April 27 2008

April 27 Everyday to us is Easter
Ad lib intro......Did you get the feeling that Easter was just too early this year?
came up around too fast
did you feel like that?
well you're right
it was early ...there won’t be another Easter that early for 152 years
this early Easter ....was something very rare
but at least you can say.... that you were there in 2008
you did it
one of those "once in a life time" kind of Easters
I’m still thinking
it just came up too fast ..
But then
I noticed (as I said )
we get another chance at Easter on the orthodox church calendar .
..it's Easter today..
So I decided to do Easter all over gain..
And I tested this idea out on the Wed Bible study group and they seem to like it.
,,,Easter all over gain..
I know...
We don’t have the Easter crowd
and the extra chairs
and the sunrise service with youth and the Easter breakfast..
No we don’t have all the Easter flowers..
I tried to tell Lorraine Ehrich that I needed about 40 flowers for today
And of course
I didn’t give the choir time to get ready again
so we are not going have the hallelujah chorus at the end
.and d Angel rolled the stone away..
But we’ve got some special music..
And "no" I don’t Easter candy. for all of you
.I was too late to get the Easter candy on sale

But its still Easter.
We have the whole season of Easter
so its never one day on the calendar
Easter is who we are
Easter is the new life that we live in..
.as we sang "everyday to us is Easter and
And you do know
that the reason we have worship on Sunday
is because every Sunday is a little Easter
our whole life in Christ is pointed to the resurrection..
We are the Easter celebration
this is simply who we are

now with that
let me go back to one of the Easter gospel lessons
back in March
we looked at the lesson from Matthew
but John's Gospel can be used for Easter every year..
And what always get my attention in Johns Gospel
is the timing...
you’ve heard me say this before
but in John
when did the resurrection happen?

In John 20 it says
early on the first day of the week
while it was still dark..
May Magdalene came to the tomb
and saw that the stone had already been rolled away
That intrigues me..
that means
that Easter happened in the dark ,
resurrection happened
in the dark,,
by the time that Mary got there
the tomb was already opened..
Easter happened in the dark,
Now the orthodox church has this figured out
Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox and so on.

so they usually start the Easter service
just before midnight.
.they start in the dark
and its a kind of candle light service
as they spread the light of the Easter candle though the congregation there in the dark
It's a powerful
liturgical way of saying
." the light shines in the darkness
and the darkness does not overcome it"
But you hear that?

.they seem to know
that Easter starts in the dark
and it does
look at the days before Easter Sunday..
the darkness of the suffering for Jesus
the darkness of that night in the garden of Gethsemane
the darkness of Judas betraying him and Peter denying him
the darkness of the cross
and Good Friday
the darkness of our sins and the injustice of it all
the pain and the agony
MY God my God why hast thou forsaken me..

The darkness of the tomb and that long day of Saturday
the disciples are hiding in the in fear and confusion
Easter gets set up.. The stage get set in the dark,,
now this is not just the way the Bible story plays out
this is not just some interesting theology
this is the spiritual truth in our life..

This is the reality of faith
That’s how it is

you cant have resurrection without the cross
you cant have Easter without Good Friday
you cant have the life... without having the death
Jesus himself said it.. Again and again
to find your life you must loose

you see what’s going on ...don’t you ?
we are being invited to look into the dark
and see it in a different way
we look at the dark and we don’t see just the darkness
we can look at the darkness of world
the pain of this world
the suffering in the world and we can see it..in a different way
some people look at the war in Iraq and the thousands of people who have died
or they look at the fuel prices ..food prices,
and the economy and the mortgage crisis
or global warming
...and yes those are serious
and complicated ,,troubling things..
But some people just get sour and cynical..
.and they want to just drop out somehow..
they get down
. They don’t have the energy of hope
But if we believe that Easter happens
that resurrection happens
in the dark
or even
especially in the dark,,
then we cant afford to be cynical
and passively resigned..
We get to be Easter people
searching and looking for the hope .
.for the signs of resurrection
in the dark.
and maybe
you and I can also dare to look in our personal darkness
of our confusion and our brokenness
we can look at the darkness of our shadows and pain
and we can trust that we are not alone in the dark
God is already there rolling away stones in the dark
God is already there working for life even in the dark.
In your life
Do you believe this
that resurrection is happening in you ..
God is raising you from the deadness
maybe your emotional deadness/
God is in the moving business ..on the night shift..
in your heart..
Moving away the stones of sin and death
this is where faith meets you life..
can you hear that!
The darkness is not Godless
and the darkness
is not hopeless
because resurrection happens
when?
in the dark.
in Jesus Christ we are being that picture.
Easter is the picture ..it is the revelation of Gods ultimate power and truth
Let me add a little story from
Rachel Naomi Remen
she talks about this in her book called
Kitchen Table Wisdom
its about something in her home growing up
when she was just a very little girl
her parents liked to do jig saw puzzles
they had those great big thousand piece puzzles kept up on a table
but just to make it more of a challenge.
Rachel’s father would always hide the top of the puzzle box
so you couldn’t see th e picture ..
you didn’t get to see what you were making.
You couldn’t see the picture ahead of time
now this was an ongoing project
and the custom was
that if you came to visit at their house
you could go ahead and work on the puzzle ..
if you saw a piece that would fit you could just put in
so people would do that for few minutes
or sometimes Rachel mom or dad
would be there for hours..
working on the puzzle
......usually in a few weeks
with these hundreds and hundreds of pieces
it would all come into place..and they would see the finished puzzle
Rachel said that over the years her family did dozens of puzzles like that
and she got pretty good at it.
She really loved being the first one to guess what the picture was
when they got some sense of what the pattern was.
She could see what had been hiding there all along
but then she tells about the first puzzle that she could remember
They had just gotten the puzzle table
it was a birthday present to her mother from her father
she was about 3 or 4 years old
and she can remember how happy they were
when they set up the table
and dumped out the puzzle pieces on the table

