This past Wednesday, I was standing at a local coffee shop waiting for my iced coffee. Over the loud speakers, turned up a little too loud, poured out the chorus of Bob Marley’s song Three Little Birds, and it was starting to grate on me:
Don’t worry about a thing
‘Cause every little thing gonna be alright
Singing don’t worry about a thing
‘Cause every little thing gonna be alright
And as I stood there and looked around it didn’t seem like every little thing was going to be alright.
Maybe I was in a dark and stormy mood this past Wednesday waiting for my coffee, because the story of Holy Week swirled in my mind….But I couldn’t square “every little thing is going to be alright” with the betrayal, torture, and death of Jesus, with the bloody collusion of empire and religion, and the maddening silence and complicity of the crowds.
And as I looked about the coffee shop – there were signs that other folks had things to worry about. Not every little thing seemed to be going alright.
Next to me was a grad student with a thick stack of note cards and a Psychiatric Disorders textbook in hand. He was fidgeting himself, looking anxious to get studying as he waited for his drink.
At the table beside me were two friends, one sharing something that seemed to be weighing heavy on her, the other listened intently with a furrowed brow.
A man sat alone with his coffee, reading a newspaper. I didn’t look over his shoulder, but my mind wandered to what saddening stories filled those pages. Was he reading about people whisked off and disappeared to prisons in El Salvador or hidden ICE detention centers in Louisiana? Was he reading a long-form piece about the millions displaced by war in the Sudan or Congo? Was he reading about the ongoing food blockade and continued bombings in Gaza?
I finally got my coffee. And Bob Marley’s voice singing “don’t worry about a thing, cause every little thing gonna be alright” finally ended – which was good – because I was starting to spiral.
But neither Bob’s cheery words nor the caffeine nor the beautiful bright sunny spring afternoon were nearly enough to convince me that things are gonna be alright.
The women disciples of Jesus we meet at the close of Luke’s gospel in the cold darkness of early morning are under no illusions that everything’s gonna be alright.
They had just witnessed the death of their friend, their teacher, their Messiah.
They are in a fog when we meet them, carried by grief and adrenaline and the love they have for each other and the love they have for Jesus.
Their heavy feet walk through the dawn stillness, shuffling forward by muscle memory. When you don’t know what else to do all you can do is show up with your body.
So the women show up with fragrant spices to give back dignity to a corpse disfigured and defiled by violence. The women get up before first light, propelled by the cultural memory that instructed them in how to care for and honor the dead.
And if their muscle memory kept them moving under the profound weight of grief and terror and if their cultural memory gave them something symbolic to do with that grief – what they encountered next, left these female disciples at a loss.
“They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus…And they did not know what to make of this,” the text says.
Their memories – carried deep in their bodies and in their sense of cultural and religious belonging took them to the tomb – to grieve and honor Jesus – but at the sight of this empty tomb – they have no idea what to do or say. They have no idea of what to make of this. They’re perplexed.
They came to grieve – but they are wholly unprepared for this emptiness, with no dead body to honor, only crumpled up linen dressings and the hollowness of damp dark rock and what lingers of death’s stench.
They remember nothing that tells them how to take in or respond to the absence of Jesus’ body.
And that’s maybe the whole point.
The resurrection of Jesus is so astounding, so miraculous, so revolutionary, so uproariously good that they don’t know what to do with it.
We don’t know what to do with it either.
It doesn’t integrate easily with our other memories. Jesus’ resurrection is a disruption of our very way of remembering.
In the Resurrection – God’s Love has triumphed over death.
And to stare into the empty tomb with these women – is to allow God to break death’s grip on our memory, so that we can search for and proclaim and remember with our lives that Christ is indeed risen.
Two dazzling divine messengers jolt the women out of their dazed confusion.
“Why do you look for the living among the dead? Jesus isn’t here, but has been raised,” the bright voices say, almost chastising the women for their now-misguided dawn mission.
