In our secular existence, it seems we spend lots of time preparing for holidays and very little time actually celebrating them. Perhaps that’s because along with the commercialization of our holy days, comes the need of the marketplace to push the next holiday on us and promote our spending even before one holiday is actually over.  We are trained to be in the ‘anticipation’ mode . . . for it is in that period that we are more likely to spend our money. What we are not encouraged to do is to be in the moment . . . to savor and ponder the deeper meanings of our holy days.  Our holy days are made one with the secular celebrations and we are in danger of losing the power our feast days have to form and reform us.

Easter (as far as Kroger and Wal-Mart are concerned) is over.  Done, complete. And, if we are not careful to cling to these texts and this mystery, we are in danger of Easter losing its power in our own lives.

There is also the part of us that would rush us out of the embarrassment of the resurrection. I can understand that. My Greek professor at Columbia, Charlie Cousar said, “The Easter event is an inscrutable experience in the life of the church. Out of that inscrutability, however, comes real and concrete newness. . . 

[Our gospel reading for this morning] shows that the risen Lord is mysterious but real. He is real in the church because he cooks and they eat, he is present and they touch; but there is enough of an enigma that the church does not fully “grasp” this Jesus. The church clearly “pondered” and was terrified in his presence, but it did not seek to “explain.” It was enough to “witness,” to tell the story of what happened. “ (Charlie Cousar in Texts for Preaching, Year B)

Recognizing this resurrected Jesus was at issue last Sunday and it is in our readings today.  As a matter of fact, you can hear that this is Luke’s account of the Emmaus road story that we heard recounted in John last week: how Jesus was  known to them in the breaking of the bread, and then, as if those wounds on his hands and feet were not enough, he eats a piece of fish.

         Bill Wylie-Kellerman once wrote that “if you can read the gospels without getting hungry you’re not paying attention. Jesus comes eating and drinking: So many feasts and feedings, table teachings and banquet parables, last suppers and Easter barbeques—one gets the feeling the kind-dom was convened as a gigantic floating potluck, the poor being seated first. In the resurrection he can walk and talk with them, speak in their midst, but they’re not quite sure ‘til, Look! He has bread or fish in his hand – it’s the Lord!”

There is something about the connection here between resurrection and food. New life and hungers filled.  And something very ‘this-worldly.’  Ghosts don’t eat.

From this strange, recurring encounter, the early church became a community that witnessed by its word and by its very life to a real chance for new life.

This is why we need not rush past Easter, dear ones.

This is why we need to stay and chew on the messages in these accounts. Let them feed our imaginations and our souls.

What they mean for us is powerful: where our old lives may have been marked by failure, or shame, or doubt, or defeat, or scarcity or fear.  Where our old lives may have seen us as victims and powerless and worthless, this new life is one of confidence and joy. 

This is the Easter message. The resurrection message. It is a feast for those who hunger. It is a banquet spread in a hall with doors swung wide for those who have hungered to be included, to be accepted, to be loved, to be the beloved, to BE.

We read in 1 John that the world doesn’t recognize us because it never recognized Christ.

We really aren’t surprised that compassion wedded with justice is not that familiar to the world. We’ve lived here long enough to know what a rare thing it can be, and how precious it is when we find it!

But here’s our task, as the church, the body of Christ in the world today . . . as those who have taken on the role of continuing Jesus’ ministry in this more-often- than-not-lackluster world. . . our task is to ask ourselves these questions:

How is resurrection recognizable in our lives? In the midst of us together? Are we willing to allow our wounds to show?  Our vulnerability?  From what  bread do we eat on a regular basis, and have we made available? And to whom?  What freedom have we found and do we offer  to others?

I read this week an excerpt from a book by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker that “for the first thousand years of Christian art, Jesus Christ was not depicted dead.”  I was intrigued, and hope you are as well. Let me read  from the article, as published in the newsletter from Voices of Sophia:

 “ Why not? Initially, we didn’t believe it could be true. Surely, the art historians who reported this fact were wrong. The crucified Christ was too important to Western Christianity. How could it be that images of Jesus’ death were absent from first millennium churches?

         The death of Jesus, it seemed, was not a touchstone of meaning, not an image of devotion, not a ritual symbol of faith for the Christians who worshipped in the churches of early Christianity. The Christ they worshipped was the incarnate, risen Christ, the Lord  of life.”

Think about that for a little while, as the authors did. Think about what we have been taught about the crucifixion and the images many of us have grown up with of Christ dying in agony on the cross.

