Welcome
Alleluia, happy Easter. I want to begin with a word of welcome. Almost every Sunday, I say to the congregation; whoever you are, wherever you find yourself on the journey of faith, you are welcome. You are welcome at this table. You are welcome to participate in all we do. Now on Easter, we clean up a bit. Some of us are even wearing suits, at St Michael’s, in Albuquerque, can you imagine? Even though some of us have scrubbed our kids faces and made them wear the uncomfortable shoes, please know, this isn’t our usual mode. The kids’s faces, at least my kid’s face, is usually much stickier. Please know, especially at Easter, if you’re uncomfortable in most church settings, if you don’t fit in, if you’ve been told you’re not really a churchy type person, you are welcome here. Easter is the Sunday for you.
With all that we do for Easter, all the pageantry, I worry we miss the point of the resurrection. I worry we are trying to turn this story into a story of earthly triumph. We’re looking for a story of victory and power as we understand them. We’re looking for perfection, and perfection isn’t what Easter is about. Perfection is NOT what Resurrection is about.
What the Resurrection is about
If we are confused by Easter, we are in good company. Mary this morning doesn’t recognize the risen Jesus. She mistakes him for the gardener. I wonder if Mary, one of the closest disciples, still imagined that a risen Jesus would would come with an angel army, with trumpets, and glowing light, and a blow-out.
My colleague, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber wonders whether Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener because he still had dirt under his nails, from crawling out of his tomb.
You see, the resurrection, Easter Sunday, is gritty. In order to understand this gritty resurrection, this being risen with dirt under your nails, it helps to understand who Jesus was before Easter. On Easter Sunday, it matters to say a word about the Jesus we say is risen.
A little over 2000 years ago a young woman, a young frightened mother dared to believe that the child she carried was God. God coming to lift up the lowly, to humble the mighty, to fill the hungry with good things. God, so frustrated with how much of a mess we humans had made of religion, God so irritated that religion had become a club of blessing for the well-behaved, that God said “nope, I’m coming down there. You’ll see? I share my table with all the wrong people.” Mary dreamed that her child would show us whose side God is on.
Jesus would grow to fulfill his mother’s dream. He walked first around Galilee, calling fisherfolk and carpenters to follow. He healed the sick, but more, he healed communities. You see Jesus always had his eyes on the edges, on the edge of town, on the people who had been left out, cast out. Jesus worked with women, with outsiders, with immigrants, with the unclean, with the sick. Jesus brought healing by knitting folks back into relationship. Jesus preached about love. He preached about justice. And Jesus made room at his table for everyone, everyone.
Jesus’ following began to grow, all the wrong people, the tax collectors, the zealots, sex workers and widows, orphans and the poor. As Jesus preached about the reign of God, they dared to believe that, though rich and angry men held the political levers, they need not hold sway over hearts, over minds, over the imaginations of the people. Jesus’ movement began to grow. Hope began to grow. Love began to grow.
And Jesus told his followers to keep looking for the lost, to visit the imprisoned, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to do justice, and to love. Above all Jesus told them to love, and to make that love real through serving those that the powerful left behind. This was a movement of outcasts for outcasts. With Jesus, there were no perfect people. People who thought they were perfect were deluding themselves. Jesus didn’t come to make us perfect. Jesus came to bring us together, with all our imperfections, with all that makes us interesting and different and weird.
As the movement grew, Jesus knew the powerful would be threatened. He warned his closest followers that they would try to kill the movement. He said to them, when they lift me up, when they execute me like a common criminal, I will draw all the world to myself. The whole world will come into my saving embrace. Notice, no qualifiers. The whole world. The whole world. Jesus was arrested. Then, despite the evidence, in a miscarriage of justice, Jesus was sentenced to death.
And all those people who had followed him, all those people who had dared to hope, had to watch as the powerful did to Jesus what they did to anyone who threatened their power. Jesus died on a cross, like thousands of other Palestinian Jews at the hands of Pontius Pilate.
Dirt Under our Fingernails
Which brings us to this morning. Which brings us to Easter. Which brings us to Mary, and the Risen Jesus with dirt under his nails, whispering her name.
I wonder if for Mary, hearing her name gave her goosebumps of recognition. She might have expected the trumpets and the angel armies to appear, but that wasn’t how it was going to happen. Jesus wasn’t coming to conquer. God is not in the conquering business. Jesus first came to walk with us, to get his feet and his hands dirty. How could Jesus’ return look any different?
