9:00 am Monday Morning

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
March 23, 2008 - Easter

9:00 am Monday Morning
Matthew 28:1-10
Romans 6:1-11

9:00 am Monday morning, tomorrow morning:
Easter will be past.
Search high and low,
and there probably won’t be
an Easter egg to be found,
except perhaps in the deepest recesses of the family room couch.
Chocolate rabbits may still be hopping around,
but none of them will sport ears.
Leftover Peeps will settle in for another year’s sleep,
smug in their confectionate knowledge that
they already know the secret to eternal life.

9:00 am tomorrow morning
and Easter vacation will be over for school children and teachers.
9:00 am tomorrow morning
and clergy from every denomination
will make their morning coffee
a little stronger to give them the push they need
to pack up for post-Easter vacations.
9:00 am tomorrow morning
and most church offices will be closed,
staff and lay members alike happy for the break
following the busy-ness of Lent.

This year’s Lenten schedule seemed particularly heavy,
with Lent beginning so early.
I’m guessing that most of my clergy colleagues
have already checked calendars
and have breathed a sigh of relief in learning
that we will not have another March Easter until 2013,
and even then,
it will be a full week later than this year.

With the end of Lent
penitential purple is put away as our liturgical color
in favor of the purity of Easter white.
We will keep the color white as our liturgical color
until we replace it with the fiery red of Pentecost on May 11th.
The next 6 Sundays until Pentecost are referred to as the
Sundays of Easter,
but who will really be thinking of Easter
once tomorrow morning rolls around?

Everyone will be eager to resume normal schedules
and normal routines after a busy and full Lenten Season
culminating in today’s glorious Easter service and
the many family celebrations that will follow.

Yet how can we even think about resuming a regular schedule,
a regular routine knowing what we know?
Knowing what happened on that first Easter Sunday?
Knowing what Mary Magdalene didn’t know
when she found the tomb empty?
Knowing what we now know across four gospels,
and two thousand years of Christian history,
writings, and preaching?

How can we even think that
come 9:00 am Monday morning,
life will be back to normal?
Come 9:00 am Monday morning,
even as we head back to classrooms, offices, and worksites,
we should go believing that life is different,
radically different,
utterly transformed,
for Easter is not the end of Lent,
but the beginning of life!
Christ is risen!
Yes, Christ is risen!
The tomb is empty, empty for a reason,
empty because of the love of God that is ours in Jesus Christ,
empty because we have been given the grace of God
that is Jesus Christ.

The tomb is empty because God raised Jesus for you:
for each of you,
for me……for all of us.
How can we even think that life tomorrow will be the same?
9:00 am on Monday morning begins our lives
“AE”: After Easter,
and “EN”: when “Everything’s New”.

The Resurrection didn’t have to happen
for us to continue being the children of God.
Jesus could have left things as he promised the Disciples
when they gathered in that Upper Room
for their final meal together:
that he would go
but in his place would come the Advocate,
the Paraclete,
the Holy Spirit to fill them and teach them,
to fill us and teach us.
Jesus could have simply vanished into the darkness of the night
the ministry his Father sent him to do completed.

But that’s not how it happened, of course.
Jesus let himself be betrayed
arrested, beaten,
crucified and killed.
And not by some nameless figures lost to history,
but by you and me.
The answer to the question posed by the Passion hymn,
“Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”
has to be “yes” for each us.
It was humanity’s sinfulness that sent Jesus to the cross;
we were part of the howling group that shouted out “Crucify!”;
we helped hammer in the nails through our
sinfulness, our weak faith and our disobedience.

But in God’s great mercy and love,
Jesus was raised, freed from the tomb,
freed from death,
death utterly defeated
so that we might have life.
so that we might know God’s mercy
so that we might know that our sinful nature is forgiven;
not excused, never excused;
but always forgiven.

How can we think that we will go back to a normal life tomorrow??!!

The Anglican cleric N.T. Wright speaks of Jesus’ resurrection
as “the beginning of God’s new project…”
And, Wright tells us,
that new project was nothing less
than filling earth “with the life of heaven.”
(NT Wright, Surprised by Hope, 293)

That new project was to bring to fruition what we pray for
every time we say the Lord’s Prayer:
“thy kingdom come… on earth as in heaven.”
That’s not a prayer to bring on the eschaton,
the end times,
that’s a prayer for the here and now,
a prayer for us to recognize that in the resurrection
that’s what God wants us to do:
to do his will to create his kingdom here on earth,
as Easter people: children of the resurrection,
children of new life in Christ,
through Christ, and with Christ.

The kingdom of God is present
in the person of Jesus Christ.
Where Christ is, the kingdom is.
Where you and I give life to Christ,
we give life to the Kingdom of God.

