“What
jumped out at you in what we just read?”
So…let me call on someone…April Fools! Some of you were panicking just now. It’s ok.
You don’t have to answer.
I know there are lots of amazing bits of information in what
we just read. You know how our brains
sometimes get stuck on the things that aren’t as important and miss the main
point? Mine does this all the time. Notice that it’s not MY fault, it’s my
brain’s fault. . . which is a clue for you to what it is in this scripture that
jumps out at me EVERY SINGLE TIME . . .
Can you guess? EARTHQUAKE!
As I have said before, I grew up in California. I have lots of experience with earthquakes. We might think, since Matthew is the only one
of the gospels that mentions the earthquake, that it was too small for anybody
to really notice. But it might just be
that they’re used to them.
There’s a scene in the movie L.A. Story in which Steve Martin and his friends are eating lunch
at a restaurant and there’s an earthquake.[1] A BIG earthquake. Things are rattling and shaking. Stuff is falling off the table, and they’re
catching the stuff and carrying on their conversations, barely even
noticing. One of the other tables even rolls
by and the people sitting at that table are continuing their meal and their
conversation as if nothing is happening.
No buildings are falling over, but it’s still a very noticeable
earthquake. The point is that in places
where earthquakes are common, like Southern California or Israel, you do learn
not to notice them.
Every so often there are big earthquakes, earthquakes that bring
life to a screeching halt. These quakes
become part of our life stories, connected with memories of where we were when
those shake-ups happened. My husband Rob
remembers one in which the earthquake woke us up and he ran into the hallway
just in time to see a TV flying across the room. When an earthquake happens, it changes
things. It wakes us up. It breaks things
loose. It rewrites our story.
It gets our attention – After
the earthquake . . . we are awake!
We are sometimes hard to wake up. This is the story we see over and over in the
Old Testament, that the people would forget about God, and their behavior would
get worse and worse, they would get more and more into worshipping idols, and
if they continued their worship of God at all, they did it in a routine,
unthinking way. God would send prophets
to try to get their attention, and sometimes they would be successful for a
time, but sometimes instead of listening, the people would kill the prophet
because they didn’t like what he was saying.
Jeremiah was one of those faithful prophets. His writings and prophecies are the longest
book in the Bible. You can hear how exasperated
he is in this passage:
“For the past twenty-three years . . . the Lord has been giving me his messages. I have faithfully passed them on to you, but you have not listened. Again and again the Lord has sent you his servants, the prophets, but you have not listened or even paid attention.” (Jeremiah 25:3-4)
We are no different.
We don’t listen. Or we listen
only some of the time. What is God
trying to say to us now? Are we
listening? Are we awake or do we need
some shaking?
Some of us need more help waking up than others. Teenagers tend to be really good
sleepers. My husband’s brother came to
visit us one summer when he was 17. It
seemed like he would sleep forever. Rob
and I liked to tease him about it, and we decided to see what it would take to
wake him up. We did all kinds of silly
things. One day we even filled squirt
guns with ice water. That DID wake him
up….but only a little. And then he
turned over and went back to sleep.
So one day we invited our drummer friend to come help us and
to bring his cymbals. We tiptoed into
his room…which is kind of funny, when you think about it…and we banged on those
cymbals as hard as we could. Did he wake
up? Yes, he did!
We remember the earth-shaking events in our lives, those
moments when everything changes. Though
we are talking about earthquakes today, we should note that the word Matthew
uses, seismos, is most of the time used to refer to an earthquake,
but it also has a broader meaning.
Seismos
- a shaking, a commotion
- a tempest, a violent storm
- an earthquake
Matthew
uses this same word in a story about a storm that comes up suddenly when Jesus
and the disciples are on a boat out in the Sea of Galilee (8:24), a scene
captured here by Rembrandt. This is
the only time that Matthew uses the word seismos
to refer to a storm, so maybe that tells us something about the severity of
this storm.
When the storm came up, the disciples were afraid, but Jesus
kept on sleeping. When they woke him up,
he was a little crabby. . . and said, “You
of little faith! Why are you so afraid?” (8:26) And then he rebuked the storm and it died
out. Matthew doesn’t tell us what he
said, but maybe it was this: “Be still
and know that I am God!” (Psalm 46:10)
Did you notice that word “afraid” shows up twice in Matthew’s account of the women
at the tomb that we read this morning.
Both the angel and Jesus say, “Don’t
be afraid.” There will be
earthquakes and storms and other kinds of things that shake us up and wake us
up. Don’t be afraid. God is still God. God is still here. Be awake, be watchful and trust God.
