It’s been a strangely busy Holy Week for me this year. Most years I’m able to put aside all additional work and focus solely on the movements of the season. Any task not directly and specifically related to these four worship services get tabled, to be dug off my desk and conquered next week. And that feels good and right. Easter is, after all, what we are about as a community of the faithful. We are Easter people.
But this year I joked with a colleague that the world did not seem to have gotten the memo that this was Holy Week and I had more important and sacred work to handle. The world chugged along as normal, and I tried to fit Easter planning in and amidst community meetings. Most confusingly, the work I was doing outside of worship planning, meeting with community partners around the future of Triangle Trailer Park, going to forums about the fire station on Cliff Street, making plans to support efforts to make Battle Creek a more welcoming community, meeting with the council as we continue to move forward on redevelopment plans for this congregation, all of this felt too like good and holy and important work, and none of it felt like work that could be put aside for this blip of liturgical activity known as Holy Week. I’ve had this itch all week for Easter to be over so I could get back to the important tasks that it seemed like God was calling me to, which felt like a strange and unfaithful place to be as a pastor.
I wonder if any of you come to this Easter Sunday a similar itch. If any of you bring with you a sense of distraction or discomfort. Are there thoughts that leave you feeling confused and unfaithful, wondering if this is the place you should be this morning? The story of Christ’s resurrection is such a miraculous story that it can be a lot to take in. And when we are engaged in the deaths of the world, illness or oppression, violence or fear, the miracle that we proclaim this morning can feel, like the disciples felt, like an idle tale.
I’ve read the resurrection story from Luke’s Gospel probably one hundred times, but it was the discomfort I felt this week that led me to read this text again as if for the first time. As I was reading, I was caught by the feelings of the women in verse four, that when they came to the tomb and found the stone rolled away, they entered the tomb, discovered the body was missing, and were perplexed at what they saw. Perplexed is a great word. It comes from the Latin per “on account of,” plexus, “many strands or cords.” I love the imagery of that word. It is more than being confused or puzzled, it is like there were so many thoughts running through their heads, so many ideas coming together. They had come for one task, the anointing of Jesus body for burial, so there were the steps of that work in their minds. There was also grief and shock from the events of the days before, when they’d watched Jesus beaten, mocked, and hung on a cross. There was confusion in the words he’d said in the months leading up to his death, about how he would rise again. There was disappointment that the one whom they thought was the Messiah had not done what they thought a Messiah would do. All of these hopes and fears and dreams and dreads so filled their minds that they could not make sense of the truth revealed in front of them, the meaning of a rolled away stone and cast off grave clothes.
But there was something holy in their perplexity. There was something sacred in their distraction. There was something of the Spirit moving in the midst of their confusion and fear and disbelief that drew them to make the strange decision to continue forward and enter into the tomb. I’m not sure it is a choice I would make, were I to suddenly come across the gaping open door of a tomb where I have on good evidence that a body should be, to investigate the problem on my own. Peter doesn’t. Scripture tells us that when the women told the disciples of what they had seen, most dismissed it as an “idle tale.” Peter got up and ran to the tomb, but even he did not go inside. Instead he stooped down, looked in, and then went home. Amazed, but not changed, by what he observed.
But the women went in. And as they stood, hunched in the dark, dank, dampness of the newly emptied tomb, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified, but the men said, “Remember.” Remember. Remember is always an active word in the Bible. Remembering in scripture is not about nostalgia, remembering instead is the act of being re-connected, being re-minded, it is being re-rooted from the source of our being to be moved forward into a new and different reality. God remembered Noah and the flood waters receded, God remembered Abraham and Sara, and they bore a son, God remembered the Israelites in Egypt, and Moses came forward to lead God’s people from slavery to freedom. Remembering is always an act on God’s part of bringing God’s people forward into the place where God already is, out of the bondage of the past and into the new life of the future.
And that experience of remembering, of being reminded, changed the women. All of a sudden the perplexing things that had drawn them forward into the tomb of death were cleared away, and they ran out from the tomb, back to the eleven and to all the rest, to tell of all they had seen and had heard. There is something almost baptismal in this transformation, something definitely resurrectional, as the women are drawn into the tomb, the holding place for death, and in this place of death are remembered, are reborn and are sent out into the world to proclaim the good news that Christ is not here, for he has risen.
It took the rest of disciples a little bit longer to get what had happened, as I mentioned earlier. They were a little less perplexed, which left them a little less open to be transformed by the remembering of what Jesus had said to them, but they will get there. The next few Sundays we will hear stories of the disciples’ slow journey into remembering. Culminating on Pentecost Sunday, when the Holy Spirit will descend in tongues of fire upon them and they will be sent out into the world to bear witness to the Gospel, to remember the teachings of Jesus and to proclaim resurrection to all God’s creation. They will get there, but they’re not there today. Today it is only the women who experience the strange paradox of being so lost as to be found.
And so this morning I invite you to dwell in the glorious perplexity of Easter morning. Let the beautiful confusion of this day hold you and challenge you and confront you. I invite you to bring this day all your questions and fears, doubts and disbeliefs, the places you wish you could see God working, and the places you thought you should find God and couldn’t. Bring your distractions, your complications, the things you should be doing, the work left undone. Don’t stay away until you have all the answers figured out, even the disciples themselves dismissed resurrection as nothing more than an idle tale. Just come. Eat bread, drink wine, proclaim “He is risen,” sing hymns with familiar words. Let the movements of this holy day carry you past understanding to remembering. Remembering not the past but the future, not what is gone but what is yet to be. On this Easter morning, we are reminded to no longer dwell in what has gone, to no longer look for the living among the dead. Resurrection, life, has gone on ahead of us, and in the holy contradictions of our God, it is in the midst of our perplexity that God meets us. Amen.
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