Easter Sermon 2006

If Christ were not risen, none of us would be gathered here. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Once upon a time a young priest was asked by a funeral director to hold a grave-side service for a homeless man who had died while travelling through the area.

The service was to be held at a new cemetery out of town.

This man would be the first person laid to rest there.

As he was not familiar with the area and like most men was not willing to ask directions, he soon became quite lost and finally arrived over an hour late.

He saw the spade by the grave and noticed that the gravediggers were eating lunch under a nearby tree, but the hearse was nowhere in sight.

He apologized to the workers for his tardiness, and stepped to the side of the open grave, where he saw the vault lid already in place.

The young preacher assured the gravediggers he would not hold them long, but this was the proper thing to do.

The workers gathered around still eating their lunch.

The young preacher poured out his heart and soul. He preached and preached like he’d never preached before, from Genesis all the way through to Revelation.

He closed the lengthy service at last with a prayer and began to walk toward the car.

He felt he had done his duty to the homeless man and that the gravediggers would leave with a renewed sense of purpose and dedication, in spite of his being so late.

As he was opening the door and taking off his cassock, he overheard one of the workers saying to another, "Well! I’ve never seen anything like this before… and I’ve been putting in septic tanks for over twenty years."

You never know what will happen when you go to a cemetery.

Which leads me neatly on to today’s gospel…

The gospel of Mark, which we are reading this year has a rather odd ending.

Now, don’t be fooled, all the gospels end with the resurrection – all of them odd, distinctly odd in ending not with a body in a grave, but with a story of an empty tomb – of a body gone, of a resurrection of some kind or another. All odd enough. But Mark’s is the odder still.

You see, Mark’s gospel is the earliest of the gospels to be written. And the earliest of the texts that we have of it end rather abruptly. They end where that reading just ended. With surprise, amazement and fear.

Whilst the other, later versions of this gospel and the other gospel writers themselves end with Mary meeting Jesus in the garden and him appearing to various others of the disciples, Mark has none of that at all.

The meeting is with an angel. The scene is an empty tomb. The stone has been rolled. The body is gone.

The message of Mark’s gospel is not that Jesus is raised and waiting in a garden in a story of long, long ago. The message of Mark is that Jesus is raised and it is up to you to go and look for him.

Mark ends not with a revelation but with an invitation.

And I give you the same invitation this Easter Day that his first hearers would have taken on their first Easter Day’s. Christ is risen – go out and find him.

You will find him where justice is done, where people are healed, where sadness is left behind. You will find him when the oppressed are set free, where the wounded are made whole, where the lonely are befriended, where the violent are conquered with gentleness, where the faithless are beguiled by good news. You will find him when life, precious, precarious life triumphs against all the odds.

Jesus is out there.

Two Mary’s went to a tomb – a garden graveyard, expecting to find a dead body to anoint. They expected to weep over their lost leader. They expected to be able to grieve for the beloved young man who had seemed to promise everything in heaven and on earth to them. Their loss was immense. Their grief overpowering. They went to do the little they thought they could do.

But they came away confounded.

For the message of the angel was that Jesus was not there.

There was to be no mourning. There was to be no grieving. For grief itself, barren, sour bitter grief and all that goes with death was smashed in pieces.

Their gloom was rolled away as surely as had been that large rolling stone which had sealed the gloomy place of death.

And they were invited to fulfil a task. Well, two tasks really. Their job was to tell others of what had happened and then to go and find Jesus in Galilee or wherever he had gone.

And the invitation that Mark gives us this Day of Days, this Feast of Feasts is no different to the invitation that was given by the angel to the women in the garden.

Get out. Get out of the garden of sadness and death and grief and pain. And go. Go and tell others when you see signs of new life, when you see signs of healing, when you see signs of resurrection, when you see signs and symbols of salvation. Go. Go and tell others and keep on looking for more.

Get out. Get out of the garden of your expectations where all might seem predictable, comfortable, safe and secure.

For he is not here, he is risen.

In the years in which we read Luke’s gospel, we have a sequil – the Acts of the Apostles which the same author wrote. We know what happened next.

In the year that we read Mark – this year – the challenge is not to find out what happened next to Jesus long ago. Mark’s gospel is an open book – a story unfinished, and page that is partly empty.

Mark asks us not to read the Acts of the Apostles but to live and be the Acts of the Apostles. The action and activity of faithful people in the world on the lookout for the risen Jesus wherever he is.

The story he gives us is a story for  us to finish – a story where the ending is up to us. Mark says – this is what we saw, this is what I saw. But what about you? When have you met the risen One.

Get out. Get out and go and find him. Go and tell others what you have seen and go to Galilee or wherever Jesus himself has gone.

For he is not here, he is not going to remain buried in the garden of our expectation.  He is risen, for if Christ were not risen, we would not be gathered here.

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Amen.

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