Christ is risen – even if you haven’t been here since Christmas.  Or last Easter.   Alleluia?!  Alleluia!

Christ is risen – even if you were here on Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and were among the Holy Saturday decorating crew yesterday, don’t think by your being here you had a hand in helping him rise. Alleluia?! Alleluia!

Christ is risen – even if you’re only here because you thought it might be nice to go to an Easter service before that brunch with the bottomless mimosas over at the hotel.  Alleluia?!  Alleluia!

Christ is risen – even if you’d rather still be in bed, or are already back to sleep during this portion of the service. Ahhhhhh-leluia?!

Christ is risen – even if you’re still P.O.’d about the traffic on Lincoln Blvd or had to park on Montana Ave and hike in on a nippy Easter morning. Grrrrrowl-elluia?!

But all kidding aside:

Christ is risen – even if your situation in life has got you lingering in the Good Friday mode, unable to utter the A-word with most everyone else.

Christ is risen – even if you feel something in you has died and you’d rather roll the stone back into place and be left alone in the dark tomb to grieve.

Christ is risen – even if you think the whole story is a big ol’ crock of sssshhh-iny jelly beans and even if you cross your fingers behind your back every time you come to those parts in the Apostles’ Creed where we say “I believe… on the third day he rose again,” and “I believe in the resurrection of the body…”

Because — especially if any of those last three even come close to being you — you’d be in fairly-fine apostolic company, at least according to St Luke’s version of the resurrection story.

Luke tells us that “the women” — namely Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and “the other women with them” — went to the tomb at early dawn that morning only to discover that the body they were going to prepare for burial was missing.  The tomb wasn’t exactly empty — first of all because they themselves were standing in it, and then there were these two fabulously-dressed men (okay Luke’s words are “two men in dazzling clothes”), who asked the women that haunting, mysteriously Easter-y question:  “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” which makes you wonder if some brave soul among them might have considered blurting out with some grief-laden anger, “Because he died.”

Well, if one of the women did, Luke doesn’t tell us that part. Instead, we’re told that they are reminded (by the two fabulously-dressed gentlemen) how Jesus had told them while he was still in Galilee that he “must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” And apparently that did the trick, because as soon as they remembered Jesus’ words, the women then were off to see the apostles, and to proclaim to them the very first Easter message “He is not here, but has risen.”

And according to Luke, the apostles didn’t believe a word of it. In fact, they — like some of us — thought it all seemed like an idle tale. The Greek word for idle tale is leros, the root of the word delirious. Yes, the apostles’ misogynistic response to the first-ever proclamation of Christ’s resurrection was that it was a bunch of jibberish, coming from a group of hysterical women who had gotten up too early.

But the thing is: everyone was grieving. Death will do that to you. Just ask anyone who is sitting here this morning having lost their beloved — whether it was a spouse or a friend or a lover or a pet or a parent or sibling or mentor or family member. Resurrection hope doesn’t make a lot of sense when you’re in the throes of grief, and it’s not always that much easier when you’re on top of the world either, I might add. Resurrection hope — after all — can seem an awful lot like whistling in the dark. Maybe because that’s how it all started.

St Luke writes that the best any of the eleven could do was Peter, that apostolic gadfly, who “got up and ran to the tomb” to have a look for himself. And there they were: the burial linens. And then he went home, amazed but not enough to tell anyone else. Quite yet.

A few of us were gathered outside the church on the front sidewalk on Good Friday night, after the service had ended. The newly-installed and freshly-dedicated crucifixion windows were being illuminated from the inside out for the very first time that night, and a we were huddled out in the darkness to see how well-lit and visible the windows would be with the three 1500-watt lamps that had just been installed during Holy Week. No one was prepared for the piercing beams of light that came exploding through the glass, illuminating the body of Jesus hanging on the cross, his grieving mother Mary and his beloved John and Mary Magdalene sorrowing on either side of him.

I think the hope of resurrection is like that — amid our darkness, in our pain, in our brokenness, in spite of all that is unjust and so not right in the world and in our lives, in the darkness of war and poverty and disaster, in the abyss of corruption and abuse in institutional religion, in the political and economic arenas and in society at large, in the pit of racial and sexist and gender prejudice comes the explosive ray of resurrection promise bursting through all that is death and darkness within and around us.

Martin Luther put it this way:

This life, therefore,
is not godliness but the process of becoming godly,
not health but getting well,
not being but becoming,
not rest but exercise.
We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way.
The process is not yet finished, but it is actively going on.
This is not the goal, but it is the right road.
At present, everything does not gleam and sparkle,
but everything is being cleansed.

Through our baptism into his death and resurrection, Jesus, the Life and the Light of the world, illumines our darkness and sets us free — despite our selves. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” proclaims today’s second reading from St Paul’s letter. But meanwhile, that piercing light sometimes seems only to illuminate our pain and emptiness.

“The symbol of Easter is the empty tomb” writes beloved author and minister Frederick Buechner. “(But) you can’t depict or domesticate emptiness. You can’t make it into pageants or string it with lights. It doesn’t move people to give presents to each other or sing old songs. It ebbs and flows all around us, the Eastertide… He rose. A few saw him briefly and talked to him. If it’s true, there is nothing left to say. If it is not true, there is nothing left to say. For believers and unbelievers both, life has never been the same again. For some, neither has death.”

Christ is risen — even if all this seems a bit delirious.

Amen.