Below is my sermon for the ecumenical Easter Sunrise Service tomorrow morning. There might be nothing new under the sun, and there is certainly nothing new in this sermon, but some of these folks will not have heard me drone on about the same old things, read from the same old texts…
Easter Sunrise Sermon 2008
J. Gary Brinn
The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 24, Verses 1 to 11.
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 Man 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 women with them who told this to the other apostles.
But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.
This is the Good News of our Savior, Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God. Amen.
Under the old Law, under the purity codes and sacrifices designed to sustain the economy of the Temple’s bloated bureaucracy, uncleanliness was contagious. If I were to touch a dead body and then touch you, I would become unclean and you would “catch” the uncleanliness, which you could then spread to the others, an epidemic of impurity. To be sure, prophets consistently argued against this system of sacrifice and artificial purity, offering instead a religion of humility and love, but it just didn’t take. Humans were, and still are, all about creating categories and rules to decide us versus them. To be sure, John the Baptizer suggested a spiritual purity, a cleansing repentance, but most people still thought of uncleanliness as contagious. And then Jesus happened and reversed the whole system.
Let’s think of one encounter that illustrates the reversal of the purity system in Jesus. In the fifth chapter of Mark’s gospel, a woman touches the hem of Jesus’ garment and is cured. The women has been hemorrhaging, I don’t need to spell it out, she is about as unclean as a person can get under the purity codes, yet Jesus does not become unclean because she has touched him, in fact, she becomes clean. Women were by their natures carriers of uncleanliness under the old system, and here was an unclean woman, and it was not her uncleanliness that was contagious, it was his cleanliness. Jesus touches the dead, touches the unclean Gentiles, Jesus surrounds himself with what is unclean, and he makes it clean.
And then there is Good Friday, where Jesus is executed by an occupation army of unclean Gentiles, who drag him out to Golgotha, the garbage dump, which is unclean, and crucify him as they had done so many others, as they would continue to do to hundreds. And Paul tells us that to be hung on a tree is the most unclean death. Thrice defiled, our Savior is buried in filth. The man who has reversed the purity system by making cleanliness contagious has been made ritually unclean. His corpse is left unclean, unwashed, for the Passover feast, and it is only on the third day that the women, already the bearers of uncleanliness under the old system, come to wash the battered husk of their beloved.
And what do they find? Not Jesus, but two dazzling young men and an empty tomb. Dazzling. Let’s think about that word- we want dazzling smiles and buy toothpaste and whiteners to accomplish this goal. We want dazzling whites and eye popping colors in our clothing, and buy detergents to that end. Dazzling, cleanliness, purity. Jesus has been buried in filth, has been murdered by the occupation army, and has even transformed that victimization into cleanliness, has left behind two clean beings, two angels to announce the good news. The first to proclaim the good news of the resurrection were the angels, the first to receive it were the women, were humans who were not able to legally testify, who were a continual threat to the purity of the community. Mark ends with them running away afraid, telling no one. Luke makes clear that the male members of the group of apostles did not believe their good news.
Here were humans, always one step away from impurity, always one step away from an imperfection that they believed would cut them off from God, always fighting a losing battle against an absurd ideal, and then comes Jesus. You’ve got it wrong. You don’t have to be perfect and pure to approach God, you’re never going to be perfect, to be pure. God approaches you, and when God comes, cleanliness happens. You are washed clean, not because of something you’ve done, but because the goodness of God, the dazzling cleanliness of God, overflows. Centurions and women and thieves on a cross and you, yes you, become clean when you encounter Jesus. And it’s contagious! It is catching, if, and only if, you carry the cleanliness of the Tomb, the cleanliness of the Risen Christ, the cleanliness of our God with you into the world. In the world but not of it, not because we are better, but because we are the carriers of holy contagion, because we carry love and cleanliness, we carry God with us into the world.
This cosmic reversal, this being transformed in Christ, is captured by the 19th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, after lines detailing how impermanent, imperfect, how defiled we humans are, writes:
Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ‘ joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ‘ Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
Immortal diamond, miracle! But we insist in re-creating the old system of laws and rules, of clean and unclean, we re-inscribe division, create us versus them. We have become the same self-righteous legalists that Jesus condemned during his own ministry. He calls us now as he called us then. It’s not about your rules, its not about your purity. It is about a love that overflows, that makes all new, all clean, that even death, even a degrading horrifying death cannot defeat. Life and love that never ends!
Today I will be made clean by prayer, by sacrament, by amazing grace, and I will be made clean by you, and you will be made clean by me, and we will dance and sing in a world transformed. We will be made immortal diamond, we will be made clean and pure, in Christ. Jesus has changed everything! It is Easter again this morning, it is new life, rebirth, it is miracle again! From the muck and filth of our despairing hearts, from our petty self obsessions, from our fears, God has made beauty, has made us vessels of grace, filled with divine love, filled with God’s spirit! Okay, we’re still sometimes despairing, sometimes self-centered, sometimes afraid, but Easter is always there. It is no surprise that we associate Easter with the early dawn approach of the faithful and clean women, for every dawn is Easter all over again, every day is miracle, is a call from God to go out into the world, carrying the love virus, the grace virus, the God virus, into the world. Are you contagious? How might you become contagious? With tomorrow’s dawn, when so many of us will trudge off to work, will you feel “eastered”? Will you carry God with you? Will I? For we can, and we will, with faith, with grace, and with our Risen Savior. We can be vectors not of uncleanliness, of dis-ease, but of contagious cleanliness, of ease and comfort in Christ. May it be so tomorrow, for a thousand tomorrows, may it be so until the world has been transformed, until we are in the Kingdom of our amazing God. Amen.