Luke 24:1-12 Used Tomb(stones) for Sale Sermon preached Easter Sunday 2013 Opening I am fascinated with the

epitaphs that people put on tombstones. Here are a few of my favorites - and Im not making these up: On a tombstone in a cemetery in Vermont (before personal ads): Sacred to the memory of my husband John Barnes who died January 3, 1803. His comely young widow, aged 23, has many qualifications of a good wife, and yearns to be comforted. In a Georgia cemetery is a classic: I told you I was sick! In a New Jersey cemetery - Rebecca Freeland, 1741. She drank good ale, good punch and wine/And lived to the age of 99. Here lies the body of Jonathan Blake/Stepped on the gas, instead of the brake. Heres one from an auctioneers tombstone: Jedediah Goodwin, Auctioneer, Born 1828 Going! Going!! Gone!!! 1876 Do you remember Chuck Jones? Created a lot of the Looney Tunes a lot of us watched on Sunday mornings? His reads, Thats all, folks! And I suppose there is nothing that seems more final than a tombstone. Thats all, folks! Aint that the truth. Nothing says, thats all, folks, more emphatically than a tombstone. Or a tomb. Thats where the women in our scripture reading were heading at dawns first light. It was two days after Jesus had been executed. And these women were followers of Jesus. And they stayed with him, right to the awful end, unlike the male disciples who ran away. They stayed with him to the awful end and watched from the foot of the cross as he cried out to God, his head fell to his chest, and he died. Thats all, folks. These women had invested all their hopes in dreams in Jesus - the things they say him say and do:

healing a man born blind; feeding a hungry crowd on a hillside, silencing the self-righteous religious leaders with his wit and wisdom; and his words - they had never heard words like this before - words that dripped with power and authority; words that to hear felt like a cold drink on an August day. And incredibly - Jesus who had radiated authority and displayed such awesome power had welcomed them into his inner circle - women - in a culture that kept women in their place - welcomed them and shared his life with them. And the hope - in him all their hopes and dreams of a new world seemed to be coming true - a world free of mothers wailing at the graves of their children, of crippled beggars wailing for passers-by to drop a coin their way, of cruel Roman soldiers clubbing people to the ground. In Jesus, it seemed like God himself had shown up and walked around with them and that everything was about to be made new. And now, it was all gone. He was stone-cold dead, slowly decaying in a tomb. And maybe they felt something like the haunting song Marius sings in the musical Les Miserables after his friends have been killed in a rebellion: Theres a grief that cant be spoken Theres a pain goes on and on Empty chairs at empty tables Now my friends are dead and gone. Dead and gone - so they do the only thing they can to honor their dead Lord - by preparing his body for its final entombment. It was their way of coming to terms with the death of Jesus and the death of their hopes and dreams. Thats how Easter morning begins. With the stench of death and the end of hope. Maybe you know what thats like. Martin Luther King Jr. Said in a famous sermon, One of the most agonizing problems within our (lives) is that few, if any, of us live to see our fondest hopes fulfilled. The hopes of our childhood and the promises of our mature years are unfinished symphonies...Is there any one of us, he asks, who has not faced the agony of blasted hopes and shattered dreams?1 Maybe when you were younger, youd wake up in the morning and sometimes you thought your heart would burst, you were so excited about the day. The world seemed 2

