Like A Thick Set Of Trifocals

"Like A Thick Set Of Trifocals"

Luke 24:1-12

"Like A Thick Set Of Trifocals"

Luke 24:1-12

There was a Sunday School teacher who asked her class of 3rd graders what the Resurrection was, and how we celebrate it.  One girl raised her hand and said, "Isn't that when we have turkey and dressing have a bunch of relatives over?"

"No, that's Thanksgiving," replied the teacher.

Another child raised his hand and said, "I know.  Isn't that when we decorate a tree and get lots of presents?"

"No, that's Christmas," said the teacher, getting a bit more frustrated.

Finally, one of the girls stood up and proudly reported that the Resurrection was when Jesus had been dead and on the third day came out of the tomb alive.  The teacher was beaming that one of her students knew about the Resurrection--until the little girl continued.  "But Jesus saw his shadow so we had six more weeks of Winter."

Getting the Resurrection story right is not only difficult because of all that gets mixed up with it at Easter time.  It’s also because it is such an awkward story.  We have to get in touch with that awkwardness if we are to understand what's going on in the Resurrection.  One Christian writer, Jurgen Moltmann, once wrote, "With Easter began the laughing of the redeemed, the dancing of the liberated."  There was laughing going on, but not the kind of which Moltmann wrote.  Not initially, anyway.  It began with laughing ridicule, not joyful laughing.

When the women returned from the empty tomb with their story, the other disciples called it, "nonsense."  What they actually called the story was "garbage."  That's the word they used.  The women's story was trash.  The kind of stuff you throw out with no second thought.

The women's story was not doubted.  It was totally discounted and disrespected.  It's important to see the difference between doubting and being totally discounted.  You only doubt something that just might be true.  Doubt is a way you wrestle with belief.  Doubt is a form of struggling with what you're trying to believe, with what you want to believe but aren't sure you're ready to believe or can.

There was none of that in the other disciple's reaction to the women's story.  Instead the women's story was met with laughter that came from a total lack of desire to entertain what the women were saying--it was, after all, pure garbage.  Garbage you throw out.  Some stuff you have second thoughts as to whether you should have tossed it or not.  Not the women's story.  It was trash through and through, from the disciples point of view.

In 1865, in a small town in Wisconsin, five-year-old Max Hoffman came down with cholera.  Three days later, the doctor pulled the sheets over the boy's head and pronounced him dead.

Little Max was laid to rest in the village cemetery.  That night, his mother awoke screaming.  She had a dream that her son was turning over in his coffin, trying to escape.  Trembling with fear, she begged her husband to go to the cemetery immediately and dig up the coffin.  Mr. Hoffman did his best to calm his wife, assuring her that while her nightmare was indeed hideous, it was still just a dream.  Mrs. Hoffman eased herself back into bed and fell asleep.

But the next night, Max's mother had the identical dream, and this time she would not be denied.  In order to placate his frantic wife, Mr. Hoffman asked his eldest boy and a neighbor to help him dig up the coffin.  When they opened the lid, there was Max, lying on his side!  Though there were no signs of life, Mr. Hoffman brought the boy back to the house so the doctor could have one last look at him.

The doctor worked for nearly an hour trying to revive the "dead" boy, when suddenly Max's eyes fluttered.  The physician immediately placed heated salt bags under the boy's arms, rubbed his lips with brandy, and watched for any other signs of life.  Max came to life!  And after a week was out playing with his friends.

The boy who died at five, lived well into his 80's in Clinton, Iowa.  For his entire life, Max Hoffman's most treasured possession was the handles he had taken from his own coffin.

How would you have reacted, if you were Mr. Hoffman, to his wife's dream induced ravings?  Garbage?  Certainly the delusions of a distraught mother at the loss of her son.  But isn't the word "delusions" just a nice word for "trash"?  Something you'd toss off, or laugh about?  Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.

