UCC Church of Charlotte

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Already…Not Yet
Isaiah 65:17-25
John 20:1-18

Grace and Peace and Joy and Hope and Love and Life and Laughter and
Faith and Goodness and Gladness to you this morning.
Grace and Peace; Joy and Hope; Love and Life; Laughter and Faith;
Goodness and Gladness.

The prophet’s calling is to tell the people what God has prepared and
what God is doing.  Our job is to be on the lookout for it.

For behold, I create new heavens
and a new earth;
and the former things shall not be remembered
or come into mind.

We get so caught up in the former things –
former grudges we carry long past their sell by date;
former stories that we keep telling even though they do not give life,
they contain none of God’s good news in them;
former wounds we keep picking at so they never heal.

It gets easy to miss new stuff coming our way if all we do is focus on
former things.
    
But God is making new skies and new land, a new and habitable place, where:

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
and dust shall be the serpent's food.
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain, says the LORD.

Those who want a settled and unchanging world regard this word as
somewhere between hearsay and heresy.  But for us, for those who live
by the gifts of God, whose stories are the stories of healing and
hope, who know the manna that sustained us in our wilderness and who
know the One who brought us through the sea, through the wilderness,
and safe out the other side, these are the words of life and new life.

The Gospel’s job is to tell us what God has done, so that we might see
it happening in our own lives.  Our job is to be on the lookout for
it.

Mary goes to the tomb while it is still dark, and sees the stone is rolled away.
She runs to tell the other disciples.

Peter and the other disciple run to the tomb, and the other disciple
outruns Peter.  He looks in the tomb, but does not enter.  Peter, with
his usual bravado, charges into the tomb himself.

Each of the first three witnesses stops short of praising God for the
resurrection.  Mary sees the stone rolled away and runs.  The other
disciple gets to the entrance and stops.  Peter charges all the way
in, but then goes home, finally believing Mary’s story that he is
gone; not yet believing he has been raised, for he does not yet
understand.

You and I both know these points where we say, “here and no further.”
Maybe we pray, “I believe Lord; help thou my unbelief.”
Maybe we are firmly set in the ways we expect God to be at work in the
world, and are not yet ready for how God can defy our expectations.

Maybe we are still afraid that if it is true how much God loves us, it
might change our lives.  (That is a very real and reasonable concern.)

Notice however that it is not the ones who are willing to look into
the tomb, not the ones willing to walk into the tomb who get to see
Jesus.  It is the one who waits, the one who persists, the one who
stands at the tomb, the one willing to weep, who sees Jesus.
Not that she recognizes him right away.  Maybe he’s the gardener, she thinks.

But then Jesus calls her by name, and she knows.

Throughout the Bible the subject of the sentence is not us, but God.
Even in the resurrection, it is not our doing that makes possible
seeing and hearing the risen Jesus.  Jesus calls her by name, and she
knows it is the one who was dead, now alive, now standing before her,
now calling her.

Do not hold me, Mary.  I am not done yet.  But go and tell the others.
They will see me, as you did.  Tell them it is true, I am already
raised.

God has already done it.  Death has already lost its sting.  The world
is reconciled to God.

The problem is the world doesn’t know it yet.
The problem is that the powers that be don’t get it yet.
The problem is, we are a stiff-necked and forgetful people, so even us
Easter people, people of the resurrection, people of the story of
Jesus, don’t always remember it.

We settle for former things.  We focus on former things.  We may even
prefer former things.

The job of the prophets is to tell us what God is up to.
The job of the Gospels is to tell us what God has already done.

Our job is to watch and listen and wait and weep and be on the lookout
for it in our lives, and in the lives of our neighbors.

Our job is to live as though we trusted the God who makes all things
new. To live as though the resurrection, Christ’s resurrection, our
resurrection has already occurred.  For it is already accomplished.

Celebrating Easter morning is good.  Better is to live Easter this
afternoon, and tomorrow, and next week, wherever we are.  Better is to
love God so much that there is no room for those former things; to
trust God enough to risk ourselves on behalf of our neighbor.

God has already done what needed doing.  We sign up for it in our
baptism.  We practice it in our worship and our communion.
But that is merely signing up and practicing.  The real task is to
live it wherever we go.

Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
So are we.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.