Easter Day

[Grant M Gallup <grant73@turbonett.com.ni>]

  H  o m i l y    G r i t
s                                     
Easter Day Year B - April 16, 2006 Principal Service
                                                                       
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
 Acts 10: 34-43 We ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead
 or Exodus 14:10-14,21-25; 15:20-21 The prophet Miriam took a
tambourine
Psalm 118:14-29  The Lord is my strength and my song (or
118:14-17,22-24) 
Colossians 3:1-4 Seek the things that are above 
or Acts 10: 34-43 We are witnesses to all that he did 
John 20:1-10 (11-18) Mary Magdalene came to the tomb
  or Matthew 18:1-10 Mary Magdalene and the other Mary ran to tell
his disciples 

____________________________________________________________________________



The earliest gospel is Mark's account of the earliest Easter morning,
which ends with the Greek words "ephobounto gar" -- "for
they were afraid."   The three women who go to the tomb to
do what in  our age undertakers would do for us were not afraid of
contact
with a dead body, as most of us seem to be.  On the way to the 
tomb
they are not wondering which one of them will have the nerve to 
actually
touch the corpse and bathe the bloody wounds. Mary Magdalene and Mary
the
mother of James, and Salome--these were all the women who had come up
> from Galilee with Jesus, and none of them were afraid of much of
anything.  They were eager to get to their work as soon as First
Light came into the sky on the First Day of the week, for the Sabbath
would be over and a working day had begun.    Days were
not thought to begin or end at midnight, in the rule we have adopted from
the Empire,  a pagan  notion, but Jews (and Muslims and other
Eastern cultures) know that days begin and end at sunset.  The
reason they waited for morning was so that they could see to do their
work, for they were not afraid of the dark--they probably started out
while it was still dark to get to the site by daybreak.   
They
were not afraid of soldiers, nor of the dark, nor of the dead. 
They
had remained at the cross, remember, when all the macho men like Peter
and James and John, had fled.   But they had a practical
worry--they were concerned about who would help them physically move 
the
stone.  Yet Mark's gospel ends, "And they were
afraid."  What was it that they were afraid of?  Let us
look a little further into the garden, as they enter.  They find
the
door to the tomb has been moved, yet they went right on in--without
fear,
and now they are at first amazed, not frightened.  Sitting inside
the tomb they find a young man in a white robe, a white robe!  
In ancient Palestine, amongst the poor at least, to find a white robe
anywhere was unusual.  It was like finding a white shirt and tie 
on
skid row or  West Madison street in Chicago,  or in the
disaster area of Acahualinca in Managua.  It meant the person
wearing it came from somewhere else.  It must be an alcalde, an
alderman,  or an angel, from city hall, or from heaven. And they
are
not afraid of the young man in the white shirt, from
downtown.   He speaks to them, not in Angel talk,  like 
a
seminarian, but in their own language, in Aramaic and says, "Don't
be so surprised.  You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, the
crucified one."     One of the commentators
said
that to even say the word "Nazarene" to someone was an
insult,  and to claim that someone had been crucified meant they
died with a shameful reputation.  Crucifixion was a shameful 
death,
which could only be done by shedding blood--forbidden to Jews, even in
their approved form of capitalist punishment, which was stoning to
death.   
And the demons had taunted Jesus with the name of Nazarene.  
So the
white-uniformed messenger at the tomb says, "You're still looking
for the convict Jesus, disgracefully dead."  Yet this is not 
a
taunting demon, but an angel,  a messenger from God who announces
that the convict campesino is not here in the grave.  Look at the
place where they laid him.  The one who was held in such contempt
cannot be held in a tomb.   The crude, unlettered man who
probably did not write anything in his life--at least there is no 
record
of his having written anywhere but in the dust, at the feet of a
victimized woman,  this man who was rejected, humiliated, a
criminal, cannot be contained where we would confine him. Look at the
places we have gone to seek him--we look for him in the past, and as
Albert Schweitzer noted, our quest for an historical Jesus will not end
in faith for us, because he won't stay there long in any history we
reconstruct.   On Palm Sunday, we looked for Jesus in 
triumph,
and find him crucified.  On Good Friday, we look for Jesus in his
crucifixion, and find him there defeated.  If we look only into 
the
past for Jesus, or for our faith, we will find defeat, even in the
triumphalism of the church in ages past.    The church
that embalms Jesus and seals him up in a tomb of history, or
resuscitates
him only into the stench of Sixteenth century controversies or
Nineteenth
century church life, will still hear the rebuke of the youth at the
tomb:  "He is not here.  The Nazarene convict is not
here.  He has risen,  He is not here." Now that's still
not much of an Easter story is it.  Where is he?  We want to
switch to another channel to get more details, if that's all we got on
lying CNN.   Peter and John want eye-witness news, not
ear-witness news, so they go to the tomb.  They run to the
tomb.  When we hear the footsteps of them runnning, it's not yet
broad daylight, so the younger one, surer of his steps, more careless 
of
his ways, runs faster and outruns old Simon renamed Peter who runs like
a
Rock, a rolling stone, heavily and breathing hard. And the teenager 
gets
there first, and stoops to peer into the entrance, and having younger
eyes, and in no need of spectacles yet for presbyopia ("elder
eyes") in this half-light of early dawn, he peers into the murky
cavern and sees, yes, the grave clothes.  He reports the kosher
linen shroud and amice for the head are there, separately, and neatly
folded up. John does not go into the tomb, or at least we are told he
didn't go in. When this was written down some fifty years later, Peter
had become the first of the Apostles, the chief witness to the
resurrection, and John here in his account  wants us to be sure
that
he leaves Peter in first place as the first one in the tomb.  John
tells us he went in and saw, and believed.  
Believed?   Believed what?  What's to believe?  
None of the others it seems believed, of the men folks, at least. 
Until the following week, remember, when something happened in the 
upper
room where they had locked themselves in, for fear of arrest. 

