Acts 7:55–60; Psalm 31:1–5, 15–16; 1 Peter 2:2–10; John 14:1–14

While checking in with someone this week, they commented that they thought, perhaps, that God was simply asking too much of them.

I’m sure most of us can empathize. Most, if not all of us, are being stretched to the very edges of our abilities. If you had told any of us what we would be doing today, a year ago, we wouldn’t have believed it.

A year ago, we all had enough on our plates already.

Six months ago, we were already trying to set boundaries and to say “no” more often.

Three months ago our lives, personal and professional, were already demanding our A game too many hours a day, too many days a week.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

We Christians claim some pretty audacious things to be true. And we are at peak boldness during the Easter season. Of course, I am talking about our foundational belief that God became human in Jesus Christ, and that he lived, died, and rose from the dead on the third day. What a truly audacious belief!

Over the last two Sundays, we have retold the stories of the risen Christ appearing to his disciples in mysterious ways. He shows up in a locked room to assure Thomas. After breaking bread with disciples in Emmaus, he vanishes. The risen Christ is both real and otherworldly, human enough to have wounds and eat food, but divine enough to show up where he is needed most. What a daring claim!

It was 5:30 in the morning and I was in the Holy Land, one of many climbing the long, rocky and sloping hillside of the Wadi Qelt. In the grey light before sunrise, in silence and awe, I sat among the boulders sheltered from the chill of the night air and watched. The rising sun bathed the mountains in light and took my breath away. High to our left was Jerusalem 2800 feet above sea level; to our right was Jericho 1200 feet below sea level. Tears came quickly as I realized I was sitting above the Jericho Road where Jesus had walked and where the story of the Good Samaritan actually took place. As I sat in silence, remembering that story, I could hear the faint sound of what I thought were cowbells. As it grew lighter I could see shepherds climbing the ridge with their goats. In that short time, so many of our bible stories came to life for me in ways that have changed my understanding of them and brought deeper meaning to them.

It is remarkable, isn’t it, how scripture written thousands of years ago can continue to capture the lived realities of our lives today. It is what makes it Living Word rather than lived history.

“A week later his disciples were again in the house.”

It is a week after our own Easter celebration and we are, again, worshipping online, in our homes.

Like the disciples, we are separated from the world, locked in our upper rooms, out of fear.

In the first Letter of Peter, the author writes of our inheritance of a new birth, a living Hope that we have been given by God to cling to and in which we are to be rejoicing, “even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials.”

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

“So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” (MT28:8)

Fear and great joy. The experience at the tomb of Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, the mixing of fear and joy in one, is an experience many of us know well. Great joy is often the partner of intense fear. We ride roller coasters for the joy borne of fear. New parents live with intense joy and boundless fear as they navigate their responsibility for a life.

I will be quite honest with you, my friends: I do not need to preach right now. In order to make meaning of this most familiar story of Jesus’s suffering and death this year, it would be enough for us to all sit in silence, to let the words of John’s Gospel echo in our ears, and to take in the sheer strangeness of our lives now in the midst of this pandemic.

In previous years, preachers on this holy day would exhort us to stay a while. “Do not be like Peter and abandon Jesus while he faces trial. Do not avert your gaze from the man on the cross, dying one of the most gruesome deaths humans ever invented. Remain at Golgotha. Do not rush to Easter.”