Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Recognizing the Risen Christ"
Date: April 16, 2006
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  John 20:1-18

This encounter occurred at least 25 years ago, though I still remember it vividly.  It was a weekday at my last church in New York.  I know it was the afternoon, because the secretary only worked in the morning and I was at church alone.  I was coming out of the kitchen after making a cup of tea when a stranger came in the back door of the church.  He was a young man, perhaps 25, with dark tousled hair, wearing glasses and a green fatigue jacket with a backpack over his shoulder.  He asked if I had anything he could eat.  I apologized, for we kept no food at the church.  He then asked if I had a few dollars so he could get something to eat.  Again, I apologized, for we kept no money at the church, and I don’t believe I had even a dollar in my wallet that day.  He turned with the forlorn look of someone who had been rejected once again and trudged back out through the church door.

Later, it stuck me, and that encounter has haunted me to this day:  had I turned Christ away that afternoon, not recognizing him?

I have often wondered the same when some stranger comes into our church office and asks for something similar.  Sometimes we are able to meet their needs, other times not.  Have we helped the Christ, or turned him away?

Church members here have heard me speak before of this continual dilemma I face whenever I’m asked to meet some stranger’s needs.  A month ago, at a small dinner of church members, I was recounting a story of someone who approached me for help several years ago.  Peggy and I were walking across the parking lot toward Ralphs up at the top of the hill.  A couple in an old Chevy stopped and asked for some money for diapers and baby food for the child in the back seat.  Looking in at the small child, I said if they wanted to accompany me into the market, I would be happy to buy what they needed.  “Oh, just give us the money.  We’ll get it,” the man behind the wheel answered.  Again, I offered to have them come into the store with me where I would purchase what they needed.  With that, the driver slammed his foot onto the accelerator and exclaimed to his companion as he screeched off, “Why can’t they just give us the damn money?!”

As I finished telling the story, Debby Andrews across the table from me said, “I don’t think you need worry about him being Jesus!”

These incidents came to my mind as I studied again my favorite version of the resurrection found in John’s Gospel.  I love the interplay of characters.  Mary coming alone to the tomb, finding the stone rolled away, and running to tell two disciples.  They arrive, peer inside, and believe.  Believe what?  That Jesus was raised from the dead as he had repeatedly predicted?  No.  They believed only that his body wasn’t in the tomb.  It was empty.  And so the first scene in the cemetery ends with “Then the disciples returned to their homes.”  Kind of an unglorious finale to the Easter morning we are expecting.  What if that had been the end of the story?

But it was not.  Mary remained alone in the garden, weeping outside the tomb.  The German theologian Meister Eckhardt in the early 14th century said, “A wonder that in such sore distress she was even able to weep.  She stood there because she loves, she wept because she mourned.”

Mary, in John’s gospel, had not come to the tomb with burial spices.  That had already been accomplished by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus on the Friday Sabbath eve.  Mary came because she was mourning Jesus’ death.  She bent to look into the empty tomb, where she encounters two angels.  She has this matter-of-fact discussion with them, as if they were her brothers, about where they might have laid the body of her Lord.  It is of interest that she recognizes the angels in white, and then confuses the risen Christ with the gardener.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of John’s telling of the resurrection is not the empty tomb or the fact that Christ was raised from the dead.  I’ve believed that all my life, both before I was a minister and to this present day.  That, to me, is the basic fundamental of Easter morning.  Of that, I have no doubt.

Rather, the fascinating encounter is where the supposed gardener asks Mary why she is weeping.  Through the tears in her unfocused eyes, she cries to him:  “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”  Jesus said to her, “Mary!”  And in that sublime moment, Mary recognized the voice of the one who called her.  There was no missing body.  There was no dead Savior.  The Risen Christ stood there before her.

Somehow, in his risen presence, Christ appeared different than before.  Several scripture accounts allude to this.  Mary did not recognize him.  On Easter afternoon, the two who traveled with a stranger on the road to Emmaus did not recognize him until he sat down to supper with them and broke bread.  Later, Thomas did not recognize him, and wanted proof by seeing the wounds in his hands and side.  Somehow the risen Christ looks different, so much so that we may not recognize him.

Barbara Brown Taylor, one of the preeminent Episcopal preachers of this age, said, “What happened in the tomb was entirely between Jesus and God.  For the rest of us, Easter began the moment the gardener said, ‘Mary!’ and she knew who he was.  That is where the miracle happened and goes on happening – not in the tomb but in the encounter with the living Lord.”

Maybe that explains my fascination with Mary’s encounter with the Risen Christ over against the resurrection itself.  I cannot attempt to explain how or exactly when God raised Jesus from the dead.  That is beyond human comprehension.  But I do understand recognizing a voice that is familiar and realizing whom it is who calls my name.

The Risen Christ appears to the disciples over the next few days and weeks in the most ordinary places:  at the dinner table in Emmaus, over grilled fish in a breakfast on the seashore, when they are all hunkered down behind locked doors.  There is something about the risen Christ that loves to meet people in the most ordinary places.  That’s good, because if you want to meet Jesus, most of us live in ordinary places.

I propose that the risen Christ comes to us in many guises, but our eyes are often clouded and we do not see.  G. K. Chesterton, in his book on St. Francis of Assisi, reports that Francis was terrified of leprosy.  “And one day, full in the narrow path he was traveling, he saw horribly white in the sunshine a leper!  Instinctively his heart shrank back, recoiling shudderingly from the contamination of that loathsome disease.  But  then he rallied; and ashamed of himself, ran and cast his arms about the sufferer’s neck and kissed him and passed on.  A moment later, he looked back, and there was no one there, only the empty road in the hot sunlight.  All his days thereafter he was sure it was no leper but Christ himself whom he had met.”  (G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1923], p. 57.)

So how often is it that all we see is some needy and perhaps not attractive person?  They are standing on the traffic island at an intersection.  They are lying on a park bench.  They are sitting on the planter outside Taco Bell.  She was the woman huddled in the chapel doorway smoking a cigarette on a rainy Good Friday afternoon.  Do you struggle, as I do, wondering if we should help or not?  Is their need genuine, or are they just trying to scam us for a few dollars for heaven knows what?

“Did you not recognize me?” asks the Risen Christ.  “That was I.  And inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”  (Matthew 25:40)

I leave you this Easter morning with three questions to ponder on your way home:

   1)  How often do we miss recognizing the Risen Christ? 

   2)  How surprised might we be if he were to call us by name?

   3)  How often might others see the Risen Christ in us?