Wright tells us, “…those who have heard the message
that every act of love,
every deed done in Christ and by the Spirit,
every work of true creativity –
doing justice, making peace,
healing families, resisting temptation,
[reconciling divisions] –
is an earthly event in a long history of things
that implement Jesus’ own resurrection
and anticipate the final new creation…”
(Wright, 295)

This is the new life you and I are called to:
called to by the resurrection,
called to embrace today,
called to embrace on Monday morning at 9:00 am.
The old life is past, gone,
and the new life is ours to embrace.
Nothing is the same,
everything is new.
Not just today,
on this glorious Easter Sunday,
but even moreso tomorrow and the next day.

The resurrection is about more than the promise of eternal life,
that extraordinary promise that we speak of
with so much hope in funerals,
as I have so many times these past few weeks.
That promise is implicit in the resurrection, absolutely.
But the resurrection is also about the here and now.
As Wright puts it,
“Jesus is raised,
so God’s new creation has begun…
and we have work to do.”
(Wright, 56)
The new life is not something that is
off on the far horizon,
but something we can embrace today, now, here.

What is that work that Wright tells us we have been called to do
by the power of the resurrection?
The same work God has been calling his children to
for thousands of years:
“doing justice, making peace,
healing families, resisting temptation.”

We are called to build a world of hope,
a world built by hope,
a world built on hope.
Hope given us through the resurrection,
grounded in our faith.

This is not a job that we assign to one of our Ministry Teams.
We Presbyterians love to do things through Committees, don’t we?
But there is no “Kingdom Building Ministry Team”
that we can give this work to.
Don’t you see: we are all called to this work,
all called to a new life,
all called to this service in the new life
that is ours through the Resurrection.

Some of the work will take place within this
body of Christ that we call Manassas Presbyterian Church:
through our Ministry Teams, and other groups.
But even more of the work,
more of the service of Kingdom building,
will happen apart from the church
outside of Ministry Teams or organized church groups.
Our real service as disciples of Christ
takes place the moment we walk out the doors
back into the world that Christ loved being part of.
Our real service takes place in families, neighborhoods,
with colleagues, with strangers,
here, in downtown DC,
in communities far away,
often when we haven’t even planned for it.

Your resurrection service may be
to take on a greater commitment in looking after God’s creation.
going beyond recycling, reducing, and reusing
at home and here at the church.

Or you may find in the new life that
you are no longer able to turn a blind eye
to the growing gap between the wealthy
and the poor in this country and throughout the world.
The power of business interests that are too often selfish,
greedy, and increasingly corrupt widens the gap.
And I say that even as a proud Wharton alumnus,
and proud of my career in the business world,
a world I still keep my hand in.
But rationalizing every decision by saying a business’s only
job is to maximize profit is not only irresponsible
to the society in which it operates,
study after study has proven that it is a bad way
to run a business.

Last week the news was filled with stories about
the Supreme Court hearing arguments
on the constitutionality of DC’s gun laws.
Perhaps this week in the new life
you will find yourself thinking that
taking a more sensible approach to how we sell and monitor guns
in our society is not the argument of those who are
painted with the label “liberal”,
but a Christian’s response to Christ’s call to be a peacemaker.

We sing out alleluia this joyful day for Christ is risen.
But tomorrow at 9:00 am, what will you be singing?
Will you be lifting high the cross?
Following it in the same way our ancestors in faith
followed the pillar of fire through the wilderness,
following in obedience and faithfulness?
Through the resurrection
the cross has been turned from a fearsome killing machine,
as lethal and frightening as a guillotine,
into a symbol of hope and new life.
We should lift it high!
And in every place we plant the cross
we should be confident that
we are injecting new life into that patch of ground,
that in that place is another patch of God’s Kingdom.

Did you hear Paul’s words?
“We have been buried with [Christ] by baptism into death,
so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father,
so we too might walk in newness of life.”
(Romans 6:4)
“newness of life.”
That’s our Easter gift,
our glorious gift given to us new each day.

No one has captured the power of Easter
better than Paul's partner in ministry,
the “big fisherman” Peter,
in his first letter:
“By his great mercy,
[God] has given us a new birth into a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead...”
(1 Peter 1:3)
“New birth into a living hope.”
Today
And tomorrow morning at 9:00 am
and every day.

We are Easter people,
children of the resurrection,
born to new life in Christ
new hope through Christ and with Christ.
We should begin every day singing “Lift High the Cross”
and then go out following the cross,
following Christ,
and building the kingdom.
For Christ is risen!
Risen to give us life!
Alleluia!
AMEN