When the apostle Paul was roaming Asia Minor on his missionary journeys, one stop he made was Athens.  The city was full of armchair philosophers, as well as some fairly famous names behind important thought of that day.  As Paul preached to them about Jesus, he was making point after point with them.  Paul was speaking their language, and they followed his thinking closely.

That is, until, he mentioned the Resurrection.  At that point the crowd dispersed.  But they all didn't just walk away; they walked away laughing.  The Resurrection story, for them, was one of the best leg-pulling stories they'd heard in a long time.  It was funny, because it was so much garbage.

That has been the front line response to the story of the Resurrection, wherever the story has been heard for the first time.  It may be that way for you, this morning.  It may not even be the first time you're hearing the story.  How many, deep down in that secret heart-of-hearts really believe the story of the women?

You may walk out the doors of church this morning, thinking to yourself, It’s just too awkward of a story to bear.  And I wouldn’t blame you.  You'd be in good company--the 12 disciples to name a few.  They all felt the same.  Garbage!  Balderdash!  Pure delusion!  Nonsense!  Not just out of the ordinary--impossible!

But, if you are feeling that way, what will come back to haunt you is that for we who call ourselves Christian, the Resurrection of Jesus is one of, if not the central stories of our faith.  Very awkward, yet fundamental.  It has been that strange mixture ever since the women came back from the tomb that first Resurrection morning.

The women were put in the very uneasy position of telling a very awkward story.  And at that point, that's all it was--a story.  No one had seen Jesus.  The women had only seen the empty tomb.  All they have is a story.  All they can ask the disciples to respond to is a story.

It isn't until later (the two disciples walking the Emmaus road) that anyone actually saw the resurrected Jesus.  So the women were in a position of telling a story they couldn't actually prove, or know themselves if it was true.  The tomb may be empty, as they saw and as they said, but it doesn't necessarily follow that Jesus had come back to life.  A woman may have a dream that her dead son was turning in his casket, but that doesn't make him alive.  Unless you decide you want to check it out for yourself.

Which is what Peter decided to do after hearing the women.  He ran to the tomb.  Luke's gospel tells us Peter "bent down and saw the grave cloths but nothing else."  Peter doesn't get visited by a couple of odd looking fellows in bright shining clothes, like the women.  He doesn't see the resurrected Jesus.  He has less to go on than the women do.  But he still has a mystery.  Where's the body?  He now finds himself in the middle of the women's awkward and frantic story.

And that's where we should find ourselves this morning.  Because, I could wax eloquently, using Jesus' Resurrection as a metaphor about how God brings all the dead things, dead situations, dead relationships back to life.  I've done that before.  I could do it again.

But, really...you know what those dead things are in your life.  I would guess you would have just as hard of a time believing they could really have life breathed back into them as you would a two-day-old dead man could.  And most of our dead situations and relationships have been entombed for a lot longer than two days.

As I said, we could play around with that comparison all we want, but it only side-steps the main story here.  Ultimately, we still have to come back to this uncomfortable story, spoken by the women that Jesus--dead Jesus-- is now Alive Jesus.  At some point we all have to respond to the story of the resurrected Jesus, either with laughter and discounting it as garbage, or with amazement, surprise and wonder.

That is what the Resurrection story, as well as many other of our Christian stories, does:  it asks us not only to believe these awkward tales, but also take them and be tellers of them—to be the women.  When we do that, when we take on these awkward stories, we must realize that at the same time we will be identified as awkward people.  Laughed at.  Discounted.

William Willimon, chaplain at Duke University, wrote in a recent article, "The lens of scripture is a thick set of trifocals which causes one to trip down stairs and walk into closed doors until one becomes accustomed to looking at the world in a mode so peculiar."

The women's Resurrection story is like that thick set of trifocals.  If we choose to look through that story, the whole world is going to look funny, with everything a bit out of place, out of kilter.  But after looking at the world through Resurrection story spectacles, you will be amazed at how clear your seeing really becomes, and how your laughter is changed from laughter at garbage, to the "laughing of the redeemed and the dancing of the liberated."