“Threshold”
Matthew 28:1-10
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
Easter 2014
The women approach the tomb of Jesus. As the sun crowns a bright and lively orange
on the eastern horizon, the bruise-dark purples and blues of night fade in the
west. It is not just a new day. It is a new week. And as the women are about to begin learning,
it is not just a new week, either. They,
and all of creation, stand on a brand new threshold. On this threshold, not only are present and
future uncharted territory, even the past is new ground to explore. Even the past comes alive as never before
because of this dawn.
The women are the first to receive this revealing news: For
those with eyes to see and hears to hear, time itself has begun to bend. Even today, you and I are trying to make
sense of this ongoing event. And this
creation-redeeming, holiness-revealing work is far from complete, but the
kingdom of God on earth has begun.
It happens in the midst of earthquakes and angels. It always does.
This heaven-wrought moment, though, is scary as hell – at
least at first. So, the Roman guards,
though armed and dangerous with permission to kill if necessary, quake like the
earth itself. They fall down and play
possum. Perhaps minds that trust only
swords and spears, minds that find their comfort in logic and certainty,
perhaps they don't even know how to be alive at moments like this.
And the angel speaks: “Don't be afraid...He is not
here...He is going ahead of you to Galilee...there you will see him.”
“So...quickly with fear and great joy,” the women hurry
away on their new and utterly open-ended mission. Along the way, as a kind of teasing wink from
God that says, 'This is how things are going to work from now on,' Jesus stops
the women in their tracks.
'Hi,' he says. 'I
AM. And the angel told you truth. Now, go on to tell the disciples that they
will see me in Galilee.'
Galilee. Galilee is
home to Nazareth, and Capernaum, and Cana, and the entire western shore of the
Sea of Galilee. Galilee is not an
address. It is a region, comparable in
size to what we would consider a large county.
When the women tell the disciples to go to Galilee and that they will
see Jesus there, they will probably roll their eyes and say, “In Galilee? Mary, you're going to have to be a little
more specific. Where in Galilee?”
And Jesus' answer remains the same: “In Galilee.”
Patient as ever, Jesus lets us begin to figure it out. He points in a direction, not to a particular
spot. Galilee is life itself. The presence of the risen Jesus and the
Kingdom of the Living God transcend time and space. They make life itself a threshold of
resurrection. Every moment is a
threshold moment when past, present, and future are held in the time-bending
mystery of eternity we call Now.
Now.
Today. Here on this beautiful,
glorious, heart-breaking earth. God
invites you, and me, and all things seen and unseen into the promise and
experience of resurrection. And we
experience this promise not by simply “passing through” the threshold, but by
living intentionally, gratefully, and expectantly in the threshold of
Galilee.
Galilee does not
allow us to live apart from world. In
truth, when Jesus calls us to Galilee, he binds us intimately to all of
creation – to its cultures, its climates, its geography, its history, and its
hope. He binds us, then, to all that is
beautiful and healing, and to all that is painful and that causes suffering.
Easter, you see, is both a physical and spiritual
reality. It affirms not just the
presence and power of the great mystery we call God, but it affirms that God is
present and powerful through and throughout the created order. To live in the threshold of resurrection
means to live as one who are gratefully aware that we are as dependent upon
soil, and air, and water, and neighbor as we are on the Creator whose image
animates every atom and cell in creation.
All of this means, of course, that the Easter threshold is
not a place where all is sweetness and light.
To live in the threshold of resurrection means that we cannot avoid the
brokenness, the violence, the poverty, the pain of the world. Indeed, it means that God calls us into the
midst of it, boldly trusting that we will not only see Jesus there, but that we
will reveal him to others through our love for them, for ourselves, and for the
holy ground upon which we walk.
Friday exposes the futility of our sin. It gives us the opportunity to recognize that
in our addictions to comfort, control, and certainty, we turn again and again
to the ways and means of fear. We turn
to greed, to brutality, and to religion that preaches gods who bless the
same. Out of love for the creation, the
Creator endures Friday, not to say, “This should be happening to you,” but to
say, “Look! This is what you are doing
to yourselves, to your neighbors, and to the earth! And it is pointlessly destructive vanity!”
Sunday proclaims God's healing, God's transformation of all
that is abusive and being abused. Sunday
says that God inhabits and is even now reuniting all things seen and unseen –
both Matter and Spirit. Easter reveals
that ALL creation is Galilee – the very threshold of Grace.
