April 20, 2003
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
This is not one of our typical Sundays. It’s not typical because it’s Easter. We normally don’t have so many colorful and fragrant flowers. We normally don’t have that many guys with jackets and ties on—something reserved only for the pastor! We normally don’t have as many people here as we do today. Easter is quite out of the ordinary for us.
The Easter season is becoming more like the Christmas shopping season. Merchants have toys for you to give from the Easter bunny. 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’s nothing ordinary about Easter anymore!
In Pennsylvania, they have this strange custom of hanging colorful plastic Easter eggs on an outside tree or bush. This German tradition from 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’t have Easter bunnies or plastic eggs hanging outside our trees!
Easter is not ordinary because Jesus, who was crucified, died and buried for three days, came forth alive from the tomb on Easter morning. What could be more extraordinary?
Ordinary Life
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 eventually dies.
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, “He is dying, he won’t get over this.” 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, “He is dying, he won’t get over this.”
Anything that lives, dies. This is the ordinary fact of life. There’s a true story of a 63-year-old man in Italy who went to inspect the progress of the construction of his mausoleum. 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—anything that lives eventually dies.
Extraordinary Easter
In the Scriptures read for today, we see what people typically would do after a death in the family.
Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went to the store and bought spices to anoint Jesus’ body. Women commonly would complete this act of final respect for their loved ones.
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 eventually dies. And they were prepared to face this reality again.
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.
When they arrived at 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!
My Ordinary Day
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’s coffee in my coffee maker and start my day’s work at 7:30. It’s 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, she would say, “He is dying, he won’t get over this.”
But one day out of the year, I don’t 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 AM! I don’t 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.
When the women came to the tomb that sunny morning, an angel dressed in white met them and told them,
“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was
crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they
laid him.”
The announcement startled them because it was not what they expected. The dead should be dead. That’s the ordinary world that they knew. They were amazed and shocked by the words, “He has risen, he is not here.”
Without a body to anoint, what are they to do? The angel rearranges 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.
Ordinary Galilee
A new insight that I have never noticed before is that there is something more to what the angel was saying to the women. We are all familiar with the angel saying that Jesus rose and that he is not here. But what we don’t realized is that the angel said that Jesus has, “Gone on ahead of you to Galilee.”
Do you know where Galilee is? Well, it’s nowhere special. It’s nothing like Jerusalem! It is where Nazareth is, the hometown of Jesus. And you can recall that when someone was told that Jesus was the Messiah, that person cynically asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Galilee was nothing special.
Why would the risen Christ, the very first thing, just hours after being raised from the dead, move toward Galilee? Maybe the first thing he wanted to do was to go back to his roots. Maybe he wanted to avoid the crowds or the Roman soldiers garrisoned in Jerusalem. All we know is that he first went to Galilee.
In Mark 14:28 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. Since the disciples came from Galilee, maybe Jesus expected them to run back to their homes and there he would most likely find them—hiding.
So why Galilee? There is nothing special about Galilee. And maybe that’s what is special. The extraordinarily raised-from-the-dead Christ returns to the ordinary Galilee.
Once Jesus was raised, he does some ordinary things. Like me eating my ordinary breakfast, he goes and has his breakfast on the beach with his disciples. He stays to have dinner with the disciples when the day was getting late.
And in the Gospel of John, when the astonished disciples peer into the empty tomb, they found the burial clothes of Jesus have been folded—neat and rolled up. It looks like the very first thing Jesus did after being raised by God from the dead, is to tidy up the tomb! Like a thoughtful house guest, Jesus got up from the dead and neatly folded all of his grave clothes. The risen Christ did a bit of ordinary housekeeping!
Is it too strange to speak of Easter, something so unexpected and extraordinary, as ordinary? But it does seem to me that, in these gospel accounts, a new insight is revealed to us. Easter has something to do with the ordinary.
The risen Christ is raised, but he is raised into this world, our world, where everything that lives, dies; where every day those whom we love are leaving us, departing from us, and someday so are we. This is the world where death seems so powerful is the same world that Jesus came back to from the dead.
Most of life is ordinary, very mundane, typical. This is where we make our home. The gospels show the disciples all going back to work. After all, the first day of the week that we call Sunday is the first Jewish workday. After the events of the past violent weekend, everything was getting back to normal now. But the risen Christ was raised on that day. On that ordinary beginning-of-the-first-work-week-day, something out of the ordinary happened. Now we call this ordinary workday Easter—the Day of Resurrection!
