April 8, 2012 | 4:00 p.m. | Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

John 20:1–18

Easter Sunday. It is my hunch that today most people are a little more gracious, more kind, more forgiving than on just any other day, so I’m going to begin tonight with a confession: We all have our guilty pleasures, and these days many of us have a TV show that falls into that category. I know this because I routinely give lots of grief to friends of mine who watch The Bachelor or Dancing with the Stars or The Real Housewives of wherever they are this week. But the truth is, I have a guilty pleasure show too; I watch a ridiculous comedy called How I Met Your Mother. I admit it, the show is shallow and crass, and I’m sure that most times I could be adding more to my life by turning off the TV and reading a book, but you have my confession: I watch this show. As you can tell, I don’t expect much substance from this show, so I was as surprised as anyone when this week I watched an old episode that provided a sermon illustration I’m using, of all days, on Easter Sunday.

Marshall is the name of one of the lead characters on the show. He’s about my age, and he’s very, very close to his father: they talk on the phone every day; he asks his father’s opinion about everything in his life; he drives his wife crazy by telling his father every last detail about their marriage. Then one day, his father, who is only about sixty years old, has a heart attack and dies. Marshall is devastated. He collapses inward; he forgets all about taking care of his marriage and his job; and he moves back home under the guise of taking care of his mother, when the reality is she is taking care of him. A few weeks along, when it finally dawns on Marshall what has happened to him, he tells a story to his friend Ted about why his dad was so important to him.

“When I was little,” he says, “our family used to go every summer to a cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We always arrived long after dark, and I remember riding down those tree-covered roads late at night sitting in the middle of the back seat between my two brothers, staring down the road, and I noticed you couldn’t see anything at all beyond the short reach of the headlights out in front of the car. And that scared me to death, except that I knew my dad was driving, and that he knew what was coming up in the darkness, so it was going to be OK.”

As Marshall gets some of his feelings out into the open and begins to put his life back together, he finds himself in the car late at night, driving back from his mom’s house to his home in New York City, and suddenly he imagines that his dad is with him—he sees him in the rearview mirror, sitting in the middle of the back seat, just like Marshall did when he was a boy. And his dad says, “Marshall, I know you’re afraid, but the truth is, I could never see beyond those headlights either. Sometimes in life, you just have to keep driving” (How I Met Your Mother, Season 6, paraphrase).

One of the things we want most as human beings is to know what is up ahead in the darkness where we cannot see, to know what the future holds, to know how things will turn out for us. And if we can’t see it ourselves, we want to know that at least someone we trust is willing to go ahead of us into the darkness.

This, I believe, is why we need to hear the story of Easter every single year—because on Good Friday, Jesus goes to the very limits of human existence, he goes to death, he goes into the darkness ahead of us, and he shows us that whatever is there, there is nothing to fear; it will be OK. That same reassurance is given to people who appear in the story of Easter, who discover that Jesus has gone ahead of them into the darkness just as he said he would and that he can be trusted to lead us.

It is early on Sunday morning, and Mary Magdalene is on her way to where Jesus’ body has been laid. She has every reason in the world to be devastated, because the one she had come to depend upon was gone. In the prime of his life, at age thirty-three, the powers that be turned against Jesus, and Mary is left alone. The one she thought would be the savior of the world was hung to die between two criminals. Alone, mourning, but still a friend, still a faithful companion even in the face of loss, Mary wakes up early on the third day and heads to the tomb to anoint the body, according to the ritual practices of her religion.

Nearing the tomb, she sees that the stone has been rolled away, which can only mean one thing: grave robbers are present. So keeping her head about her, she goes back and gets two friends, Peter and another disciple, the one who is always referred to as the one whom Jesus loved.

