**Originally preached at 4:00 Jazz Worship at Fourth Presbyterian Church Chicago on Easter Sunday, March 27, 2016**
I have this box. It hasn’t always been a box. It’s looked different over the years. It started out as a folder—or maybe it was an envelope. Right now, it’s a blue and white striped hat box. Inside of it are momentos of my past.
As I get older, more and more of the items in this box represent people I have loved who have died. There are funeral programs from high school classmates and old Sunday school teachers, a poem I wrote for my grandfather, the last sermon my preaching professor graded for me, a cross that belonged to my grandmother.
I’ve moved about 20 times in the last 10 years, and inevitably, some of even these most precious momentos have gotten lost. I often don’t notice the absence right away. After all, my box mostly just gathers dust on a shelf. But when I do notice something missing, the pang of it is sharp. I know that it’s only a piece of paper or costume jewelry, but it’s also the last thing I have left of a person I loved—the last little bit of them I can touch and feel—and in its absence the grief and loss well up again anew.
Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Maybe you have a box too. We all have our hearts wrapped like fingers around pieces of those we’ve lost—trying to hold on just a little bit longer.
In our text for today, the women rise early, before the sun. Women who loved Jesus and whom Jesus loved and called by name: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary mother of James, and others who we don’t know but whom Jesus surely did. In the eerie quiet of predawn, they gather the materials they need to visit his tomb. To care for his body in death.
The previous hours and days have been long and surreal—like they come from a life and a world that don’t belong to them. The brutal cut of Jesus’ death has carved out a hollowness in each of them. There is nothing in his place except deep, endless uncertainty. Everything about their future is unknown. But this—these rituals of burial and death—these they know. These they understand. These they can still trust.
On their somber journey to his tomb, they are startled to recognize an out of place feeling. Where there should be only anger and sorrow and numbness, they feel within themselves the tiniest spark of—what is it?—relief? Comfort?
They will see his body. They will touch it and care for him as they always have. He is gone and so much has been lost, but at least they have this familiar part of him. At least they have this.
Except they don’t. When they reach the tomb, the stone is rolled away, and Jesus’ body is gone.
The text tells us that the women were first perplexed, and then overcome with fear. I wonder if the text doesn’t have it a little bit backwards. In my imagining, the fear comes first—fear that grows from a grief that no longer has its limit or its mitigating comfort. Now he is truly lost. They have nothing left to hold on to.
This gut-level grief and despair is what roils and churns inside of them when they are encountered by two strangers in dazzling clothes. And dazzling though they may be, the bedside manner of these two messengers… well, it leaves something to be desired. They are not comforting or understanding, they don’t even offer the standard angel salutation of “Do not be afraid!” Instead, one of them asks the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.”
See, this is where I think the perplexity comes in. Because this is a confusing thing to hear, through the haze of your grief, so newly reignited. This is a perplexing question to be asked at the burial place of your friend, whose absolutely lifeless body you helped lay here just two days earlier. Where else would you come to be with him? Where else should you look? Where did he go?
The messengers explain it to them, then. Perhaps with an exasperated eyeroll. “Don’t you remember what he told you?” they ask. “He said that he would die and be raised on the third day. He told you this would happen.”
And perhaps, through their grief, the words he’d spoken to them over and over did echo in their memory again. But even then, it couldn’t have felt entirely real. After all, resurrection wasn’t something they witnessed regularly or understood. And even though these strange men were telling them Jesus had risen, they haven’t seen it. They haven’t seen life re-enter his body. All they have is absence. And the command to remember, and trust.
The text smoothes over this part. It tells us that the women remembered Jesus’ words and then skips ahead to the part where they have returned to town to tell the 11 and other disciples. But something hugely significant happens inbetween. Before they reach the disciples, first, they have to leave the tomb. I cannot imagine how difficult that would have been. I’m not actually sure I could have done it.
I mean, sure, the tomb isn’t a good place to be. It’s scary and broken and painful. But it’s also the last familiar thing. See, we like to hold on. Even in pain, we grasp firmly onto the familiar. And these women, seemingly, have to leave what they’ve known and loved for something that will surely be totally new and unknown.
The strangers’ question having been dealt with, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”—leaves another question in its place, “If Jesus is not there, in the tomb, where is he? Where does Jesus go to be among the living—among the resurrected?”
The answer is not immediately apparent to the women or the disciples they run off to tell. Their journey from the tomb is not a momentary leap into the waiting arms of easy understanding and new certainty. They tremble in fear and doubt and they wait. But the answer does come. And just like their discovery at the tomb, it is an unimaginable surprise.
The risen Jesus—gone to be among the living—is not in some far off, unfamiliar place that his followers do not know—the risen Jesus appears in their very midst. In their world. He is in their upper room and on their dusty roads, and at their breakfast fire. The resurrected Jesus is among the living—and, as it turns out, they are the living.
Their world is the resurrected one—the one that, through Christ’s conquering of death, is being made new and whole even then. It isn’t something unfamiliar—it is the world they know. They just must learn to see it, and themselves, with new eyes. Resurrection eyes.
