In one way or another, all the lessons today deal with death—with being dead or being as good as dead; and they say surprising things about this. A good place to start is with the Psalm, especially verse three. I have been fascinated by this verse for years—and I keep coming back to it. Listen: The psalmist says to God, "There is forgiveness with you; therefore you shall be feared." Repeat that. How is the presence of God’s forgiveness a source of fear? That took me a long time. I think it has to do with being as good as dead, and with the temptation rather to enjoy being as good as dead.

The prophet Ezekiel spoke to an Israel that considered itself like that, as good as dead. Israel was in exile, Jerusalem was destroyed, their heritage was gone, their freedom was a memory, their land was ruled by pagans, the King was dead, there was no hope. It was all over. The children of Abraham, created to be the people through whom all the nations of the world would learn about God, had lost their temple, and, most believed, their link to God. The dream was dead, the mission had failed, the struggle was over. Getting to that point had been terrible—the horror of defeat, the agony of exile itself, the destruction of all that was precious. That had been awful; but that was over, that was behind them. All that was left was living out their death. Stranded in exile, they did that. But there were some consolations.

Among them was that Israel learned despair and malice. Israel learned to hate its conquerors with a fierce and vicious passion. ( Psalm 137) Israel learned to live in the past and feel sorry for itself. Israel saw itself as dried bones and rotting corpses—and dried bones have no responsibilities, rotting corpses have no mission to the world.

Hating Babylon was easier than loving God. To hang up their harps was easier than learning how to sing a new song in a strange land. To fantasize their enemy’s destruction was more fun than trying to be a light to the nations.

This is what was going on in Israel when Ezekiel prophesied life to dried bones, and the opening of old graves. Ezekiel spoke with the voice of God: and that voice carries. It carries even to dried bones. The prophet’s vision was a word of hope, but it was also a call to responsibility. Ezekiel insisted that Israel’s mission was to continue. He insisted that it is not over after all. There was more to come. There was work to be done, and the world needed them.

In this way, Israel was reminded that, (like God’s people in all times and places), it was chosen, not for privilege, but for service; not for ease, but to be God’s witnesses. New life to dry old bones meant a call to responsibility and to mission.. It would have been much easier to stay dead. "There is forgiveness in you; therefore you shall be feared."

Forgiveness means it isn’t all over yet; there is still work to be done. Forgiveness means that God’s voice continues to call his people, through whatever distance there is. It calls to life, and it calls to ministry. ||Ezekiel spoke truly, Israel was, indeed, restored.

Now, Lazarus wasn’t just as good as dead. He was dead. Everybody knew he was dead. He knew he was dead. Getting there was no doubt terrible. The pain and fear of his last illness. The harsh business of the dying itself. The knowing that that unknown must now be faced. The dying itself, that was very hard, no doubt, for Lazarus. But that was done. That was over once and for all. Whatever else there was, that was over—and he was through with it and with all that his life had been.

Then, from wherever Lazarus was, he heard, really heard, the same voice Israel heard from Ezekiel. He heard the voice of the Lord. Lazarus heard a voice that carried through the stone and through the grave and across all that there was to cross. He heard the voice that carried him out, hands and feet bound, four days dead (and, doubtless, there was an odor.)

It was a voice that told him that it wasn’t over yet—no matter how dead he and everyone else thought he was; it wasn’t over yet. So Lazarus came out. And within hours the authorities were plotting both his death, and the death of Jesus. Immediately, Lazarus was caught up in the great crisis that Jesus caused. For the Lord called out to him—and there was work to be done.

There is an important sense in which forgiveness is always to be feared. After all, forgiveness means that we cannot go to any place where the Lord’s voice does not reach. Forgiveness means that no matter what has happened, no matter what we have done, no matter who we have been, God is constantly calling us out. No matter how dead we and everybody else may think we are, no matter how horrible it was getting there—however large the stone we roll in front of us, however dry our bones become, (and even if there is an odor,) it is not over. Both God’s love and God’s call to mission will carry through all of that.

No matter what, we are not separated from God; we are not released from our mission and left free to despair, or to hate, or to look only backwards, or to feel sorry for ourselves. Instead, like Israel, like Lazarus, we are called to return, to come back. ||Now, that can be scary, that can be risky. Whatever happened to make us as good as dead might happen again.

