THE DAWN OF THE NEW CREATION
Texts: I Corinthians 15:1-9, 11 and Luke 23:55-24:12

What happens when Easter begins to happen? Surprise, amazement, fear, bewilderment. We are perplexed; we are wild with joy. This is the absolutely new and the wildly unexpected happening before our blinking eyes. I invite you into the mystery of Easter today.

I begin with the witness of Luke. To use Paul's words, "I hand on to you what has been delivered to me." It feels like a sacred duty to me: To hand on to you what has been handed to me, person to person, community to community, over two thousand years of history.

I remember going to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit last year and standing almost in awe before those actual fragments of manuscripts, hand-scribed passages of Hebrew scripture from two thousand years ago. It would be close to sacrilege if I would take a pen and begin to change a Hebrew letter here and there to suit my fancy and fit my theology.

That's how I hold the five witnesses to the Resurrection: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. I examine them, translate and interpret them, ask questions of them, wrestle with them, enter into conversation with them. I do not change them. I hand them on to you as they were delivered to me.

Picture the five witnesses to the Resurrection as five overlapping circles as in a Wenn diagram. They each have their own stories to tell; they each have stories that overlap with one or more of the other circles. And at the center there is a shared witness, bedrock witness to the Resurrection that all five hold and tell.

What is common to all is an empty tomb and then a series of appearances of the risen Jesus in a transfigured body that Paul has to invent a phrase to describe: A "spiritual body." These appearances are not provable, not in our modern sense of provable. They stand too far away; they are wrapped in mystery. But without them Christianity is unexplainable.

I

Luke begins his Easter account, as do all the Gospels, with women. They are described as the women who had "followed him from Galilee" (Luke 23:49). They had watched Jesus die on the cross. They had followed those who put Jesus' body in the tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea. They had prepared spices and ointment to anoint his body. Then they had observed Sabbath and rested. Later in our text Luke tells us who they are: Mary Magdalene; Joanna, wife of Herod's steward; Mary, mother of James the disciple; and others.

Early dawn on Sunday they came to the tomb to anoint his body. They found the stone rolled away from the entrance. They went in and found the body of Jesus gone. They did not know what to think; they were puzzled, perplexed, confused.

Then suddenly there appeared two men with clothing shining with dazzling light. I have no experience with such. If I reported such you would take me to a doctor. The women trembled, terrified, and lowered their faces to the ground.

The angels - - or "messengers," which is what angel means in the Bible, messengers from God - - did not say what angels often say in the Bible: "Be not afraid." They asked a question. Sometimes a question is what we most need, not an announcement: A question which begins to draw us into the light the way early dawn begins to introduce us to the day.

They ask the women: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" Imagine going to visit the grave of someone you love. You hear a voice say: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" What could these words mean? Is the one I love, whose body lies here, not dead but living? Can you begin to believe such a thing?

The angels' words are what I'd like to say to Titanic director, James Cameron, and his cohorts who made their documentary on what they claim could be the bones of Jesus. I call them "Raiders of the Lost Bones." I want to ask: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?"

Then the angels complete their announcement: "He is not dead, but has been raised." Then they say, "Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise?" That Jesus told these things to these women means that they were part of the inner circle of Jesus' disciples. Not just Peter, James and John. Mary Magdalene and Joanna, too!

I have a friend who played a practical joke as a boy. His parents would always leave a murder mystery on the bedside table in the guest room. My friend and his brother sneaked into the guest room and carefully tore out the last chapter. When the guest came he began to read. The next morning he came to the breakfast table bleary-eyed and with the question: "Who dun it?" How did it end? The last chapter of a good mystery novel not only tells you who did it but also helps explain everything you've been reading about throughout the book. The characters, the actions, all.

The resurrection of Jesus begins to explain everything we've read before, experienced before. It gives us new eyes to see what God has been doing all along and what God intends for the world from this point on.

The text says they remembered Jesus' words, then went to tell the eleven disciples and others what had happened.

And how did the eleven respond? "But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them."

Would they have believed men? It's a tired, old story - - and tragic: Only men can be messengers of the divine, we are told. But Jesus is making women the first messengers of Easter!

An idle tale, they thought. But there was something about the women's words that hooked Peter. He ran, he ran to the tomb. The last time we had seen Peter was on the night of Jesus' arrest. He had denied he even knew Jesus. Now he heard the report of the women and ran. And he stooped and looked in. And he saw the linen burial cloths lying there. And no body lying there. And he went home filled with amazement.

II

This is how Easter begins: With an empty tomb, with angels' words, with women the first evangelists of Easter, with people confused and disbelieving and filled with wonderment. And if this were all that happened, Christianity would never have been born.

Something else began to happen. The risen Jesus began to appear to people in a body which was like and unlike his earthly body. All five witnesses have their different stories. In the weeks ahead I will tell Luke's stories, but today I want to go to the fifth witness, to Paul. He is writing to the Corinthians. It's about 53-54 C.E., twenty years or so after Easter.

