When Fear, Joy and Hope Intersect (Easter Sunday)
Easter: When Fear, Joy & Hope Intersect
Luke 24:1-11
April 20, 2025 Easter Sunday
First Presbyterian Church, San Rafael, CA Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body.
While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Humanity must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again."
Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.
Every day one question that emerges is - What do we know? What do we know about what is real and what is fake? Ongoing challenging questions when fake news and unscientific assertions are made. Our best selves want facts, truth, unbiased reporting about local, national and global events.
This question can lead us in some other interesting directions. What do we know – about happiness, love. Easter is a moment to consider – What do we know about life? How is does it open us to naming our fears and finding joy and hope?
The story of Easter, rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus, flows out the stories and events of Holy Week – of betrayal, fear and death. The celebration starts in a cemetery, at the tomb. What did the women experience on the first Easter about life, death & new life?
Women Come to See and are confused – in Luke’s account
At the first light, the women came, their hands full of burial spices, the hems of their skirts wet with dew, their hearts heavy with sorrow and they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. The big boulder sat off to one side, jarringly out of place. It would be like driving by south on 101 and suddenly Mt. Tam is on the left, the east side instead of the west!
Yet according to Luke’s account of the events of the morning of the first Easter, neither the rolled away stone nor the discovery that Jesus’ body was gone caused anyone present to believe. What the women saw only caused confusion.
When the two men “in dazzling apparel” appear, the women move from being confused to being terrified. They literally fall down on their faces in fear. The divine beings remind the women what Jesus said. Luke says nothing about the women’s reactions to the angelic messengers, only that “then they remembered.” They saw the empty tomb with new eyes, and then they tried to tell the others. He is not dead. He is alive. Christ is risen.
How do we look at life and death and the Easter story? How might this story offer images of hope for us today?
Resurrection Story from Barbara Brown Taylor
Barbara Brown Taylor writes about one of her first experiences as a child and seeing deep truths about life and death and new life in her adventures in the woods.
When I was a girl, I spent a lot of time in the woods, which were full of treasures for me. At night I lined them up on my bed: fat flakes of mica, buckeyes bigger than shooter marbles, blue jay feathers, bird bones and -- if I was lucky -- a cicada shell, one of those dry brown bug bodies you can find on tree trunks when the 17-year locusts come out of the ground. I liked them for at least two reasons.
First, because they were horrible looking, with their huge empty eye sockets and their six sharp little claws. By hanging them on my sweater or -- better yet -- in my hair, I could usually get the prettier, more popular girls at school to run screaming away from me, which somehow evened the score.
I also liked them because they were evidence that a miracle had occurred. They looked dead, but they weren’t. They were just shells. Every one of them had a neat slit down its back, where the living creature inside of it had escaped, pulling new legs, new eyes, new wings out of that dry brown body and taking flight. At night I could hear them singing their high song in the trees. If you had asked them, I’ll bet none of them could have told you where they left their old clothes.
That is all the women and disciples saw when they got to the tomb on that first morning -- two piles of old clothes.
Seeing, knowing, being open to mystery and miracles. We were living in New Jersey when the 17 year cycle of cicadas took place. Thousands of brown bugs everywhere singing and flying. Loud, ugly …. and amazing. A mystery. A miracle. Empty tombs.
Seeing an empty tomb gave the women Easter eyes.
So is the story of Easter true? In light of this story, what can we know?
Resurrection and seeing with Easter eyes means we can work, create, and care in ways that take us toward the fullness of new life for ourselves and others. Easter morning was not an historical event, but part of an ongoing story of resurrection and new life.
The church at its best continues to be the community of the new creation in a world that is too often headed for dissolution by violence, abuse, death, and destruction. Being people of the resurrected Christ, the church is in the business of praying for the renewal of the world and seeking to renew it. Resurrection in community.
Jeanne O’Donnell shared her resurrection story with New Life Church in 2005 where Jeffrey and I started a new church in the Pocono Mountains of PA.
My son Christopher was 17 and full of life. Some people called him a gentle giant – he was tall and sweet. He was a senior at Pocono Mountain and enjoying his classes at Monroe County Vo Tech school. On April 7, 2000, he was riding in a car with 3 of his friends near Rt. 423 in Tobyhanna. The driver was going too fast. The car spun around and hit a tree. Christopher was killed instantly.
