Resurrection is God’s way of getting our attention. Making us sit up, look up, listen up. I was walking through the Holmes Room the other day, more quietly I suppose than I realized, because when I stepped into the kitchen and saw our sexton John Swain at the other end of the room with his back to me and said, in what I thought was a soft voice, “John,” he jumped about five feet off the floor.John is a big guy. And as he was leaping into the air he hit a few falsetto notes that our sopranos would have been pleased to reach.

Easter is like that. God gets our attention. Matthew says it started with an earthquake. Have you ever experienced an earthquake? It’s a pretty big surprise. Even a little one. The suddenness and power are awesome. Easter doesn’t emerge out of artful arguments and subtle distinctions. Nor is it an annual ritual to welcome spring as some detached observers say. It’s nice that Easter coincides with the greening of the earth. Crocuses popping up. Days lasting longer. Robins reappearing. But that’s not what the day is about. Easter is confrontational. It starts with a bang. Resurrection is unnatural. It catches you by surprise – like a sudden voice or an earthquake.

I want to talk this morning about our part in the drama of Easter… and it begins when God gets your attention. Like Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity a couple of decades ago. Fuller was a talented businessman. Making money hand over fist.
A millionaire by the age of thirty. Able to retire at forty. But his marriage and family life were going down the drain. God got his attention with a personal earthquake. It was disturbing, disorienting, disillusioning. My hunch is God is trying to get the attention of some of us here today. Things aren’t going right in some sphere of your life; maybe some old wound hasn’t healed. You’re disillusioned. One writer says disillusionment – the loss of an illusion – is a painful thing. But it is not a bad thing. The women who went to the tomb that day were disillusioned, perplexed, fearful says Luke. Those cowering disciples were disillusioned. Jesus didn’t meet their expectations. God didn’t do what they wanted.

But the gift of disillusionment is that it clears away old props and crutches. You reassess your life. When you lose an illusion you glimpse your own relative size in the cosmos. You see that no human can say who God should be or how God should act. Sometimes, you even see your requirements for God and recognize them as your own fictions. Things you tell yourself to feel safe or good or comfortable. You find out what is not true. You are free to seek what is true. Our part in God’s story begins when God gets our attention. Easter always starts with some disillusioning experience or relationship. Some crucifixion of the soul.

The point of God’s getting our attention is to deliver a message. If we are ever to have any part in God’s story there is a very specific message we have to hear. When I popped in on John the other day, after I apologized, I had his complete attention. When the women came to the tomb in their disillusionment those two dazzling messengers of God had their attention, then gave them a message.The message had two parts. “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but risen.” That’s the first part of the message.

Indeed! Why do we look for the living among the dead? It is amazing to me what we are willing to settle for and call life. Maybe you saw the TIME magazine article on phobias. Fifty million Americans suffer from some phobia or another. You name it, somebody is afraid of it. The point is there’s not much left of life after one of those phobias takes hold. Or maybe it’s not a phobia. Maybe it’s some garden-variety dysfunction or dependency. What happens is we begin to build our lives around whatever is left. Why do we look for the living among the dead?  Why do we expect to find life among the dregs and left-overs? It has to do with our limited expectations. Our cowering spirits and defensive living. Maybe we see life as an unexpended bit of time…or the balance remaining in our checking account. It is not a confident perspective. Hiding in some upper room seems a reasonable thing to do. We settle for less. A bottle perhaps or an affair. Maybe we reduce our living to keeping score or keeping count or keeping up.

Our part in God’s story begins when God gets our attention and tells us not to seek the living among the dead because Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed. The message of Easter is resurrection, not immortality. Immortal means death-proof. It means this life doesn’t change. Things just keep on going in some other body or form. But resurrection means life ends. Period. And then out of the ashes, out of the darkness, out of death comes new life. Transformed. Renewed. Made whole. This is what we mean when we proclaim in our creeds the resurrection of the body. The body not as the prison house of the soul, but as the good and glorious gift God made. Anything less, a divine spark or resuscitated spirit is an illusion. We believe what God prizes enough to bring back to life is not some disembodied echo of a human being. But a new and revised version of all the things which made that person special and unique. The very things we need something like a body to express.

I’m thinking of loved ones who’ve died over the years. An uncle whose raised eyebrows communicated more than any lecture; a cousin who loved to blow circles smoking a holiday cigar; my grandmother’s southern accent. We don’t know how these resurrected bodies will look. But we do believe, as St. Paul says, that just as Jesus’ body was raised so also shall ours be. I’m thinking of people and relationships resurrected from brokenness. A young professional woman addicted to credit cards; a fireman in a small town addicted to alcohol; parents and the sister of a young boy who died of an allergic reaction. All broken, all raised from the ashes and despair to new life. Whole and well.

And then those angels gave the final part of their message to the women. The piece of the message that made it all fit together. “Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that He must be handed over and crucified and on the third day rise again.” Luke says when they remembered Jesus’ words the women returned from the tomb and told everything to the eleven and to all the rest. Remembering moved them into action. Our part in God’s story begins when God gets our attention then tells us to remember what Jesus told us.

Remember. Mnesis in the Greek. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – lives and breathes deep in us somewhere whether we like it or not. Almost anything can bring it back: the scrap of an old song, a book we read as a child, an old photograph.  And what we remember is not just there like a picture on a wall to stand back and look at. But a reality we are a part of, and that is still a part of us. When we remember we are like a friend of mine. He loves to sail and has a picture of a sailboat in his office. When he is exhausted or worried or perplexed he looks at that picture and enters a new reality. He remembers sailing his boat. He feels the sun on his face, the spray of the waves, the strength of the wind that fills the sails and lifts the boat. Somewhere deep inside him peace and calm enter his heart.

It wasn’t surprising they forgot what Jesus told them that day – the women and disciples. Given the grief, the despair, the weight of their loss. In one sense the past was dead and gone. But when the messengers said ‘remember what he told you’ their sorrow turned on a dime into joy. Their darkness gave way to daybreak.Of course he is not here. He said he would rise and go ahead of us. Suddenly, those cryptic words made sense. They were in the midst of the truth he spoke to them. He was alive and well and would meet them again. Everything was different. Anything was possible. Giddy with joy, breathless with awe they ran to tell the others.

You and I have a part in the drama of Easter, the drama of resurrection when God gets our attention and when we hear the Easter message – “do not look for the living among the dead for he is risen.” “And remember. Remember how he told you he would be crucified and on the third day rise again.”

Mrs. Strawbridge was our 93 year old seatmate at the Philadelphia Orchestra. When she discovered I was a minister, before the lights went down or at the intermission, she loved to recite to me the creeds she learned by heart as a child.  The Nicene was her favorite. Very God of very God, begotten not made. He suffered, was buried, and on the third day rose again, according to the Scriptures.

Those words sustained her through a depression and two world wars, the loss of her husband and a child at middle-age. There was more life in her twinkling blue eyes than in many people half her age. Abundant life.You see, for Mrs. Strawbridge resurrection wasn’t someone else’s story. It was her story, her hope, her salvation. The good news today is that it can be yours as well.

Amen.