Back in March, our congregation was responsible for two
evenings of Family Promise support. I
signed up to help serve the Thursday meal, so I joined the others who were
there, and we readied the food for the arrival of the families. Among the guests that month was a young
mother with four children, all under 6 years old. I don't know her story, but her present is
heavy with immediate and relentless demands.
And her future does not promise easy days ahead. For her the earth is quaking, and she is
desperate for an angel who will move her stone and proclaim good news to her.
Her youngest is a baby girl, not yet on her own feet. But her three boys were on theirs, and
everyone else's. They crawled, jumped,
and raced around the fellowship hall of the Methodist church like a bunch of
squirrels ramped up on Mt. Dew and driving a rental car. Simply unable to sit still, the interaction to
which they were obviously accustomed, and to which they were obviously
oblivious, was to be yelled at by loud adults.
It was disturbing and heart-breaking.
While the kitchen crew cleaned up after supper, Mark
McCalman, who, along with Glenn Walker, had come to pull the overnight duty,
took the boys into the family room to try to entertain them. After cleaning up, I walked downstairs to see
what was going on. It was quite a scene.
Have you ever tried to read Curious George to a
roomful of caffeinated squirrels? It's
easier to get a consensus in congress. I
quickly realized that the best thing I could do was to take one of the boys out
of the room. Divide and conquer.
I decided to try to take the oldest boy, the alpha
squirrel, out of the equation and see if that helped. I'll call him Joe. Grabbing a deck of playing cards, I said,
“Joe, do you want to play cards?” He
agreed, so we went back into the fellowship hall and sat down at a table. Glenn came and joined us.
My plan was to play “match,” the game where you lay all the
cards down and turn over two at a time and try to get matching pairs. It flexes memory muscles, and when my kids
were that age, they beat me mercilessly time after time. I wasn't prepared for Joe's lack of
preparedness to play that simple game.
I began to lay the cards down and to explain the
rules. I figured we'd even play it
together, as a team, rather than compete, but Joe would have none of it. He wanted to play, but “match” was a game
that lay far beyond his capability.
Neither numbers nor letters were in his wheelhouse of recognition. The best we could do was to deal with
shapes. So Joe stacked the cards and
began to flip them over one at the time.
He'd identify each one the best he could. He knew hearts. He needed help almost every time to say
diamonds. And as for the other two
suits, he just stuck with fish and puppy toads.
Joe would flash a card on the table and say victoriously,
“Hearts!” He'd flip the next one and
ask, “What's that again?” “Diamonds,” Glenn
and I would say. “Oh, yeah,” he'd
answer. Then “Fish!” And then, “More puppy toads.” On and on went the game. He went through the deck four times, while
Glenn and I celebrated with him on nearly every card.
Eventually, Joe got enough.
So we gathered the cards and put them in the box. Joe headed back toward the stairs leading
down into the family room, but just at the top of the stairs he stopped and
turned around. And with his hands in his
pockets, his little ears standing out wide from his crew-cut head, Joe kind of
leaned to one side and said, with a grown-up sincerity that blindside me,
“Thank you for playing cards with me.”
Using what little breath Joe's “Thank you” left inside me,
I said “You're welcome.”
It could not have been the first time someone played cards
with Joe. He recognized hearts when he
saw them. But twenty minutes of personal
and positive attention was not something he received every day, either.
I cannot know what the coming years hold for Joe. He and his family have an extremely difficult
path ahead. For their sake and the sake
of many others, you and I must be personally involved in their individual lives
and stories while addressing the systemic, big picture issues, as well.
Then again, you and I don't have to end homelessness and
hunger. We do not have to cure cancer or
solve the problem of evil to experience and to bear witness to resurrection,
because resurrection is not some doctrine to be argued. Resurrection is a new life to be
embodied. We experience and bear witness
to resurrection by living gratefully, intentionally, and expectantly in the
threshold of Galilee, by living in the great gift of Now by living with and for
one another in kindness, humility, justice, and love.
God moves the stones.
And, to borrow a line from singer/songwriter Chuck Brodsky, “We are each
other's angels.”1
1“We Are Each
Other's Angels” from the CD, “The Fingerpainter's Murals,” 1995, produced by
Brian Dozer.
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