But John says that after Peter and John had been in the tomb, the
disciples simply went back to their own homes.  The group broke up
and dispersed. Still no Resurrection story there.   Mary's
message to the disciples at first was, "We do not know where they
have laid him."  And John tells us, "They did not know
the
Scriptures."  In this version,  Mary stays now at
the tomb, and weeps, and when she stoops to look into the tomb she sees
Two messengers--the Greek word "angel" means that, it means a
reporter, someone with a press card.   And they ask her,
"Why are you crying, Señora?" And again she uses the words of
ignorance: "Because they have taken away my Lord and I do not
know".  This phrase is used over and over in these
accounts:  "We do not know,  they did not know,  I
do
not know."  And yet in the sermon from the Acts of the
Apostles, Peter's great Easter sermon, which we heard for our first
reading,  the apostle addresses us, " I truly understand. . .
You know the message. . . We are witnesses. . . God raised him and
allowed him to appear not to all the people but to us who were
chosen by God, who ate and drank with him after he
rose."   "You know. . . we know. . . they know. . .
and "We are witnesses."    This word is much
used in the scriptures,  and Peter tells us that he is one of them
and that we are also witnesses   The word comes from the word
"wit".  We speak of people who have very special insight
as having Mother Wit.  Or we speak of folks who aren't playing 
with
a full deck as being "half wits".  The word Wit comes
> from an old, old word that means To Know.  The word "wizard"
is
also one who is full of Wit.  The ancestors of this word are in 
the
Latin "Videre," to see, and the Sanskrit "Veda", to
know. So we see that Witness is a word which means one who knows 
because
she has seen,  a Witness is
always an EYE-WITNESS.    Peter says on the one hand 
that
God shows no partiality, that the knowledge of what happened at Easter
is
available to everyone, and yet tells us that God raised Jesus on the
third day and made him manifest (showed him off) not to all people but
to
us who were chosen as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he
rose
> from the dead, who discovered him at Eucharist.   We notice
that the empty tomb was itself not evidence of anything.  
Mary
saw the evidence and immediately thought that the body had been
stolen.  Peter and John too saw it, a week later hiding in a 
locked
room.   Some
contemporary Biblical scholars pose the possibility that the body did
in  fact disappear,  but at the foot of the cross itself,
where
graveyard dogs and vultures devoured it.  An empty tomb itself is
not a proof of Jesus' resurrection.  It is itself for us a Sign of
Faith instead.   A proof can be argued against, refuted by
opposite testimony,  like the controversy over the tattered Shroud
of Turin.   But it can never be a Sign of Faith, only a relic
of religion.   Peter tells us that there is nothing secret
about the way to liberation. For the same signs can evoke faith in one
person or disbelief in another.  What made the difference, and 
what
still makes the difference?  Let's go back to our story.

