last time, ‘Wake up! God's mornin' is comin'. God's mornin' is comin'.'

Isn't it amazing; isn't it incredible what God can do? Isn't it incredible that God can bring black and white together and unify humanity? Isn't it incredible what God can do through the resurrection? Isn't it incredible how people who come in fear leave in love? Isn't it incredible that those who are confronted by death see the power of life? Isn't it incredible that those who doubt will have faith? Isn't it incredible what God can do? Isn't it marvellous? Isn't it wonderful that Jesus is risen from the dead? Amen.