There's No Jesus???

Easter Sunday





Readings:
Acts 10:34-43
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
Luke 24:1- 12




This may have been one of the BEST Easter sermons I have ever heard preached ……





Pastor Mohn starts with two images: first her husband, Erik, reminding her of the possibly slippery slope that is preaching on the Luke Easter story in which “There is no Jesus”; second, a good friend of Pastor Mohn’s is going to run a marathon, but not Grandma’s marathon because at the 20 mile mark, you actually see the finish line with all it’s release and fanfare with yet 6 miles to go, needless to say the hardest 6 wherein many marathoners have claimed to enter almost a trance-like state of either pain-denial and/or utter depletion of resources. To see the finish line before the end of the pain of the race, that image will be forever lasting.

So, first, there is no Jesus? In the Luke story, no. Perhaps, as Pastor Mohn, delicately points out …

If we’re looking for Jesus, perhaps we have to look in a different place …

Then there’s that finish line, oh sooo long before the end. You can see the finish line, the taste, the smell of it, but not the touch, not yet. It’s still a 10K away …. A long haul after having already completed more than 30K and suffering system shutdown on some fronts. The road less traveled is one on which you go so far, and yet there is still so far to go. It’s a bait and switch, topsy-turvy. The road less traveled means you have a calling form God to serve your neighbor – to treat everyone you meet as a child of God.

Today ….. today, you get a glimpse of the finish line. A flash. A moment.

I imagine a movie character in a flashback. Soundbites cut short. A taste. A glance. A vision all too short.

But, in the end, when the picture stops spinning and comes into focus again, you’re back off the mountaintop and it’s Monday morning, again. You still have our problems, our conflicts, our confusion … and the joy we experience may not last through Easter dinner. It’s the anti-climax that accompanies any epiphany. We don’t get to hold onto it as we experienced it “in the moment”.

Doesn’t it feel as if we’ve come so far along that road less traveled only to say “Where’s Jesus?” Easter can be anti-climactic that way. What comes next but the road to Emmaus. Even the disciples did not see Jesus right beside them, until He breaks bread with them. And then, like that, poof ….. He’s gone!

But is he?

There’s a great line in the movie The Usual Suspects where Kevin Spacey, playing the infamous Kasier Soze, says “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist …. Then, like that … Poof! … he’s gone.” Maybe the greatest trick Jesus ever pulled was convincing the world He DID exist! And leaving lasting signs in the ways of the Holy Spirit, The Advocate who is to remind us of Him in everything around us. The advocate’s eyes, Jesus’ invisibility glasses we heard about early in Lent. When the disciples look up, they see it IS Jesus, and that He’s been with them all along.

A story that began with “There was this guy, and he taught us so much and then he died and we thought it was all over …. And then …..”

The road less traveled has taken us to an empty tomb that foretells a taste of that finish line, but there is more road ahead, indeed. That road brings us today to the empty tomb for to carry that message “back to life as we know it” – that life with its sorrows and its problems.

So, is there a difference?

YES! You’ve gotten a rare & fleeting glimpse of the finish line ahead to come. On that final 10K, you don’t know where you’ll encounter Jesus. Will you recognize Him? In the homeless person on the street, in the waitress at the diner, in the person kneeling next to you at Communion, in a person you’ve just met who dies suddenly and without warning. Were you to “see Jesus” IN that moment? He is there … all along, as the poem Footprints reminds us – those times “you saw but a single pair of footprints were when I carried you.”

He’s there … around nearly every corner.

Pastor Mohn beautifully offered the awe-inspiring message of Easter morning is that …

EVERY day you have another day of hope, another day the slate starts out CLEAN, another day things don’t HAVE TO be the same.

EVERY person you encounter may be another chance for you to
witness that good news of that Resurrection

EVERY moment, there’s another chance for servanthood

EVERY step is another step closer to that finish line.

Alleluia! … for EVERY one of those chances ……

EVERY day, EVERY person, EVERY moment, EVERY step along that road less traveled that, on Monday, continues on to that greatest of finish lines.