Wow. What does one say? I must confess, sometimes I find it awfully intimidating to do anything other than say, “he is risen”, sit down, sing our last hymn, and surprise our family with an early arrival to Easter Lunch. But I don’t think that would be satisfying.
One of things that I find frustrating about moving around like us Methodist clergy do is that just as soon as you figure out where everything is located in the grocery store—you know where you really can sneak in and sneak out to get just that one thing you need—once you’ve learned the grocery store, its time to move onto the next place. And Lord help me, there’s so many options around here for where to shop for groceries that its an all-day expedition—that’s one day for each store, mind you.
Just like going into the grocery store and looking in the wrong aisle for something, that’s what these women were doing. They were looking in the wrong place for Jesus. You can’t blame them, really/. After all, they went to the place where the expected to find him—the place where they had laid him. It was what they expected. But their expectation were not met, he was not there.
Do we sometimes look for Jesus in the wrong places? Oh I don’t mean it in a literal sense. We know that Jesus has ascended into heaven. What I mean is this: Where do we look when we are trying to find the holy in our lives. Surely when we are looking for Jesus, the places we expect to find Jesus can be trusted—our community of faith, church (a little child thinks that God lives here), a Sunday School class, a close friend. But I wonder if we sometimes miss out on God’s blessings by not having out RADAR tuned to look for Jesus in those unexpected places. I heard a theologian once say that if Jesus were to come to earth for the first time, today, he would not come to the United States. No, he’d come to a family in a remote village in Belize. So I wonder if when we are having our public discourse on he plight of undocumented workers, that maybe one of their children might have been Jesus.
In Jesus’ life, he tripped up the religious folk by not being where people expected him to be—from when he was in the temple as a child to hanging out with all the sinners when he was practicing ministry. We need not be surprised that he is not where he was supposed to be in his resurrection and neither is he where we expect him to be today.
Can you imagine how surprised the Mary’s were—they thought that Jesus’ body had been carried away only to see him walking down the road with them a few minutes later? To go from grief to awe in such a short time.
Many of you saw my wife’s picture in the news yesterday. I always new that I was going to one day be known as the husband of Rev. Allen Grady. I just just didn’t think it would be this soon. So to bring her back to earth in everyone’s mind, let me tell this story the Allen’s like to tell. One day, the entire Allen family went to the mall. They found their parking spot (like true southerners looking for the spot with the most shade). They get in the mall and realize they had quite a few things to look for and not much time. Martha goes one way, with Nancy. Hoyt goes the other. They say that they are going to meet back that same place at a given time… let’s say 3 o’clock. Well, three oclock rolls around and everyone is there… except for Susan. In the rush to get everything done, no one bothered to see who was going to take little Susan. About the time that everyone in the family was starting to panic… and by panic I mean cry… here comes Susan, skipping back up to her family. She looks in her mothers panic-yet-relieved eyes and say, “Hi mommy.” Ask Susan to recount that story and she talks as if she was not scared. She walked around looking in windows and saying hi to people. Sooner or later, she wound up back where she started.
Maybe that’s a more appropriate way to look at Easter—I was thinking about this when I saw all those children wondering around this campus looking for Easter eggs, high and low, yesterday. We go looking for Jesus and he’s not where we expect him to be… “no, Jesus, don’t go into those other parts of my life… stay here in your church-room. That way I’ll know where you are.” Only he’s not there. He’s out doing hospitality, greeting a cold world with a warm smile. And just about the time that we get panicked into thinking, “oh no, what will we do.” Here comes Jesus, skipping up to us with that same warm smile and say, “my precious child, don’t you know, just like you can’t keep me boxed up in a room, neither can you lose me. I might not be where you want me to be and I definitely won’t be where you expect me. But where ever life takes you, there I am, too.”
That writer for the AJC was calling up preachers and asking what the significance of Easter is for us, today. Well, I didn’t get a phone call but here’s my answer. You’re found, child. You’re found.
Happy Easter.
Amen.
