We all love to look for things. Think of the games that involve finding things from our childhood onward. Peek-a-boo. Hide and Seek. Kick the Can, for the older set. The Hidden Pictures puzzles in Highlights magazine that you read in the dentist’s office to distract yourself from the dread of having to visit the dentist. Word search puzzles. Where’s Waldo, or “Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?”, for all those 90s kids. Clue—the game and the movie. The puzzle where you have to find five differences between two seemingly identical pictures in the newspaper. In the Harry Potter universe, the player who can immediately win 150 points and end the game in the Wizard version of polo and soccer known as Quidditch is the player called the Seeker.
We all love to look for things—unless it’s our keys when we need to leave, or our glasses, at any time. Like these three poor reading glasses, looking for a home these last few weeks after they had been left here during Lent.
Lent is a time of losing— especially losing the barriers that we put between our hearts and God’s love. Easter is a time for seeking and finding—finding that the kingdom of God has already begun, each time it wins over the hearts of one of us to live a resurrection life.
Sometimes finding begins simply with seeking you’ve never had or thought possible, such as the moment the shepherds run on an angel’s say-so to find the baby Jesus in a manger, to today, we look to see signs of God’s presence all around us.
Stories of losing and finding are abundant throughout Luke’s gospel. Sometimes, finding begins with loss. Mary and Joseph turn around from being halfway home after a festival to find the 12-year-old Jesus back in the Temple instead of on the road with them. Sheep and coins and prodigal sons and elder sons—all get lost, and joyfully are found.
It’s a fact, though, that looking for something starts with the hope of actually finding it. So seeking begins with hope.
The Galilean women who approached that tomb at early dawn probably had lost all hope. They approached that tomb with dread, preparing themselves for a job they faced with dread: rolling away the stone, and seeking and anointing the broken yest beloved body of their precious teacher and friend.
What they found was the stone already rolled away.
What they found was an empty tomb.
And just when they were trying to take that all in, they suddenly have two men in dazzling clothes standing beside them and put forth a question what must have seemed to be nonsense:
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
The women don’t have an answer. And they don’t get to see Jesus. Not yet. But notice something: they don’t see Jesus, and yet they BELIEVE he has been resurrected. Even without seeing him for themselves. Compare that with apostles’ reaction: they scoff and call the women’s news an “idle tale.” Ah, yes—two words that have been used to undermine women’s experiences for millennia. Even Peter, when he runs back and sees the empty tomb goes away “amazed.” Amazed, but certainly not believing it, or he would have gone back to the apostles and told them so rather than just going home and staying quiet about it.
Those women are the only ones of Jesus’s disciples who have stayed faithful throughout this long journey from their homes in Galilee to the horror of Golgotha. When everyone else deserted Jesus on the cross, they stayed and watched. They stayed and watched as Nicodemus took down the body and wrapped it and placed it in his own new tomb. And they left only to obey the commandment. The minute it was permissible, they came back to do one final act of love and ministry for their beloved Jesus.
What if we could see these women as the model for our own life of faith? After all, we proclaim what we have never seen—and many of us rightfully struggle mightily at times with that. They respond to the incredible news of Jesus’s resurrection with hope, and then belief. Hope that helps us to seek and find the abundant life and grace God offers to each of us every day.
The angels call those women—and us—to a life in which we have the hope to seek the living rather than the dead. To seek hope when around us there is despair. To seek kindness where we see contempt. To seek abundance when we look at God’s beautiful creation all around us instead of scarcity. To seek love in a world of human alienation and fear, and justice and mercy in a world of exploitation and oppression.
To seek Jesus within ourselves and in each other, where he has asked to be all along.
What if we also took to heart the question the angels ask the women? For many of us, our hearts have taken a battering. For some of us, our hearts feel as cold and as empty as that tomb itself. So many of us feel alienated after all the disruptions of the last several years.
The empty tomb those women find on that early Easter morning reminds us of a vitally important assurance: the silence of God does not mean the absence of God. It means God is inviting us to seek, and find, and shout Alleluia! God is calling us into conversation, and inviting us to be the face and hands and heart of Christ in the world. That is the meaning of Easter, and of the resurrection-shaped life Jesus has proclaimed to us all along. And in seizing hold of that promise, we have life, everlasting and abundant, right now.
Why look for the living among the dead? Easter calls us to believe that love has the final say.
Each year we hear of more and more people turning away from faith—and faith communities themselves. Yet I am convinced that one of the root causes of the crisis of faith in modern life begins with too many of us thinking the cross is the end of the story. Too many of us only see the empty tomb, and think that’s the end. We look for the living among the dead. We long for the past—a past that really might not have been as easy as we remember—rather than looking to this moment and beyond. We look for things or money or power or thrills or distractions to fill the emptiness within us. And yet none of those are things that will last. I wonder if we don’t look for the living among the dead things that don’t satisfy because we are afraid to hope?
Why look for the living among the dead?
God is inviting us to live a resurrected life right now, the life of not just faith but action that we promise in our baptismal vows. We do not worship a crucified Savior. We worship a living, resurrected Savior. Death does not have the final word. Love does. That is the promise of Easter—and the hope that makes our hearts a fitting habitation for the living, risen Savior.
Jesus stretches out his hand toward each one of us in love and calls us to embrace the land of the living—right now. He has left the tomb--- and is asking to take up residence in your heart, and my heart.
St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, experienced dazzling visions in her brief life. And she offers us some advice on how to live a resurrected life on this great Easter day. She calls us to attend to Christ’s leaving the tomb—and his request to live always within our hearts. The poet Scott Cairns has adapted her words into a beautiful poem entitled “Attend:”
Attend
Notice! Jesus stands just before you,
waiting in the tabernacle shaped
for you—shaped precisely for you!
He burns with great desire
to enter into your heart.
Ignore the yammering demon
telling you “not so!” Laugh in his pinched face
and turn without fear to receive
the Jesus of quiet calm and utmost love.
Partake of His Mysteries often,
often as you can, for in Them you find
your sole, entire remedy, assuming—
of course—you would be cured. Jesus has not
impressed this hunger in your heart for nothing.
This gentle Guest of our souls
knows our every ache and misery.
He enters, desiring to find a tent, a bower
prepared for His arrival within us,
and that is all, all He asks of us.
Christ is Risen! Risen, and resurrected, and calling each of us to embrace a life of wonder, a life of love, a life of hope. A resurrected life—the only one worth living. Alleluia!
Preached at the Great Vigil of Easter, and the 8:00 and 10:30 am services on April 16 and 17, 2022 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO.
Reading:
Citation:
Scott Cairns, ed. Endless Life: Poems of the Mystics, pp. 137-138
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