Easter Sermon: 3/31/2024, House of Prayer Lutheran Church, Hingham, MA

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

To begin an Easter Sermon, we must begin by praising God. Back home in Puerto Rico, it is almost a requirement for the congregation to respond to the preacher, so I’ll take advantage of this to teach you a little Spanish today: I will say Cristo ha resucitado! Christ is risen in English, and you will say Gloria a Dios! Glory to God! Amén!

Glory to God indeed! Today is the day! We come together to celebrate God’s infinite goodness. He has risen Jesus from the dead, and He has gone ahead of us! It is this event that we celebrate every week when we gather together in church, for it is the resurrection of Jesus that we proclaim and live by. This is the great altering event by which death holds no sway, but hope and joy are once again sources of life now and eternally! The suffering and the evils of the world have not disrupted God’s promise of Liberation, He has accomplished what He has set out to do. This very gathering is the proof, the vitality of Christ’ resurrection that continues to inspire, and vivify, and restore us to new of life. I want to encourage you to keep the great Easter word of praise in your mouths: Aleluya! In Puerto Rico, we freely utter Aleluyas to everything: Aleluya, the bus arrived, aleluya the food is ready, aleluya, the preacher stopped talking, aleluya, I received the help I needed, aleluya, I really needed to hear that today, aleluya, Christ is risen, there is hope! I live and breathe one more day, with eternal love waiting for me at the end of this road of life. This is a season of praise and joyful expectation, when we need to catch up to Jesus and follow Him where He leads, and trust Him who has done the impossible. This is not to say, that you are not going through rough times, this is not to forget that the world is going through great struggles. It is to remind ourselves that praise and gratitude can sail us through the battering seas, that just as we have reasons to worry and fret, there are many reasons to hope, and look beyond into the horizon and see that God has worked out the ultimate good for us, there is a way where we used to see no way. The stone that blocks the way to liberated life has been removed.

But how do we reach this state of resurrection praise? Mark’s Gospel shows us we reach it after much fear and trembling. To praise and chant is a need of the human person, but by no means does it come to us readily. There must be something great that provokes our praise, and this great event often takes some joyful adjustment after the initial fear of how things have changed, even if the reality we used to live by was difficult, at least it was a difficulty we knew well. The resurrection is clearly an event that shook the core of those who witnessed it. The resurrection account in Mark’s Gospel has much to say about our propensity to be imprisoned by our own hopelessness and fear. Sometimes, we rather not hope, because we rather not be disappointed. Life has already heaped many unique hardships on our shoulders. We rather stay with the facts on the ground, stay realistic. Most of us do this to shield our broken spirits. The same thing happened to the disciples and to these women who came in to anoint the body of Jesus. They have seen Jesus do amazing things, they have heard Him say incredible things, like He will rise from the dead. They didn’t understand what He meant really, why Jesus did the things He did. And He did strange and marvelous things, things that upset the status quo. God’s presence exuded from His very Being. But he was hung and killed. Dead men tell no tales, everybody knows that. Have they wasted all this time, following Him? Now their lives are in danger, and they have to go into hiding, to cower again under the might of the authorities because they hoped too much that this Jesus would bring the Kingdom of God? What was the point of Jesus’ ministry? Why would God show all these signs, only for failure to reign once more in their lives? This is the human side of the story. How can we move on after our beloved has died such a scandalous death?

The brave women who went to Jesus’ tomb that Easter morning perhaps decided to cope by showing one last act of love towards their beloved Lord. They wanted to anoint him with ritual, to give His body the sendoff He deserves, the sendoff denied to Him by the cross of the powerful. But there is one more obstacle in the way. “”Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” Even this act of love, seems to be denied to them; they are denied access to Jesus. It is just another reality check. Of course, all of this was too good to be true. But, my beloved church, if we are here gathered together, it is because that was not the end of the story. The stone that impeded them to see Jesus was removed. This is the shift that the author of Mark’s Gospel wants us to see. The stone is everything that prevents us from going to God, and God Himself has removed the obstacle. They are no longer entering the same old reality that they were expecting. God has transformed their reality. The tomb is empty, the messenger of the Lord tells them that the impossible has been made possible. Not only was Jesus not there, He had gone ahead of them! ‘Now is the time to journey, the same Jesus is waiting for you in Galilee, go tell the others!’ the angel says. However, happiness is not the reaction the women have in this account. They experience terror and amazement. They were afraid and told no one. What are we to make of this? How did people receive the good news that Jesus rose from the dead if nobody said anything?

