What do you see in the tomb?

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Easter Sunday

March 31, 2024

Acts 10:34-43

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Mark 16:1-8

Christ is Risen!

Doesn’t it feel good to say that at last? It has, after all, been a long, weary Lenten season. Grey, wet days. The days seem too short to get everything done. The sun, on those days when it appeared at all, was cold and dull in the sky.

But now – now we can feel the change coming. The days last longer, the colour is coming back to the lawn, the trees are coming back to life. The other morning, I watched a red cardinal and two sparrows playing what looked like tag in my neighbor’s maple tree. Why, BBQ season seems just around the corner! Easter could not arrive at a better time. We are done with bad news: bring out the colored eggs and the lilies. The time for somber thought is over; God wants us to have a party.

But hold on. Have we forgotten something? Have we skipped over a certain chapter of the story? It seems we might have jumped right from grief to joy in an instant – as if we leave Jesus on the cross and turn around, instantly to find him safe again in Heaven. It’s understandable, really. After all, it is bad enough that we have to endure Good Friday, and all the shame that comes from that day. It’s a relief to get to the salvation of Easter. So we rush through that one scene in the middle: we skip over the dark tomb, the place of death where the stone is rolled back, and the women find emptiness. We are relieved when the angel stops them only for a moment and then sends them off again, to spread the Good News. Now that is the part of the story we want to hear. Alleluia! Jesus is Risen!

But…force yourself to look again. Push away the flowers growing by the entrance. Shade your eyes from the sun, bright above your head. Peer inside, past the rolled-away rock, into the shadow: What do you see in the tomb?

If Good Friday is the day when we did nothing – when we allowed, with willful blindness and human weakness, Jesus to suffer on the cross, then Easter – Easter is the day when we must do something. Easter is the moment in every day when we choose to do something for the good of God. We cannot get to that choice by skipping over the part that makes us nervous. In every difficult act, and every hard decision, there is a moment when we must look inside the tomb and decide what we see there. It is the turning point upon which the Easter story hinges. What do you see in the tomb?

The Marys who arrived at its door, who discovered the stone rolled away, panicked when they found it empty. And who could blame them? They must have thought the body of Jesus, already desecrated on the cross, had been stolen. But they paused, and looked deeper at the scene again, because first impressions - first perceptions - do not always tell the whole story. And if ever any place needed a moment of contemplation it was this one. In pausing, they gave the angel the chance to appear, and to explain to them what had happened. They must have looked inside that empty tomb again, considering what the angel told them in clear contradiction of the laws of the world, and they chose to hear what God was saying. It was not in the rising sun of that morning that they learned the truth of the resurrection: it was by looking deep inside the tomb.

So, what do we see there? The tomb, of course, is an analogy for the choices we make – that quiet space before we decide to go left or right. Before we choose to work at a marriage or let it unravel, to forgive or never forget, to go out of our way for someone else or step over the hardship in our path and walk on. We are a society that has become obsessed with happiness – we poll ourselves about it, we calculate the economics of it, we rank which countries have more of it. Every time we do it, we get the same answer. The happiest people are the ones who give the most to charity, no matter what their bank accounts say. The happiest countries are the ones who do the best job of looking after their most needy citizens – even if it means higher taxes for everyone else. Those people and those countries do not skip to the Easter Bunny – they look into the tomb, and they look long and hard. They see the homeless, and the beaten, and the poor, and the broken. They see the shadows in themselves. When humanity so often stumbles into the crime of willful blindness, they choose to face what is wrong, and they decide to do something.

Many times, throughout the Bible, God has spoken through an angelic messenger. But on Easter Sunday, before we hear the angel, God takes us to the tomb. This is no accident. God wants us to look inside and decide what we will choose to see in the shadows. I cannot tell you what that is. It is different for each one of us. And different for us depending on the day and time in our lives. But that moment before the tomb is when we decide whether to hang back with those who did nothing on Good Friday, or to join in doing something on Easter Sunday. And that moment spent peering into the shadow of the tomb doesn’t happen only today: it is how the resurrection speaks to us every day of our lives if we pause long enough to hear the angel.

