"Terror and Amazement Seized Them"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on Easter Sunday, 2007


There are many things we don’t know about the Easter story. Many things are in dispute. But one thing almost everyone agrees on is that Jesus died. I’m sure someone has a different opinion on that too, but for the most part, it’s one thing we don’t have to argue about.

Another point of general agreement is that, after Jesus died the disciples were pretty messed up. They’d acted badly before Jesus’ death.  They argued with him. They told him to stay out of Jerusalem, that he didn’t need to die. They betrayed him, and ran away from him.

These are the same disciples on whom the church would be built.  Not a very auspicious start. When the disciples had first started following Jesus, they had a sense of confidence about how the world works and how it would turn out.  Jesus was going to be on top. And they’d be on top too as long as they were with Jesus.

Then Jesus was crucified, and he was on the bottom, and they were on the bottom.  After the crucifixion, we see them hiding, getting out of Jerusalem and going back to fishing. Jesus’ life appeared to be a total disaster. 

But on Easter, something totally unexpected happened.  His followers — first the women — experienced Jesus’ living presence and power. I want to put special emphasis on the word “power.”

This wasn’t just a hope. Something dramatic happened to these defeated, demoralized, weak disciples. And that experience gave them not only hope, but energy and power to live a different way.

This is a really odd thing. After all that weakness and fear and running away and hiding, suddenly, when they had good reason to keep hiding, so they wouldn’t end up crucified, they became bold and started doing the things that Jesus had done — the same thing that had gotten Jesus killed.

This change, this dramatic reversal and the experience that caused it, we call the “Easter event” — the most decisive turning point in world history. And the vast majority of the people living at the time — everyone but a dozen or so — had no idea it was happening.

Like the disciples (in their early days) we live with a fair amount of confidence about how things are going to turn out. I reached my peak of this kind of confidence as a senior in high school. It’s a confident age.  I was amazed how much my parents learned in the four years that followed. We do have many tools to help things go the way we want them to go. We have ways to stay healthy, ways to be successful, ways at least to minimize the chance of disaster — seatbelts, sunscreen, and things like that. But even with these tools, life is not always steady and predictable.

A couple of weeks ago, Neely and Phyllis Bruce’s 23 month old granddaughter died.  That’s not the way the world is supposed to work. People in the middle of life who are healthy and active one minute, can have a stroke and be severely disabled. Back in 2003, our national leaders told us how the war in Iraq would go. They knew. The Secretary of Defense said it might last 6 days, or 6 weeks.  He said, “I seriously doubt it will last 6 months.”

The world doesn’t work the way we expect it to work when we’re in high school, or how even the mature experts think it will work, or the way we hope it will work. But there is hope in that unpredictability, and that’s where Easter comes in.

The Christian faith has 3 basic points that are all tied together. The first point is Christmas. God became flesh. God is the creative force of life. Here at First Church, we often compare life to floating down a river. It’s beautiful. It’s dynamic and exciting. Floating down a river, you feel the force is with you.

The second point is Good Friday.  Christ was crucified.  God suffers. We suffer. Sometimes we don’t just float down the river. Sometimes there’s a flood. You get baptized in the rapids and smash into rocks and feel like you’ll drown.

And the third point is Easter. God takes chaos, disappointment, failure, heartache, disaster, and makes something new rise out of it.

As it was for the women at the tomb, the first glimmer of that new life is strange, even terrifying.  They were seized by terror and amazement. And notice in this passage that the women don’t get to see Jesus right away. The angel tells them that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee. There they will see him. Jesus is always ahead of us.

The Easter event and the Easter conviction are that God’s love, mercy, and creativity are more powerful than all our human failure. Christ is risen.  He is going ahead of us … to a mountain in Galilee. There we will see him.

 
First Church of Christ, Congregational
United Church of Christ
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Middletown, CT
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