I wonder if Mary’s goosebumps are a recognition that Jesus is the same one she met along the road, who called to her. Religion isn’t about striving for some image of perfection. Faith is about being met, where we are, being known for who we are, being loved, and being invited to work that will get your hands dirty with God.
Practice Resurrection
This Easter, how do we do more than proclaim resurrection? How do we do as the poet Wendell Berry says and “practice resurrection?”
Practicing resurrection isn’t about becoming perfect. Practicing resurrection isn’t about worldly triumph, no, the stakes are both subtler and more cosmic. Practicing resurrection doesn’t make you perfect. God doesn’t promise to make you perfect. “Perfect” usually describes an image we humans have invented, an image outside ourselves. God doesn’t want you to look like some AI generated nonsense from instagram. That’s not what God wants for your life. God wants you to be you, only you, exactly you. God whispers your name, like Jesus whispered “Mary.” That’s what it means to practice crawling up out of the grave. That’s what it means to practice resurrection. It means trusting that God is always, always lifting us up, into being more fully ourselves.
Friends, I have to be honest with you: Practicing resurrection often looks awkward. Practicing being risen looks like an addict in the first months of recovery, figuring out what it means to be social without alcohol. Practicing resurrection looks like learning to walk again as you adjust to the changes in your aging body, Practicing resurrection looks like taking those first steps into church with a walker or a cane, and feeling both relieved that you have something to hold onto and nervous about what people with think.
Practicing resurrection takes bravery. Practicing resurrection requires letting go of shame. Practicing resurrection looks like a trans person taking hormones for the first time: it looks like the shape of your body and the sound of your voice changing. It looks like you becoming more fully yourself, and as any teenager can tell you, becoming yourself can be an awkward endeavor. Practicing resurrection sounds like serving at a food pantry where the clients mostly speak another language, and you have to ask people to repeat what they are asking, and you stumble your way to being understood. But you smile, and embrace, and are grateful for one another. Practicing resurrection takes more time than we’d like. Practicing resurrection means letting go of all of the pretense, letting go of all of the false images of perfection we set up for ourselves. Practicing resurrection feels like standing with thousands of other Burquenos in Civic Plaza, raising our voices for better policies, better treatment for the LGBTQ+ people, for immigrants, indigenous communities, veterans, women, government workers and the land itself. Practicing Resurrection means standing up for the world you hope for, even when the political winds are against you. Practicing resurrection means remembering that though cruel tyrants may hold sway from time to time over politics, they do not have to control our minds, our hope, our imaginations.
Practice resurrection my friends. Practice resurrection. Get dirt under your nails.
The Easter Revolution
This Easter, I can’t promise you that following Jesus will make you powerful, successful, and attractive. That’s not how God works. Following the risen Christ does not mean that your life will be the image of perfection. Following Jesus means learning to be yourself, and not some image you’ve downloaded on your phone. Following Jesus means joining a movement for truth, a movement for truth that can be awkward and costly, but it is a truth that sets people free.
Friends, Jesus is risen, and I believe that the One who is risen invites us to a revolution, a revolution that doesn’t look like conquering armies. This isn’t a story of the kind of victory we might imagine. This is victory over death. The most ancient images of the resurrection are of a jailbreak, like the image over there above the choir. That icon of the Anastasis, Jesus
Lifting Adam and Eve out of their graves is what we mean by victory. The Easter story doesn’t look like wealth, success, or worldly power. This Easter revolution must change our hearts before it can bring change to our world.
Because Easter revolution is the movement of a God who is willing to reach down into all the graves we dig for ourselves, into all the places we lose hope, into every dark corner, to grab ahold of us and to pull us up again.
The story of Easter is an invitation to get our hands dirty for the sake of justice, for the sake of love. The story of Easter is the good news that life climbs out of the tomb. Death never has the last word.
Our Easter Alleluia is a defiant shout. Despite the despair of today, joy comes in the morning, hope comes in the morning. Even when we fail to recognize him, Jesus comes back in triumph, and that triumph looks like the dirt under his nails. We shout a gritty Alleluia in the face of all the injustice in our world, because Christ is risen. Alleluia, Christ is Risen.
Mike Angell 