Whatever life, and whatever tasks, we avoid by being as good as dead suddenly need to be faced. The excuses are all gone, and it is time to begin again, and to try again, and to return to that struggle we thought had defeated us.

Our life with God is never over. His voice carries, his call continues, his forgiveness haunts us and seeks us; wherever we go, whatever happens; whatever has happened. The call is there. There is forgiveness with the Lord, therefore he is to be feared, indeed, and therefore he is to be praised.

God’s life is stronger than any death. That is the good news. The worst we can do, and the worst the world can do to us, is not stronger than God’s love and God’s forgiveness.

"The dead man came out...and Jesus said, ‘unbind him and let him go.’"

Sometimes great moments drag up the darndest things. Today’s powerful liturgy—with its dramatic actions, its layer upon layer of religious meaning, its divine engagement and eternal significance— as moving as it is, has brought to my mind a very different, and oddly simple story. It’s from Carl Sanberg, who once wrote of a very successful chameleon, (one of those peculiar lizards) who got along quite well by changing his color to match whatever his surroundings were—until one day, the poor thing happened upon a piece of plaid cloth. Yeah, it died heroically, trying to be several different things all at the same time.

That chameleon is a wonderful image of so much that we have seen and heard this morning. Just about everybody is changing colors, blending in with whatever seems to be going on at the moment. Perhaps the most dramatic is the crowd, whose parts in this drama we have all just acted out. One minute they are shouting ‘hosanna’ and waving signs of lordship and power at Jesus; then their perceptions of their own best interests shift, and a minute later their shouts have changed to "Let him be crucified". That shift is what gives this day much of its power.

But this shifting and changing is hardly the exclusive property of the crowd. It seems to be a part of just about every player in the passion. Thursday evening the disciples, with Peter as the loudest and the most determined, swore before God and everybody else that they would die before they deserted Jesus. A couple of hours later they are running in any direction that was away from him, while Peter devotes the rest of the night to denying both his Lord and every hope he had ever had for his own integrity.

Judas, meanwhile, has gone from cleverly cutting a deal with the authorities and boldly leading the crowd that arrested Jesus| to trying to change it all back, and to take it all back. He ends up simply unable to live with the reality of his own behavior. Meanwhile, Pilate vacillates—he is for Jesus one moment, for the crowd a minute later, trying in vain to keep the crowd, his wife, and whatever sense of Justice he had left in some sort of functioning balance.

And so on. The story of Passion is at the same time the story of the chameleon— it’s a story of vacillation, change and betrayal. The background changes, the circumstances wobble a bit, and just about everybody involved suddenly becomes somebody else—somebody with a different opinion, a whole new direction, and a finger in the wind checking for where the next shift is coming from.

In the middle of all of this, Jesus stands like a stone tower in a field of weeds. While the rest are moving in whatever direction the wind in blowing at the moment—Jesus is standing firm. He stays, somehow and always, the same person through it all. He does not change his story, he does not change his allegiance, he does not change his direction, he does not change his commitments, he does not change—regardless of what anyone else is doing, regardless of what it might cost, regardless of how easy it might be (with a few retractions and a few apologies) to get out of there, or to turn things around.

Maybe it’s a sign of our times today that, with everything that is going on in the Passion, this simple constancy, this ancient moral virtue of being all of the time the person you have chosen to be, stands out so sharply. I think we hunger for that, and I think we are drawn to that. I want to look at that for just a minute.

First of all, notice that, while Jesus is being firm and clear and always the same, no matter what is going on around him, he is not being stubborn. That is, he is not holding tenaciously to some opinion, some ideology, some theory or notion that he has come up with and is not going to let go of no matter what. He does not ride into Jerusalem, or stand before the High Priest and Pilate, or walk the way of the cross, in order to make a point, or to prove something to someone. That’s not what’s going on, not here or, for that matter, ever, with Jesus. What is going on is something deeper, something more important.

