Wallingford Presbyterian Church
April 8, 2007 (EASTER SUNDAY)

“Tell It!”

(Psalm 150 and Luke 24:1-12)

          Whether or not the story is already familiar to you, the basic plot line is easy enough to follow, right?  Jesus having died back on Friday, and the Sabbath not being an appropriate day for final burial preparations, the women arrive at the tomb early Sunday morning to get to work.  Arms full of spices, sleeves rolled up, for the sad task of embalming their dear friend and teacher.

           When they get there, instead of a dead body, they find an empty tomb, and men in dazzling clothes seemingly chiding them for their lack of faith: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? Don’t you remember what he told you?  He is risen!”  The women run back to relay the amazing news to “the eleven” (that’s the 12 disciples, minus poor Judas) and to the rest.

          It’s not at all surprising that the eleven would have trouble believing the women’s story.  For any of them, it would have been one thing to hear Jesus talk about his resurrection ahead of time, and quite another to believe it’s now actually happened.  How would you have reacted when Joanna, the two Mary’s and their friends came running back to tell you what they’d seen and heard?

          I can’t resist sharing with you Anna Carter Florence’s take on this verse that talks about the women’s words seeming to the disciples an idle tale:

Alas.  The disciples, I am sorry to tell you, are not as receptive to this news as we might have hoped.  In fact, they are less than supportive.  You might even say that for one wildly out-of-character moment, they forget their disciple manners and resort to the subtle cadences of a high school locker room: “Yeah? Well that sounds like a load of !@#$%^&!* to me.” (Luke 24:11)  Translators of Luke have clearly tried to play this down…[“an idle tale” indeed!]  But the Greek word in question is leiros, which means “nonsense,” “drivel,” “trash,” “garbage…”[1] 

And, I would add, a host of far more colorful English equivalents – hence the !@#$%^&!* in her paraphrase of the text.

“Leiros!”  “Easter nonsense!” And those first witnesses to the Resurrection weren’t the only ones to get that reaction.  The Greeks scoffed when Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and told them about the Resurrection of the dead (Acts 17:22-34).  And it’s happened countless times since. In fact, if you want to get a little taste of what it felt like for the women to breathlessly share the most amazing news of their lives, only to be shot down for their troubles, leave this sanctuary today and start telling folks you believe what they witnessed at the tomb. Engage your Seattle neighbors in conversation about the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and get ready to be met with “leiros!”  Sure, it’s better disguised in some conversations than in others.  Your well-educated neighbors may use words like “I’m an empiricist, you see. I simply need proof.”  Others will say something friendly enough, along the lines of “Hey, I’m glad that works for you.”  But leiros is what many of these folks are thinking, if they find this all a little hard to stomach. “What a load of ___”(well, you fill in the blank).

          It’s a perfectly natural reaction.  And those of us who are most comfortable with the story would do well to sit with the skeptics for awhile.  The Easter story is unbelievable. It defies logic and explanation.  It sounds too good to be true. If it weren’t these things, it wouldn’t be Easter.  Sure, trees budding and birds chirping and eggs hatching – all those signs of springtime, we can explain.  But Jesus on the third day wasn’t at all like a little daffodil bulb pushing up toward the sunshine!  The Easter story almost has to sound like leiros to be worth anything at all.  Let’s not get caught in the trap of trying to make it more palatable. 

          But to return to our text, I find it compelling that the unbelievability of the story doesn’t seem to deter the women at the tomb.  They could have huddled just outside the walls of the graveyard, weighed the pros and cons of actually blurting out this bizarre thing they’d seen, and opted instead to let someone else stumble upon the empty tomb and take it from there.  That they didn’t take the easy way out tells me they couldn’t help but spread the word.  Something had happened to them that needed to be told. And of course their testimony is no less true, no less faithful, simply because they weren’t believed. 

There’s also something really marvelous that happens in our text between verses 11 and 12, which gives me hope.  Verse 11 – the women’s words seem to the eleven a load of bunk, Peter of course being one of those eleven.  Verse 12 – But Peter got up and ran to the tomb.  Why’d he go, do you think?  To prove them wrong?  Why would he need to, if he already knew it to be impossible?  Or was there just enough room in Peter’s understanding to wonder… to doubt his own judgment of leiros … to think it really might be as the women had said? 

