Easter
April 20, 2025
Luke 24.1-12
I want you to take a journey with me back to President’s Day 2025. It is a decently comfortable day outside, a little chilly, but not awful. We are only a couple of days out from Jim Cantore levels of snow apparently, and I have one final task that I need to get done before the house goes on the market on Thursday: I have to get the leaves in the backyard bagged up. Full confession, I had put this off because there are always more leaves. So there I am, on my day off, jet-pack leaf blower at the ready and I am just going to town with these leaves. I have put them in manageable piles and now I have to bag them.
At various points throughout the day, I had thought, I should put gloves on, but I never did. At various points throughout the day, I realized I was going to run out of bags, but didn’t want to go to the store yet. The neighbors tell me I’m welcome to empty some of the bags into their ravine and he’ll mulch them up. So I have hauled easily three bags of leaves next door and emptied them, while five other massive bags finally sit in the backyard, ready for pickup. At this point, it’s 4:00, I am feeling accomplished with myself, relieved that the work is done, and I call my mom on my way home. I pull into my parking lot and look down at my hands and instantly my mom knows something is wrong based on the gasp that came out of my mouth. Remember the gloves I didn’t put on? Yeah, I should have because as I looked down at my hands, I realized, my sisters ring, my most cherished possession was gone. This is a ring I have not taken off except to sleep since June of 2007, the treasured symbol I have of the connection between Jennifer, Kristin, and I, and it was gone.
Immediately, I did the only thing I could think to do, called the best problem solver in my phone who wouldn’t judge my panic, Kelly. I rambled through panicked breaths that I needed help because somewhere in these bags of leaves, possibly in my neighbor’s ravine was my ring, and the idea of losing it was incomprehensible. I then called Jennifer, the giver of said ring, and burst into tears, because I didn’t know how to tell her it was gone.
What followed was one of the longest hours of my life, and possibly one of the longest hours of Andrew Rummel’s. As Kelly and I painstakingly waded through leaf after leaf, Andrew walked the backyard twice, all the while waiting for Erik to get there with our last ounce of hope, a metal detector. By the time he got there, I had given up, the bags had been emptied, multiple yards checked, there was no way. This was about as literal of a needle in a haystack as you could get. Erik waved the detector over the tarps of leaves we had laid out and there was just nothing, until…there was a beep. One lone beep. And Andrew flipped up the tarp, picked up a few leaves…and there it was…and I debated the logic of going to buy a lottery ticket because what were the odds?
I called Jenn and she was flabbergasted, but then also proceeded to tell me how she had already talked to my mom, and she was going to be in Michigan the next week anyway, and she could go to the jeweler where she got them, and she would replace it without question, and because she is my oldest sister, she had to remind me…it is simply a material thing. Yes, this ring is precious, but it isn’t us. Us, is the three of us, our laughter and our connection and our love and our group chat and who we always have been. The ring is a symbol, but it isn’t the living thing. I was beyond grateful that it was back on my finger and that Erik had access to a metal detector, but Jennifer reminded me it was a little bit of looking for the living amongst the dead. The two of them are always with me, all the time, regardless of what jewelry I’m wearing, but sometimes we need that reminder.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like Easter has come up on us like Speed Racer this year. For all of my lamenting that Easter was so late, it feels like it got here in a flash, but for the women approaching the tomb this morning, these last three days had to have felt like Lent ten times over. Forty days, forty lifetimes lived in the span of 72 hours. They have shared the Passover with their families, they have rested on the Sabbath, but for all of the reminders that these observances are supposed to bring—that God is a God of liberation and freedom, that we have been freed to live peacefully, the women had to have felt like those promises rang a little hollow this year. They have witnessed their friend, their Messiah die an excruciating death, watched his disciples scatter to the winds, and now they know the task that lies before them. If they won’t do it, who will? Someone has to go and anoint his body, someone has to take care of him after he spent his life caring for them and for others. So they take that painstakingly long walk to the tomb only to find the stone rolled away and no body to be found, and if that wasn’t enough they then come face to face with two men in blindingly white clothes who ask them what had to have felt like a ridiculous question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Umm because our friend died, he was buried here. They nudge them with reminders of what Jesus preached about the resurrection and the promise that sometimes the ending is only the beginning. They do the math and realize today is the third day. These men are speaking literally when they say he isn’t here, he is back out in the world, risen from the dead, and the whole world is about to be turned upside down. This Jesus, their Jesus is once again in the business of doing the unexpected, world-altering thing. He is risen.
