Sermon 4.19.26 Absence of Christ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyDEiuqyiMM

As we move into the second week of the Empty Tomb,

I’m moved to ask the question: How do we deal with the absence of Christ?

This Easter, so far, has been a very strange one for me, I wonder if it has been for you.

The Joy of Easter, the Joy of having the church more full than it has been in more than half of a decade.

The Joy of welcoming more people into the household of God in one day through baptism than we have done collectively in the last 13 years.

The Joy of the music.

And most of all, the Joy of remembering that if Jesus has risen from the dead, then we also have a reasonable hope for an eternal risen life with Him.

There have been so many things to be joyful about.

Every day has brought new blessings and new glimpses of the Spirit moving among us.

Can I tell you one of my Holy Spirit moments from this week?

This is also an invitation by the way, if you want to be involved.

On Wednesday evening, we had a small group meeting to plan for a Juneteenth Block Party here at the church.

The meeting was specifically to get neighborhood folks on board and involved.

Rashale, one of the moms of a couple of our afterschool kids has been part of this.

And, last week, as we began an every other Friday parking lot barbecue for the Justice HUB, we met a neighbor who is starting a hot dog stand.

He and his wife came to the meeting to talk about being vendors for the Juneteenth block party.

While we were meeting, these neighbors who came to see how they could be involved in just the vending aspect of the block party, began to get even more engaged and excited about this block party as an opportunity not just for a party, but also as an opportunity to lift up and teach about the heritage and the culture.

One of the things we decided was to reach out to the Freedom Center to see if they had a traveling exhibit they might be willing to bring.

On Thursday, I got a call from The Rev. Aaron Rogers, who was not at the meeting, and he said that he had been on the phone with the Freedom Center,

And that they were wanting to take a traveling display of about 18 items around to the churches, and he was calling me to see if it might be something we would want for the Juneteenth block party.

When I tell you that I was stunned…

I was sitting in a coffee shop with one of my professors to discuss my dissertation and he looked at me like I had seen a ghost…

God is active, I’m telling you.

I wonder if you have had your own moments like this since Easter.

I hope that you have.

But Eastertide has also been a very strange.

As many of you know, my 32 year old cousin Cameron died the day after Easter, sometime between sunset and sunrise on Easter Monday.

He went to sleep and did not wake up.

Yesterday, our beloved Phylis Bruce lost her son Robert.

Earlier this week, he had decided to stop his dialysis treatments and enter hospice. He passed yesterday afternoon.

Of course, we all still have the strangeness of celebrating Easter in the midst of an unjustified war being fought on our behalf in Iran and throughout the Middle East as we see again that violence is never isolated.

Violence always begets more violence.

And so, I don’t know if it has been this way for you…

(I actually hope that maybe your Easter has been much more calm and steady, much more surrounded by blessing and joy)

But Easter has been strange.

And in fact, though we often focus on the awe and pomp of Easter, the blessed assurance of Easter, and the Joy of the Resurrection, the story of salvation that we hear every year at the beginning of Spring, the Alleluias after six weeks of fasting,

A story that we’ve heard so many times that maybe it just seems normal to us, or natural,

It is a good reminder to us today that Easter is actually meant to be strange.

And so, this week I’ve been thinking a bit more about the Absence of Christ from the Tomb and the strangeness of our Easter narratives;

In what follows, I want to talk about the Road to Emmaus, but I also want to go back a little bit to the very first experiences that the disciples had at the Empty Tomb.

For the Empty Tomb narrative, I want you to notice two things.

First, I want us to see the problem that the Empty Tomb didn’t immediately solve; the felt absence of Christ

Second, the different reactions of the three main disciples in John’s version of the narrative.

As we transition to the story of the Emmaus Road, I want you to see how the resurrection sightings are the answer to the Empty Tomb,

And I want to suggest that today’s Gospel, along with giving us hope in the resurrection also encourages us not just to talk about Jesus, but to remember that we can talk to Jesus.

