Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014 | 4:00 p.m.

Christ Has Risen!

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Matthew 28:1–10

The following sermon begins with the worst opening illustration in Fourth Church history. How many of you remember the TV show ALF? See—I wasn’t kidding. For those of you who missed ALF—and honestly, it’s probably an exaggeration to say you “missed” it—the premise of this sitcom was that and Alien Life Form—an ALF—crash lands into the garage of a typical American family, and the furry, Muppet-like character who gets out of the spaceship takes up residence in the attic. I am telling you this for one reason only. It illustrates, albeit in very rudimentary form, a storytelling technique that has been used to great effect in many times and places. On the show ALF, the family is normal in every respect—and then an alien crashes into their garage. This is not a fantasy world like the Smurfs or The Lord of the Rings. It’s a world where everything else is normal, and one thing happens no one can explain.

Some of the world’s greatest authors have made use of this technique. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known for what has been called magical realism—a story in which one magical event enters into otherwise normal circumstances and changes everything. In Marquez’s stories it is often one character who lives an extraordinarily long life or ghosts who visit the living. Franz Kafka used a similar strategy in his story Metamorphosis. In that story, a man gets sick and dies as his family looks on. Because we are so desensitized to the events of illness and death, Kafka’s main character does not die of an accident or cancer. Kafka turns him into an insect, and through that twist of reality, we see with new eyes how dehumanizing it can feel to lose one’s health. The point is that the presence of one unexplainable event in the midst of otherwise normal life is enough to change anything; it’s enough to make us question everything. Obviously that’s where I want us to go today as we consider the resurrection.

When trying to make sense of miraculous stories, it’s important to remember we are not really interested in things we can easily understand or explain. The human heart and spirit is captured and stimulated by the things we cannot explain. We’d much rather hear a story we can’t explain than one we can. Look no further than the disappearance of the Malaysian 777. The story has completely consumed the news for weeks because we cannot understand or explain it. We are endlessly fascinated by the conspiracy theories, the failure of technology, the corruption and intrigue that might have been a part of it. But mark my words—if we ever find that plane and figure out what happened, the story will disappear. As soon as we can explain it, we’ll lose interest, because that’s the way human beings work.

Easter is like that. This is not, and never has been, a day that needs an explanation. I am not here today to explain it away. I have no desire to tell you a story about how Jesus just “seemed” to appear to the disciples but really didn’t. I am not interested in stories about the historical likelihood that the body was stolen. Some people prefer to pay attention to the moral teachings of Jesus and would rather not consider the resurrection. If that’s you, I appreciate your perspective, but there may be little in today’s sermon that you will find helpful.

I believe this story is the greatest mystery in the history of humanity, and I believe it is supposed to be. And it happens in the midst of life that is otherwise normal.

In Matthew’s account of the story, two women, Mary Magdalene and another named Mary, go to the tomb. Hearing from men who appear to be angels that Jesus has been raised, they run to tell the other disciples. The version in the Gospel of John tells it a little differently: Mary, afraid when she sees the stone rolled away, goes for help. The two disciples she tells break into a footrace to the tomb. Everyone is running. Can you remember the last time you were in a footrace (and I’m not talking about the Shamrock Shuffle; I’m talking about an all-out sprint)? Obviously something unusual has happened; this thing that has taken place makes no sense to them. I make that point because it’s tempting to read this story and assume that, because it happened so long ago, these people reacted somehow differently than we would, but that just isn’t true. These people lived a long time ago, yes, and they lacked the scientific sophistication that is now commonplace for us. But they were not foolish people, nor were they naïve. In their world, just like in ours, dead people did not get up again. There was no explanation for it; there never has been. This story is a mystery, and that’s why they started to tell it. That’s why we tell it still today.

Mysterious stories are of value to us not just because of the mystery in the story but because of the effect it has on the rest of us. ALF is an interesting TV show in only one respect: it’s fun to watch the family and ask ourselves, how would life be different if an alien moved into my attic? When Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s characters encounter ghosts, suddenly they ask different kinds of questions about their own lives: “How much time have I been given on earth?” What will I do in order to give value to the time I have?” Any mystery, if it is told well, causes us to ask what about our own lives might be different now that we have heard the mystery. In the story of Jesus, the implications are huge, because in this story, death—the great equalizer, the one and only thing in life that is common and inescapable and final for every last one of us—death is suddenly off the table. And if that’s true, what else in the world could possibly be out of the question?

Think about your own life and about the things that have come to be “givens” for you—things that simply are the way they are and aren’t going to change. Are you stuck in a relationship that you think can’t possibly change or improve? Do you arrive at work most mornings convinced that you’re going to have a bad day before it even begins? Is there something about your family that has frustrated you for years, but you’ve decided that’s just the way it is? The good news of the resurrection is that those things can change; all of the possibilities are back on the table. The world is changed by people whose lives are marked by resurrection thinking, by the confidence that nothing is out of the question. Communities are transformed when individuals come to believe that gun violence really can be stopped and that in a city where there is plenty of wealth, no child should attend a failing school or go to bed hungry. People who work for these things are resurrection people, because in a world that is otherwise normal, they are convinced that nothing is impossible, and so that is how they live. Mysteries are frequently interesting, but they are important because of the way they change us.

One of my favorite stories is Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. You might know the movie version with Jodie Foster. The main character, Ellie Arroway, is an astronomer who spends her time not sending up satellites or studying weather patterns but looking for signs of alien life. Everyone thinks she’s crazy until one evening when she’s scanning the galaxy, evaluating the messages she’s sent, she suddenly she gets an answer. A short message becomes a longer one, and blueprints emerge for a spaceship. The world community mobilizes to build it, and by the climax of the story, Ellie, who everyone thought was crazy, is ready to launch into space and find the answer to the mystery she’s been waiting to know her whole life. The launch takes place, the engines of the ship are deafeningly powerful, and in the midst of the launch, Ellie passes out and is shaken into a beautiful spiritual experience that is far beyond anything she can understand or explain. When it is over and she wakes up in a hospital bed, the people who were outside the spaceship claim that the mission failed, the ship never took off, she didn’t go anywhere. At first, Ellie is devastated. She can’t believe that no one understands, that they doubt the extraordinary experience she had. We are all left feeling a little unsatisfied—wanting to know if anything happened, or not. And the story never reveals if the journey actually took place. In the midst of that story, though, there’s a subplot. At the beginning of the movie, when Ellie is a little girl, her father dies. They were very close. He loved her very much, and for reasons she can’t understand or explain, her father is taken away from her. The emptiness and pain in Ellie’s life is profound. She is unable to commit to loving anyone for the fear that they too will be taken away, and her obsession with astronomy, with “Contact,” is a metaphor for her need to have closure with her father and let go of her grief. During Ellie’s trip in the spaceship, the trip that no one believes, she meets her father and speaks to him again. After that, it’s clear that it doesn’t really matter if she can prove whether or not the trip happened or whether she actually spoke to her long lost father. What is important is that because she believes that she did, she is finally able to let him go, to fall in love, and to regain her own life.

The resurrection is meant to be a mystery. Did it really happen? Is it true? Past or present, no one really knows. But believe this: we keep telling this story because we cannot explain it. We keep telling this story because as long as we do, every other story we need to tell is still on the table. The world that surrounds us, the way we understand it, and our very own lives are only limited by the things we decide are out of the question. As it was told to the disciples long ago, so I tell it to you. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! What do you believe?

Amen.