God understood us better than we understand ourselves. We cannot be happy if we do not come clean with the sadness that exists around us, or inside us – otherwise how can we know what happiness is?

Perhaps, in the shadow of the tomb, you will see how one part of your life is ending. You will recognize the true cost of a careless mistake. You will see where your failure to act led someone to be hurt. That is hard – surely as painful as it must have been for the women who found the broken body of the Messiah gone, unable even to give him a proper burial. But pause for a moment. Look more deeply into the shadow. And Listen. The resurrection of Easter teaches us that there is more to hear: in every ending there is the promise, always, of a new beginning. In that careless mistake there is the opportunity for reparation. In our failure to act, there is the chance to do better the next time. But we get there only if we are brave enough to see what waits for us in the tomb.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! Be joyful when you speak those words and know that God guides us from the tomb to forgiveness and love. A place to start over. But don’t miss the true moment of the resurrection. Don’t rush off too quickly. Understand that God has given you a chance to look without fear and doubt inside the tomb – to see the joy that may be hidden in shadow - and to know that you will have the strength to face whatever answer awaits you there. That is the true secret of happiness at Easter.

Amen.

May your eyes be open

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Good Friday

March 29, 2024

Psalm 22

John19: 1-42

This year, a German movie, called Zone of Interest won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. If you have seen it, perhaps, like me, you remain haunted by it. If you have not watched it, I encourage you to brace yourself and do so. If any movie speaks to the theme and events of Good Friday, it is this one. 

At one point, in the movie, the mother of the family, Hedwig, makes this observation: “We’re living how we dreamed we would, with everything on our doorstep.” And yet, both she and we are complicit is what lies on her doorstep: her husband is the celebrated commander of Auschwitz, and Hedwig is raising her children in a fine home with a grand garden, where the air is filled with the screams of the living and the ashes of the dead. 

Listen to the pretty bird, the father says to his son, while the terror of the concentration camp plays on. His young son plays in a pool with a shower head that looks like it may be an extra from the gas chambers; his eldest plays with stones like teeth he picked from the garden; a gardener – a prisoner – puts ashes on a flower bed. Don’t look too closely. Don’t focus your hearing too intently. Don’t let your mind drift.  

When her husband is posted to another location, Hedwig is enraged; “You will have to drag me out of here,” she says, while trainloads of people are being dragged to there. Where is there? We never see. The horror of the movie is that human life is ending on an unimaginable scale, and we are trapped with this family who is complicit in these murders, in this genocide, and refuses to see, refuses to act. We catch a hint at the end that the father feels something: that, as the actor who played him put it, his body tells the truth of what his mind cannot face. But he carries on and returns to his family and his garden and his favourite horse on the edge of nightmare. 

As a German Lutheran, I can tell you, it was not easy for me to watch this movie. And the memory of it lingers with me uneasily still.

But then, this is not a day to feel easy. This is a day when we must acknowledge our guilt. It is a day when we must force ourselves to hear the most tragic and horrifying story of our faith lives – and know that while it happened, while Jesus stumbled to his death, while his hands and feet were hammered into the cross, and while he hung, dying, people did nothing. They were smiling with everything taking place on their doorstep. 

We can ease our own guilt by saying – we were not there, that was before our time. We make ourselves feel better by saying – we would have acted differently. And we can comfort ourselves by quoting the prophecy, by making this God’s plan – that one day a Saviour would come, and die on a cross, that it had to happen this way. 

But that is not the posture of how we should face Good Friday. And, in any event, none of those statements are really true. The fact of Good Friday is this: On the cross, Jesus said: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” But Jesus was simply being kind to us: they knew – and we know – exactly what they were doing. Willful blindness is not the same as being truly blind.