After the
earthquake . . . we are changed
Earthquakes cause change but they are also a result of
something that needs to change. In our
gospel reading, the stone gets moved away from the opening of the cave, which
needed to happen for the women to see that Jesus was no longer dead. Generally when earthquakes happen, it’s
because tension is released. Where there
are tectonic plates sliding against
each other, they break apart. We can see
from this graphic that there is a plate edge in Israel. It goes right along the Jordan River, so it’s
not surprising that Israel has earthquakes.
Around here there are no tectonic plate edges, but there are earthquakes,
although they tend to be smaller than the ones that happen along these
lines. Here in Kansas earthquakes are
more likely to be the result of mining.[2] Something
has changed and the earth needs to adjust.
Regardless of the cause, earthquakes happen when something
needs to change. When an earthquake or a
storm wakes us up, then we can see how things are and what’s happening. Things fall into perspective.
Man-made things will pass away, the things that matter will remain
– faith, hope, love. Jesus’ death and
resurrection demonstrates for us that nothing, not even death, can separate us
from the love of God that we have through faith in Jesus.
After the
earthquake . . . we are changed, and we are thankful
Today, in an amazing quirk of the math behind calendars and
astronomy, is not just Easter, it’s also April Fools Day. How many of you like to play jokes on people
for April Fools? How many of you have
already had a joke played on you today?
One of the best April Fools jokes anyone ever played on me happened
years ago before my husband Rob and I had kids.
We both worked at an office supply store that was about 30 minutes away
from where we lived. We were a little transportation challenged back then. We took the bus a lot, or carpooled. So when my grandfather died, we got his
car. We were very excited about this,
and anxious to start driving it, but first we had to get car insurance.
We finally got everything arranged so we could drive it to
work, and since we now had a car, we owed some people rides so we had a carpooler
with us, too. So we drove to work. About halfway through the morning, I got a
phone call from our insurance agent. She
says, “I hope you haven’t started driving the car yet. We had a problem and you are not insured
yet.” This is before the internet, long
before 15 minutes would get you Geico.
If the insurance agent calls and says you’re not insured, you’ve got a
problem. We had a big problem, and it
wasn’t going to be resolved that day. We
not only drove ourselves to work and now had no way home, we also were the ride
home for other people. What are we going
to do? I was flipping out.
So I called Rob. We
both worked for the same company, but we were in different buildings that were
about two blocks away from each other.
He wasn’t in the other building.
He was out in the company van making a delivery. I asked them to have him call me when he got
back. I tried to be cool and just keep
working, but I wasn’t doing very well.
And he wasn’t calling me back. I
tried calling the insurance agent back.
No answer. I tried Rob
again. Still out. Agh!
What are we going to do?!?
Well, Rob finally called me back. He was laughing. And laughing.
And he said, “April fools!” What?!?
No problem with the insurance. Everything was totally fine. He’d arranged the whole thing. It was hilarious. A very good joke. I wasn’t laughing at the time, but it was
good.
Once I got over my panic and fear, and maybe a little bit of
anger, I was thankful…thankful that though I’d thought there was a big mess, we
were actually ok. And I was able to
laugh, too.
An April Fools joke works because we are deceived into
thinking something is different from how it really is. In Genesis, in the Garden of Eden the serpent
deceives Eve into thinking that God is playing a joke on them about the fruit
on that tree. “Did God really say you must not eat fruit from the tree or you will
die? You will not die.” Adam and Eve believe the serpent instead of God,
and then find out that God was NOT
joking and they were cast out of the Garden of Eden forever (Gen. 3).
I like to tell jokes and make puns, as you already know if
you’ve heard me preach much or follow me on Facebook, but I want to be clear
that our relationship with God in Jesus Christ is no laughing matter. It is, in fact, a matter of life and
death.
Jesus went through the agony of
death on a cross because God loves us too much to let us keep on being deceived
by our sin or to let us be separated from him by death. Jesus’ death and resurrection is
earth-shaking because it changes everything. It changes our status with God through
our faith in him. Our sins are forgiven,
and we can look forward to eternal life with God that starts right now as we let Jesus be Lord of our lives.
If Christ
is King, everything, quite literally, every thing and every one, has to be
re-imagined, re-configured, re-oriented to a way of life that consists in an
obedient following of Jesus. —EUGENE H. PETERSON[3]
Jesus’
resurrection changes everything. So let’s
welcome that change. Let’s be awake and
changed and thankful, and live out that thankfulness by staying ready. We
cannot go back to how we were before. We
are changed for a purpose – to live as God’s people, helping spread God’s
redeeming work.
I will
never be the same again. I can never return, I’ve closed the door.
I will walk
the path, I’ll run the race. And I will never be the same again.[4]
[3] As quoted
by Harnish, James A.. in Easter
Earthquake: How Resurrection Shakes Our World (Kindle Locations 1282-1286).
Upper Room. Kindle Edition.
[4] Geoff Bullock, “I Will Never
Be” ©1995 Geoff Bullock Music, CCLI Song Number 1874911
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