Grief & Hope

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! It is so exciting to be here celebrating Easter with you today. We have journeyed through Lent and Holy Week together and now we have made it to the day that is above all other days. To be honest I have a mix of emotions. I have enjoyed and will miss the extra intentionality placed on Lent and the services that we do. I appreciate all the ways that Holy Week really prepares us for the celebration of Easter. At the same time I will be glad that I can get back to a more normal routine and not worry about planning and doing all the extra services. While I enjoy them they do take a lot of extra time and emotional commitment to do them. And I think that is why I have treasured our theme of Everything in Between so much this Lent. It has given us the space to live into a range of feelings and spaces, while knowing that most of us ebb and flow between the two extremes that were given to us to think about.

And today is no different. We are presented with the opposing sides of grief and hope. And if we are honest with the Easter scripture, and look at it from the eyes of everyone mentioned, we can see grief, hope, and everything in between. The women come to the tomb with the mindset that they are going to prepare Jesus’ body for its final resting place, according to custom. I’m sure it doesn’t take much imagination to know that they women are in full grief mode. And if we imagine the 11 disciples and all the other followers huddled in groups at different places, are also living into the third day of grief.

In fact, they are so full of grief that when the women tell them that Jesus isn’t there, they don’t believe them. While our translation tells us that the disciples shrug off the women’s ‘story’ as an idle tale, another possible translation is that the disciples understood it to be total nonsense. Almost to the point of saying that the women are not making any sense by what they are saying. Some commentaries even go so far as to say this word was used when talking about people who were so sick they were delirious and essentially had no idea what they were saying. I feel like in this moment the disciples are not really prepared to hear what the women have to say even if it is good news. You might saying to yourself but Pastor Brian, Peter ran to the tomb and walked away amazed at what happened. Well, again, the word amazed can also mean marveled, and in that amazement and marveling, I believe that Peter finds himself somewhere between grief and hope. I feel like he is in the trying to sort out his emotions of the death he saw on Friday with the empty tomb he now sees.

So, while Easter is a joyful day for us it was a rather mixed emotion day for everyone there that first morning. I know I say mixed emotions and I don’t mean that they were torn about how to feel, but mixed emotions of trying to make sense of it all. And what hit me this year in understanding all these emotions was what the angels, or men dressed in dazzling clothes, say to the women in verse 6. Remember. Then, after they remind them what Jesus said, verse 8 tells us that the women remembered. That memory sparks their urgent return to tell everyone else.

Remember. As I meditated on this word, I began to realize how powerful a word it is. Remember. When I remember my mom, I, like everyone in this story have mixed emotions. I always feel grief knowing she is not around. But I also remember all the good times we had. I recently shared with some of you a story of a fishing trip my mom, brother and I took down in Mexico for the day years ago. It was good to remember that and joyful to remember how excited she was to catch, snag, the huge Halibut she reeled in. In a way, I was transported back in time as I brought myself into that moment of remembering. To be honest sometimes it takes me a little bit to move out of the grief when I remember her. But I also remember that in our baptism we were promised salvation, and so I know that just as my mom was reunited with the one who we celebrate as conquering death, that I too will one day be reunited with him and join all the saints, including my mom. So it is in that moment that I am able to move from remembering and feeling grief to remembering and feeling hope.

I believe that is what the women were able to do. The angels tell them to remember and in that moment of sharing what Jesus had told them, they were transported back to those moments when they were walking or sitting with Jesus and he shared with them that he, in fact, would suffer, die, and in three days rise again. And I wonder if the women as they were in that memory triggered by the angels, were counting on their fingers, Friday, Saturday, Sunday; three days. As they fully remembered, they then moved from days of intense grief to a future of hope. A hope where Jesus’ prediction, his promise, had come true. In that transition from grief to hope, they were compelled to go and tell the eleven and all the rest what they had seen and heard.

And even though Peter was still trying to make sense of what the women had said and what he had seen as he was marveled and amazed at what had happened, you do have to imagine that just the ability to snap out of his grief enough to go to the tomb and look for himself, he had to have some amount of hope inside of him. Hope that the women were right, hope that Jesus was right, hope that there was more to this story, and that this in fact was not the end.

And even though we are all here to celebrate the fact that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead. That this day is the day that is greater than any other day, we cannot deny the fact that all of us here, when the Easter celebration ends, we are somewhere in the spectrum of grief and hope. Some of us may be here and thinking that it’s Easter and so we must be filled with joy and hope, but that might not be the reality of how we feel. We might be closer to grief because of what we are facing right now in our lives. I am here to tell you that you need to embrace and understand that wherever you find yourself in the spectrum between grief and hope, that is perfectly fine, even on Easter.

The angels met the women at the tomb right in the midst of their grief even though I am sure the angels were praising God like never before on that day. I’m sure the heavens were exploding with the most joyous praises to God, yet God sent two angels to meet the women to remind them what this day is really about. God meets us in our grief. I don’t want to get ahead of myself because we here the Emmaus story next week, but I will say that Jesus himself, meets two disciples on the road in the midst of their confusion, their grief, their marveling, their possible hope. God meets us where we are to help us in whatever we may be going through.

Perhaps that is the power of the Easter story. No matter where we are, no matter what we are facing, no matter how we are feeling, God comes to us. God sends people to us. In that coming and in that sending of we too hear the words remember. Remember what God has done. Remember what Easter means. Remember and draw hope and comfort from a God who sent God’s one and only son to die on the cross to forgive us of our sins so that we might forever be joined to God. To remind us that no matter what God meets us where we are and calls us to remember. Calls us out of our grief and journeys with us until we can, like the women, like the disciples and all the others that first Easter morning, move from that grief into a world of hope where we can clearly see the joy of the resurrection. That is the power of Easter. That is the power of God. Christ is risen, He is risen indeed. Amen.