If there is nothing special about Galilee, then why mention the place at all? Jesus went to Galilee to show his disciples that in the extraordinary miracle of the resurrection, its impact is on our ordinary places of life. How about the places that we call home? In our church directory, our Galilees are:
San Francisco, Danville, Davis, San Jose, Denmark, Maine, San Carlos, Hong Kong, Palo Alto, South San Francisco, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Milpitas, Los Altos, Daly City, Santa Monica, Mountain View, Hayward, Fremont, Hoboken, New Jersey, Richmond, Oakland, Berkeley, Monterey Park, Long Beach, San Diego, Los Gatos, San Ramon, Burlingame, Belmont, Hercules, East Palo Alto, Alamo, Millbrae, Union City, Orinda, Sausalito, Pittsburg, Castro Valley, San Bruno, Hillsborough, Walnut Creek, San Leandro, San Pedro, Los Angeles, Pacifica, Foster City, Sunnyvale, El Cerrito, Fairfield, Corte Madera, San Mateo, Vallejo, Antioch, San Marcos, Las Vegas, Moraga, Alameda, Foster City, Livermore, Novato, Seattle, Arcadia, Santa Rosa, Menlo Park.
Did I miss any place?
We hope you are enjoying the jubilation in our singing this morning. Some of you are sporting new Easter clothes. And our church looks extraordinarily beautiful with all of the fragrant flowers. But remember this—one reason why we are filled with joy is that God did not leave us but met us in Galilee. It is in our ordinary places of life, in the towns and cities where we call home are the places where Christ will meet us. The real Easter story begins in Galilee, the ordinary places we call home.
Our God in this extraordinary moment did not leave us caught in this web of death and decay. God raised Christ into the ordinariness of life. Now everything is redeemed. Death does not have the last word. The resurrection breaks out everywhere!
Easter in the Ordinary
There’s a story of a hard-working high school student who made good grades. Even though she had come from a difficult home situation, she worked hard because she had high goals. But when it came time for her to go to college, and she applied to a number of schools, she received far too little financial aid to be able to go to any of those schools. She went instead to work in a rather modest, dull job.
Her friends told her, “Well, you have just got to face the facts. It doesn’t look like college is in the picture for you. You just need to adjust.” Her friends were saying to her, “You are dying, you won’t get over this.”
But she remembered Easter. She took a deep breath, enrolled in some night classes at her community college, worked hard, made good grades, and eventually received the help she needed to go on to college. She is today a good teacher of young children.
Just as Jesus could not stay dead in the tomb, she was not held by the common and ordinary circumstances of life. In Easter, Christ rose from the dead and made our ordinary world extraordinary. And Christ being extraordinary goes to Galilee to reveal to us that he has redeemed our ordinary world once and for all. The good news is that we see Easter in the ordinary!
It’s impossible to celebrate Easter without talking about death. My mother if she was here would say, “Nee gong moit yeh? Gam gnet koi gong hing, mo gong koin na yeh!” Translation: What are you talking about? Today is a celebration, don’t talk about these things! But you can’t talk about Easter without talking about death. You can’t have Easter without Good Friday! We can’t have Easter without first confronting death.
In closing I would like to tell you another story. A daughter was sharing about how her father died over the summer. It was hard because her father had a stroke and lost his power of speech. She said,
And you know how hard that would be for my daddy. He loved to talk.
But his last few days he couldn’t speak. I never will forget, my sisters and
my brother and I were gathered in his hospital room on the last day of his
life and we were feeling the pain of his struggle as he tried to communicate
with us. Finally he motioned toward my brother as if to say, ‘Get me a glass
of water.’ My brother went over to the sink and filled the glass and brought
it to my father. But he wouldn’t drink it. He motioned as if to say to my
brother, ‘You drink it.’ So my brother took a sip. Then my father made a
motion, ‘Give it to your sister.” He handed the glass to my sister, And then
he motioned, pass it to me. And suddenly my brother said, ‘Oh my God. He’s
serving communion.’
And then they knew that neither death, nor life, nor powers, nor principalities, nor anything else in all creation could separate any of us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. In that ordinary hospital room, with ordinary people, on an ordinary day when anything that lives eventually dies, a wonderfully thing happened. We witnessed Easter in the ordinary.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus Christ, on this day you were raised from the dead, death was defeated, and we saw the full triumph of God. Help us to live in the light of that triumph, in expectant hope of the resurrection, in confidence that death and sin shall be defeated and God’s way will be the world’s way, now and forever. Amen.