full of opportunity and possibility - and other people saw it in you - they said you were going places in life. But the scholarship never came. Your athletic abilities werent quite good enough. Your skills became obsolete. You got chronically sick. Someone betrayed you. Your career got derailed. Or you made some seriously bad choices. And now whats in your heart is a permanent gray kind of disappointment and you do your best just to slog through life. And with Bruce Springsteen, you wonder, Is a dream a lie that dont come true/Or is it something worse? Or maybe youve suffered from that gray disappointment as long as you can remember. Could have come from abusive parents whose cruelty words and actions programmed you to believe that no matter what you do, you are essentially worthless and youll never amount to anything. And you look out at the world - the world that executed the Son of God - and its still filled with brutality, evil, innocents suffering. And you may never have really articulated it, but you would agree with H.L. Mencken who defined hope as the pathological belief in the impossible. People dont change...I cant change...and the world isnt going to change. And when hope dies, the future dies. Easter beings, with the stench of death and the end of hope. And when hope dies, sometimes the best you can do is try to find closure. Like the women carrying that load of spices - anointing Jesus body was for them their way of finding closure and saying goodbye to a man they loved. And saying goodbye to all the hopes and dreams he embodied. So the dawn is beginning to brighten the sky...still pretty dark so they are carefully picking their way along the path into the cemetery. They see the tomb, that place of death, the final resting place for Jesus body. But as they get closer they are amazed to see the big stone that was rolled across the mouth of the tomb, is resting off to the side, the tomb is wide open. They poke their heads in, Jesus body isnt there - they look high and low for the body, its not there, hes not there. And two mysterious figures appear next to them, like they beamed down from someplace and they deliver what is maybe the best line in the Bible: Why do you look for the living among the dead? 3

Say what? Well now...you see, God had his hopes, too. For people like you and me, that we could be reborn and made new and find healing and new life. God had his hopes - for the beginnings of a new world, where children dont get mowed down by a gunman or die from hunger, where the powerful people dont squash the poor...thats why God sent his son Jesus Christ - so God did something amazing - he took the worst, the very worst that human beings are capable of, and flipped it on it s head and raised Jesus from the dead. It was the great reversal. What looked like the end of hope - the final, thats all folks, for the human race when we nailed Jesus to the cross - God took that act of horror and used it as his way of taking our very worst into the divine heart and then raised Jesus from the dead as his way of showing, you cant stop Jesus, you cant stop hope, you cant stop new life, you cant stop this new world being born in him. You have to love Easter - girls wearing new pretty spring dresses and chocolate bunnies and a packed church - let me say it again, Im so glad youre here - and the return of Spring - but my goodness Easter means so...much...more - it means Jesus is alive, hope is alive and the future for you and me and the whole world is wide open! There is hope for us Because Easter means Jesus is still alive, still around, still showing up and doing the kind of stuff he did when he walked the earth. Like bringing hope in the dankest nights of human life. Ive seen this with my own eyes. The summer of 1988, Im working as a chaplain in an inner-city hospital in New Jersey. You want to see what life can do to people, you want to see what people can do to other people and to themselves, you see all of it in an innercity hospital. I met a woman in that hospital named Vicky. She was about thirty and dying of AIDS that she got from sharing needles. She was never going to leave that hospital - no cure for AIDS back then. Seemed pretty hopeless. She told me her story - born to an addicted mother, never knew her father, starting turning tricks on the street as a young teenager, had babies and gave them up, got addicted to crack and heroin and one day in an emergency room got the death sentence of the diagnosis of AIDS. Shes lying there in the hospital bed in her last weeks - shes got a dozen IV lines and wires sticking out of her, her hair is falling out and she cant weigh more than 70 pounds. Now that, looked like the death of hope. A young woman about to die after throwing away her life. Thats all, folks! 4