“He has been raised. Remember, remember, what he told you while he was still in Galilee, that the Human One must be handed over to sinners, be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”
The divine call to the women and to us is to remember the impossible.
The women are invited to remember what Jesus had been telling them all along. That walking his way of love, would lead to death, but that death would not be the end.
Jogged by divine assistance, the words of Jesus now lodge themselves differently within the women.
The resurrection to these women, these first witnesses, is not the presence of their Living Lord Jesus – but his absence.
The women carry the memory of the promise of the resurrection… that will set them on a search, looking everywhere they go for the living Christ.
The resurrection promise beckons them out of this empty tomb so that they might return them to their lives to search for Jesus…so that they might go back to the community of Jesus’ followers and proclaim the news that Christ has risen.
Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other unnamed women, became the first preachers of the resurrection. The male disciples dismiss them for who they are as women and demean their preaching as an “idle tale” and “nonsense.” When the women proclaim that, “Christ is risen!” there is no, “He is risen, indeed!” echoing back triumphantly.
Peter is a bit of an exception – in that it’s not clear he has much faith in the good news the woman proclaim but at least his curiosity gets him moving, to peer into the tomb and ponder what has happened, but he keeps it to himself.
Yet for the rest of Jesus’ followers to respond with their lives that, “He is risen, indeed!” will require embodied appearances of Jesus, risen from the dead – walking with them, breaking bread with them, eating with them, entering the fear and terror of their hearts and homes to announce “Peace be with you!”
So dear church – on this beautiful, bright, Sunday when we celebrate the Resurrection of our friend, our teacher, our Savior – I am not asking you to make sense of the Resurrection.
The tomb is wonderously, mysteriously, nonsenially, comically, empty…
But I invite you to remember the Resurrection today and to be re-membered into beloved community by it, because God and God’s resurrecting love has swallowed up death in victory.
I invite you to remember the promise of God’s love made known in Jesus, which is a love that neither death nor sword nor cross can hold down.
To remember means returning, like the women, to the places and communities where we are from, returning to the dirty dishes and homework and dreams and disappointments and schedules, to announce, even if we hardly know what we are saying or what it all even means, that “Jesus is Risen from the dead.”
And to proclaim that “Christ is Risen,” is to hold on tenaciously to hope. It is to believe that redemption is possible.
It is to cling, with fledgling, fragile faith to God’s promise that greed and money have not won out, that violence will not have the last word, that the ultimate power is a Love that no one can buy or control or own or dictate.
To proclaim that Christ is Risen is to go from today with our hearts full of song from this worship service and our bellies full from the potluck, leaving this Camp New Hope wide-eyed with the new hope of God, carried from here by the persistent expectation that Christ is alive, moving and working.
To be a disciple of Jesus is to remember his promise that the Resurrecting Life and Love of God is our ultimate hope, our beginning and end, our strength and our sustenance when we are weak and tired and grieving, when we’ve exhausted the last sinews of muscle memory and the last threads of cultural memory have worn thin.
To be a resurrection-remembering follower of the crucified and risen Son of God from Galilee means returning home to proclaim our whole life long that Jesus is Risen, He is Risen Indeed.
We will never fully know what the Resurrection means until we turn and remember Christ’s Words and the call of God to leave the empty tomb where Jesus’ body is not to be found, and we return to our lives, to the road and the table and anywhere the fearful and hurting are gathered, remembering that this is where Jesus, the Risen One, will meet us.
Jesus, the Risen Christ, will even meet us at the coffee shop, not to assuage us that “everything will be alright,” not with a message to “don’t worry about a thing.”
Instead, Jesus, the Risen Son of God, offers us a deeper promise. Not a life free of worry and fear, but Jesus promises us a life where he is alive, where we are alive, where the Love of God is alive in us, where Christ is on the loose. So let us leave the empty tomb, giving thanks that Love has triumphed over death.
Let us remember to remember the impossible.