What is going on here is constancy of vision, constancy of identity, constancy of purpose. Everyone around Jesus wants Jesus to be someone else: Peter with his sword and his denials, Judas with his kiss and his coins, the disciples, the religious authorities, Pilate, and, perhaps especially, the crowd. What they all want from Jesus is for him to be someone else, someone they can understand and control, someone who will fit into their ways of seeing things and of doing things. They all want the same thing the tempter in the wilderness wanted—they all want Jesus to make just a few key modifications in his vision of who he is and what he called to do.

And Jesus does not do this; Jesus remains clear about who he is and whose he is, and he walks with integrity the path that is in front of him. And make no mistake—it was no easier for Jesus to do that than it would be for you or for me. It took no less human courage and trust for him than it would for you and for me—and Jesus didn’t have any secret help from God that isn’t there for you and me. On this day we see the real, agonizing weight of the full humanity of our Lord.

Yet he remained constant, and it was that constancy that brought him to Jerusalem, and to the cross, and beyond.

Of course, this is about us. It is about us in at least two ways. First of all, the constancy of Jesus, the choice to remain who he knows himself to be, in spite of all the things going on around him, this is a challenge. It is a reminder that walking forward, faithful to our sense of who we are and whose we are, is part of our call as Christians. Jesus is in a every respect a model, an example, of what human life can be. There is challenge in that, and there is judgment in that. That’s one way.

But more important than that, we see in this constancy of Jesus an instance of how Jesus continues to be, how he continues to be for us. We see here a hint of the depth and persistence of his love for us, and his search for us. In Jesus’ faithfulness to his mission in Jerusalem, we get a hint of his faithfulness and persistence as he calls us, and seeks us out, and draws us to himself— even now. We see in it a hint of his present passion for our souls, and of the lengths he will still go to for our sake.

For Jesus is more to us than a model of human life lived well, he is also our savior—the one who goes far beyond anything we can do, and who, by his faithful obedience, heals the wound of our sinfulness, and brings us to the father. We do not just follow Jesus, we hold to him as our hope, and our redeemer.

On Palm Sunday we see something we rarely see these days. We see constancy of vision, of purpose, and of identity—and we see the cost of that, and we see the hope of that—both for Jesus, and for us.

The Lessons for today: Isaiah 45. 21-25; Palm 22.1-1; Philippians 2.5-11;  Matthew 26.36--27.66

One of the distinctive things we do tonight happens at the very end of the service. We strip the Altar, and we leave the Church dark, bare and vacant. The holy place, the sanctuary, will be empty. We do that because this is the night in which he was handed over to suffering and death. This is the night when the disciples betrayed him and denied him and deserted him. This is the night that we and all that we call "the world" have our moment to speak, and to act. And when the world speaks, the holy place is empty. So we will leave tonight with dark emptiness behind us, knowing that when we come to church tomorrow, all we will have to look at is a man on a cross. That is fitting, that is one of the most powerful images of this day, of Maundy Thursday. It is what we have to say to God.

And if our word, if the word of the world, to Jesus, if this were all we remembered tonight, our service would be very brief. We would just show up, strip the altar and go home. There isn’t much else worth paying attention to tonight, or tomorrow, if we only remember what we did.

But tonight is about much more than what we did on that first Maundy Thursday. On that Thursday in Jerusalem, Jesus knew that the crisis was at hand. He knew how very important, and how very lasting, memories of that night, their last night together, would be. So what he did was very intentional, very carefully planned.

And, as the Gospel said, Jesus loved them, he loved us, to the end. Part of what this love looked like was that Jesus very carefully and very deliberately gave the disciples, and us, two unforgettable images: Two special ways to remember Him, two pictures of who He is and what He is about. We just heard them in the last two lessons.

The first had to do with the meal. It was Passover time, and Jesus and the disciples were gathered around the table. The meal wasn’t all that different from so many the disciples had done together. Jesus presided, as he had on countless similar occasions. But when it came time for the familiar blessing over the bread, (when the matzah was broken) Jesus added something—just a few words: He said, "this is my body that is for you, do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, to the blessing over the common cup at the end of the meal, Jesus added, "this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this...in remembrance of me." Momentous additions to a prayer older than memory. Words that changed everything.

That is the first image that goes along side the bare altar, and the empty sanctuary; Jesus at the head of the table, saying—this is my body, this is my blood, do this. (Notice that there is a command, Do this.)