Now that’s a lot, so we better get started.

The Absence of Christ is one of the biggest existential problems of Good Friday for the disciples.

I mean, on Palm Sunday, I would wager that most of them thought that they were following an earthly king into Jerusalem.

How do we know?

Because even at the Last Supper, when Jesus reveals that he will be betrayed by one of the disciples and denied by another,

In Luke’s gospel, after this startling information is revealed, the disciples almost immediately move on from who will betray Jesus to arguing over which one of them is the greatest:

A sure sign that they have no idea what is coming.

Good Friday, then, among other things, is the first moment that the disciples have to deal with the reality of the Absence of Christ.

What does it mean that this person, this messianic prophetic royal person that they have been following, this person who seemed invincible, is dead.

They watched the most powerful person they knew get taken from them in the blink of an eye, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Jesus, who had been so present for them, so much bigger than life, was now absent.

On Easter Day, in retrospect, after we’ve read the whole story and know the “rest of the story” as Paul Harvey used to say,

We sometimes lose the fact that the Empty Tomb does not immediately solve the problem of Jesus’ absence.

In fact, it highlights his absence.

It is remarkable because of his absence.

“he is no longer here,” the Stone is rolled away, the bench is empty, the cloths that covered him are lying neatly folded.

The tomb does not solve the problem of the Absence of Christ.

We are especially reminded of this, as I was during my daily devotions on the Lectio 365 prayer app this week, by the reactions of the three disciples who came to the tomb in John’s gospel.

Mary Magdalene, the first apostle, the apostle to the apostles, the first one to the tomb sees the absence of Christ and she thinks that someone has taken his body away,

But we wonder, what kind of grave robber unwraps the body and leaves the linens.

Mary questions the practicalities of the situation.

When Simon Peter gets to the Empty Tomb, for the first time in his whole life probably, he is silent.

Was it despair? Was it bewilderment? We don’t know exactly what he was feeling, but we know that he leaves and goes back to the upper room, and soon he will even go back to his previous life of fishing for a while, almost as if nothing that had happened during his time with Jesus had occurred.

Finally, John’s unnamed disciple, the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” as he so often calls him.

His reaction is belief.

“He looked in and he believed.”

And yet he didn’t understand, none of them understood. John tells us that, “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

And so, standing in the reality of the Absence of Christ, these three reactions: thinking about the practicalities, remaining silent, and believing and finding hope in the emptiness. Yet none understood.

How strange that must have felt.

How many questions there must have been still in their hearts as they went back to the places where they were staying for Passover in Jerusalem.

I wonder how often, when we feel the Absence of Christ in our lives, we come at it with one of these three reactions.

We start to dig into the practicalities of life, hoping that if we can distract ourselves with the issues that need to be solved, we can somehow intuit or use logic to find Him.

If we talk about Him enough, then maybe we can figure out the mystery and bring Him back ourselves.

Or, maybe we remain silent, we wander from the places where we met Him, we try to ignore the fact of His absence in the hope that, if we don’t think about it, He’ll come back on his own time, or if he doesn’t, at least we didn’t look like we were trying too hard,

At least we won’t be embarrassed by looking like we believed in the impossible, when it didn’t happen.

Or, we simply choose to believe despite the odds and the evidence.

Somehow, we are able to find hope in the emptiness, even though everyone around us thinks that we’re delusional, stubborn, or sanctimonious.

No matter the reaction, the Absence remains,

And along with the Absence, the questions of longing hearts.

In my Lectio 365 devotions, I was reminded that as we sit with the strangeness of Easter, with the unsolved problem of the Absence of Christ, the reactions to the Absence, with the questions that His Absence brings,

The beauty of this moment is that the problem of Absence will soon be solved for each of these disciples through the Appearance of Jesus meeting them in the midst of their uncertainties.

Each of these disciples will experience the Risen Lord, as they move from talking about Jesus to talking to Jesus.

