Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 118:14-29; Acts 10:34-43; Mark 16:1-8

Christmas and Easter – the two biggest days of the year in the Christian calendar, when the churches fill and people get dressed up, and the rest of the world takes notice, if only by wrapping presents or hiding eggs.  Yet for all that they have in common, Christmas and Easter are more different than they are similar.  Christmas falls in the dead of winter, on practically the longest night of the year, time enough to follow the bright star in the eastern sky all the way to a newborn child who’s more focused on where his next feeding is coming from, than on the strangers bringing him gifts and kneeling down to worship him. Easter, on the other hand, comes in the springtime, as life and warmth return to a once barren land.  And whereas Christmas is about the incarnate presence of God, Easter’s about absence.  For in today’s gospel reading we don’t have a tangible human being, but rather a tomb, empty save for a mysterious person clad in white who announces that Jesus has been raised.  “He is not here,” the man says.  You will see him, but not here, and not now. We have no hard and fast evidence, or eyewitness accounts, or things like that.

And that fits with the message of Easter.  For whereas Christmas is the beginning of something that will eventually come to an end, Easter is the conclusion of something, with the hope that it will return. Christmas marks the birth of what could well have been a pretty normal child, much like any other; while Easter marks a most extraordinary finale: a death that wasn’t, a short-lived homecoming, and a promise of an ultimate return in power and great glory.

Christmas is understandable because it’s so normal and human, but Easter is mysterious because it’s so miraculous.  It’s little wonder that we follow the custom of giving presents that the wise men started that first Christmas, but for Easter our traditions have little to do with the Bible, and more to do with pagan fertility celebrations that featured rabbits and eggs.

And I think Christianity is seen as a Christmas religion.  A religion that’s as straightforward as it is polite. A religion that’s as concrete and undeniable, and some would say as simple, as the birth of a child.  It makes sense, then, that Christianity drew so many adherents when certainty was the number one priority of people seeking God, because it had a book that explained God, and a church to help with the tricky parts. But nowadays certainty isn’t the name of the game, because in our postmodern world, where everything isn’t quite as simple as it once seemed to be, a lot of people are looking for some mystery.  They don’t want all the answers to be easy and black-and-white, because life doesn’t seem that way, at all.  They want someplace to go that isn’t riddled with doctrine or dogma. A wordless place, where they have room to move and grow and understand things for themselves.  A manger in Bethlehem doesn’t seem to fit that bill, but I’d argue that an empty tomb does.

First, an example. Before my wife, Pam, and I moved to Vermont, we lived in New York City.  Near the end of our time there, as luck, or fate, would have it, two spiritual masters came to town in the period of a single week, both to speak about peace, and love, and transformation.

The first was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Han, whose writings I greatly admire.  He’s dedicated to a movement he called “engaged spirituality,” which referred to a combination of action and contemplation in the service of peace. He was speaking at the huge, historic Riverside Church, which seats about 2,000 people, and it was standing room only that night, with hundreds of people turned away at the door.  And the crowd wasn’t all peaceniks or theology buffs; the beautiful people were there, too – people who devoted considerable time and money buying a new outfit to wear to a talk given by a little, poor man who wore the same clothes every day.

Pam and I were in the balcony; and in one of those ironic twists that can only happen in New York, we had a hard time paying attention because the people next to us were rudely jostling us and each other in an attempt to get the best vantage point from which to hear a sermon about treating other people better than yourselves.  We left impressed by the wisdom of the speaker’s words, and by the contradictions of the crowd’s behavior.

The following Sunday afternoon, Daniel Berrigan spoke at a small Episcopal church on the Lower East Side. Berrigan is a priest, poet, and social activist, and is the closest thing to a hero that the Christian peace and justice movement has.  I didn’t have to get there early, because there were plenty of seats.  Everyone there looked like either a student or a priest, and by the end of the talk there might have been fifty people present. Certainly not more.

