God Goes Before Us
April 8, 2012 | Anita Retzlaff | 1 Corinthians 15: 1-11, Mark 16: 1-8

Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed!

Grace to you and peace on this day of resurrection joy! 

Easter is always such a relief to me. My favorite time of the Church Year happens to be Lent and I value the call for and expectation of deep reflection on the life of faith. The season usually turns out to be a time of careful thought about life in general I suppose. But after the rigors of contemplation and weeks of introspection I long for that bright and light Easter morning when we all adorn ourselves and our houses and our place of worship with light-colored and festive decoration. I admit that I embrace the journey through Lent because I know that Easter is coming. 

Christ is risen! Christ has overcome death and darkness. Christ survives our deathly ways to provide for us yet again a way out of our harmful and selfish tendencies. I say this not to put us down but to be honest about why Easter is so important. Once again God does not give up on us.

I momentarily take us back to the passion story that sets the stage for our celebration of life today. It has become abundantly clear to us in the Women’s Bible Study as we continue to find our way through the Old Testament that God’s chosen people habitually brush God off. Things are going along well enough. A new and spirited leader helps Israel restore their relationship to God but without fail in very short order they blow it and do something incredibly selfish, dishonest or cruel. I would hazard to say that this scenario is the plot of much of our scripture story, repeating over and over again a theological piece of music in theme and variation. Good Friday finds the people of God in that trough of darkness yet again, though this time it feels like the ultimate rejection of God’s way in the world. 

As the Good Friday story reaches its ultimate conclusion all of the things that human beings can do to humiliate and reject another are done in rapid sequence. All the things that we can do to each other to put down, abandon and destroy a relationship is done to Jesus who has shown in his ministry of reconciliation quite the opposite. So, Peter denies him. Judas betrays him. The disciples desert him. The Jewish religious leaders produce false testimony against him and the crowds who adored him with palm branches waving now demand his execution. Finally the political power of Rome mocks and scourges him. The last act of Roman brutality we might expect but all of the other acts of hostility and rejection are inflicted by Jesus’ own people, his followers and his very closest friends.

I want us to put ourselves into the story, not so much as actors who abandon, deny, betray, desert, indict and lie about Jesus but the ways in which we do this to each other. For as Jesus says, “As much as you do it to one of these you do it also to me.” So we have walked through Lent, recognized our sin and arrived here freshly scrubbed on this joyous Easter morning with a legacy of having acted like heels and back-stabbers, sometimes jealous, demanding and callous. But my friends the good news of this morning is that God goes before us even in the face of our betrayals and provides a path, a possibility for our rehabilitation, the restoration of our relationships. That is what we celebrate today. Jesus overcomes death, God overcomes our selfishness and in mercy goes before us to light a new way into the future. With God it is never over. Do you know what that means?

Think about it. In the darkness and despair of that Friday Jesus is taken down from the cross and hastily placed in a rock grave that is closed up with a big stone. Two days elapse. As the world stands still, even as the practitioners of religion observe the Sabbath as usual, God incubates a tremendous act of power. With God it is never over. Pure grace erupts out of the depths of the darkness of death. The hope that virtually everyone had abandoned springs forth in a way that no one expected. Despite generations of scripture and story that promise resurrection no one had any faith in it; no one believed in it when it actually happened

Three women, Mary Magdelene, the other Mary and Salome, head for the grave after the Sabbath has been given its due. As Ched Myers notes in his writing on the Gospel of Mark, the last thing uttered by any of the followers of Jesus come from these three women in this particular gospel account. They ask, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” They come to the grave to finish up the details of a proper burial providing spices to anoint Jesus’ body. What do they find? What they thought was the end has become a new beginning. God has been there ahead of them working the most amazing transformation of all time; death gives way to life. The stone is rolled away by the very power of God and by that same power of The Divine One life goes on into the future. With God it is never over. God goes before us.

God removes the obstacle for the women that day; the obstacle that stands between them and the discovery of resurrection. The stone is rolled away; a remarkable symbol for us to consider when we are up against it. God is always a step ahead of us preparing a new path, another way for us to live. And lest we become complacent in the face of such grace let us pay attention to the reaction of these women as they become witness to resurrection. They did not laugh and sing. They did not shout for joy! They ran in terror and in fear. 

Resurrection is an awesome and demanding truth, a discovery of incredible importance. When we come face to face with resurrection the world as we know it changes in that moment. All of our efforts, expectations and manipulations come to naught as it dawns on us that the love of Jesus Christ trumps all of our strivings and all of our deficiencies. God is grace and God rises above our denial, betrayal, desertion and disloyalty removing the barriers that get in the way of our chance to walk in peace, in love and with hope. 

God goes before us, loving us, even after we have spurned the way of Jesus and hardened ourselves against the call of the Divine Heart. It is frightening that any kind of love is that powerful. This Easter Sunday morning we face the truth of our self-centred notions of fairness and the conditions we put on the love we offer others. This is not a call to grovel in our imperfection but rather to celebrate the gift of unconditional love and acceptance that is ours on this side of the grave, on both sides of the grave.

So it is that today we mourn the loss of a young life in our extended family of faith: the death of Heather, 33 year old daughter of George and Luanna. It is a death that is untimely and tragic. She leaves behind 4 young children and parents dazed and stricken with grief. We remember Rosemary Slater as she mourns the death of her husband Clarence who died on Good Friday. Yet we take from the beauty of this Easter morning the hope and consolation that comes with resurrection. God has gone before Heather, before Clarence and before their families to make a new path – for everyone. 

The implications of resurrection are not necessarily easy; they can be frightening at first. Why? Because resurrection invites us to join in, to join in God’s way of being heaven on earth, to join in Jesus’ ministry of compassion to all who know rejection and need. God has done the act of power that brings new life and God has removed the stone, the impediment that keeps us from experiencing the full power of that new life. We are freed to believe in the resurrection power of God in the world and to join in the healing ministry. 

By the grace of God you and I can feel the full joy that this day brings. We do not take it lightly but we take it, this Easter light, with gratitude and praise. God goes before us. With God it is never over. 

Prayer – On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food… and he will destroy the shroud that is cast over all people… he will swallow up death forever. This is the LORD for whom we have waited. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. This is the day that the LORD has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. AMEN (taken from Isaiah 25 and Psalm 118)