"Surprise!"
Phillipians 2: 1-13; Luke 24: 1-12
Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006

…thanks to Rev. Jim Harnish of Tampa, FL for inspiring this prompting!

A pastor in California told a wonderful story about a little girl named Nicole who was as excited about Easter as she had been about Christmas Eve. This caught her father off guard. And so, her father wanted to be sure she understood what Easter was all about and so he asked her, "Do you know what Easter means?" She said, "Yes!" So he asked her, "Nicole, what is Easter about?" She threw her hands up in the air and said, "Surprise!" Now, I think there’s a little Nicole in each one of us here this morning, so on the count of 3 lets all shout surprise…Surprise!

I think the gospel writers would have said Nicole got it! They all tell it differently but one thing all of them hold in common is that the resurrection came by surprise. No one expected it! Now there had been hints of it in the Old Testament and in the gospel narrative there had been 3 places where Jesus predicted it, but nobody, nobody thought it would happen. Do you?

Luke focuses on the women who had followed Jesus all the way from Galilee, all the way to the cross, and then after Jesus was dead, they followed his body all the way to the tomb. They had been with him the whole way through. Because it was the Sabbath they went home, and at home they prepared the ointments and spices needed for embalming the body. Make no mistake about it. These women knew what to expect. They expected to deal with death.

….Sooner or later the call comes to each of us too….of someone dear to us who has died. And we are left to make the arrangements…service and all. And somewhere in the process of things, we learn what to expect and how to a "manage" death. And that’s how the women came to the tomb that day, expecting to deal with death. Like us, they knew what to expect. They came with the spices they had prepared. You can be sure that embalming that body would be ugly, gruesome work but they knew what to expect and they were prepared.

And that’s when the unexpected thing happens. There in the place of death they heard the most unexpected question ever asked on this planet…"Why do you seek the living among the dead?" And what a question, an unexpected question….they never anticipated this and were taken totally by surprise. And there at the entrance to the tomb they heard the good news that he is not there, he has been raised!

Easter is about the last thing any of us are expecting. It is about more hope than we can handle. It’s about reality, the ugly in our everyday realties, taking an unexpected twist. Are you seeking it…in the right places…amongst the living part of life?

The only way to hear the Easter story is put yourself in it….to listen for that gasp of breath in the story, a gasp that always accompanies surprise as you find yourself standing there with the women at the tomb in shocked amazement at this act of God….this amazing way in which God breaks into the dark, heart-broken, painful predictability of our ordinary lives and brings something we never expected.

I suspect that on this Easter morning if we tell the truth about ourselves, the truth is that most of us some of the time and some of us most of the time…really don’t expect it either...a surprise ending to the way things seem to be going in our lives.

Constrained and conditioned by the mind set of the culture we live in, we expect the dead to stay dead, dead things to stay dead, the past to stay in the past, broken hearts to stay broken, might to try to make right, and violence to somehow make peace. We expect this world to go on pretty much the way it’s always been going.

We don’t really expect broken relationships can be healed, shattered hopes restored, sword turned into plowshares, the sick to be healed, the lame to walk, the lost to be found, prisoners to be freed, the hungry to be fed.

We don’t expect to find life in place of death.

Like these women on the way to the tomb, we’ve been conditioned with a mindset prepared to deal with death. When God intersects the human experience, it always takes us by surprise! ….maybe because we don’t always know what to do with life…the new life of the resurrection.

So, this Easter morning challenges us to have the same mind in us that was in Christ Jesus! A reorientation of our thinking that results in a radical reorientation of our living. We are to get the mindset of living our hope… live the surprise! Live the "surprise ending" and truly live….and then death is only about resurrection to deeper life….literally upon our death, but maybe more poignantly, deeper life in our living.

The challenge of Easter is not to celebrate something that happened in the past but to experience the living presence of the Christ amongst us today…a mind transforming presence that shapes our lives into the likeness of Christ’s life. This is where it helps to know about his life, friends. This is our part, ascribing to the mind and ways of Christ. The resurrection is God’s part……that big surprise that breaks into our lives with hope and life and love….all new. Surprise!

Which mindset, attitude, perspective will you choose?
          The predictable mindset of a death addicted world?
                    Or the mindset of risen Christ?

Which mindset, attitude, perspective will you choose?
          Within the narrow, predictable boundaries of our human experience?
                    Or the unexpected, unpredictable, life giving presence of the risen Christ, and resurrected life?

Which one will you choose?

It may look like a Good Friday world out there. But contrary to all appearances, this is an Easter world after all! Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Love never dies…not with God and not with us. You can kill God’s love but you cannot keep it dead and buried. It rises…it lives putting love in our hearts, decent thoughts in our heads, and some iron in our spines! We are resurrected to something more than life…more than what is seen, what life seems!

Are you going to continue the illusion of a Good Friday world?
Or will you start living the real life of an Easter world?