I will never forget realizing how very protestant my own children’s upbringing was when one of them, about the age of five, showed me a picture of a cross, with a fellow reclining on the cross bar, his head resting on the top of the cross, like a pillow, his legs dangling from one end of the cross bar. He had a smile on his face. “Tell me about this picture . . . I asked of my child.” To which the response was, “Oh, that’s Jesus dying on the cross.” In her head, the death was seemingly of natural cause, and the smile on his face did not express torture of any kind.

But that is not the image with which most of us grew up.

And those images helped shape our theology, and our understandings of God and humanity and love itself.

The authors remind us that the images with which we grew up contributed to “sanctioning intimate violence and war and by claiming the highest form of love was self-sacrifice, modeled by Jesus on the cross.”

         I received an email just before Easter that supports their claim. The texts were about those who are dying now in Iraq, and those who have died in Viet Nam and the World Wars and as dying just as Jesus did. It was a very troubling piece of mail. A troubling bit of theology.

The authors go on to say;  “we regard such theology as a travesty – a poisoning of souls to acquiesce to evil. It is also a theological justification of God’s use of violence to save the world.

We found nothing life-giving or redeeming in a theology that sanctified the torture and execution of Jesus as God’s will.”

“Even so,” they continue, “ we were unprepared for the possibility that Christians did not focus on the death of Jesus for a thousand years.”

So – without the focus on the crucifixion, what was there in those first millennium churches?

Well, “the images were beautiful. They prayed and processed in their churches, surrounded by a cosmos of stars in night skies, sparkling rivers, and exuberant flora and fauna.”

         In other words: paradise.

“ . . . Not an imaginary, idealized afterlife, not a perfect world. It was in fact, often rather homely and ordinary in its loveliness, life depicted with irregular forms and rough edges. Nor was it a return to a primordial Garden of Eden, though its best features resembled the Genesis descriptions of creation at its dawn. It was something else. It was paradise as this world, permeated and blessed by the presence of God. Divine power illuminated ordinary life from within. The images of paradise captured the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape and agricultural fecundity of the Mediterranean world.”

It was the eighth day of creation.

“Paradise was especially in the church, where a great cloud of witnesses who had passed through the curtain of death returned to bless their communities. The paradise of the dead was not a place removed from paradise on earth. Physical death separated the departed from the living, but it was a gossamer golden curtain, strong enough to keep Satan from passing through, but sheer enough for prayers to seep across and for the dead to visit in drams and visions to bless the living.

Paradise was infused by a  life-giving power, one that could outlast all betrayals, denials, despair, violence and sorrows inflicted by political might – the power of love, the Holy Spirit of God.”

“In the cross-cultural inter-religious brew that produced early Christianity, the assurance of paradise in this world was an inebriating grace, a life-giving recipe drawn from many ancient sources. Christians believed the spiritual journey was not toward greater innocence and purity, but toward a complex understanding of the forces of life, an understanding they called wisdom, Sophia, and its fruits were works of love, a passion for justice, an appreciation of beauty, the discernment of the spirit in the world, and the embrace of this world as good, as blessed.” (from Saving Paradise by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, Beacon Press forthcoming Spring 2007)

         Paradise.

The early church lived in paradise in this world in their day. The same paradise that is not only open to us, but inviting us in.

Paradise that is here and now . . . not someday, somewhere else.

Paradise in recognizing God’s presence at work in our midst, in spite of what we may see. . . being able to trust God working, being able to experience the power, witness and love of those who have gone before us. ..  no end to love.

That understanding makes Peter’s words jump out: “Why do you stare at us? This healing is not by our piety or power.” (vs. 12)

The rest of the world didn’t get what was going on. They didn’t know what they were looking at when they saw the new life in those early Christians.

When they saw the love those folks had for one another and for others. They didn’t understand what happens when God’s love permeates human life in such a way. ‘See what love God has . . ‘ They saw and felt it everywhere. They knew all that mattered was that love. And that they were that love. That love was their very essence.

         But more than that, Peter is preaching in a place the authorities will quickly forbid.  He is living in a freedom  those who didn’t get it could ever understand. He is living in the resurrection, in paradise, and preaching it openly.

The temple cops are on the way.

This is not the same Peter we last saw slinking away, fearful, trembling and shamed by the crowing of a rooster.

         Nor are these the same disciples who were huddled in the dark behind closed doors.

Well, they are, of course, but they aren’t. There is something to this resurrection business. Something to this paradise business. Something to this here and now. Something to God’s love transforming the world, beginning with us.

The Risen One is here. The Risen One has claimed them, and brought them out from death.

The Risen One claims us and longs to bring us  from despair to the paradise that is here and now.

Something profoundly new and amazing happened there. And can happen here.

Bill Wylie Kellerman says:

“It does not yet appear what we shall be, but you can bet your life it’ll look like Christ.”

Wal-Mart and Kroger think Easter is over. We know it has just begun!