After the resurrection and Ascension, as the early Church began its life, that image persisted. Even though they didn’t understand at first, the disciples remembered what Jesus had said and done; and, much more importantly, they kept that image alive, they obeyed, they did it.

They remembered—and they followed his command. Gradually, they learned. ||To their wonder, they discovered that their was Lord present with them in a special, intense, and unique way when they gathered to break the bread and share the cup.

They discovered that Jesus had not left them isolated, he had not left them alone. In this great gift given on the eve of darkness, in the bread and the wine, He had provided a means by which they could indeed be with Him, and share—among themselves and among any who would come—His presence, His power, and His love.

Tonight we keep that first Maundy Thursday image of Jesus before us as we once more gather around the table, and say the ancient words, and discover anew the presence of our Lord. Once more, we do what he commanded.

The other image that Jesus gave on the first Maundy Thursday came after the meal. The gospel tells us how he "got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself." Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel." Nobody knew that was going to happen. It must have been a strange and uncomfortable moment. (And remember, Judas was still there.) I’m pretty sure that nobody there thought the foot-washing was an improvement to the Passover liturgy, and I doubt if anybody actually liked it. But Jesus insisted. He said that this was an example for them, that they should treat one another that way. He insisted they should not only think they were servants, but they should also act like servants.

So Jesus gives us the second Maundy Thursday image, the Lord on his knees, washing their feet, wiping them with a towel. And that image also persisted. The disciples didn’t understand it at first, either; but they could not forget it. So they held on to it, and they reenacted among themselves what Jesus had done for them and they wondered about it.

Gradually those who followed Jesus came to understand that both images of Maundy Thursday—the table and the towel, Eucharist and service—were gifts for the same purpose. Both were ways the disciples could still be with Jesus. Both were pathways into his presence, and into his grace. Today, if we want to know how our Lord is with us, we can still remember, and we can still do, what Jesus told us to do the first Maundy Thursday. We can still share the cup, and we can still serve, we can still reach out to those Jesus loves.

The first Maundy Thursday Jesus knew that the crisis was at hand. He knew how very important, and how very lasting, memories of that night would be. So he left us these gifts.

Notice that, on his final night, Jesus didn’t preach, he didn’t teach, he didn’t perform miracles, he didn’t heal anyone, he didn’t rebuke the disciples and he didn’t run away. Instead, he loved them. Instead, he left these pictures of Himself: He stood at table and said "this is my body...do this". And he girded himself with a towel and washed the feet of Judas and the rest. These two images are Jesus’ response, indeed his answer, to the bare altar—to the betrayal and the denial and the violence.

So tonight we will hold those before us—even though the altar and the church will be bare— and we will remember, and perhaps we will begin to understand a bit more.

For Holy week is a time of images, of pictures, more than of words.

Where do you find God? It’s a good question, an old question, and an important question. There are probably as many answers as there are individual people and distinct religious traditions. But I have noticed that people almost always talk about finding God in things that they value, or things they admire, or things that they love. I have heard lots of folks talking about finding God in nature, in the vastness of all creation, in important relationships, in great ideas, in the beauty and harmony of art and music, in sacred texts, in human wisdom, courage and virtue, in the face of a child or even on a golf course. As a rule, these are all good things, important things—and I don’t doubt for a minute that they contain hints and intimations of the divine. If we are looking for the presence of God, then all of these are pretty reasonable places to look.

But on Good Friday we are asked to do something truly different, something very strange. We are asked to find God here, on the cross, in something that is ugly and barbaric and grotesque and terrible. And we are asked not just to find here some hint of God, or some faint whiff of God’s presence—rather we are asked to find here, in this gory spectacle, the greatest display in all of history of God’s love for us, the most important thing that God has ever done for and with humanity, the glorification of the Father. And we are to find that in the cross, in something we hate, in something we try to hide, or rush past, or avoid.

Finding God here is the task of Good Friday in particular, but it is also much of the business of exploring our faith. St. John of the Cross, a 16^th century Spanish Mystic, said once that "It is not the act of a good disciple to flee from the cross in order to enjoy the sweetness of an easy piety."

On this day especially we are not to flee, but to gaze, and to ponder, and to wonder.