The disciples are alarmed, just as Mary had been. They race to the tomb, and as they feared, they find it empty. The other disciple gets to the tomb before Peter but stops outside, not seeming quite ready to go in and face the sight of it. Peter arrives and goes into the tomb, the other disciple following close behind. Just as they feared, Jesus’ body is not in the tomb. Slowly it dawns on them that this could not have been a robbery. His burial clothes and the linen cloth that had been wrapped around his head are still there, rolled up neatly, left there in the tomb. And slowly it dawns on them that what Jesus had been telling them all along had come true. That he must rise from the dead. He did not leave them after all. The one who went ahead of them into the darkness is alive. And one day they would be able to follow him there and go without fear.

Mary’s story is even more touching. The two disciples depart for home, wondering when they might see Jesus again. Not having been into the tomb yet herself, Mary sits outside, crying. But eventually her curiosity gets the best of her, and she steals a glance into the tomb, where she sees two angels who ask why she is weeping, and she replies, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Our hearts go out to Mary, because we have heard this story before, and we know Jesus is waiting right behind her. But as hearers of the story, we wait to see how she will make the discovery for herself. She turns around and leaves the tomb, and wandering out into the garden, she runs right into Jesus, still so grief-stricken that she mistakes him for the gardener, and she says again, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

Jesus looks her in the eye, and this is the moment when she finally sees him, because he calls her by her name: “Mary,” he says. And that’s all it takes. Suddenly she knows that, just like he said he would, he has gone into the darkness ahead of her, and just as he promised, he will never leave her alone.

It is an incredible story; it has been called the greatest story ever told. One of its mysteries is why we, who have heard this story so many times, never tire of hearing it again. I think it has something to do with our fear about the darkness ahead of us: the future we cannot see; the things that lie ahead for ourselves, our families, our city, and even our world. What will become of us, we do not know. And we want to know that someone we can trust is going to be there.

And within the story there is another mystery, something almost miraculous. Unlike our experience of most people we know, we have never talked with or touched or stood side by side with Jesus, but when we hear this story, we are confident that we know Jesus and that he knows us. It’s like when he calls Mary’s name, we hear him calling ours: Adam, John, Judy, Holly, Lucy, Roger . . . When he calls Mary’s name, we hear him calling ours. We have that feeling because of something we all share: a longing we have in our lives to know God—and not some distant, untouchable, disconnected God, but a God who knows us, a God who is connected to our lives. Theologian Serene Jones says we connect with this story because “we want to be seen for who we are in the most intimate, far-reaching corners of our inner psychic lives, our bodies, our histories, our dreams and losses” (Serene Jones, Feasting on the Word, p. 378). Isn’t that true? Well, not in most of our relationships, it isn’t. We spend so much of our time and energy worrying about what might happen if other people were to find out about our secrets and past mistakes, the skeletons in our closets—not that it does us any good—but this is our creator, and God isn’t supposed to be like that. God knows it all anyway. The good news of Easter is that the one from whom no secrets are kept not only won’t ever desert you, but wants to call you by name and claim you as a child. Just as you are, you belong to God. It is just the sweetest news in the world.

In this story, God is near to us and accepting of us and wants to help us. As we go forward into a world where so much ahead of us is unknown, Jesus, the light of the world, guides our way and invites us to follow. God is immediate in our lives, calling us by name, and God calls us to be present to one another in the same way. This is a God who gives a name and value to every human life. This God has not forgotten about the oppressed protester in Syria or the disillusioned suburban housewife. This God has not forgotten about the Alzheimer’s patient or the addict who has lost hope. This God has not forgotten about the critically injured soldier or the millionaire who needs to be challenged to live more generously. This God has not forgotten about the nurse working in the wee hours of the morning or the public school teacher putting in extra hours late at night. This God has not forgotten about the young lawyer hanging on to ideals about justice or the mother and father wondering if their troubled child will be all right. Every one of them has a name, and God goes ahead of them, lighting the way. This God has not forgotten about you or about me. This God calls each one of us by name. And we know this to be true, because the tomb is empty. Christ is risen. He got up, and so we are called to get up—and live. Amen.