March 31, 2024

“The Easter Posture”

Matthew 28:1-10

Broadway Christian Church

David Shirey   

My dad was big on posture.  David, stand up tall.  Put your shoulders back.  Hold your head high. You have a backbone. Use it! 

Well, there’s such a thing as an Easter posture. It’s exhibited this morning by the women running from the tomb exuberant, falling all over themselves to tell others what they’ve seen and heard. 

By contrast, there were two other postures exhibited that first Easter morning that are un-Easterlike…but not unusual. The postures I speak of represent two unhealthy orientations toward life. Let me describe them for you and tell you how Easter delivers us from them so we can rise up and live our lives out of an Easter posture.  

One un-Easterlike posture is living life faced toward the past.  It’s the posture of the two Marys and the disciples first thing Easter morning. Ellen read to us, “After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.” Got that?  They went to look at a tomb.  A repository of death.  Theirs was a posture focused on the past.  On what was. Jesus was crucified and died. The other disciples didn’t go to the tomb, but you can bet they woke up with a past posture, too – filled with grief, despair, regret. Past postures are rooted in what was.            

We can get stuck in a past posture, unable to move forward because of looking back at something, someone. Remembering when. Regretting what happened. Sighing over what is no more. I remember a woman I visited while in college. Mrs. Teague was a member of the church I attended as an undergrad. The pastor thought a young person’s visits would cheer her up. Wrong! One of the first things I noticed the first day I visited her was the calendar that hung in her kitchen. The calendar was dated 1963. I was visiting in 1978. In time, I learned of what happened 15 years earlier that chained her to the past. Every morning she got up, sipped her coffee, and stared at 1963. The two Marys, the first disciples, and dear Mrs. Teague woke up in a past posture.  I dare say we all have things in our past that mold us into a past posture of living.                   

There’s a second un-Easterlike posture that was exhibited that first Easter.  Let’s call it a ‘present posture.’ As in maintaining the status quo. Making sure nothing changes.  Keeping things the way they are.  It’s the posture of the Roman guards that first Easter. Pilate ordered them “to make the tomb as secure as you can” (27:65).  “They went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.” (27:66). The Romans had had enough of that Galilean agitator/change agent named Jesus. They had an investment in the status quo.  It’s always the powerful and privileged who are invested in the status quo. So, they rolled a big stone in front of the tomb to keep Jesus in his place, namely, dead. And they posted guards to keep him there so there’d be no more undesired change.

Of course, Roman guards aren’t alone in adopting and enforcing a ‘present posture.’  I know people who have lived their entire lives in a closely guarded system of thought, belief, and behavior, resistant to any kind of change. I knew a woman who, whenever she moved, would find and put up the same wallpaper pattern, lay down the same carpet, paint rooms in the same color scheme as the previous place. She moved a half dozen times in her life, but nothing ever changed. Neither the wallpaper, nor the carpet, nor the paint scheme, nor her mind, opinion, or worldview. She had set a guard over the status quo.

Institutions, too, can adopt a rigid ‘present posture.’ Laurence Peter said, “Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.” Churches are notorious for setting a guard over the status quo. What’s the old joke? How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb?  Change?!  It’s possible for us  Christians to worship not the Living God, but the status quo.  Beware!

This is all to say there are two unhealthy postures evidenced on Easter morning, one past-fixated – the women and the disciples looking at a tomb; the other present-preserving – the Roman soldiers standing guard over the status quo.

But then Easter happened! Hallelujah! All heav’n broke loose! And when it did, everyone with poor postures received a spine-tingling adjustment from Jesus Christ Chiropractic! “Suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord … came and rolled back the stone and sat on it … And the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid.  He is not here. He is risen!” Rolf Jacobson, a professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN, said of that scene, first they feel a message, then they see a message, then they hear a message:

• They feel a message--a great earthquake. The Greek words are mega seismos.  As in seismograph. Your status quo just got shaken up.   

• Then, they see a message. The Greek word angelos means messenger. The angel descends and sassily flips that stone away like a tiddly wink.  Alyce McKenzie calls him “the angel with an attitude.” He asks the guards, Is that as secure as you can make it, boys? Gonna keep God from shaking things up?  I don’t think so.    