Years ago, when I was in third grade, my class used to watch a show every Friday called Reading Rainbow. Among other things, each episode always included a narrated reading of a children’s book, complete with illustrations on the screen. There is one particular book from that time in my life that has always stuck with me. It’s called Round Trip and it was written by a woman named Ann Jonas. It recounts a fairly simple story of a trip to the city and back.
What stuck with me, though, about this book wasn’t the name or the storyline. It was the illustrations. See, the illustrations for this book are done entirely in black and white silhouette. As you read, they reveal tall buildings and crashing waves, and long roads with other cars, and the high view from the top of a skyscraper. And then, you reach the last page and the story just seems to stop. It’s a little anti-climactic, a little disappointing.
Until you realize… the story isn’t over. You just have to turn the book upside down. When you do, the story continues. You read the book in reverse as it recounts the journey home. And all of the very same illustrations you saw before are transformed into new pictures from this new perspective.
Hidden in this simple but cleverly illustrated book is an Easter promise.
On that cold, dark morning, the women came to the tomb to hold on to what they could of a story they believed to be over. But it turns out, it isn’t. What the women and the disciples find when they summon the courage to leave the tomb is that Jesus isn’t gone. The story isn’t over. Jesus has turned the book upside down.
This is the powerful promise of that first Easter dawn—and it is our promise to take hold of this Easter day. A living Jesus who bears resurrection to this world and proclaims us the living too. The risen Jesus is in our midst, right now, this very day and moment. Not lost in death or only raised in some new kingdom beyond our knowing—but in our world. This messy, crowded, dusty, broken world. Jesus has risen and turned this world upside down.
The cornerstone promise of our faith is that one day all those who have died will be resurrected to new life and this world, God’s original creation—will be restored to wholeness. And it is true that that project is not yet complete. But it has begun. It began the moment Jesus left that tomb behind, and when we leave the tomb behind we find that that restoration, that resurrection is ongoing—it is happening even now in our midst. Jesus is among the living—and the living is us.
Some days, this is easier to believe than others. Some days, life and this world can feel like a tomb. As friends hurt, and loved ones die, and communities suffer—as violence erupts in our street and across the world—as lines blur between protectors and those we need protection from—between leaders to trust and tyrants to fear. When global violence becomes so common place that our first reaction at the news of a bombing isn’t horror but resignation, even inconvenience. When the future of our world or just our own lives looks like an abyss of uncertainty. Sometimes, it feels like all we can do is hunker down in the dark and wrap our fingers and hearts tightly around whatever pieces of love we have left to hold onto and watch the world around us shatter.
Sometimes, the most familiar and comforting thing we can think to do is to stay in the tomb. But we don’t belong there forever. We, like Jesus, are not meant to be among the dead—we are the living.
Ours is not a world that is slowly, irrevocably breaking all around us—ours is a broken world that is always already, even now, bit by bit, being made new and whole. And we are not a people called to passively wait for some new day in some far away unknown time and place. We are harbingers of the resurrection. We are the ones who rush from the tomb to bring to this hurting world the good news that Jesus is risen and we are being raised too. Resurrection is afoot. New life is beginning in our very midst. Right now. In this world that we know. On our streets and in our houses and at our tables and even behind our locked doors and in our doubting hearts. We need only open our eyes to see it.
When young queer black women witness the evil of countless careless murders of their own race and begin a movement that dares to proclaim that “black lives matter”—that is not a last feeble gasp of hope against an unstoppable tide of brokenness. That is goodness and life that refuse to surrender to evil and death. That is resurrection. When citizens and businesses alike respond to their state’s hateful legislation with the firm declaration of “we are not this” or at least “we don’t want to be”—that isn’t a futile, empty gesture—it is the gospel of persistent redemption. That is resurrection.
When, in the face of some global tragedy or many, we stand together across races, countries, and faiths v to say that we are stronger than what seeks to destroy us—when we recognize that we are bound up together in love—that is resurrection. And when you are too filled with doubt, with agony, with hopelessness to believe in any good at all—and a friend says “for as long as you need, I will carry that hope and faith for you”—that too is resurrection. It’s everywhere. It is alive in this world right now. And, even if it doesn’t always seem like it—it will win in the end.
Theologian N.T. Wright says, “The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that [we are] now invited to belong to it.”
Our call this Easter day—our call every day as God’s people—is to know that Christ is among us. Christ has given us new life—declared us the living and this world—this very world—a world of resurrection. We are called to trust and participate in all of the ways that God’s justice and love are being done and, whenever we can, to join in the work of making this world new.
And so we leave here this day, summoning our courage and trust, to go be among the living. We leave with the promise that Jesus has turned the book upside down and the story isn’t over. We go to seek out Christ in this world and to see this world with eyes of resurrection and look for how we might participate in that resurrecting work.
This very day, Jesus Christ is risen and among us, and proclaims that we are the living. The story doesn’t stop here—the story continues.
So you tell me: what happens next?
Rev. Layton E. Williams 
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