Sermon for Easter Vigil, 2011

Matthew 28: 1-12

In this morning’s Washington Post, David Waters asks what seems to be a very strange question. He asks whether ordained people should seek public office. “To put it bluntly,” he says, “the question is can ordained people serve God and government.” David used to write for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis where I read him often. These days he lives in our area and writes on religion for the Post, including a blog where I’m sure his question has been tossed around all day. The flaw in his question is so basic that when I read the teaser for the blog I was surprised he had asked it. My guess is he was fishing for a particular answer and he posed the question expecting to slyly sit back and let his readers make his point. Being an old-fashioned newspaper reader, I’ll probably never go to the blog, but I am glad he printed the question in the version of the paper that lands on my lawn. It feeds right into what is speaking to me this year in Matthew’s telling of the resurrection. But we’ll get there in a minute. First I want to deal with David’s question.

The question suggests that faith orders the lives of ordained people differently than it does the lives of lay people. Otherwise, he would have asked whether people of faith can serve in the government and of course, we all know they can and do--thank goodness. The question he asks suggests that somehow clergy have a more pressing commitment to the moral and ethical demands of their faith than those who are not ordained--that somehow people with collars are more deeply formed Christians than those without collars. Well I’m here to tell you that just isn’t the case. If I thought that was how this business worked I’d be out of here tomorrow. The vows that clergy take have to do with specific service in a specific capacity among the faithful. The vows that might--that should--affect the way we approach our public lives and our work are the ones we will hear and renew this evening. I know we just sprinkle water on people’s heads these days, but the symbol of the water represents a full-immersion rite that makes us Christian from head to toe. You will never be any more Christian than you are when you are baptized.

So my answer to David’s question is, Yes. Of course ordained people can serve God and Government. This faith of ours belongs in the world. In fact, everything we do here in this place of worship is meant to fuel us and feed us so that we can live our faith well when we leave here. That seems to be the message for this evening, for we hear tonight that it is out there, in the world where we can expect to find Jesus.

Three times in the resurrection story we just heard Jesus’ followers are told that he will meet them in Galilee. Not here, but out there. Not right now, but out in their future. Tell them to go, he says, I will meet them.

Years ago I read a commentary that suggested Galilee was not the best of neighborhoods. Some people in the gospel story ask about Jesus whether anything good can come from such a place. I have had some fun over the years playing with the idea that Jesus was from the wrong side of the tracks. This year, when I looked up Galilee in another source, the Oxford Companion to the Bible, the Oxford folks made a point of saying there was no basis for thinking Galilee was some sort of unappreciated backwater. Galilee, they said, was home to many devout Jews as well as Gentiles, it was known for good and abundant produce, and in the first century after Jesus it became a home to schools and communities of pious Jews. They made Galilee sound like a pretty ordinary place, not much different from anyplace else in that part of the world at that time. I felt a little sad reading that because I had always liked the other version, where Jesus had that rebel-outsider stain to heighten his irritation of the rich and proper. Jesus told his disciples, go to Galilee and I will meet you there. And Galilee turns out to be nothing special at all. Maybe that’s the point.

Tomorrow we will fill the room with flowers and sing great hymns of praise about the amazing thing that God has done in raising Jesus from the dead. Tonight, though, we are told that our meeting Jesus is yet to come and we are told that meeting will take place in the most everyday parts of our lives. Matthew, Luke and John all tell stories in their gospels about Jesus appearing to the disciples. Mark’s gospel, the earliest, has several endings in the ancient texts. The shorter and supposedly older version has no appearance of Jesus. Just a young man sitting in an empty tomb telling the disciples that Jesus would meet them later in Galilee--out there, in the plain old, ordinary world where they would live their lives, where we live our lives.

I am persuaded by those who say that the stories of the resurrection appearances in the the gospels have a lot to do with the experience of the early Church. I can imagine people discovering the truth of that simple message--you will meet Jesus in the world--and telling all kind of stories. I have stories of meeting Jesus, of being loved better than I deserved, of being called out of myself by another’s need, of being challenged to amend my life, of being touched by awe. I have had heated, impassioned, intimate conversations with someone nearby and unseen, real and present. I have been surprised by Jesus in the the strangest, most ordinary moments. I’m pretty sure Jesus has asked me for spare change, and I know he has asked me to contact my congressman. Out there. In the real life world. Do Christians belong out there in the real world. We have been sent there by the one who promised to meet us there. We had better run for office and more.

So, Robert, Grant, Vance. The good news is that being baptized tonight won’t keep you from becoming president some day if that’s what you want to do. Being baptized will make you a Christian, though, as much a Christian as anyone can every be, just as much as a bishop or even a pope. And the promise that Jesus makes to you as the water is poured over you is that you will encounter him, in this moment yes, but most importantly, in the life that lies ahead of you. Keep your hearts and minds and eyes open and you will see him. In Galilee. In the plain old every day world. JB