Sunday, April 20, 2014

Sermon: All Heaven Breaks Loose


Matthew 28:1-10
All Heaven Breaks Loose
James Sledge                                       April 20, 2014 – Resurrection of the Lord

If you’ll pardon the expression, there’s a whole lot of shaking going on in Matthew’s account of Holy Week and the Resurrection. It started on Palm Sunday although it’s easy to miss that in the English translation. There it says that when Jesus had entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, but the word more literally means “shaken,” a word most often associated with earthquakes and the root of our word “seismic.”
The same shaking occurs when Jesus dies on the cross, an earthquake that leads the centurion and those with him to say, “Surely this man was God’s son.” And now on Easter morning, the shaking continues. An angel comes down from heaven to roll back the stone, setting off a great earthquake. This angel causes the guards to shake as well and become like dead men. Like I said, there’s a whole lot of shaking going on.
All this shaking is Matthew’s way of saying that something of cosmic proportions is happening. Earthquakes and angels are about the power of God bursting forth, about all heaven breaking loose. 
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A lot of you may not know about it, but our denomination recently put out a new hymnal. I love it. It has a lot more music than our current one, including lots of different kinds of music, music from the Iona and TaizĂ© communities and from different world cultures. It’s a great hymnal, but when I was looking through the hymns and songs it has for Easter, I was a bit surprised, maybe even disappointed, to find one called “In the Bulb There Is a Flower.”
Some of you may know it. It’s a nice, pleasant tune that is easy to sing, but I’m less sure about its theology. “In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed, an apple tree; in cocoons, a hidden promise: butterflies will soon be free! In the cold and snow of winter there’s a spring that waits to be, unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”
It is true that bulbs turn to flowers, cocoons hold fledgling butterflies, and winter gives way to spring, but none of that has much to do with resurrection, to God’s power bursting forth and all heaven breaking loose. When two women named Mary go to a graveyard early one Sunday morning, they do not find spring, or butterflies, or daffodils, and if they had, it would not have been big news.
When Mary Magdalene and another Mary go to the cemetery, they expect nothing more than any of us do when we go to a cemetery to pay our respects. As Barbara Brown Taylor says in one of her Easter sermons, “When a human being goes into the ground, that is that. You do not wait around for the person to reappear so you can pick up where you left off—not this side of the grave, anyway. You say good-bye. You pay your respects and go on with your life the best you can, knowing that the only place springtime happens in a cemetery is on the graves, not in them.”[1]
But as Matthew has already alerted us via earthquakes and angel, something cosmic and unnatural is happening. God is doing something completely new and unprecedented. This has nothing to do with natural processes, nor with eternal souls that continue on after death. It is about heaven erupting on earth. When Jesus bursts from the tomb, it’s not about creating an escape route from earth for believers. It is the opening event in heaven’s invasion of earth, the first act in the coming of God’s new day, that event we pray for each week saying, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
When we gather to celebrate the resurrection today and on every Sunday, on every day of resurrection, we proclaim so much more than life after death. We proclaim heaven breaking loose, God’s resurrection power shaking things up. It is something so different and new and powerful that it is more than a little frightening for those who encounter it, which is why both the angel and Jesus must say, “Do not be afraid.”  This power can be especially frightening to religious folks because it cannot be controlled, and we do like things controlled.
But God’s power that shakes things up is also a power that makes all things, including us, new. It is God’s wild and free power to make us truly alive. It is, writes Walter Brueggemann, “…new surging possibility, new gestures to the lame, new ways of power in an armed, fearful world, new risk, new life, leaping, dancing, singing, praising the power beyond all our controlled powers.” [2]
It is the cosmic power of heaven, of God, breaking into our lives and into our world, and that is even more wonderful than it is frightening.

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Thanks be to God.


[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Unnatural Truth,” in Home By Another Way (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999), 110.
[2] Walter Brueggemann, “The Surge of Dangerous, Restless Power” in The Threat of Life (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996), 157.

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