Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Matthew 28:1-10

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Are your feet Easter-ready? With spring weather finally here, some of you may be thinking about getting your body swimsuit-ready for the summer, but have you thought about whether your feet are Easter-ready?! When the Marys see the risen Jesus for the first time that Easter morning, Matthew tells us they fall to their knees and embrace his feet. Throughout the gospels people are kind of obsessed with Jesus’ feet. Falling down at someone’s feet was an act of worship, usually reserved for the Roman emperor, at the time. Before the resurrection, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with perfume and wipes them with her hair. Another woman washes Jesus’ feet with her tears. People sit at Jesus’ feet to listen to his teaching or to receive healing. Jesus’ washes the disciples’ feet and asks them to wash one another’s feet. Jesus also instructs the disciples to shake the dust from their feet if a town does not receive his message. Jesus’ feet and hands are nailed to the cross, and the earth reels and rocks under the Marys’ feet at the empty tomb.
All this talk about feet is not for us to get too squeamish about how our toes will look in sandals in a few weeks, but causes us to ask how God wants us to use our feet after worship is over, to leave the empty tomb along with the women that first Easter morning to share the message about Christ’s resurrection. Jesus tells the women not to hold on to him too tightly, not to stay at his feet in worship, but for them to go use their feet to tell others the good news that he is risen. The angel instructs the women: “Get on your way quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He is risen from the dead. He is going on ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.’ That’s the message.” That’s the message we have to share, too! He is risen from the dead, and you will see him, you will see Christ resurrected! Are your feet Easter ready to share that good news with someone who needs to hear it?!
Your immediate answer to that question may be…no! “Did you hear the good news? He is risen!” This would be the text message my atheist friend in college would send me every Easter – it was an irreverent joke between us as we would argue about Jesus’ existence and my own faith that “yes, I actually believe all this stuff,” and my friend’s doubt. Maybe it is jarring to hear a pastor share on Easter morning that she has joked about Jesus’ resurrection with an atheist, but I share this partly to shake US up with the realization that we are all, those of us who are believers, a bit weird! I appreciate my friend helping me realize that saying “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” is actually a very difficult thing to believe and make sense of today. The Easter message we have to share is the same as the women’s message at the empty tomb, but the women saw the risen Jesus with their own eyes, and we haven’t. Especially in Matthew’s telling of the resurrection of Jesus, it sounds so fantastic to our modern ears, doesn’t it? An earthquake occurs as an angel comes down from heaven with shafts of lightning blazing and his garments shimmering snow-white! This account almost makes the Easter bunny more believable, if we look at it with post-Enlightenment skepticism. This is the way more and more people today look at Easter – a nice holiday spent with family and Easter egg hunts and maybe dressing up and going to church to make mom happy, but a guy being raised from the dead, escaping from a sealed tomb and an angel to tell about it? Kind of hard to believe. Are our feet Easter-ready to share this counter-cultural, unbelievable message?
So, how do we make our feet a little more Easter-ready? How do we let go of clinging to Jesus’ feet with joy and a little bit of fear of what we might say, or who we might talk to, and venture out to share this strange good news that Jesus STILL lives, lives in us and through us and with us and promises us life abundant, life eternal for all who believe?! Can we talk about resurrection in a way that might actually make sense to some skeptics who have a hard time getting past the scientific impossibility of a man rising from the dead? I will confess that I believe the historical Jesus rose from the dead just as the gospels tell us, because God can defy natural law. I also believe, however, we can’t fully explain this mystery of faith, and resurrection is a present reality for us all as Christians, not just a historical fact that we can never really prove or disprove. That is what faith is – trusting in what can’t be proven or seen. Easter reminds us that Christ’s crucified and resurrected presence is all around us, all the time, and we miss it because we are thinking it only took place 2000 years ago in a quite spectacular way. If Christ’s resurrection was only a one-time historical event, though, he might as well have stayed dead, because we worship a living God with a living faith that proclaims resurrection every single day! We God bringing new life out of death all around us, all the time.
Christians have used “ordinary,” or “natural” symbols for years to explain the mystery of the resurrection, which is truly miraculous in God’s order of creation. A caterpillar is “buried” in a chrysalis for several weeks and is transformed into a beautiful butterfly. Jesus himself described resurrection as a seed dying in the ground to become a new plant bearing fruit or grain that feeds us, sustaining life. And some of us have had the holy privilege of witnessing someone else’s death, not seeing the full transformation of the soul after death but having a glimpse of the peace, comfort, and hope amidst the grief that comes with letting a loved one leave this life for the next.
Getting our feet “Easter-ready,” to share the good news of resurrection, in the end, is less about rationalizing or explaining away the miraculous Easter event, and more about sharing how we have experienced God’s gift of new life after death. My atheist friend from college, who facetiously texted me “good news” every Easter, is now married to a Methodist pastor and goes to church almost weekly. I can’t explain that, and I definitely don’t attribute that transformation to me, but something about that Easter message got to my friend and made sense, despite the odds. I can only thank God for that. In my own life, as I reflect on my own experience of going through times of sadness, loss, death, and difficulty, I can always find those resurrection moments of feeling and seeing Christ’s crucified and risen presence right there, in the midst of the mess, with joy and hope ALWAYS on the other side! Today, we Christians dare to believe and share that message in spite of the skeptics and in our own skepticism. Even when others think we’re a bit crazy, or pretty intelligent “but I don’t know about that Jesus stuff she believes in.” We say joyfully today, “Did you hear the good news? Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” Some of us may make sense of Easter’s resurrection differently than others of us to come to a place of belief – but together we say, “we believe!” My Easter prayer for you ALL, which is really a prayer every Sunday because every Sunday is a little Easter, is that God leads your feet to the feet of Jesus, and then sends you out with a good news resurrection experience to share. That’s the message! Christ is risen! He has risen indeed Alleluia! Amen