We may not have been there physically, but we were part of it, as surely as we are part of the human race that has committed one act of willful blindness after another, while others died, and injustice was allowed to have its way. Certainly, the soldiers wishing Happy Birthday to their commander could argue willful blindness: Auschwitz was roughly 40 square kilometres and divided into three camps – the first, was the offices; the second part, called Birkenau, contained the gas chamber and crematorium; and the third housed the labour camp. A soldier or a female office worker might say they didn’t know what was happening: but we wouldn’t believe them, would we? After all, where did they think all those people were going? What did they think the smoke was from? Why did Auschwitz exist at all?

And what of the willful blindness when Jesus went to the cross? We lay our blame at the feet of the Pharisees, and Pilate, and the mob – but what of everyone else who was there in Jerusalem in those days? Are we to believe they didn’t know what was happening? That they could have been somehow ignorant of the fact that the most famous man in the city – an innocent man – was walking to his death? Of course, they knew. And they chose, for reasons that probably made sense at the time, to look the other way.

That is the Good Friday story. It is what so often haunts people who live through great wrongdoing: how could I have done nothing? Why did I allow myself to be blind? It is no coincidence, by the way, that the story of Auschwitz fits so well with the story of Good Friday: since the latter was used, so tragically, in part, to justify the former.  The truth is we don’t need to look very hard for examples of humanity’s being blind to tragedy: we allowed women to go their deaths for being witches, we have permitted famines to ravage entire countries, we have allowed religious wars to wipe out families. If there is a human failing that has done more damage than any other, it is not the evildoers themselves. It is those of us who knew better and did nothing.

“Forgive them, father,” Jesus said, “for they know not what they do.” Except, we did know. If this were a Hollywood tale, a brave team of heroes would have organized a rescue party, tackled those Roman soldiers, and saved Jesus from the cross. But this is not Hollywood; and most of the time, in real life, we walk on by – we don’t want to get involved, we don’t want to risk ourselves or our own families. We choose to be blind. It is why we so celebrate the hero who chooses to see– why we love those Hollywood action movies – because we know how rare that is. That is why a movie like Zone of Interest is so hard to watch and stays with us so long. It tells the story of real life. More often than not, no hero saves the day. More often than not, the villain lies within. 

And what of the prophecy? Can we not comfort ourselves by saying Jesus was destined for the cross? Let’s consider that: for I believe that the prophecy was more about us than we like to own up to. The prophecy assumed that we would give in to our baser human weaknesses – that our leaders would be greedy, and Pilate would be duplicitous, the disciples would be cowardly, and the rest of the mob would be weak and allow Jesus to be sacrificed. And then, of all those people in Jerusalem , not one would do anything to stop it. “Forgive them, [God],” Jesus said, “for they know, not what they do.” Except we did know – and God, who has a better understanding of our own human failings than we do ourselves, knew we would not be strong enough to stop it from happening. That is what we must own up to on Good Friday: the most tragic human weakness of willful blindness.

So what, then, does God do? God opens our eyes. God urges us to look at ourselves, to see our weakness, and to accept it. And then God says, I forgive you. Follow me to the cross, and I will heal you. Take my hand and I will show you the truth of the world so that you can make it right. That is the prophecy, the gift of Good Friday: that God opens our eyes, so that we might see Jesus do what we are so often too fearful to do – sacrifice himself for others. And God’s hope is that we will keep those eyes open and turn our guilt and grief into something worthy of the price that was paid.

For humanity also knows that path as well. For every German soldier sunbathing outside the grounds of Auschwitz, there were German citizens who hid their neighbors, and helped them reach safety. For every Westerner who pretended there was no famine and no war in Africa, there were others who went to deliver medicine, who wore the uniform of peace. For every 10 people who drive by a homeless person, there is always someone eventually who will stop.

 “Forgive them, [God], for they know not what they do,” Jesus said. Except we did know. And we do know. If Good Friday, was the day when we did nothing, let it not also be the day that is Good for Nothing. Let us learn the lesson of today: if someone must open their eyes so that salvation is possible and justice is delivered, then may our eyes be open.