This world and our lives live within the realm of God’s….SURPRISE!

We’ve been traveling some salty road this Lent….at this point, the saltiness of life is predictable for us…in wounds, and it heals, binds, preserves, enlivens.

But we are in for a surprise! An Easter surprise!
Today…our Lenten salt becomes Easter sugar!
Sweet life! Not sugar coated, but unexpectedly sweet at the core, in the face of all that is! …a life giving reenergizing, surprisingly life giving!

Some days it’s as if I am walking around with my eyes closed….sleep walking. Asleep. Not seeing anything more than the surface of things….the way things appear to be…rather than how they really are in God’s sight. Stumbling. Stumbling around…bumping into all these stones. Stones. Everywhere I go….we go. I wonder how life might look different if I would just open my eyes to the really real….side-stepping the stones or rolling them away? How would my life be if I would just lean back and sigh a sign too deep for words and AWAKEN to the more…to more than what seems to be…more than I can see in the moment….to all I can be. I wonder….what might happen if I awoke to roll away the stones….

Roll away the stone!

♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫

If these stones could speak.
Corner stones.
Not one stone left standing against another.
Theses stones…perhaps they are rock foundation of my faith…I’m not to be stone cold

Stones.
The women went to the cave expecting the stone to be there. Expecting a dead Jesus to be there. And we’re still doing it. We’re still going to the caves, empty places of our days expecting a stone to be there that will keep life from happening….we still don’t expect new and better life to happen!

Roll away the stone!

♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫

Why is it we keep seeking the living among the dead? Why do we keep returning to the places of death....violence, indifference, self-centeredness, alcohol, gambling, stealing, denial and fear....maybe these are our stones…still our stones….why do we continue to revisit old sins and old death-dealing habits, daily routines….when in baptism we are called and brought into new life....and the promise fulfilled in Christ.

Why do we continue to go to the dead places within us and within our lives....when Jesus is risen? We let stones block us….stumbling…around as if asleep…we focus on what’s wrong with our lives…the stones…rather than what’s right with our lives!

Roll away the stone!

♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫

Are we waiting till we completely understand and it's completely safe for us before we go to new places, put ourselves amongst new people, give ourselves to new patterns of living...share the good news and roll away the stone? What are we waiting for? Can any of us ever really comprehend God's love for us and power with us? Are you willing to stay trapped behind that stone until you got it all figured out and everyone else convinced?

Mary and the women could not have expected the turn of events of that morning in the garden…and they kept on going knowing in their faith…God would do something! You and I know how the story goes and yet we often just stop, don’t go on, stop moving forward, wondering, "Who will roll the stone away?" "No one", we think, so we stay stuck where we are and use it as an excuse to never even go to the tomb of our feelings. Or, we run away thinking the tomb is empty and Jesus is gone forever….that there’s no hope for our life….never stopping to look for another possibility for life where there once was death within us, another possibility for our lives.

Do you sometimes wonder who will roll the stone away from your life?

If not you, who? Ahhhh….but then, friends, God has already done what no one else would do for you…not even yourself….the stone…..it’s already rolled!

Roll away the stone!

♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫

We so easily forget! We ARE EASTER PEOPLE with post-Easter SOULS. It’s not the resurrection of the dead that we believe in, but the resurrection of the living! We AWAKE each day to yet another Easter…a daily dose of Easter.

If you begin to believe in the new you….the resurrected you!...the one God is constantly creating…if you begin to begin to believe in you the way God does, then, Christmas lives and happens in you now even more deeply as Easter….and you get to grow up again and live again! You get resurrected life! There is no such thing as a stone! We are not empty like that tomb. We are full….faith-full.

Roll away the stone!

♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫

We see through the fullness of our faith, the Lord is risen! In fact, the Lord is just beginning to really live in ways that can make a difference in you, if you will but go to that hard, empty place in your life, notice the stone already rolled away, stay with your feelings, and realize he goes ahead of you! Christ goes ahead of you into that hard place…he has already begun a good work in you….just follow. Hear him call to you. God calls you to a willing spirit….an Easter spirit….willing to believe…calls you to believe in YOU…the way God believes in YOU. God calls for you to believe in your own resurrected life!

Awakened, we have the power! We have the power to roll away every single stone!

For those of us still following like the women…
For those of us, like Peter, still denying…
Roll away the stone!

♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫

For those of us, like Caiaphas, still controlling…
For those of us, like Mary, still searching…
Roll away the stone!

♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫

For those of us, like Pilate, still washing their hands…
For those of us, like Thomas, still doubting…
Roll away the stone!

♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫

For those of us, like Judus, still betraying…
For those of us, like Mary, still anointing…
Roll away the stone!

♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫
♫ Roll away, roll away the stone. ♫

Awake! We roll away the stone and come out, SOULS deep, and the day bright!