See Go Tell

This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas during the regular 11:00 serivce on Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008.

Acts 10:34-43
Psalm 18:1-2, 14-24
Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

He is risen!

He is risen indeed!

Now come on, who talks like this? We might say “he is raised,” this is the suggestion Microsoft Word gives me. He has risen is another possibility. He was raised is also in line with the grade school grammar.

Who talks like this? Nobody in regular life talks like this. He…is…risen.

He is risen indeed!

In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams writes that in the future, when time travel is possible and ordinary, the most difficult thing about time travel won’t be accepting the fact that through your travels you have become your own grandpa. Actually, Adams asks what truly well adjusted modern family won’t be able to come to grips with this little anomaly of time and genetics? No, the most difficult issue with the future will be grammar.

How do you conjugate with all good grammar something that happened and then didn’t happen because somebody chose not to put jam on their biscuit this morning? Adams comes to the conclusion that in the future, grammarians will ultimately be able to come to one decision. They will decide that “future perfect” is not.

So, in a way, this little piece of sentence is right out of nouveau grammar. This little odd piece of grammar is not present tense; it’s not past tense either. It’s got an element of either the imperfect or the passive, not both. It’s also got a bit of the present perfect and past perfect, but isn’t either one. It’s not even pluperfect, whatever that is. By now if you aren’t a wordsmith or recovering English teacher, this is probably just making your eyes glaze over as I speak. Really, this is not how people talk to one another in this day and time.

So who talks like this?

We talk like this.

Christians talk like this and we talk like this every Easter.

“He is risen/He is risen indeed” is an ancient liturgical formula. It’s a call and response we use to declare to all who will listen that our Lord Jesus Christ lives. He is as alive today as he was the day he was born. He is as alive today as he was on the day of his resurrection, the first Easter. This is one of the many ways we rephrase Matthew’s gospel when the angel says, “I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here for he has been raised, as he said.”

He is risen.

He is risen indeed!

And because he is risen, the angel gives the two Mary’s three instructions. See, go, and tell. Instructions we are called to follow nearly two thousand years later.

The angel invites the two Mary’s to see for themselves, “Come, see the place where he lay.”

See where he lay. This is the spot where he was placed, but he is there no longer. The Mary’s know he was placed in the tomb. They had been there when Joseph of Arimathea placed his body into it. They were sitting across from the tomb, watching this happen.

Then the tomb was sealed, and guards were placed to protect it. Nobody was getting in or out of the tomb, at least not through the mouth of the cave.

So after the Sabbath when the Mary’s came to the tomb, the ground shook, the angel descended, and the stone rolled back.

Jesus was no longer in the tomb and there was no humanly way he could have left it.

I have backed up in our reading because the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the foundational event of Christianity. In this single event, we testify that God incarnate walked the earth, was put to death, and conquered death to rise from its clutches.

In the words of the ancient creed of the Church, we say that he was “crucified, dead, and buried he descended into hell; [and on] the third day he rose again from the dead.”[1]

We don’t testify that Jesus was “almost dead” like the nearly dead man said to the Dead Collector in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” We don’t even testify that Jesus was “mostly dead” as Billy Crystal said in “The Princess Bride.”

We testify that he died, no “almost” about it. Crucified, dead, buried, descended, and rose again. This is how we define the Jesus the Lord, the incarnate person of God who walked the earth and shared creation with those he loved and with those who both loved him and hated him. This is who we see.

The next instruction the angel gave the Mary’s was to go. He told them to go quickly.” In this way, we are told to go too.

Often though, when we think of going because an angel of God told us to go, we think about going to exotic lands and learning some odd dialect, eating some strange food, and doing things we read in books about missionaries like James Michener’s “Hawaii.” But this is not what the angel tells them to do. The angel’s instructions are far closer to home. This “Go quickly” is not intended for the world, not yet. That comes next in Matthew’s gospel with the Great Commission.

No, this sending is back to the disciples. They are not told to go to the ends of the earth. They are told to go to their friends, the people they love. They are sent to the people who all ready knew who Jesus is. They were not told to go to strangers, they were told to go to their best friends.

The final command from the angel was to tell the disciples that the tomb was empty. Indeed the tomb was empty; Jesus has been raised, and is going ahead of them all to Galilee. In Galilee, they will see him again.

The final command is not to regurgitate some elaborate theological truth. Shoot, I have at least 200 feet of shelf space dedicated to theological truth. I have on the order of a half ton of books about scripture and theology and worship and church growth and so on. None of these vast tomes can say what the angel says so splendidly to the Mary’s, “Jesus lives and he wants all of his disciples to come and join him in Galilee.” No greater truth than this, the groom calls the Church, the bride of Christ to come and join him in the splendor of the new age.

The angel tells the Mary’s and continues to tell us today to see that the tomb is empty, go to those you love, and tell them that God is calling us to join in the celebration of new life in him. This is our story, this is our song. The angel tells us all to see, go, and tell.

Then, suddenly as their trip takes them down the path, Jesus himself meets them and tells them, “Do not be afraid, go and tell my brothers go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

Jesus repeats the angel’s command, if in a slightly different order. Go, tell, and see.

On this Easter morning, this is our call. We are the Easter people, the people who the living God has called to continue to live and to tell this story. The people who are called to see that the tomb is empty, go to our dearest friends, and tell them that he is risen.

He is risen indeed.

[1] The Apostles’ Creed, paragraph 2