And, I am convinced that, if we cannot find God here, in the agony and defeat of the cross, we will not be able to find him truly and rightly in the resurrection, or in creation, or in any of those good and lovely places where He seems so obvious and close to the surface. That’s because we Christians believe that this is God’s great defining moment. It is here, we believe, more than everywhere else, that God makes Himself perfectly clear. And it is here, in the midst of this awful mess, that we must see him, if we are ever to see him fully.

Doing this, I am discovering anew, is a distinctively Christian task. One of the fascinating things I have been reminded of by our adult class’s look at the great religions of the world, is that while we have much in common, in many and various ways, with other religions; and while we have much to learn as well as much to teach, nobody else has anything like this—or anything remotely resembling this. The claim that God is most clearly seen and most clearly active in a grotesque execution is a claim that, as far as I know, has neither parallel or place in any of the great religions of the world. Paul, talking about the only two religious groups he knew anything about, said that the cross was a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. That took care of everybody. He was right. This is ours, ours to grapple with (mostly in silence), ours to look at with awe and puzzlement, ours to try to wrap our souls around. And we Christians do that alone. Nobody else come even close to saying about God what this cross says about God.

So, where does it take us, this singular and unique task of finding the deepest love, the greatest power, and the truest glory of God in what is ugly and scary and horrible? First of all, it is not like ‘Where’s Waldo’, where there is a puzzle and you look around a bit and find the answer and that’s that. Coming to grips with the cross takes time. We have to keep coming back over and over and looking it square in the face. Mostly what it gives us is questions. But they are very good questions, and they are questions that we must face if we are to claim we know much about who God, and how God is, to us and for us.

Here are a few of the questions about God that the cross has given me lately. You can start with them, or you can find your own.

What does the cross say about the power of God? What does God’s power look like here, and what can this tell us about the ways we usually think about power, and want power, and use power? How does the power of sacrifice and obedience compare with the power of coercion and destruction? Does the cross tell us we miss the point about God’s power, and about our own?

When we say "God is love", do we realize that we are really talking about this, this cross? We think we know what love looks like; but without Good Friday, without this, all of our notions of love are incomplete, deformed, and really very dangerous.

We are to love one another as Christ loved us; this is the great commandment the Lord gave us. But if this is what it looks like for Jesus to love us, then what does that leave us with? What in the world can be involved in loving one another this way? Is it anything at all like what we usually imagine?

If this is the cost of our reconciliation with God, then what is the cost of our reconciliation with one another, and with ourselves? What does it mean for Christ to have paid the price for our sins, but for us still to be called to take up our cross?

Any claim about God that is flatly contradicted by the cross is a claim we Christians have to reject. For example, I don’t see how we can look at the cross and say, as I’ve heard told— that what God wants most is for us to be happy; or that religion is really for children; or that if we just follow what our deepest feelings tell us, we will follow God’s path. The cross shows such silliness to be nonsense, and cultural wishful thinking. How do our ideas of God hold up to the cross?

And so on. There are lots of good questions that emerge from looking at the cross, and looking for God. Or solemn task on the most dark, and most good, of days is to find God here, in what we hate. The cross is a great teacher; and it shows us the truth, first about God, then about ourselves. But we do have to look, and to wonder.

The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.

And here we are. Gathered on Easter Sunday just exactly like we are supposed to be. There is no better place for us to be right now—on this day beyond all other days. (Not, instead of all other days, but that’s a whole different sermon). Today is our special day, the church’s special day.

The Resurrection is mostly about Jesus and about the Father’s love which is greater even than death. That is always first. Still, today is also about us, it is also about the Christian church–the whole church—over one billion strong just among today’s living Christians, and vastly greater in its deepest reality: rooted in eternity, and encompassing all who now or ever share our baptism and our faith. That’s us.

And today is about us, first of all, because the church is, in many ways, the strongest evidence we have for the reality of the resurrection. After all, there aren’t any photographs, and it was a long time ago, so how do we know? One way we know is that it is perfectly reasonable to work backwards from consequences to causes; and something big had to happen to completely remake that small, unimpressive, defeated, and scattered band of disciples into the movement that became the Christian Church.

