God Took a Selfie and Gave Him to Us
Easter Sunday C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
Alleluia! Christ is risen (Christ is risen indeed, alleluia!) Yet that first Easter morning, despite the fresh bloom of early spring, everything looked dead. Mary Magdalene and the women made their way to the tomb at early dawn. As they did, the ribbons of color spreading through the eastern sky were not beautiful. The budding garden was not fragrant. The singing birds could not be heard. The women went to the tomb shrouded in grief. All their senses were silenced by the crushing weight of loss.
Throughout the Northern hemisphere the natural world testified to the promise of new life. Yet, neither these women, nor anyone else, expected anything but death. Springtime comes to grass, trees, and living things but bodies stay put where they go into the ground. Jesus had told them—that he would die, and on the third day, rise again— despite this—Mary Magdalene, the women, and the rest of Jesus’ followers, still lived in a Good Friday world filled with the shock and horror of the cross. They were like many of us who have lost a loved one, lost a job, lost a relationship; many of us who feel our future sinking behind the lawless, capricious, self-righteous, and tragically destructive will-to-power and greed.
We greeted Easter last night, and again, this morning with jubilation and with trumpets. But here, walking with these women, we are confronted with something quieter, more mysterious, and perhaps more resonant with our own lives. That first Easter morning it was hard to be sure what you were seeing. Those Jesus-followers stumbled in the half-light on that third day after Jesus’s crucifixion, confused and afraid. The details didn’t compute. Where was the stone? Were those angels standing beside them in that unlit tomb? And where was Jesus? Are they sure the tomb is empty?
It was “…the first day of the week, at early dawn” (Luke 24:1). That’s when Easter begins. “It begins in darkness. It begins amidst fear, bewilderment, pain, and a profound loss of certainty.” Perhaps you know the place? The creeds and clarifications we cherish today will come much later. What came first were variations on a theme that sound a lot like our own lives—like a woman I heard sing about Jesus who struggles with cancer and must carry her own oxygen—or another woman I visit who testifies to the power of God from her sagging nursing home bed. Easter is what happens when ordinary people brush up against the surprise of an extraordinary God. Easter looks like people of a broken, hungry humanity who encounter a bizarre and inexplicable Love in the half-light of dawn (Debie Thomas, I Have Seen the Lord, April 14, 2019).
Alleluia! Christ is risen (Christ is risen indeed, alleluia!) This was the disciple’s great discovery. Our gospels tell the stories of individual people having profoundly individual encounters with Christ. These encounters are not identical. Last night we read when Peter saw the empty tomb, he ran away and returned to his home. When the beloved disciple saw it, he believed but did not understand When Mary saw it, she ran to tell the disciples who promptly dismissed her story as an idle tail. In other words, we come to the empty tomb as ourselves, no better or worse.
What they discovered is that everything they heard and saw in Jesus is a message about all of us, about humanity, and indeed, about all of creation. They learned that had God accomplished something extraordinary and decisive in Christ Jessus. It was as if God took a selfie and handed it to us in everything Jesus said, did, and endured. God took a selfie and look—God is smiling! God is waving and inviting us in to become part of the undying life together with all humanity, and all life in Christ. “The Word became flesh and lived among us. We have seen the glory of God in the glory of the one and only Son, Jesus, who came from the creator full of grace and truth”. (Jn 1:14).
“Today is the feast of hope, direction, purpose, meaning, and community. We’re all in this together. The cynicism and negativity that our country and many other countries have descended into show a clear example of what happens when people do not have hope. If it’s all hopeless, we individually lose hope too. Easter is an announcement of a common hope.” (Richard Rohr, Daily Meditations, “A Universal Message,” 4/20/25)
The first disciples discovered that the resurrecton is not so much a proposition to be believed or not believed as it is a way of living. Resurrection is a way of seeing. Because we have seen the living God in Jesus, now we can more easily see the presence of God already at work everywhere and always in everyone, including ourselves. Joined to this loving presence of God fills our world with color again, fills our heart with hope again, gives us reason to love again, gives us courage to stand again in solidarity with all victims who are being thrust onto crosses fashioned by the principalities and powers today.
I invite you to turn to page seven in your worship folder. Do you see the small image there? Do you see the bunny? Or, perhaps, you see something else? Do you see the duck? With a little practice, maybe you can see them both? Resurrection is a way of seeing that changes everything. Easter doesn’t divide us into rabbit people or duck people. That is the way of the world that leads to violence and the death of hope. Resurrection seeing is not either/or. It is both/and. Easter is about seeing the whole duck/bunny. This way of seeing is everything. It is as precious and life-giving as it is fragile.
Easter seeing comes like a lamb before wolves, with a word to shatter hard won common sense. Easter living comes like a dove into our Good Friday world. It is a dog-eat-dog dog; only the strong survive; white makes right; if you want peace prepare for war world. But here comes Easter, telling its idle tales again. Here comes Easter whistling a different tune. Easter makes promises like those we heard from Isaiah, God is doing a new thing: a new heaven and a new earth. “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” No longer must we consume one another to survive in this new world.
Easter says hope never dies. Easter says all your tomorrows can be different from your yesterdays. Easter says life is stronger than death; light conquers darkness; love is stronger than hatred. Easter does not a return to the past but moves always toward the future. When false expectations, flawed speculations, wrong theologies, or hateful ideologies threaten to wall us off from grace and each other, God’s Easter is going to break through that wall.
Since ancient times Christians have called Easter the “first day.” From Easter comes our practice of worshiping on Sunday morning. It is the first day of the week. It is also the first day of a new creation, sometimes called the “eighth day”, because on it, Christ restored the image of God in humankind and in so doing also brought restoration and renewal to all creation. We are an Easter people. We are a new creation through the gift of God’s grace revealed in Christ Jesus.
Of all the things Easter promises this may be the most preposterous—that we are now members of the resurrected body of Christ. Within you are seeds of hope to renew the hope of the whole world. The cross reveals the depths of cruelty, violence, and immorality to which we can sink, at the very same time it marks the path God has opened to lead us forward. The cross is a Tree of Life with leaves for the healing of the nations. ‘When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain…see, how, the green blade rises from the buried grain! Love is come again like wheat arising green.’ (ELW #379)