Yet there was in that woman, a force of life that shined through the darkness of coming death. The risen Jesus had found her and his resurrection life had flooded into her and she was full of peace and hope and she knew Christ had forgiven her for the wreckage of her life, she knew, that she was going to be with Christ when she died, she knew, that Jesus Christ was alive and well and the cemetery was no more going to be the end for her, than it was for him. What next for us? For some of us, its time to get out of the cemetery of blasted hopes and shattered dreams, the cemetery of our acidic cynicism that nothing can ever get better and the world is going to the hell it deserves. I mean, you can stay there, if you want, among the tombstones marking your failures and disappointments, the tombstones memorializing all the bad things people did to you, all the rotten things life threw at you. Or you can be like my friend Bruce. Im in my first month of my ministry in Virginia some years ago and this guy shows up in my office. He says, I came to your church last Sunday and I dont know why and I dont really know why Im here in your office either, Im an atheist. He tells me his story. Comes from a good family, pretty brilliant academically, he was a young man going places - but he couldnt manage to finish college...gets started on a writing career and has some stories published but starts drinking and drugging...goes through a series of failed relationships...works in a series of bad restaurant jobs and scrapes by but hes forty now and hes done nothing with his life and he hates God if there is one - but now heres here sitting on the couch in my office and hes bawling his eyes out, he prays, Jesus, help me - and he is transformed - he becomes a man of love and gentleness and strength, becomes a great father and great leader in his church and most of all, he loves Jesus, the living Jesus, who came to him and led him out of the cemetery of his rebellion and cynicism and anger and set him free. If youre still in the cemetery - well, let me ask, hows that working for you? That cynicism about other people, the world - is that giving you joy? That bitterness about the what-might-have-beens, hows that feel when you try to fall asleep at night? That selfcondemnation about your mistakes - is that making you a better person? Get up, get out, of the cemetery! Theres a risen Christ on the loose, hes around here right now and hes ready to touch you and let his resurrected life and power flow into you and heal and change you. Get out of the cemetery -and out into the world. Did you notice what else the angels told the women? He is risen! He is not here! 5

Meaning, hes not in the tomb, hes not in the cemetery. Because - Jesus Christ is alive and on the loose in the world he died to save. Maybe youre in a kind of cemetery - of lifeless religion. Youve done the whole church thing, youve got the Lords Prayer and Apostles Creed memorized and you can sing Amazing Grace without looking down at the hymnal - but its - stale...kind of empty. You come to church out of force of habit - maybe twice a year or maybe a lot more than that - but the little you get out of it fades away by the time you change out of your church clothes. Let me tell you, theres more to it than that. The risen Jesus is out there in the world - and if you want to encounter him, get up out of that cemetery and start looking for him among the kind of people he hung around with during his ministry - the poor, the sick, the hurting. So, go looking where people are trapped in cemeteries of human cruelty. One ministry I recently learned about is called Shared Hope International. They are a group of Christian abolitionists. That sound outdated? Its not. There are more people in slavery throughout the world than during the days of slavery in the United States. Many of them are kidnaped and sold into sex trafficking and kept as prisoners in brothels in places like India, Burma, Thailand. Some of them are young girls. Kidnaped, sold and enslaved. So part of what they do, is rescue enslaved women and men. And provide residential care where they can get medical and psychological care, education and job training. These women, who had no hope, get a whole new life. One girl is named Renu, born in Nepal and sold into slavery by her adoptive brother. The girls who worked in the brothel, worked until they died. She managed to hide some of the money she earned - the rest of it was confiscated daily - and fled Bombay and went back to her hometown, but her family shunned her because of the life she had been forced to live. Desperate, she remembered the phone number of a woman with a connection to Shared Hope. They took her in, and Renu says, accepted her like family. Renu came to know the risen Lord Jesus Christ, began to heal from our physical and emotional and psychological suffering, and today she is married, just finished her first year in Bible college and intends to get a business degree so she can help run groups like Shared Hope that rescue girls and women she ended up by Gods grace

Because Jesus is out there working through ordinary women and men to renew this broken and suffering world - to bring to life Gods dream of a new world. Look for the risen Christ, in the cemeteries of human cruelty and suffering. Closing A few years back, there was an eye-catching ad in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, newspaper's classified section. Big, bold letters advertised "Used Tombstone. " The ad's text read as follows: "Used tombstone for sale. Real bargain to someone named 'Dingo.' For more information call ..." A used tombstone. Strange thing to see in the classifieds. But I guess that means its owner didnt have any use for it anymore. Like Jesus with his tomb. Because Christ is risen! And, because of Him, we dont need our old tombstones, either. Amen. Endnotes 1. Martin Luther King, Jr., Shattered Dreams, in Strength to Love, p. 78. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.