Now we are getting deep into the wonderful argument of Mark’s Gospel. When God changes our reality, we are entering into the unknown. Often in the Bible, when God makes an appearance, it provokes a very stark response from the human side. It is a powerful presence that provokes fearful reverence, even if this presence seeks your wellbeing. When Jesus is resurrected, God has done something unexpected. Even in the ancient world, people knew folks don’t rise from the dead, so if you witnessed such an occurrence any one of us would be even a little bit troubled and perplexed. It takes some time for the new reality to sink in, to acclimate to the reality where Jesus is risen from the dead. The wonderful statement Mark establishes with this ending is that failure to understand what God has done, our fears and worry, our dumbstruckness and inability to comprehend the ways of God are not an obstacle for God to save us. We might fail, we might run away like the disciples and the women at the tomb, but God is faithful, He keeps His promises, this Jesus did what He said He would do. Even His scandalous death, what some people might call the failure of Jesus, was no obstacle for God to fulfill His goodness for us. Even more so, God takes us despite our folly, despite our failure. God’s Love is a waterfall flowing ceaselessly to us, to you. Praise erupts from our very core because we have been gifted with such incomparable grace. It is like the persistent love of a parent, who might see their beloved child take a million turns in different directions, some of which might even bring a lot of pain, and yet the parent persists with their care and love. It is the kind of love that parents often describe as unexplainable, the love they have for their kids. As a recipient of such love, and they are watching through the livestream, (mami y papi, los amo), even after all forms of disagreement with them, it is often difficult to put into words the commitment that binds them to me, which I praise and am grateful for. The same way, the indescribable reality of the risen Jesus is God’s way of saying He is eternally committed to you. You are in the palm of His hands, even if you run away, even when you doubt, even when you are feeling afraid or downtrodden, even when reality seems hopeless, the resurrection of Jesus is the assurance that God is speaking words of new life into your spirit. His voice is like music playing in the background of your life, an eternal melody that you can always tap into if you listen very closely.

For Mark and the community he was writing to, it was this reality that he was trying to convey. They have might been going through tough times, perhaps they were also afraid and had failed in their discipleship at some point. But the fact that they are gathered, that they were recipient of the spirit of the living Christ, that they were hearing that music in the background of their lives, kept them strong in the faith that declared them loved and saved despite their failures. They know the Risen Lord in their midst, and there is no fear that can take away from God’s victory over death. This is the epitome of the good news for us. We are witnesses to the spirit of the Living Christ in our midst, we are the testament to the ongoing power of the resurrection. Jesus has gone ahead of us, and is patiently waiting for us always to catch up to the new reality of God’s Kingdom.

As the biblical scholar Francis Moloney wrote, the resurrection is the answer to Jesus’ question on the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus has not been forsaken, and therefore neither are we. The resurrection of Jesus created a revolution in the lives of those early disciples, we know that their story, even though not mentioned in the ending of the Gospel of Mark, did not end with terror and fear. But that accompanying feeling, amazement, drew them deeper into the mystery. And from there on, I can imagine moving from fear, to tears of joy, from tears of joy, into the unknown adventure. Who knows where God would take them next. But if the Risen Christ was any indication, it would be full of a new life. They would never be the same. A new courage would take over their lives, a courage to travail deep with faith into whatever challenges for the sake of Christ. For the love that bore the resurrection, could never be kept to oneself. It is meant to be lived out in the community, and blooming new life wherever it is faithfully preached and ministered.

All of us are here are gifted a new opportunity, a new opportunity to love and serve in such a way that shows the world the power of the Living Christ. What better meaning could we have as a community, but as the beloved community empowered and liberated to love in the deepest of ways, to forgive in the deepest of ways, and struggle in solidarity with the least of these. There is no stone in your way, God has removed it. Jesus is ahead of you waiting for you. Go onwards to your Galilee, and take up your discipleship, live a life full of this always renewed power of the resurrection, and look for the risen Jesus wherever you go. Carry Him with you, struggle alongside Him, Be with Him in good and ill. You have not been forsaken, God is with us until the end, and beyond.

So let the alleluias rise from your voice, bring the spirit of gratitude born from this new reality into all your life. See this present moment as leading you towards a deeper life that you are called to live as disciples of Jesus.

So to this new life we say, Gloria a Dios!

Let us pray: Father, thank you for the resurrection of Jesus, thank you for the new life you have given us, thank you for the struggle you bore, thank you for breathing new energy into our lives to live and love more deeply. What would we do without this reality? Thank you, God, because you did not forsake us. Thank you because you are a Loving God, ready to make our failures into moments of grace and newness. You deserve all our praise. I also pray for all the people in this gathering, that you breathe new life into whatever situation they might be facing, that we may encounter Joy as we seek to serve you faithfully. In your name we pray, Amen.