This past week has been quite a week. It began with St. Patrick’s Day on Monday, the first day of Spring and Maundy Thursday on Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and today is Easter Sunday which Valley Pastoral Charge is celebrating twice with the Easter Sunrise service. This week is brimming with events. And today contains I believe the biggest event ever in the church. It is the day of the resurrection. Now Easter is not only a great day, but it is also the only one that is set by the moon. Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon or after the spring equinox. As complicated as that sounds, it makes a whole lot of ancient sense, since it means that Easter happens along with the greening of the earth. The Easter message, “Christ is risen” goes right along with a whole world springing to life. (I’m not sure what they do in New Zealand with them entering winter now but we won’t go there???). Here in Canada, sap rises in dormant trees, spring peepers start their peeping, trumpet lilies spill their sweet smell into the air. New life springs forth out of Easter and life awakens winter’s dormancy in spring.

As much as the message of Easter and the message of spring are the same, they are very different events. Spring is natural and Easter is not. Buy a daffodil bulb in the winter and it looks like nothing in your hands. But we all know that all you have to do is put it into the soil and wait for the warm winds of springtime and watch that bulb break through the earth and paint the world in a glorious yellow. Spring is completely natural. But resurrection, the big message of Easter is not. Jesus being raised from the dead has nothing to do with anything natural. When we bury our loved ones we don’t wait around for the person to reappear so we can pick up where we left off—not this side of the grave anyway. We pay tribute to their lives and say good-bye to their physical bodies for good. Spring and Easter are very different.

In Matthew’s telling the Easter story two women go to see the tomb. That’s all Matthew says, “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.” Matthew doesn’t say why they go. Perhaps in their grief they wanted to be close to their loved one. There are no spices mentioned so it’s probably not to do the usual anointing of Jesus’ body. Maybe they went to check something out because just before today’s reading in Matthew some of the religious leaders went to the Roman governor (Pilate) and told him something Jesus had said while he was still alive, that after three days Jesus was going to rise again. And Pilate and the gang imagine that Jesus’ disciples are going to steal the body and say Jesus has been raised from the dead. And so, to prevent resurrection fraud, the Romans tighten the security around the tomb with an army of guards and a whole lot of gluey stuff to seal the tomb. That tomb is sealed tight. Maybe the two women went to the tomb to see if, “After three days I will rise again.” was really true. After all the dawning of third day had arrived.

And on this third day….you know….I just love Matthew’s account of the resurrection! It’s really like none of the other gospel writers. It’s like being in another world altogether where a stunning series of events is happening. You don’t know where to look. The women who go to see the tomb soon discover they’ve entered an earthquake zone and they see bolts of lightening cracking and flashing around an angel of the Lord sitting on the big boulder that the angel miraculously rolled back from the tomb. Shattering, upheaval, ground shaking, earth trembling, guards (don’t you love the way Matthew describes those guards who fall in a dead faint!)—the special effects in Matthew’s witness are incredible—jolts of a stunning heavenly vision signal daybreak in a new world—and none of this is natural. All priorities (business as usual) are set into a glorious confusion of events.

Now, this craziness at the tomb is not the actual resurrection of Jesus. That event happened earlier and Matthew does not describe the actual resurrection of Jesus being raised to life from death. Matthew only describes what comes after it. What we are seeing here at the tomb is the aftermath of the resurrection, the effect of the resurrection. So Easter Sunday is really more of an aftermath day, a day when the shock jolts the truth to life that Jesus is in fact risen.