The take home message of those two events was that Christianity isn’t very cool; it doesn’t seem to allow for much contemplation; it’s too caught up in rights and wrongs, and do’s and don’t’s, and it doesn’t give people room to breathe, and grow. Or so the world thinks, given the throngs at the first talk, and the empty seats at the second, when both were about pretty much the same thing: creating space for what is holy; showing God’s love to one another; making this world a better place, starting with ourselves.

We falsely pigeonhole Christianity this way, ignoring Jesus’s radical call to discipleship, glossing over the great Christian mystics and their embrace of mystery. We focus on the baby Jesus in all its certainty, rather than on the Easter tomb in all its emptiness.  And we’re happy to look at things like that, because it keeps Christianity safe, and predictable, and polite. We delude ourselves into thinking that the message of Jesus Christ is basically the same as common morality, and whatever specifically “religious” obligations we have can be met on Sunday mornings.  We trap the gospel inside this building, like a corpse within a tomb, instead of seeing the Gospel as the only hope for a fallen world.  And when we see that the stone has been rolled away, and Christ is risen, and the demands on us are radical and life-changing and not limited to Sunday mornings, we’re profoundly uncomfortable. 

Because all of a sudden things aren’t as simple as they once seemed – they aren’t as neat and straightforward as we’d like them to be. Now we have to deal with the empty tomb, which symbolizes so many things: the dead places deep within us that we’d rather not look at: our sins, our scars, our regrets.  It also symbolizes the death of hope, which is a much more comfortable way to live than by daring to hope in this tenuous, uncertain world of ours. The empty tomb represents our tendency to imprison God, so that we can live our lives the way we see fit, without divine interference.  For, after all, what was the death of Jesus all about, if not our desire to do what we want to do, and not have God tell us any different?

In the end, the empty tomb is all about uncertainty, and freedom, and silence, and trust.  We don’t know what the future holds; we don’t know where Jesus is, or what He’ll say to us, ask of us. All that we know is that the stone has been rolled away, and the tomb is empty – God has broken free of the bonds we tried to bind Him with, and so He may ask us to do what is uncomfortable, demanding, sacrificial. The vision we must take with us, as we walk out into the world, isn’t a cute, little, lovable baby. The image we must take with us is of a God who offers us freedom, but demands a freedom of His own. A god who isn’t easy to define.  Who can’t be summarized in a catechism.  A god who isn’t trying to take us back to a simpler, bygone era; but rather a god who wants us to grow, and move forward, and take his message of transforming love out into a world that isn’t ready to hear it.

And perhaps we’re not ready for it, either.  For, let’s face it, Christmas is a lot more comfortable than Easter. We know what to do at Christmas – give presents, have a pageant, decorate a tree – but not so at Easter.  Because Easter is an open book, where we reached the end of one chapter, and the beginning of the next has yet to be written. It’s the very uncertainty that we say we long for, but, in the end, we shy away from, because it may ask us to spend our whole lives seeking God, trusting that we’ll find Him, risking everything in that pursuit. And if that’s not the beginning of a holy quest, I don’t know what is.

My favorite author, Frederick Buechner, once described the Empty Tomb this way:
 

He rose. A few saw him briefly and talked to him. If it is true, there is nothing left to say. If it is not true, there is nothing left to say. For believers and unbelievers both, life has never been the same again. For some, neither has death. What is left now is the emptiness. There are those who, like [Mary Magdalen], will never stop searching it till they find his face.
 

Two things, then, are certain, this Easter morning: the world will never be the same, and there’s nothing left to say. But there is something left to do, something so important and demanding and life-changing that it can only take place in a world of absence that lies beyond the rules and regulations of Christmastime.  For today marks the beginning of Eastertide, a season of mystery, and absence, and, above all, hope.

This morning Christ is calling each of us to never stop searching until we find his face.  The question for us, is whether we’re up to the task.

[1] Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (New York: Harper & Row, 1988): 42.

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