Amen.

Wash feet... break bread... pour wine... remember

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Maundy Thursday

March 28, 2024

John 13: 1-17, 31b-35

587 years before the birth of Christ, the Babylonian army converged upon Jerusalem and utterly destroyed the city. One eye witness to this dreadful event set down his feelings and reflections in a poem. In what we now call the Old Testament book of Lamentations, he not only expresses the pain of defeat and destruction, but also the hurt of the indifference of the people who passed by the smoldering ruins of that once great holy city. He laments the apathy of those who travel by without the slightest effort to offer a hand to help.

Jump ahead some 600 years. The scene is again Jerusalem, just outside the city wall. A man in his early 30s is cruelly nailed to a cross. With every swing of the hammer, the nails puncture his hands and feet. His body is wracked with pain. A crown of thorns cuts into his skull. The full weight of his body yanks at his wounds. Instead of water to quench his thirst, they trick him with vinegar. Instead of comfort, they cry in derision. Instead of walking by in holy awe, they strut by doing nothing.

Now jump ahead 30 more years. The scene is again Jerusalem and Emperor Nero has declared that every Christ-follower will die. Some are used as toys for the emperor’s amusement and torn apart by wild animals. Others are burned alive and used as human torches to light the streets and remind the people what happens to Christians under Roman rule. Some passed by at a distance, no doubt to avoid the sight and smell of the burning human flesh. Others forced themselves to tolerate the sight so that they were not suspected as followers.

One last jump to the present day. The scene is the roof of the Christian holy site known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. From it you can see the sacred Wailing Wall of the Jewish people and the Dome of the Rock so precious to the people of Islam. All three sites are inside the old city walls of Jerusalem. In the not-so-far distance you can see the smoke rising from the war in Gaza, the desolation of homes and gardens, the devastation of families, the brokenness of place never at peace with its mutual existence. Over 1,400 Israelis murdered. More than 30,000 Palestinians wiped out. Almost 100 journalists, and 150 aid workers killed. The world stands by while things are getting worse, not better.

The cries of indifference and apathy are heard not only in Jerusalem. We hear the cries, too. From the people of countless other nations where unrest grows into chaos. From the people living on our streets, crowding our prisons, weeping at grave sides in our cemeteries. The sights and sounds of human suffering surround us at every corner in our life. And the victims cry out and we stand by.

Our very gathering this night is deeply embedded in history. It is the night of the Passover meal remembering God’s mighty act of the deliverance of God’s people from being enslaved by the Egyptians. The history of the Jewish people means something to us. It is part of our story. But of much more importance to us is the second scene from Jerusalem. We gather to wash feet, break bread, and pour out wine in remembrance of the One who served, suffered, and died upon the cross. It is something for us because we know when and where we too have been bystanders. On this night we are forced to stop in this upper room. We cannot simply pass by the cross because we know what it really means. While others will be opening up the cottage, going to hockey games and doing Spring cleaning this weekend, we might want to stand in judgement. That is not what Jesus asks us to do. Jesus asks only that we look at our own lives. May God give us the grace to look upon the sacred Head now wounded and rejoice in calling Christ ours. Christ is not just some nice guy. Christ is among us as one who serves.

And if the thorn-crowned Christ is among us as one who serves, then the modern-day scene from Jerusalem and all the scenes of human pain and suffering have to mean something to us. We will never stop all the suffering in the world. But we can tell people living in the middle of it, that there is hope. That God is raising Jesus from the dead, and this is not a one-time event. God continues to do this each and every day through those people who have the courage to believe it. That is what Jesus tried to teach those first followers on this very night long ago, with the act of washing their feet and sharing a meal. We are invited to meet suffering and pain with the hand of comfort and help and hope.

The cries of indifference and apathy do mean something to us. The destruction of Jerusalem, the crucifixion of Jesus outside the city wall, the persecution of Christians, and the pain and suffering in the world around us remind us to love one another as Christ has loved us.

Amen.