Luke 24:1-12
The Fire in the Equation
The Lord is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed!
Not long ago, my son, my grandson and I visited the Museum of Science in Boston. Among the live exhibits, the three of us watched the lightning show in the Theatre of Electricity. We enjoyed a thrilling display of sparks, lightning bolts, and loud cracks that kept everyone wide-awake including dozing grandfathers!
For those of you who have never experienced the Theatre of Electricity you have to imagine that you are sitting beside the Wizard of Oz. There are complicated elongated panels with funny looking dials and brightly colored lights. There are coils that seem to snake around the podium that glisten silver.
There are two large domes called the Van de Graaf generator which produce sparks that travel to two smaller grounded spheres. The sparks fly when the voltage on the domes get big enough to ionize the air turning the generator from an insulator into a conductor. When that transformation happens it happens very quickly -- like 1/1000 of second. Bang. Zap. And it’s over. Everyone is wide-awake!
After the show, while my grandson wandered over to the mammoth control panel monitored by the Wizard of Oz, my son and I started talking about those things beyond our comprehension: electromagnetic fields, the force of gravity, black holes, the Big Bang. We concurred that there are some things that just cannot be explained away. I am reminded of a cartoon of two professors with one of them pointing at a blackboard scribbled with complex-looking equations. In the middle of the blackboard instead of an equal sign it has the words, “then a miracle occurs.” And the one professor is pointing at the words saying to the other one, “Can you explain this a little bit better?”
Today as we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, Easter is the miracle in the equation. It is the “Something” that cannot be explained away. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes, that the miracle of Easter stands in the middle of a second Big Bang. It serves as an eighth day of creation when the atmosphere was divinely charged and the world was irrevocably changed.
Williams thinks of Easter as the fire in the equation; and I think that is an apt description of Easter as fire. It is about the Light: the light of creation, the first ray of daylight, and the radiant light of the Paschal Candle. The fire in the equation for us is the risen Christ. When He rose from the tomb truth, goodness, and hope rose with Him.
If Easter is about truth then Easter is about you and me. What we profess as truth shapes our understanding of things – even things such as resurrection. The Easter story is about the disciples’ initial understanding of the resurrection of Jesus. Was it true? And what truth shaped them to become the people they became?
In today’s Gospel reading from Luke the evangelist writes uncharacteristically even hesitantly. For those familiar with Luke’s Gospel know that he is a consummate storyteller. Only Luke includes the Parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan. Only Luke highlights Jesus as a man of prayer and valorizes women as much as men in both his Gospel and in The Acts of the Apostles.
For those who read carefully the Easter text this morning you will find Luke use the word “but” five times. Like a boulder in the middle of the road this obstinate conjunction causes one to pause and take note. The narrative demands us, like the evangelist, to see that there are two competing stories being told at the same time. The stories are odds with one another.
One story recounts that the man Jesus, who some claimed as the Messiah, died –End of story. What happened on the cross crushed all their hopes and all their dreams. There was a hopeless finality to Good Friday. This was, and is, the rational and empirical story of Jesus of Nazareth. He lived and died a failure.
And this joyless and hopeless story is the enemy of the Easter Story. And yet it is a narrative that some people acknowledge today: Jesus was only a kind rabbi from Nazareth. He was a good and godly man and, at most, an interesting footnote in history. For some today, He is worth studying but not worth knowing.
The other story embedded in Luke is that something happened like an electrical charge that changed everything. Luke the physician, the man of science, is writing like one who can hardly believe the truth – But when they went in the tomb they found no body. But the men said, “He is not here but has risen.” But Peter saw the linens lying by themselves.
Luke the physician, the meticulous historian, surrenders all rational thinking to the truth as witnessed by the disciples: “Christ is alive!” “Remember how he told you in Galilee, remember how he told you on the holy mountain, and remember how he told you again before his entry into Jerusalem that he would die and on the third day rise again?” By remembering his promises, the disciples experienced a resurrection in their own lives that transformed them forever. All that Jesus spoke to them was true.
The second gift that rose with Jesus was goodness. All that Jesus said about the first shall be last and that last shall be first, about the meek shall inherit the kingdom of God, about loving your neighbor as yourself, and about being with His followers to the end of all time, was all true. His resurrection was his vindication about All that was good, all that was true and all that was beautiful was going to last forever through Him.
Tom Long, well-known preacher, tells the story of a young boy who was a great fan of both Capt. Kangaroo and Mister Rogers. The boy faithfully watched both television shows and one day it was announced that Mister Rogers would be paying a visit to the Capt. Kangaroo show.
The boy was ecstatic. Both of his heroes, together on the same show! Every morning the boy would ask, “Is it today that Mister Rogers will be on Capt. Kangaroo?”
Finally the great day arrived, and the whole family gathered around the television. There they were, Mister Rogers and Capt. Kangaroo together. The boy watched for a minute, but then, surprisingly, got up and wandered from the room.
Puzzled the father followed him and asked, “What is it, son? Anything wrong. “It’s too good,” the boy replied. “It’s just too good.”
Maybe that’s it. Maybe the news of the empty tomb, the news of the resurrection, the victory of Jesus’ victory over death is just to good to be true, too good to grasp all at once. Yet, we do not have to apprehend the gift of Easter all at once. The spiritual life is one of progressive revelation knowing that the goodness of God never ends.
And if God’s goodness is endless then Easter is also about hope rising. You and I live in a body of hope. It is an energizing field. It makes for a spiritually charged atmosphere bigger than we are. God gives us more hope than we can handle.
In the Risen Christ we are embraced in an electromagnetic field of love that connects us to all things and to all people. Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we find that the power was within us all along – As Jesus said many times to his disciples, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” By Him, through Him and with Him, we are born to a new life that is ever new, ever fresh, ever young and ever connected.
After the monsoons and flooding we have experienced this past Lent, we look with hope to sunnier skies, drier basements and warmer weather. Might not that hope just be a glimmer of Easter? Signs of resurrection are all around us.
Looking outside on this beautiful Easter Day, it is worth concluding this Lent season and commencing this Easter Day with those famous words of the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who wrote, “Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.”
Let us pray:
Almighty God, on this Day of Resurrection, you give us more hope than we can handle. We thank you for the promise of truth, the joy of goodness, and the gift of hope. This and more we ask through Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Amen.