back then for this first time as just a little girl
she didn’t understand what this was about
and they figured that she was too young to play this game
or whatever it was they were doing
so they didn’t explain it to her
but of course she wanted to know what this was
so one morning when she was alone in the living room she climbed up on a chair
and dug around in all the loose puzzle pieces and all these pieces spread out loose on the table
.of course these pieces are pretty small
; some of them had bright colors
and they looked like they might be birds or flowers
and they seemed to be the fun shapes..
But
some of them were dark and shadowy.
And The dark ones seemed kind of scary
shaped maybe like they were spiders or bugs,
ugly and strange.
She didn’t like dark things. So she took some of those dark scary puzzle pieces and hid them underneath one of the sofa cushions.
For several weeks, whenever I was alone in the living room,
she would get up on the chair,
take a few more of those dark pieces,
and she would stash them in that hiding place
down in the couch
Well of course it was taking the adults forever to finish that puzzle
something was just wrong
and people got frustrated when they tried to work on the puzzle

,the mother finally counted the pieces
and she realized
that more than a hundred pieces were missing!
By this time
Rachel had been seen hanging around the table now and then
so the mother said to her
Rachel have you seen any of the pieces
do you know anything about this

so Rachel took her over the couch
over to where where all the missing pieces were hiding
The mother got the missing pieces and in just a little while
she got the whole puzzle put together
Rachel remembered watching her do this.
And she could see the picture coming to life
As she watched it come together
little Rachael back them
didn’t even know that it would be a picture
so she was surprised
to see this the beautiful picture of a deserted beach
with just a start.. of the sunrise
the sun was coming up to start this new day.
that was the picture
but Rachel had taken out the dark pieces..
And the picture could not happen
without those dark pieces
the sunlight
the sunrise
the beauty
the wholeness
could not be seen with out those dark pieces
.
There is a lesson in there
maybe it is the gospel story
th Easter story..


Maybe it tells me something about living in faith..

There are e pieces that we don’t like in this puzzle of life
we don’t understand them
probably don’t want them..
..but pieces like that...are in every persons puzzle

And when they are just a single piece ..its true
they can be senseless and frightening and ugly..
And that’s a fact.
But can we leave them out
can you leave out pieces of your life.
Can you leave out
and hide or deny the pieces
that t you don’t want..
Well we do that in some ways
we take out those pieces
and stash them deep in some hiding place in our hearts..
But that doesn’t really work...
The puzzle work of life .gets stuck..
eventually we have to go and find them
and dig them out
Because we cant live with those holes in the puzzle
those blanks... in our life ..
to get the picture We have to eventually claim all the pieces.
The failures
the losses
the choices we made
the mysteries
and the bad ..along with the good
every life has those pieces that we think... cant fit
When you look at the story of the cross
and the Easter Sunday
I'm sure those dark pieces
standing alone ...
By themselves..
have nothing much to offer..
But like Mary on that Easter morning
we can go ahead and go to the tomb in the dark

not knowing at all what could be there..
Probably expecting only to grieve..and
then to find
that God has already been there..and rolled away the stone
something indeed had happened
and more of it..will come to light
like Rachel and her puzzle
we can....see that t life is not just one piece at a time.
.and life is more than the piece of the puzzle
that you might be holding right now in you life.
Trust that there is a promise of light
a son rise
the rising of God’s son
it’s a bigger picture of life
its like getting to see the picture of the puzzle
on the box
"While it was still dark
Mary went to the tomb..and saw the stone had already been rolled away"
Christ is risen
Christ is risen indeed







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