In so many of our conversations about faith and doubt in the church, we talk about doubts that challenge or complicate our faith.  Here’s a case study in doubt being the very thing that brought Peter back – not only back to the tomb, but back to wonder and amazement, back to a place of receptivity to what Jesus had been telling them all along, back to the hope that what seemed impossible was actually possible.  All because he left that door of curiosity open a little crack, instead of slamming it shut.

Martin Copenhaver tells it this way: “’Nonsense!’ says Peter, and with that he is off like a shot, as if the word he had just spoken were like the crack of a gun that starts a race.  I love the juxtaposition of those two reactions (“Nonsense!” and “Let’s check it out!”) because I think it says a great deal about the mix of belief and disbelief that [is part of] every subsequent Easter as well.  The head may say, “Nonsense,” but then our eager and running feet bring us here to check it out.”[2]

Because what it all boils down to is our desire to know: “Is it true?” 

James Cameron’s recent documentary, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” certainly feeds into our desire for an answer to that question.  Granted, the first thing to keep in mind is that these things are always carefully timed to coincide with Lent and Holy Week.  Last year it was The Da Vinci Code movie and the Gospel of Judas, a year or so earlier it was “The Passion of the Christ.”  It doesn’t take a genius to realize this is peak season for Jesus news;  booksellers and filmmakers get a far bigger media buzz right about now than if they released their supposedly groundbreaking works, in, say, mid-July.

But it’s also important to realize that Cameron’s documentary, and the book on which it is based, are but the latest in a long line of attempts to offer proof for an unproveable proposition.  The logic is that if we could establish that a particular pile of bones in a tomb outside Jerusalem belonged to Jesus of Nazareth, then we’d know for sure he didn’t really rise from the dead.  Fair enough.  Hard to argue with the premise.  Unfortunately, it simply isn’t possible to prove that the bones belong to Jesus of Nazareth, as opposed to the thousands of other Jesuses floating around 1^st century Palestine.  The concrete evidence our scientifically oriented minds want simply isn’t available to us.  Just as it is impossible to prove the existence of an empty tomb, (as many of us wish we could), we’re also too far removed in time to prove it wasn’t empty.

Fortunately, caves and piles of bones aren’t all we have to work with.  As Jesuit priest James Martin observes, “the most compelling proof of the resurrection… is the disciples who went from being terrified members of a failed movement, cowering behind closed doors, into men and women emboldened to preach about Jesus at the cost of their lives.”  Eva Stimson adds, “This is still true today.  The most convincing evidence of the resurrection is not likely to be found in some Jerusalem cave... The risen Christ will continue transforming lives long after The Jesus Family Tomb goes out of print.”[3]  Or as one bishop put it, “Yes, I believe in the resurrection.  I’ve seen it too many times not to.”[4]

To return to Copenhaver: “On this the gospel writers agree, and this I believe: Jesus appeared to the disciples and others after his death, in such a sure and unmistakable way that they agree it was Jesus…It was not simply the power of his memory overcoming them, not some generalized sense of the presence of God.  It was Jesus, in the midst of them again in a way that was previously unknown and as unimaginable to them as it is to us.  It was an experience of which they were so sure that it changed their lives immediately and for all time.  It was an experience of such power that they could no more ignore it than they could ignore their own lives.”[5]

Is it true?  Those of us who aren’t sure likely wouldn’t be here at all if we didn’t have at least a little of Peter’s healthy doubt.  “Nonsense!  Leiros!  But let me check it out just in case…” And those of us who believe the Resurrection is true generally have experiences that confirm our trust in the story, that help us “find [our] place in the history of grace.”[6]  Once we’ve had those experiences of new life, of despair-turned-hope, we too are called to share what we know.

I understand a gentleman once got up to lead a children’s time in his church with a borrowed bank sign hung around his neck.  It said simply: “Teller.”  His point, of course, was that we are all called to be tellers of God’s mighty acts, tellers of God’s grace.

When it comes to the story of Easter, we don’t really have explanation or logic to work with, so there’s no point pretending we do.  No precedents.  No scientific proof.  What we do have is testimony.  That of the first witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, that of women and men of faith through the centuries, that of our own experience.

If you suspect the story the women told the disciples was “an idle tale,” I’m grateful you have enough doubt to wonder and listen to those testimonies and try to experience Easter for yourself.

And if you are here this morning because you have experienced in your own life the truth of the Easter story, put that “Teller” sign around your neck and get to work: Tell it!

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!