life

It doesn’t take too long after meeting me to figure out that one of my deep callings is business, leadership, and organizational management. Don’t get me wrong, I love preaching, but I also love a good excel spread sheet, organizational chart, PowerPoint and thinking through new systems! One of my favorite tools for evaluating an organization, specifically a church, is to engage in the Appreciative Inquiry Process. I learned about this process from a pastor in our conference before I started the process of becoming a pastor. It was so intriguing. Appreciative Inquiry isn’t about fixing problems. It isn’t about focusing on the way things are broken. It’s about discovering the best in people, the organizations they work for, and finding opportunities that will nurture are grow that organization. That is done, in the beginning through an interview process. You sit down with person after person, asking them questions, and looking for deep themes, deep meaning, and hope. In the church world, it looks like a conversation with church members, and leaders, and pastors, former and current. Asking them about the ways their church community has added to their life. The stories I have heard from churches about how their lives were different because of their church home. One young man in his mid-to-late-eighties talked about helping paint the church when he was a teenage. How his church believed in him! Can you imagine, 60-years later, remembering how powerful your church community was? There are so many stories of the power of faith. If you just know which questions to ask! Appreciative Inquiry helps, with some really powerful questions. One of my favorite questions of the Appreciative Inquiry process, “When have you felt the most alive, most connected to the church?”

I imagine if I were to sit down with the disciples in the years following the crucifixion, they would talk about the power of walking through the Galielie with Jesus, teaching and healing, learning, and connecting. Hope was poured into them. Overflowing. Can’t you hear the words of wonder and hope when you read the gospels? They encountered life, and connection, and they were sure this period of learning would last a lifetime. A thousand years in fact!

Exegesis 

Now Jesus he was dead. He wasn’t sleeping. He was dead.  Don’t believe it? Ask the disciples! They may have been standing at a distance, but they could tell you, he was dead! Maybe you think they were standing too far away to see… ask the soldiers… ask them about the one in the middle… ya, he’s dead. Ask the women, who prepared his body. The women who laid him down, cleaned him up, covered him… Jesus was dead.

Somebody needs to run to Bethlehem… go tell the Shepherds it was a mistake.

When you leave, will you swing by Rachel’s tomb, will you let her know that the mothers of all the children Harrod killed, their deaths were in vain. They will need comforted…

All those Christmas Carols we were singing not too long ago; the words just seem silly now. He is dead, there is no hope, it was just a poor baby born of a poor-women.

And Epiphany… humph… there is no light, no revelation, will you take the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh back to the East? Let the astrologers of the east know they are nice gifts, but they aren’t needed. He is dead. Thanks anyway. Will you run and tell Harold that he wins again. It was rather naive of us to think we could have actually change anything. All the party and joy of Palm Sunday, the palms the two donkeys, one with a rider on the roof of that car, the other joining us from its vantage point… home safe now. Returned to their owners, the Lord no longer needs them. Someone tell Pilate that Rome is safe again. No need to gather an army. Will you run and tell Caiaphas that he was right… the slow, slow change of the religious elite is the only way to go… political maneuvering wins out over the dreams of the marginalized, the poor, the immigrants, the women, the sinner…

He is dead.

Someone take the microphones back. He is dead. Send the band back home. Take up the carpet. Those trucker’s caps, coffee cups, bracelets, prayer beads… just toss them. It was a nice dream, but that’s all it was, was a dream. He is dead. Crucified.  Hope, our hope hung on a cross. Our Messiah is dead, our hope lost…

This morning, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome come with tears, faced with the daunting task of preparing his body, giving away his things, sorting through the remains of a life, so beautifully lived. They were not coming to the tomb expecting Easter Bunny’s, eggs, anything beautiful… they were expecting grief and pain and tears…

Let’s listen to their story from the Gospel of Mark 16:1-8

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

May God bless the reading, hearing, and doing of this word.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, a theologian and preacher, says this about the Easter Story:

Easter in the Bible may be the greatest story ever told. It’s just not the story we usually choose to tell, because its not a story about new dresses and baskets and flowers and candy and spiffyness. Really, it’s a story about flesh and dirt and bodies and confusion, and its about the way God never seems to adhere to our expectations. Because, think about it: Mary Magdalene stood there at the empty tomb that morning while her expectations of what was possible collided full force with the God of Abraham and Sarah. Her certainty that she knew how this whole Jesus thing was ending slammed right up against the full force of God’s suffering and redemptive love and though it was nothing short of divine revelation in the flesh, Jesus still didn’t look very impressive — not in the churchy, Easter sense.

All the funeral plans were in place, hopes set aside so the long slow process of saying goodbye could begin. The women walked into the tomb, prepared for the long slow journey of grief.

But encountered something beyond imagination.

They encounter a God so overflowing with love, so overflowing with grace, that death itself couldn’t keep this God down.

Somebody needs to run to Bethlehem… go ask the shepherds what they saw, what they heard, what was that promise again? We might have missed the cosmos altering power of this birth they were a witness to… we failed to see God in the arms of a poor-girl. We missed heaven opening-up to call the poorest of the poor, the outcast, the smelly, stinky, shepherd to come!

When you leave, will you swing by Rachel’s tomb… I know it isn’t a straight shot, there’s the thirty-foot wall with barbed wire, and machine guns, and fear, and pain blocking your way… but will you let her know that the mothers of all the children Harold killed, that death has not won. That in their pain and grief and fear… they will encounter healing and hope and compassion from this God…

All those Christmas Carols we were singing not too long ago; the words just seem silly now. They are way too small to capture the truth of God coming to us in the form of a baby born of a peasant girl… We need candles, and voices, and story…

And Epiphany…will you go back to the East? Tell those wise, wise travelers that they were right? That we can see now! God, showed up in that baby! The Messiah, so wise, eating with tax collectors and sinners and the religious elite… we almost missed him because we were looking to the heavens, to the stars, to the vastness of universe… that’s where we looked. But you knew… you came and kneeled, you came and worshipped God… right here, right in our midst, we can see now…

Will you run and tell Harrod that has not won. That the powerful, the oppressor, that swords and army’s will not keep our God for moving mountains. That God has risen up an army, an army armed with love, grace, and invitations to something so beautiful, so true… that no army with swords and pride and greed can take down…

All the party and joy of Palm Sunday… come back! Donkeys, and palms, and art, and fun… come back! Let’s celebrate… it’s easter. God refuses to sit up on some invisible heavenly throne, accounting for our mistakes… Our God is a God that would rather hang on a cross and descend to the depths of hell than be apart from those that betrayed him.

Someone tell Pilate that Rome is not safe. That those that hold power over others are not safe… God will be born into the arms of a peasant-girl and die at the hands the most powerful army the world has ever known before he gives up those that are oppressed or marginalized… or invisible or hurting…

Will you run and tell Caiaphas and all the religious elite that they are so wrong… they cannot contain God in their rules, and judgements, and certainty… someone needs to tell them that political maneuvering will never contain the dreams of the marginalized, the poor, the immigrants, the women, the sinner…

All the funeral plans were in place, hopes set aside so the long slow process of saying goodbye could begin. The women walked into the tomb, prepared for the long slow journey of grief.

But encountered something beyond imagination.

They encounter a God so overflowing with love, so overflowing with grace, that death itself couldn’t keep this God down.