The aftermath of Easter doesn’t come out of the blue. It germinates from today and everyday:
• the terror and horror and violence of Good Friday when Jesus, the one who was out of order and was brutally killed to put things back into order.
• the aching time of Holy Saturday when we wait for hope to arrive, when long days of the same old, same old make us think that God has forgotten us. On Holy Saturday it really, really looks like the light has gone out. This time after the ending, when hope and despair have a battle in the soul of every disciple and every church. Holy Saturday appears to give us no reason to believe that new life can come out of anything. Maybe that’s what makes Easter all so unnatural. These are hopeless situations. It’s the end and it looks like an end. Our partners and loved ones turn away from us. Our father dies. Our mother dies. We pour another drink because we have decided that that is the fastest way out of dodge city. We loose our pets that have served us faithfully for years and years. Our energy and hope are drained and we fall into an exhausted heap. We argue with others and lose friends in the arguing. We run out of money. We become paralyzed because the problem of world hunger is too big for us and we take on a relentless guilt.
• then on the third day, on Easter Sunday God loosens a body, not just any body but Jesus’ body and what we thought was the end is not the beginning of new life.

All this is unnatural. It is not what anyone expects. A mystery—really. Now mystery is a word we use a lot in the church, especially when we don’t know how to describe something. I like to think of a mystery, not so much as something indescribable but as something endlessly describable. Although nobody can contain the whole event in a word, there is something always that can be said about things we don’t understand. To say that something is indescribable is actually to say something about it. Although metaphors run the risk of diminishing an event I think we can use metaphors to talk about mysterious things. To say that this mysterious thing is like something else. And for the mystery of Easter. I would like to say that Easter is like a crucible. A crucible is a really, really, really strong container or pot which can be heated to very high temperatures. It is often used to mix metals to make brand new metals. God takes all the horrible violence of Friday, the hopeless waiting of Saturday and the raising on Sunday and melds it together in a crucible that changes everything. We are somehow mysteriously Eastered into a cruciform people.
• An Eastered and cruciform people who hold a daring and audacious hope where there was none. Jon, Dorothy, Sonya, and Bev and all their helpers made sure there was food at every event of this week. Even in the confusion and impending doom of Jesus ripping the Maundy Thursday bread apart and saying, “This is my body broken for you all.” we gathered around a pot luck supper, leaning into the fellowship and support of each other. Even as we heard Mary scream in horror over the soldiers breaking her son’s legs on Good Friday we gathered in hope of new life around hot cross buns and coffee. And even as we arrive in the dark of the early morning dawn we sat at the breakfast table with eggs and muffins, waiting and watching for a word of hope to lighten the darkness.
• An Eastered and cruciform people who plant a ton of seeds (which translates as a ton of money) into the ground at springtime and wait with a resurrection hope that a crop will appear, that will support a way of living.
• Living in Easter hope is living in a resurrection hope without expectation or anticipation that you will see the results of our labours—like the seed that never sees the flower and sometime we need to be like those seeds—but planting seeds of hope anyway because you are a farmer and that is your calling.
• Being an Eastered people means living in hope that is not just looking on the bright side of things. It is about being involved in the heartache of all that is wrong in the world and being a part of its transformation. It is going out with prayer shawls into the communities and beyond hoping against hope that there will be blessings and healing somewhere in days uncertain health.
• Eastered people act quite unnatural, living by a resurrection hope that love and life are in fact stronger than fear and death.

The women in Matthew’s story are told to go and tell the others that
• Jesus is raised from the dead
• Jesus is going to Galilee where he will meet us. Now Galilee is a code word for home. Jesus is going to all homes, in every place.

And so the new people created by the resurrection are to go out to their homes in Woodmore, in Dominion City, in Emerson, In Green Ridge area, in Tolstoi, in St. Malo, in Carlowrie, in Vita, in Ridgeville, in Letellier, in Winnipeg, in Arnaud, in Manitoba, in Canada, in the Middle East, in Africa, in China, in Tibet and all over, and tell the vision of new life in Christ. Cruciform (cross-shaped people) are to go in the strength of resurrection hope, boldly enlivening life with amazing stories of Jesus Christ using words and through acts of living, singing revolutionary songs of wrongs that must be righted, dreaming dreams of hurts that can be healed, and weaving cloths of all the world united within the vision of new life in Christ. Communicate resurrection. Communicate hope. Christ is risen! Christ is risen! Indeed!