Mary Magdalene, as the others leave and she remains to unravel the mystery, so focused on what happened, she doesn’t realize that she is in the presence of angels, nor of Jesus.

She talks to them as if nothing strange is happening, as if they were just the guards and the gardener, normal people tending to the grave.

She is asking them about Jesus, talking about Jesus, until he is revealed to her and she realizes that she can talk to Jesus.

“Rabbouni,” which John translates as teacher is so much more intimate than that.

“My teacher, my great one.”

Mary receives the presence of what was absent as she begins to talk to Jesus and not just about Him.

Similarly for the disciples in the Upper Room. Surely, as they seek to unravel the news that the women have shared with them, they were talking about what to do next, and about what had happened to Jesus.

The must have talked about the missing member of their cohort, Judas, who had betrayed Jesus.

And suddenly, Jesus appears among them and they speak to Jesus, and they see his scars.

Even Thomas, as we saw last week, he is told by the others about Jesus.

It is when he sees Jesus and is able to talk to Jesus, that he believes.

And, this is what the Emmaus moment is about as well.

These men walking along the road, talking about Absence of Christ and about the events that had happened, when they are approached by the stranger.

The Passover has ended and everyone is heading back to where they came from.

They are not surprised to be walking along with someone, whom they don’t know as the crowds that rushed into the city on Palm Sunday become the Exodus leaving it.

They are surprised that this person doesn’t know anything, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?”

He allows them to talk about Him, and about the hope that they had had, which now seems to be broken by His absence.

Then, strangely, this person who knew nothing all of a sudden knows all of the Scriptures related to Jesus’ ministry.

How did they feel as they listened to Him.

That old hope resurging, a kindred soul, who was also a believer, who could talk about Jesus and about the Scriptures.

It must have been exciting until they realized that though there had been rumors that he had risen.

Sure, maybe it happens to the elites, those closest to Him. Maybe, though, they just want to believe so badly that they aren’t willing to let him go.

We don’t know these men’s exact emotions or thinking about the rumor that Jesus had risen, but we do know that they were still leaving the city to go back to their lives, and that for them Jesus was still absent.

What I want to say to you this morning is that the Road to Emmaus, and the moments like it in our own lives are the true hope of the resurrection;

That even when Jesus feels absent, He is actually there looking like a gardener, or walking next to us, waiting for us to stop talking about Him and to start talking to Him.

I know this struggle all too well, as someone writing a dissertation. I can sometimes go a whole day writing about Jesus, and get to the end of the day and realize that I never talked to Him as my Risen Lord.

I wonder if that happens for you.

These post-resurrection appearances are the answer to the problem of the Absence of Christ.

No matter how you react in your life, when you feel like Easter is strange, or you feel like Jesus is not there,

No matter what your initial reaction is, whether it is practicalities, or silence, or faith, believing…

Let there be some hope in the emptiness, because it could be that as soon as you stop talking about Jesus, and remember to talk to Jesus, you will find that he has been there with you all along.

As Poet R.S. Thomas puts it, “There have been times, when after long on my knees in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled away from my mind, and I have looked in and seen the old questions lie folded and in a place by themselves, like the piled graveclothes of Love’s risen body.”

Jesus is longing to make Himself known to you in the breaking of bread, in the moment of connection, in the Holy Spirit moments when you remember that you can talk to Him and not just about Him.

This has been a strange Easter season so far, but really, every Easter is strange.

And, even if it has not been a strange Easter for you,

I pray that as you reflect on this Emmaus moment, as you lend your imagination to thinking about the Absence of Christ, that whenever the moment comes for you,

Whenever that time of absence hits, you will be prepared for your own Emmaus moment,

Because Jesus is here, Jesus is always near you, walking with you on the road, ahead of you to Galilee, and at the places where you sit, rest, and break bread.

May God be praised, for Christ is never really absent, and Love’s risen body is always waiting to be discovered.