April 20, 2003<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mark 16:1-8<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are a visitor here today, or if you are here today and haven\u2019t been here for a while, I would like to tell you that what you see here today is typical for this church. This is just an ordinary Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But if I were to say that, I would be lying. This is not one of our typical Sundays. It\u2019s not typical because it\u2019s Easter. We normally don\u2019t have so many colorful and fragrant flowers. We normally don\u2019t have that many guys with jackets and ties on\u2014something reserved only for the pastor! We normally don\u2019t have as many people here as we do today. Easter is quite out of the ordinary for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Easter season is rapidly becoming more like the Christmas shopping season. Merchants are armed with toys for you to give from the Easter bunny that Easter is now the second biggest toy-giving holiday of the year. Some children even write letters to the Easter bunny detailing what they hope to receive. There\u2019s nothing ordinary about Easter anymore!<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Pennsylvania, they have this custom of hanging colorful plastic Easter eggs on an outside tree or bush. The tradition from Germany in the 1500s introduced the first Easter bunny that would leave a nest of colored eggs for children as a symbol of new life during the spring season. Eventually the nests in trees became what we know as the Easter basket. It seems that when Easter comes, the ordinary routines of life become extraordinary. We normally don\u2019t have Easter bunnies or plastic eggs hanging outside our trees!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Easter is not ordinary because Jesus is crucified, dead and buried for three days, came forth from the tomb on Easter morning. What could be more extraordinary?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ordinary Life<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is ordinary, typical in our world is death. In the ordinary world, the world that we know, day in and day out, is a world that knows that everything that lives, dies. Life is fleeting, finite, and limited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n St. Augustine once said that our lives are like when a man is sick and his friends look over him in his sickbed and say, \u201cHe is dying, he won\u2019t get over this.\u201d Or we can even say that on the first day of our life as a newborn baby, someone looking over our crib, could shake his head and say, \u201cHe is dying, he won\u2019t get over this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anything that lives, dies. This is the ordinary fact of life. There\u2019s a story of a 63-year-old man in Italy who went to inspect the progress of the construction of his mausoleum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to get a better view of the project he climbed a ladder. But he slipped, hit his head on a marble step and fell into his own grave. This is what the ordinary world is like\u2014anything that lives eventually dies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Extraordinary Easter<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Scriptures read for today, we see what people typically would do after a death in the family. With so much to do, the women got up early in the morning. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went to the store and bought spices to anoint Jesus\u2019 body. Women commonly would complete this act of final tribute to their loved ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They may have done this kind of work before for others who have died. There was nothing extraordinary to what they needed to do. In their minds, anything that lives do eventually dies. And they were prepared to face this reality again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what they encountered was not what they expected. They expected that they would need to hire someone to roll away the stone that was placed to seal the tomb. They expected that they would need to convince the Roman guards that they were there just to anoint the body. They expected to see a body to anoint. Those should have been the expected, typical things to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When they arrived to the tomb, everything they expected was not the case. The big, heavy stone was already rolled away. No guard was to be found. And sitting on the right side was an angel dressed in white. And there was no dead body to anoint. This was not an ordinary day!<\/p>\n\n\n\n My Ordinary Day<\/p>\n\n\n\n Joy always thinks that my life is pretty darn boring. Everyday, I get up at 6:15, shower, and eat a bowl of cold cereal while reading the morning paper. I stay with the front-page news and then treat myself to reading how the Red Sox did in the sports page. I make a cup of Peet\u2019s coffee in my french press and start my day\u2019s work at 7:30. It\u2019s very routine and ordinary. I do this day in and day out, 364 days out of the year. If somebody were to look over my morning routine, he would say, \u201cHe is dying, he won\u2019t get over this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But one day out of the year, I don\u2019t do what I do the other 364 days. I get up, shower, no time to read the Sunday paper and we come down to Portsmouth Square to attend the Sunrise Service at 7:00! I don\u2019t eat a bowl of cold cereal but I eat a plate of YMCA pancakes! On Easter Day, what is ordinary becomes extraordinary. My ordinary morning becomes an out of the ordinary morning. Easter breaks my routine and rearranges my schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the women came to the tomb that sunny morning, an angel dressed in white met them and told them,<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDo not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was<\/p>\n\n\n\n crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they<\/p>\n\n\n\n laid him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The announcement startled them because it was not what they expected. The dead should be dead. That\u2019s the ordinary world that they knew. They were amazed and shocked by the words, \u201cHe has risen, he is not here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without a body to anoint, what are they to do? The angel rearranged their typical schedule for that day and sent them to go and tell Peter and the disciples that Jesus has already gone ahead to Galilee where he would see them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ordinary Galilee<\/p>\n\n\n\n A new insight that I have not noticed before is that there is more to what the angel was saying to the women. The angel said that Jesus arose, that he is not here, that he has, \u201cGone on ahead of you to Galilee.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do you know where Galilee is? Well, it\u2019s nowhere special. It\u2019s nothing like Jerusalem! It is where Nazareth is, the hometown of Jesus. You recall perhaps that when someone was told that Jesus was the Messiah, that person cynically asked, \u201cCan anything good come out of Nazareth?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why would the risen Christ, the very first thing, just hours after being raised from the dead, move toward Galilee? Perhaps the first thing he wanted to do was to go back to his roots. Since the disciples came from Galilee, perhaps Jesus expected them to run back to their homes and there he would most likely find them. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the crowds or the Roman soldiers were garrisoned in Jerusalem. All we know is that he first went out to Galilee. In Mark 14:28<\/a> when Jesus was predicting his crucifixion and his resurrection, he told the disciples that after all of them have deserted him, he will meet them in Galilee. So why Galilee?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" April 20, 2003 Mark 16:1-8 Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco. If you are a visitor here today, or if you