They take this message of good news and joy to the disciples and are kind of faced with the same question. In the midst of their grief, their guilt, their pain, the disciples don’t believe what the women have to tell them, and you can imagine them despondently asking, why do you look for the living amongst us, the faith dead, the faith weary, the faith done? There is no good news here, don’t bring a message of life to us when we saw death for ourselves. The idea of re-writing what they know of the world in the face of such life-changing information seems impossible. They know where they can find Jesus, in the tomb. And the women just tell them over and over, no, he is not where you expect him to be…remember…
We so often, especially on Easter morning, when the sun is bright, the lilies are blooming, and we’re full of candy, want to judge the disciples a little bit. How could they not believe them? How could they not remember? How could they keep thinking they could only find Jesus in one way? And then well…reality dawns anew…we go looking for Jesus in all sorts of places that he is not going to be. We forget constantly the promises that he gave us, the commandments he left for us. We are more likely to believe our own version of the gospel than the version that bears any sort of resemblance to Jesus’ life and ministry. We look for the living amongst the dead constantly, because sometimes we cannot shake ourselves free from the idea that Jesus has to come in one way, shape, or form and anything different is to be rejected or not believed, an idle tale and nothing more.
We go looking for Jesus in power, in empire, in wealth, in the hands of authority. We distort the resurrection into some sort of message that Jesus rose from the dead so that we could live life abundant at the expense of others. We look for Jesus in what will make us the loudest, the strongest, the most powerful, the most important, even if it takes walking over or around those who are most in need, those that look most like Jesus in our world. We go looking for Jesus in messages of discrimination, hatred, and apathetic disinterest in the need of our neighbor. We distort the resurrection into some sort of message that Jesus only came for the “right” kind of people, people who look, talk, and act a certain way. We look for Jesus in the assurance that its ok to ignore certain people because clearly they aren’t someone Jesus died and rose again for. We look for Jesus in our own determination to go it alone, assuming we don’t need others, we don’t need community, we can do this ourselves. We distort the resurrection into a message that wasn’t from a Messiah who literally called 12 people to walk with him so that he didn’t do it alone. We look for Jesus in our own sheltered silo, because then that way, we don’t get hurt and we don’t get asked to help anyone else, everyone else can take care of their own.
We go looking for Jesus in all the wrong places, y’all. We constantly look for the living, breathing, resurrected Jesus amongst the dried out bones of the dead who had no place with the gospel to begin with. Our resurrected Lord walks amongst the lost, the least, the forgotten, the lonely, the discarded. Our resurrected Lord walks in El Salvador, with those who have been deported. Our resurrected Lord walks in clinics and hospitals striving to give non-partisan, life-affirming care. Our resurrected Lord walks in homeless shelters and on street corners with those who have been discarded by society. Our resurrected Lord walks with those who have been judged as useless for their diagnosis. Our resurrected Lord walks with the tattooed and the addicted and the searching. Our resurrected Lord walks in all of those places that we would much rather ignore, write off as dead. And yes, our resurrected Lord walks here, amongst us, reminding us of the love he calls us to and the love he fills us with, reminding us that today is not the end of a journey but a beginning that asks where are you going to take this resurrection news? How are you going to use it for the good of your neighbor? It is time to stop looking for Jesus in all of the places we want him to be and start going to those places where we know he would be. Jesus is out there, it shouldn’t take a metal detector to find him. We just need to remember where to look. AMEN!!!