• Finally, they hear a message: He is risen!  Jesus is no longer past tense dead.  He’s no longer imprisoned in the tomb of the status quo. He’s gone ahead. He’s risen!    

That message felt, seen, and heard on Easter morning was a mega seismos sent by God to shake up postures that have become frozen in the past or chained to the present so we can get up, look up, let go, and move on.

He shakes up those of us frozen in a past posture by delivering us from the  grief, regret, guilt, or shame that hold us in bondage to the past. Someone said, The only thing God cannot do is change the past. But the past can be redeemed – forgiven, healed and released into the hands of our great God. As Frederick Buechner put it, “Resurrection means the worst thing is never the last thing.”  We do ourselves a disservice when we think of Easter only in terms of its promise of life after death in the hereafter.  It’s that to be sure, but Easter also has to do with life after all the painful deaths we face in the here and now-- the failures and frustrations, the separations and setbacks, the turmoil and tragedies, the unfairnesses and injustices. On Easter, God makes a way through those deaths to new life. 

On Easter, God also shakes up those of us trying to control the present. How so? By walking past the (old) guard and rolling away the stone. Jesus refuses to be confined or controlled by anybody. As the great African American preachers have said, “Where we put a period, God puts a comma.” God won’t allow anybody or anything to thwart God’s purposes. Lotsa luck keeping a lid on God! The prophet Isaiah said, “Behold, I do a new thing. Now it springs forth.” The prophet Sam Cooke sang, “A change is gonna come.” 

This is all to say that, given the good news of the resurrection delivered by the angel to the women, we can live our lives henceforth out of an Easter posture.  Not fixated on the past, not desperately trying to preserve the status quo, but running toward God’s promised future with great joy.

By the way, who did God entrust with the breaking news of the resurrection?  Who were the Resurrection Correspondents, Spokespersons for the Kingdom Come? Who were the first preachers of the Gospel? Women. Despite the fact that in those days women’s testimony was inadmissible in a court of law, don’t tell God that because God told that messenger angel to send women to be the first witnesses to the resurrection. If you’re ever questioned about the role of women at Broadway: “I notice you have women serving as elders, deacons, board chairs, board members, Ministry Team Chair, pastors and preachers. What’s up with that?” Just say, “The New Testament. We’re just following God’s lead on that first Easter.” Hippolytus, Bishop of Rome in the early 200s, called the Marys “the apostles to the apostles.” The first people God sent to preach the resurrection were women. 

Speaking of which, women (or anybody for that matter) living life out of an Easter posture despite past and present adversities, seven years ago I was Hospice night nurse for my mother who was dying. I told Jennie and my sister and brother-in-law to go out for the evening. “You need a break,” I said. “I’ll take care of her.” They left and Mom and I talked until she fell off to sleep, which I used as an opportunity to slip upstairs to the bathroom. When I came down, her bed was empty. The sheets had been rolled back. Her wheelchair and oxygen tank were there, but she wasn’t. I looked in the adjacent room. Not there. I scurried across the hall to the first-floor bathroom – Nope. Then I hastened down to the kitchen and there she was, her back to me, standing upright, no visible means of support. I said, “Mom!  What are you doing? You scared me to death. You could fall and hurt yourself more’n you’re already hurtin!’” Whereupon she turned around and she was holding a package of yellow marshmallow peeps, which she had torn open. She was chewing on one of those rascals and grinning from ear-to-ear with the impish grin of a girl caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Or in this case, the Easter jar. Somehow, she had risen from her bed, walked away from the confining bed rails, tubes and such, and there she stood, smiling defiantly at death, at cancer, and at the Roman guard – her son – who had been posted by her bed. She ripped off another peep, took another bite, then, she extended the box to me, smiled, and asked “Want one?”

It’s the Easter posture I want!  It’s the Easter posture I saw in my mother that night defying death, disease, and despair. It’s the Easter posture that was exhibited by the two Marys as they dashed off from the tomb leaving the guards in their dust, no longer bound by the past, no longer needing to control the present. “They left the tomb … with … great joy, and ran to tell his disciples, “He is risen, just as he said.”

It’s the Easter posture and it’s being offered to all of us this morning, a free gift of our great and gracious God!

Want one?

Let all God’s people who’ve received the joyous testimony of the women say, AMEN