The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado

April 8, 2007

Easter Day – B
Acts 10:34-43
Colossians 3:1-4
Luke 24:1-10

In the early days of the Church Christians referred to Easter Day in ways that pointed to the unique happiness of the Day. They called it the “Queen of Days,” the “Festival of festivals,” the “Day alone great.”

“Easter,” wrote C. S. Dodd, ”was a time of exuberant joy.... All labor ceased, all trades were suspended.... The law courts were closed, alms were given to the poor, slaves were freed. Easter Day, in fact, became known as the Dominica Gaudii, [the] ‘Sunday of Joy.’ [And] in some places, the clergy, to increase the mirth, recited humorous stories from the pulpit for the purpose of exciting the risus Paschalis, ’the Easter smile.’”

Not a bad idea. It reminded me of the story I told several years ago, a story that’s worth retelling, so I’m going to tell it again. It’s the story about the misfortune of the construction worker, who arrived at the building site early one morning and found that the heavy winds and rains had dislodged a number of tiles from the roof during the night.

“I rigged up a beam with a pulley at the top of the building,” he said, ”and I hoisted up a barrel full of tiles. I emptied the barrel and put all the tiles on the roof, and then I let the empty barrel down. I went back down and hoisted up a second load of tiles, and I tied the rope securely at the ground, leaving the second load of tiles in the barrel and hanging from the pulley, and went up again by ladder to repair the roof.

“Once I was on the roof, I found that I needed to use only about half the tiles from the first load I had hoisted up, and when I finished fixing the roof there were a lot of tiles left over. So I put all the unused tiles from the first load on top of the second load that remained in the barrel. Then I went down to the ground again and untied the rope.

“Unfortunately, the barrel of tiles was now heavier than I was, and before I knew what was happening the barrel started down, jerking me off the ground.

“Unfortunately, I decided to hang on, and half way up I met the barrel coming down, which gave me a severe blow on the shoulder. I then continued on to the top, where I banged my head against the beam and got my finger jammed in the pulley.

“Unfortunately, when the barrel hit the ground its bottom burst and spilled out all the tiles. Now I was heavier than the barrel, and I started down again at great speed.

“Halfway down, I met the barrel coming up, which hit me in the leg and cut my shin. When I hit the ground, I landed on the tiles, getting several cuts from the sharp edges.

“At this point I must have lost my presence of mind, because, unfortunately, I let go of the rope and the barrel came back down, giving me another blow on the head. And that’s why I'm in the hospital.”

Sometimes life is like that. As soon as one problem is solved, another problem bites you, and life, as the little old lady said, seems to be just one damned thing after another, and then you die.

And maybe that’s also why we’re in church this morning – for the same reason that man was in the hospital. Because, for him, the hospital was a place of healing and hope after a morning of one damned thing after another.

I know that you have come to church this Easter Day for many different reasons. You have come with different injuries, different anxieties, different concerns and needs. Many of you are here because this, or some church, is where you are every Sunday. Perhaps some of you came today just because someone especially invited you. Maybe some of you just woke up early this morning and looked out the window and said, ”Oh, it’s Easter. Well, it’s too cold to play golf, so what the heck!” Some, I imagine, are here because it is, after all, Easter Day, and Easter Day is like opening day of the baseball season. The stadium is always full and the stadium liturgy glorious on opening day.
But what I want to address this morning is not how you came to Easter, but how you will leave Easter.

The Gospels tell about the women who first came to Easter. Three women went to that first Easter long ago for their own personal reasons, each with her own one-thing-after-another experience of life, each with her own injuries and anxieties and fears, and each with her own experience of Jesus. It was still dark when they made their way through the cold streets of Jerusalem, which were quiet at last after a weekend orgy of violence and crucifixion.

Their friend was dead. But they had one more thing to do for him. It was a customary, loving thing to do. On this forlorn morning, they went out to the cemetery to perform one final act of devotion for Jesus, their dead teacher and friend – to dress his decaying body with sweet-smelling ointment. And when they got there, when they got to the tomb, to the place of death, they found that the stone before the door of the tomb had been rolled away.

Luke says that two men were there “dressed in dazzling apparel.” Matthew says it was one person, an angel. But Mark just says it was a “young man dressed in a white robe, sitting inside the tomb, on the right side.”

In any case, the man or men, the angel or angels, gave the women the news. “Jesus of Nazareth? He is risen. He is not here. Go tell his disciples that he is going ahead of you to Galilee and that you and they will meet him there.”

Now Matthew and Luke say that the women then ran back to town with great joy and with great excitement reported everything they had seen and heard. But Mark tells the Easter story differently. Mark ends his report of Easter abruptly, even awkwardly, ambiguously. Mark says that after the man at the tomb told the women that Jesus was not there, and that he had risen, they fled from the place in terror, and that they said nothing to anyone, because they were frightened out of their wits!

Mark tells of no appearances of the risen Lord, no walks with the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus, no meetings with Jesus in a locked room, no breakfasts with him on the beach.

It's no wonder, then, that