March 31, 2013 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:30 a.m. | Easter Sunday

Roll the Stone Away

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 11:1–2, 14–24
Isaiah 65:17–25
Luke 24:1–12

“They found the stone rolled away from the tomb.”
Luke 24:2 (NRSV)

We can never “celebrate” Easter in isolation from the cries of our world. The moment we “celebrate” Easter in some isolated way—in our little comfortable way—we make a mockery of Christ. We reduce the message of Easter—and in that process we domesticate Jesus so that he becomes some powerless household idol.

Peter Millar

On Tuesday this week Missy, my wife, and I received a card in the post. It is so nice to get cards by snail mail these days. It was an Easter card from our friend K., whom we do not see often enough but who is very attentive to birthdays and special days and always sends fun cards. This one had on the front a picture of a little boy, aged five or six, with his hair all neat and patted down, dressed in a suit and a vest and a tie, holding a plate with flowers on it, all ready to go to Easter service. And the legend on the card was this—and just imagine a little boy’s whiny voice—“Church? But we just went at Christmas!”

Which is to say I’d like to add my welcome to all of you. Welcome all of you regardless of when you were here last in church. And if it was Christmas or a while ago, that’s OK. This is a good day to come to church, this day with the beautiful banners in the Sanctuary, the beautiful flowers reminding us of the onset of spring, great music, the choir, the brass. A particular welcome to those of you who might find yourselves in overflow seating this morning in the Gratz Center. Welcome. A suggestion: why not come to the early service next year; you might get a seat in the Sanctuary. Or even better still, come back next week, because I can assure you there will be space in the Sanctuary and we will still be doing Easter. Easter is not just a day in the Christian calendar; it’s a season. We will be doing Easter for the next seven weeks, so do take an opportunity to stop by again; there will be plenty of room for you.

So why do we gather here, fill the church three times this morning, and gather at the beach this morning at sunrise and then again here at 4:00 this afternoon for the jazz service? Why do we gather here, I wonder, in this increasingly secular age? Perhaps it’s for cultural reasons: it’s just what’s done on Easter Sunday. Or maybe it’s a family tradition to come to church. Maybe your mother-in-law forced you to come today but promised a nice brunch afterwards, so it’s worth putting on the shirt and tie and coming.

Or maybe out there are some devotees of the History Channel’s new Bible miniseries, which seems to be taking the world by storm for what reason I’m not really sure. I always think that Monty Python’s Life of Brian has a better telling of the gospel story than attempts to tell it straight. (I’ll probably get into trouble for saying that.)

Or perhaps, just perhaps, among us this morning there are people gathered because they heard a rumor, a rumor of the presence of life where once there was death. Perhaps among us are people asking the big questions of life and being and meaning. Some of you, I know, journeyed with us through Holy Week, experienced the darkness of Maundy Thursday and the cross on Good Friday and come now celebrating the hope that is inherent in the Easter message. Many of you perhaps fall into that ever-expanding category of spiritual but not religious. And so what’s a preacher to do on a morning such as this? It’s a dilemma for those of us who seek to bring a word to this varied congregation.

I think the task of the preacher is not in some way to try to explain the resurrection, for the resurrection is at its very heart the central mystery of our faith as Christians. I’ve shared with the congregation before my interest in the writings of Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian journalist who writes regularly in the New Yorker. A few years ago he wrote an article in which he led off by defining the difference between something that’s a puzzle and something that is a mystery. A puzzle, he writes, is something that can be solved with more knowledge or information. The example that he used was of the then-missing Osama bin Laden, and indeed that puzzle, as we know, has been solved. Mystery, he says, is qualitatively different from that. It can’t be worked out by getting some more information or by finding some secret key that unlocks the mystery for us. It can’t be done by learning New Testament Greek and engaging in your own acts of interpretation. It is, at its very heart—the resurrection story—a mystery. “Mystery,” writes Gladwell, “requires judgment and assessment of uncertainties.”

Now really, we are not people who like uncertainty, living as we do in our rational, scientific world where everything has to fit the system. Resurrection doesn’t fit the system. And so it’s not the job of the preacher in some sense to reflect on the mechanics of resuscitation, because resurrection is different from resuscitation. In the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead by Jesus, Lazarus is resuscitated but will die again. Resurrection is a different concept. It is the entrance of God’s time, eternity, into our time in that miracle.

Yet look closely at the text we have this morning. Jesus doesn’t even appear in this part of Luke’s telling of the resurrection morning. So what do we have to go on? A bunch of women who come and to their surprise see that there is a stone that was covering the entrance to the tomb that has been rolled away. There is no body. They bring a message; the disciples hear it skeptically. Peter runs and is amazed.

I invite you this morning to reflect on that stone, the stone that was placed in front of Jesus’ tomb after the crucifixion, in front of the tomb where the body was laid. Imagine that stone in all of its hugeness, solidity, heaviness. John Updike, in the poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” writes, “the stone is not papier-mâché, but the vast rock of materiality.”

The vast rock of materiality, which is placed in front of the tomb as a demarcation of the dead and the living. The stone carries with it heavy symbolism. The stone placed at the entrance of the tomb symbolizes empire, the Roman empire, which placed the stone there after the empire had killed Jesus. Just a week ago Jesus rode into the city at the time of Passover and was proclaimed king, and empires don’t like kings that they don’t appoint, and so the empire kills Jesus on the cross for his act of sedition. Then the body is placed in the tomb, and that vast rock is placed in front of it.

The stone is also a symbol of religious oppression, for it was the religious authorities of the day, the mainline church of the day, who didn’t like Jesus because he broke the rules: he healed on the Sabbath; he ate with people whom society looked down on.

For the women and the disciples, the stone symbolizes the destruction of the hope and potential that was present in the ministry of Jesus, the one whom they loved. The stone marks the end to healing the sick and binding up the brokenhearted and feeding the hungry and caring for the poor and welcoming those whom society deems outcast.

I wonder what that stone might symbolize for us this Easter morning, that demarcation of the place of death to the place of life? What is the stone, the vast rock, that comes between our lives as we live them and our lives as we aspire them to be as people of faith? What meaning might the stone have for you?

James S. Stewart was a Scottish minister, a famous preacher back in the days when that phrase was not an oxymoron. He preached a famous sermon called “The Wind of the Spirit,” in which he reflects that in Greek and in Hebrew the word for spirit, Holy Spirit, is the same word as “wind.” The wind blows where it will, is the text from John’s Gospel.

“Try shutting the door against that wind,” preaches Stewart. “Try shutting that door. It will break the door down, as on the day they rolled a great massive stone against the mouth of a tomb in a garden and sealed it fast and said, ‘That’s Christ finished. This dead and defeated man will trouble us no more. Let him sleep behind the stone forever.’ Suddenly came the wind of heaven and burst the tomb and rolled the stone away and Christ went conquering through the world.”

Listen, listen for the rush of the wind of heaven in your life. Be open to where the Spirit is moving, rolling away the stone that is the barrier between where you are today and the fullness of life and love, which is God’s calling on each of us and God’s promise. Listen for the rushing of the wind breathing new life into the tired and musty and deadened places of our life and of our world. For the Easter story is never just about us and our individual lives but about how we live together in community and in the world. I love a prayer for Easter written by the English theologian and writer Janet Morley:

When we are all despairing. When the world is full of grief.
When we see no way ahead and hope has gone away:
roll back the stone.

Although we fear change, although we are not ready,
although we’d rather weep and run away:
roll back the stone.

Because we are coming with the women.
Because we hope where hope is vain.
Because you call us from the grave and show the way:
roll back the stone.

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Thanks be to God. Alleluia. Amen.