Expect the Unexpected

The Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew, The 28th Chapter

After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the

women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

In my family, there is a story that gets told almost every Easter.  It’s a story from way, way back when I, ironically had the same amount of hair that I have now, but was much, much shorter.  My parents invited a big group of their friends over for Easter dinner.  My dad made a beautiful leg of lamb on the hibachi he brought back from Southeast Asia... he had rubbed it with herbs... slow roasted it over coals for hours... took it off the grill and set it on a cutting board on the counter to rest before carving it and then went out to the living room to check on the guests.  When he came back into the kitchen, our German Shorthaired Pointer, Duke had pulled the leg of lamb off the counter and was eating it on the kitchen floor.  That Easter, things did not go as expected.  

After I became a pastor many, many years after Duke had his best Easter dinner ever, a man walked up to me the week before Easter in the congregation I served in Colorado and asked me, “Is it ready?”

“Is what ready?”  

“Your Easter sermon!  It’s the big one!  The Gettysburg Address of sermons!  It’s the one sermon that really matters!  Do you have it ready?”  

“Yes?”

I know I preached a sermon that year at Easter but since I can’t even remember the details of it I’m pretty sure it wasn’t as memorable as the Gettysburg Address and I have no delusions that one day it will be chiseled in marble somewhere or memorized by school kids.  Needless to say, my sermon that day probably didn’t live up to that man’s Easter expectations.

But you know what?  Maybe it’s in the nature of Easter that things happen outside of what we expect.  The two Marys from the Gospel story came to the tomb that first Easter morning with what I think were pretty realistic expectations.  They expected to find Jesus still laying in the tomb and still very much... well... dead.  They expected that, because for all of history before then (and frankly for all of history since then) dead people... well, dead people stay dead. 

The two Marys came to that first Easter with some expectations and I think we all come to Easter with expectations.  Some of you, I’m sure, came expecting a certain Easter hymn.  Some expected this would be two hours of your life you’d NEVER get back!  Some expected flowers.  Some expected that church was the price you had to pay to get to eat with the family later on.  Some expected to be uplifted.  Some expected to be bored to tears, some expected to feel God’s presence, some expected they wouldn’t be welcomed, some, I suspect, expected a pulpit pounding sermon and a pastor yelling that you needed to “get saved” and I know for certain that some of you expected bacon at breakfast. 

But there seems to be something about Easter that things don’t tend to go exactly how we expect them to go.  When the two Marys got to the tomb they expected the stone to still be in place, but it wasn’t.  They expected Jesus to still be laying in the tomb, but he wasn’t.  They expected that he would never be present with them ever again, but he was.   

In the other stories in Scripture where Jesus appears after Easter, he doesn’t seem to be expected either and to be honest, if I were in their sandals I wouldn’t have expected Jesus to appear either!  But story after story Jesus does the unexpected and there he is!  There’s the story where Jesus joins a couple of people walking along a road and even though they were followers of Jesus before, they didn’t recognize him until they shared dinner with him.  There’s the story of Jesus making his way mysteriously through walls and locked doors to be with the disciples which certainly wasn’t what the disciples were expecting.  There’s the story of the disciples who went fishing (because what else are you going to do after the guy you’ve been following for three years gets killed) but then they saw someone on the beach grilling fish and that someone turned out, unexpectedly, to be Jesus.  

Jesus showed up unexpectedly over and over again after his death.  Sometimes, it seems he showed up in a flesh and blood sort of way where the people who encountered him could do things like touch his wounds, eat a meal with him or grab his feet.  But sometimes he appeared in ways that aren’t quite explainable, doing things that rational people like me find hard to understand, like walking into locked rooms or vanishing in the blink of an eye.  

The two Marys encountered Jesus that first Easter morning in a way they didn’t expect... in a way they could really NEVER have expected and yet they did experience him, somehow alive and at work in their lives.  The disciples encountered Jesus in ways they didn’t expect and really, how could they possibly have expected it?  And yet he was somehow alive and active in some way in their experience.  So how about you?  Have you experienced Jesus alive and at work in your life?  Think for a minute about how you might expect that to look.  Think for a minute what you might expect that to feel like and where you might expect that encounter with Jesus to happen.  Now... remember, sometimes we do encounter Jesus where we expect, like in the elements of bread and wine in communion or in the waters of the font, but Jesus also seems to make a habit of being present and active in people’s lives in other ways they absolutely, positively NEVER expected at all.  

So maybe the real question we need to be asking ourselves is not where might Jesus be alive in our lives or how might that look or feel, but where out there in the world have we been missing seeing, feeling and experiencing Jesus in our lives because he’s been alive and active in our lives all along, just in ways and in people and in places we had never before expected he would or could be!  Perhaps the real lesson for Easter is that when it comes to experiencing the living Christ we would do well to expect to experience the living, active, Lord of all in the most unexpected ways!  Amen.