My husband Jon and I spent the next years trying to cope with the overwhelming grief of losing our son. I know Christopher is in the loving arms of God, but I missed him so much. I found grief support groups and they helped. But the hole in my heart was still deep and dark. Two years ago I found myself walking into worship at New Life Presbyterian Church at the middle school. I know God brought me here.
That day was the beginning of a resurrection for me. I found I could begin to believe again that life was not over for me, that God would give me strength and peace each day. I found friends here that I could talk with, laugh with and even cry with. God gave me hope. God showed me I could help other people facing the death of someone they loved through our grief support ministry. I began going to the women's study group and learning the meaning of Bible stories for the first time. God showed me that my love for children and teenagers could be used in REACH after school program. Making snacks, reading with children, playing games. I am coming back to life. I am finding joy again.
Christopher's birthday was on Good Friday last week. He would have been 22. God helps me face each day. On this Easter Sunday I thank God for all of you who have helped me experience resurrection.
Opening ourselves to being transformed by God’s love and grace, there can be resurrection and in community. One by one and stories of collective hope and joy.
When I think about if or how this story of the first Easter morning is true, I think it helps to take a step back and see a larger narrative and deeper expressions of truth. One of the people who helps me do that is Nadia Bolz-Weber. Here is part of her Easter message:
There is a mystery. There is truth in the stories and songs and poems of the Bible. It begins - In the beginning God – the source and ground of all being – set the universe into motion through sound in a love song that set it all into motion. Let there be Light.
God so loved the world that God gave God’s own breath to speak into existence that which was not – and then God so loved the world that God gave God’s breath another time, breathing into dust, dirt, to create humanity. Through dust and the very breath of divine love we were created. In the image of the songwriter we were created, and we too were given voice and language and breath and song. And there the original blessing, belovedness, was the truth of all creation and humanity.
And that love song of creation continued. Often people forgot or ignored that original song.
The sound interrupted the din of the Roman empire. This time, God’s divine love song was heard in the cry of a baby.. Jesus born to Mary and Joseph, Jewish peasants.
God so loved the world God created that God walked among us as love. This love takes no account of opinion or tribes or income, but insists on ignoring information we think of as important: data about worth, beauty, status. This love has quite ignored the Kelly Blue Book Value on us.
Jesus was like a clearer set of lyrics so that we might be freed from the noise of being told we are full of sin, freed from the noise that we are broken and need to be saved, freed the noise that says that there is only one right way to live and be. Jesus came to remind us who we are, beloved, Divine in us, remind us of the true beat, the real rhythm, the clear lyrics of the song of creation and the sacredness and connection that is life and that is eternal.
And those who heard this tune, began to sing it to others….This deep truth that is both in the sacred story of Jesus but in other faith stories and traditions too. We know it is life and it is here and it always has been and always will be.
We celebrate Easter because the voices of Empire said to Jesus, “Silence! You will not sing that song or invite worthless people to sing that melody.” So they unplugged his microphone and dragged him off stage and said the show was over. He was gone….but that is not true.
That which was from the beginning and is in this very moment and will be forever here, in all creation, this mystery of the divine love song calls us back. Again and again. It takes time to hear this song of life, hope and joy.
On that first Easter and today and tomorrow, we can know this ongoing story and song. In the midst of the realities of climate change, deep divisions in our country, leaders ignoring the rule of law, racial injustice, the war in Ukraine, the war between Israel and Palestinians, and more, people and communities are experiencing resurrection, new life and deeper connections to the source of Love and one another and global family. Jesus said that the point of all his teaching is that we have his joy, that our joy may be complete.
Let’s keep practicing as we play the real and true notes of hope and joy together in community in harmony and in a new key. Amen.
Resources
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Escape From the Tomb” (Jn. 20:1-18) The Christian Century, 4.1.98 https://www.religion-online.org/article/escape-from-the-tomb-jn-201-18/
Nadia Bolz-Weber, “Sermon on John 3:16,” 3.18.15 https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2015/03/sermon-on-john-316/