We know a little bit about these first followers of Jesus: and the idea that anything less than a major miracle could have motivated and propelled those folks into somehow transforming all of western civilization around a single message of Jesus is simply absurd. All by themselves they just weren’t that smart, and they weren’t that imaginative and they weren’t that energetic.

These simply are not the sort of people who would sit around a dead body and plot a conspiracy that would result for them in lives of hardships, struggles and finally martyrdom; and they weren’t about to start having mass hallucinations about the last thing in the world they could have expected to happen. And it is impossible to imagine simple wishful thinking leading to the commitment and sacrifice each of them showed. Granted who you are starting with, it really would take something like the resurrection to make the creation of the Christian Community happen.

And here we are. After the resurrection the Church did begin, with power, direction, persistence and success—in the most improbable of circumstances, and during some of the most difficult of times. That simple fact remains some of the best evidence around for the reality of what we proclaim. No other reasons for us being here makes as much sense as the resurrection from the dead of our Lord Jesus Christ, as wonderfully unbelievable at that reality is. That’s the first thing about us, we are evidence for the resurrection.

But that’s not all. We are also the fruit of the resurrection. We are what the resurrection created. When Jesus returned from the dead, he did not do it to make a big splash, to show off, or to get famous. After all, there were plenty of people in Jerusalem who were lots more important than the disciples. (Come to think of it, just about anybody in Jerusalem was lots more important than the disciples.) Jesus could have made quite an impression, at least for a while, if he had showed up in Herod’s palace or at Pilate’s Praetorium, or some such place.

Instead, after the resurrection, Jesus returned only to us, to that community he had created, to those who already were together, who already knew him. The one, single, and very intentional thing that Jesus did after his resurrection was to forgive, strengthen, build up and offer purpose, guidance, and direction to us, to the Church.

In fact, after the resurrection, Jesus did basically the same thing he did before the resurrection. He formed his Church. That was it. No sound bites, no press conferences, no shroud-signing parties, no spin doctors. Doing that, building that community, must have been very, very important to him. It took precedence over everything else; all of the time. While Easter is, first of all, God’s vindication of Jesus, it is also Jesus’ total commitment to the church, to us.

And here we are. The proof of the resurrection, the fruit of the resurrection, and, what’s more, in ways we can easily overlook, we are also the continuation of the resurrection. If the good news that God’s love will overcome even sin and death is to spread through our world, and our community, and our families; if unremarkable and ordinary folks, like the first disciples and like us, are to continue to find themselves changed and energized by the resurrected Jesus; and if the constant and vital task of renewing the world, if these things are to happen, it will be because of us—guided by God’s grace and enabled through his power, to be sure—but none the less because of our intention and our choices as well.

This gift of God’s love, this victory of Christ that has been given so freely to us, all of this is for everybody, it is for the whole entire world. It isn’t just for us who have received it up until now. It is for all creation to witness and to marvel at. That’s why, after the resurrection Jesus did more than come to us, and love us and begin to heal and form us as his community, as his people. The resurrected Lord did one more thing—he sent us. He sent us into the world as his ambassadors, as those who carry his word, and his peace, and his presence, wherever we may be.

Just as Jesus comes to Mary Magdalene, comforts her, shows her the truth, and then sends her to the rest of the church, so that church, so all of us, are sent into a world that needs to know the risen Lord—into a world that needs to know that there is beyond all our sin and pain and broken-ness a love that is inexhaustible, a hope that is real. We are sent into a world that needs to know who God is, and how God will have us live. It is our sacred calling to do our part, in this place and in our generation, to bring this about.

Now, none of this is intended to shift the focus away from where it belongs. We must never forget for a moment both that Easter is, first and foremost, about what God is doing for us in Jesus, and that anything we do is grateful response. At the same time, I do want to insist that when we gather here on Easter morning, we do not come as passive spectators to a divine production that is put on primarily for our entertainment or even for our benefit. And we do not come here as an appreciative audience applauding a good performance. We are here as players. The resurrection is at the heart of our identity. We attest to it, we proclaim it. It is what created us as a community, and it sustains us still. And we are called to continue that witness, and to bring to a hurting and needy world the great gifts of love that have been given to us. So Easter Day is our day, also, it is about us, too. And it calls us both to rejoice, and to get busy.

And here we are.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.