"I hand on to you what has been delivered to me," he says, and then begins to quote exact words passed down over these twenty years. You can imagine them read in earliest Christian worship as we read them today:

That Christ died for our sins
in accordance with the scriptures
and that he was buried
and that he was raised on the third day
in accordance with the scriptures
and that he appeared to Cephus [Peter]
then to the twelve.
Then he appeared to more than five hundred at one time
most of whom are still alive, though some have died.
Then he appeared to James [the brother of Jesus]
then to all the apostles.
Last of all [Paul adds], as to one untimely born,
he appeared also to me.

Whom did Paul leave out? Ah yes, the women! The ones who first witnessed the resurrection and told the men! It is a sad fact that in the ancient world women were not counted as reliable witnesses. It is a fact of the new creation that God called women to be the first witnesses to the resurrection! Mary Magdalene became known as "Apostle to the Apostles"! How far has the church moved into the new creation? Not far enough!

Then there are those almost impenetrable words: "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." Could this mean that he died on account of our sins, because of them? And that God was using his death to deal with our sins, ours and our world's? Then the words: "He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures."

And here I go back to the mystery novel and the last chapter, which gives us new eyes to see everything that's gone before. All the pieces begin to fall in place.

Jesus' death and resurrection give us new light to see all of scripture. Easter illumines a God who has been at work raising the dead since the beginning:

- the God who scooped us out of the clay and blew into us the breath of life;

- the God who took Noah and started the world all over again when it had descended into violent chaos;

- the God who took Abraham and Sarah and began a new people;

- the God who heard the cries of Hebrew people in Egypt and passed them over from slavery into freedom, from death into life;

- the God who went into Exile with the Hebrew people and then delivered them from Babylonian captivity;

- the God who said in Hosea 6:2: "After two days God will revive us; and on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him."

- the God whose own suffering servant would bear our sins and make us whole;

- the God of Ezekiel who showed us a valley of dry bones and said, "Can these dry bones live?" Then said, "I will send my spirit and they will rise: Toe bone to head bone, flesh, sinews, rise!"

When Paul says, "In accordance with scriptures," he is not prooftexting a line here or a line there. He is saying, This is what God has been about forever. And he is announcing that now in the death and resurrection of Jesus something new has dawned. It is what Paul called "the new creation."

He had experienced it in the most radical way. There is no plainer way to say it: Paul was a jihadist for his faith. He persecuted the church with violence.

Then what had happened to others happened to him: The risen Jesus appeared to him, and Paul the jihadist became Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ, evangelist of the new creation.

There was in first-century Judaism a fervent hope in resurrection. Not all had this hope, but many did. And this is what resurrection meant: That one day God would raise from the dead all the righteous Jews from all ages and bring a complete transformation of history. The kingdom would fully come. There would be no more pain, suffering, injustice, oppression. It would be the resurrection of the whole world.

When Jesus talked to his disciples about the Son of Man, about death and resurrection, this was probably what they were imagining. It was all they could imagine. It may have been all Jesus could imagine.

But what happened on Easter was something completely new, outside their frame of reference: That a single person, Jesus of Nazareth, would be raised by God, and that his resurrection was the beginning, the dawn, of the new creation.

This new creation was not a new creation fully come, but one which had dawned. It was the new creation at work in the midst of the old creation. Which means if we enter it, we enter it by faith, by the slenderest of faith.

There's still enough of the old creation around for us to believe that's all there is. There's still enough of the old creation around in us to hold us back. Eli Wiesel, holocaust survivor, Nobel Laureate, has said: "I have my reasons not to have faith in God. I have my reasons not to have faith in humanity. I chose not to use them."

Easter faith gives us eyes to see the dawn of God's new creation in the midst of the old. It gives us courage to live by the new creation rather than by the old one.

So now we live by the forgiveness of sins rather than by the twin bondages of guilt and unforgivingness. Easter came first to the guilty and defeated disciples as utter grace, free forgiveness and a new commissioning.

So we choose by faith to work for justice in the midst of the powers and systems of injustice. The old creation is giving way brick by brick, law by law, institution by institution, person by person, to the new creation.

We say in our church covenant here that we "covenant to be a community of God's new creation" and as such are "open to all and closed to none." The divisions, hatreds and bigotries of the old creation no longer count; they are giving way to the shalom of the new creation.

Easter faith lets us trust in the God of Easter who says: "Behold, I am making all things new.... In this world you will find tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world!"

Easter is the dawn of the new creation. And while it is not yet fully come we can taste the goodness of its morning light.

If anyone is in Christ, behold, there is a new creation!

When any prison door opens, behold a new creation. When the hungry are fed, behold a new creation.

When the ancient enmities between religions are overcome, behold, a new creation.

When anyone turns to Christ and follows the way of Jesus and is baptized, behold, there is a new creation.

When any broken relationship finds healing, behold a new creation!

We experience it in every experience of joy. "We have God's joy in our blood," says Buechner. We experience it in every experience of love. We have God's love in our blood. We experience it in every experience of pardon, healing, hope and release. We've got God's pardon, healing, hope and release in our blood.

Why do you seek the living among the dead? Christ has been raised!