Peter and John run away and leave Mary alone in the garden.  she
sees angels, and thinks them to be the undertaker's
employees--gardeners,
grave-keepers.  But then someone asks her Why are you
Weeping?   Who are you Looking for?   She has no
doubt frantically searched for the corpse of the rabbouni, Jesus, as 
the
earliest Church must have searched and researched for Him. But now she
speaks to this questioner, whom she esupposes to be the
gardener.   Why?   The grave
clothes in this story are still inside the tomb. So what would Jesus be
wearing?  He would have no doubt picked up the work
clothes of the gardener, left nearby in a shed  or shelter near 
the
mausoleum.  "Mr. Undertaker," she says, 'If you have
taken
away the body, please tell me where you have put it.  I'll handle
it
> from here."   The first search is the search for the
historical Jesus, and what is left of him. And now Jesus says,
"Mary."    Jesus hadn't read Dale Carnegie's
book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," which told 
me
years ago that there is no sweeter sound in the world to any human 
being
than the sound of their own name.    It is the sound one
first hears, and learns to respond to, in the giving of mother-love and
uniquely personal attention,  and it is the first word we hear at
our Baptisms, and it is the word we all will hear always deeply in our
heart of hearts until the day we are called, like Lazarus, from our
tombs, with  the shouting of our name across the stars. So Jesus
calls "Mary" from the tomb of unbelief and despair and
weeping,
and it is this calling, this unique one-to-one relationship with Jesus
that made all the difference to Mary,  as it would to John and
Peter, and all the apostolic band.  And to each of us.  
That's
the difference between Earwitness and Eyewitness,  the difference
between conventional religion, which knows the gospel only by
hearsay,  and  formed faith, wherein we have responded to a
personal call to our own new life.   That's why the
Resurrection is the center of our gospel faith.  Jesus calls each
of
us by name. And then we know that it is our beloved one--our rabbouni,
our padre, our father-mother-brother-sister-friend-lover,  who
speaks to us at tomb-side:   Go and Tell my Brothers and
Sisters.  Go and tell my family and friends.   
Jesus
enables our witness,  to tell out of our own Wit, out of our own
experience, "I have seen the Lord."  The prophet Miriam
picks up her tambourine across the years and sings to us a song of
Resurrection always.  A song of Exodus from oppression and slavery
and death   Set your focus on what you are looking for, Paul
writes in the epistle today, and you'll find it.   You won't
find what you aren't looking for. You may look into the tomb at the
garden and see old clothes and grave diggers, and you may look Jesus
dead-in-the-eye and see a derelict, a castaway, a bag lady, a
gravedigger
or a gardener's assistant..Listen, the Rabbouni will always call you by
your own identity and into your own 
identity.   Witnesses are those who have sat down to share a
meal with him after Resurrection.  He has been known to us in the
breaking of the bread.    Jesus does not come back to us
> from the past,  tip toeing along through the
tulips as a thirty three year old zombie.   The women at the
tomb would in that case have need still for their ointments and spices.
Everything
about Jesus has been raised for ever, as St. Peter says, 
"beginning
> from Galilee."  It's all now in perspective, Peter realizes,
as
he preached to the Italian soldiers.  God had pushed him along,
teasing and tormenting him with dreams and pushy invitations, until 
here
he was,  with the realization of what had been raised up in Jesus
dawning on him even as he spoke haltingly to
heathens.      "What I'm figuring out is
that God is no respecter of persons," he writes.   It
doesn't really matter where you come from culturally--Jewish or
Catholic,
Italian or Greek,  Zulu or Zen, what your sex is or its
orientation,
what your nation is or what your notions are. God accepts everybody who
looks to God in fear and hope and tries to do
justice and be decent. You can't have a future without that.  God
has raised up in Jesus that Acceptance, and has now made him available
to
us all by God's spirit.  It is us to whom God has given 
mouth-to-mouth respiration, so that we may be raised, not merely
resuscitated.   Beginning with Galilee, all of Jesus is 
raised
up in all of us.

Galilee is he place of Jesus' encounters with the oppressed peoples of
the earth.  It is the place where he calls us, in each of our
Galilees, where he calls us to his side.  It is the place where 
his
teaching is raised up and heard, as it is still listened to and acted
on,  where there are Galileans to lay down their money-making nets
and listen and act, as the Nicaraguan peasants listened at Solentiname,
and acted the gospel there. Jesus is raised wherever babies are born in
barns and stables, wherever kids are rescued from malnutrition and
slaughter, from misinformation and neglect, wherever the poor are
enabled
to break loose into life.  What is raised up in Jesus is God's
anointing us with power, as he was,  and what is raised up, St.
Peter says, is Doing Good and Healing All the oppressed. What is raised
up is Witness now in our own Galilee, and where we confront
the great world in its Jerusalems.   What is raised up in
Jesus
is not to be found in yesterday's sepulchres,  but in our Galilee
this afternoon. Don't go back to the tomb--go forward to Galilee, and
catch up to him, for he's away ahead of you in your own
land.    At the tomb, the women were frightened, not of
death, which is easy to deal with--one of the oldest experiences of the
race.  We all are ear-witnesses to it, and we have all heard also
of
its toothlessness.  "Death be not proud," John Donne
wrote, "for thou art not so; for those whom thou thinkest thou dost
overthrow die
not, poor death."    What frightened them was the
prospect of new life.   At Easter Jesus comes to us not out of
the
tomb--for no one ever saw him alive again in a tomb--but Jesus comes to
us out of the future, still wearing the wounds of his past, for he is
not
a phantom nor a ghost.  He comes to us fully raised up in 
ministry,
in identification with our common life, our solidarity with the
oppressed
moving together towards a human future.  And he speaks his gospel:
Do not be afraid.  Go and tell.   

Albert Schweitzer's gospel is the Fifth, which speaks to us out of the
twentieth century into our own new one:  Try this year to memorize
the paragraph:

"He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the
lake-side, He came to those who knew Him not.  He speaks to us the
same words, 'Follow thou me!' and sets us to the tasks which He has to
fulfill for our time.  He commands.  And to those who obey
Him,
whether they be wise or simple, He  will reveal Himself in the
toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His
fellowship, and, as an
ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He
is." *    

  
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165 
grant73@turbonett.com.ni
GRITS 4th series now on-line:  
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
Homilies for Holy
Saturday morning service,  the Vigil, the Dawn Service, and 
others,
may be found at the Web Site noted above. 

*Albert Schweitzer, "The Quest of the Historical
Jesus."
Messrs. A.& C.
Black, Ltd. from  "A Treasury of the Kingdom," ed. E. A.
Blackburn et.al.
Oxford University Press. 1954.