Bring your grief and your scars.

First things first: if you came here today with a grieving heart, carrying any kind of grief, you need to know one thing: you are allowed to grieve.  Singing alleluia and saying “Christ is risen” is not a glittery bandage to cover over your woundedness.  So let’s get that clear right away. 

We’re not celebrating resurrection to the exclusion of every other human experience, including the unpleasant emotions and feelings associated with grief and loss.  We’re not here to tell the story of these silly disciples who didn’t understand what Jesus told them.  We’re not mocking the faith of the women who showed up with burial spices to anoint their friend’s dead body which first they couldn’t locate and, then come to find out, wasn’t actually dead anyway. 

And I wouldn’t make a big deal out of this except that the stories we tell about Jesus’ death and resurrection form us and shape our worldview.  Calling resurrection a victory over death can be true, until we go so hard in that direction that our thinking becomes: any victory must be from God, and then death becomes a defeat, an enemy to be feared, rather than a natural part of life. 

And if focusing on resurrection means erasing the suffering and pain that led to death, that can take you down a whole road of blaming victims for their pain, disconnecting from the foundations that built up your understanding of God, and throwing out the ancient traditions and even dismissing the entire Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament: it’s old, it’s past, we don’t need it anymore. 

These are traps that represent heresies of the ancient church, and we are still falling into these traps today.  Look around and witness the effects of Christian nationalism, around the world and in our own country. 

Nadia Bolz-Weber, an ELCA pastor, spoke at a Lutheran revival—yes, Lutherans can have revivals—and said, “The problem with Christian nationalism is that you can draw God’s name into your obsession with power, but you can’t draw God into it.  What has lasted is the Gospel.  …Christianity has survived papal corruption, the crusades, and this thing called clown ministry.  Christianity is about raising the dead.”[1] 

So if you’re willing to be honest, if you’re carrying grief for your job loss, for your friend in the hospital, for the loved one who died in a terribly unfair way, grief for the dismantling of social safety nets and fear of inflation, if you are with Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women, carrying spices to dignify the death of your unjustly executed friend: you are not required to let go of that grief.  You are not asked to forget everything that came before right now and somehow step into a brand-new reality. 

What you’re actually asked to do, by a pair of dazzling men, is to remember what Jesus told you. This isn’t a break with the past but an integration of something new.  What did Jesus tell you?  What did Jesus tell you?

Did Jesus say “love one another” but someone else claiming to speak for Jesus said: “here’s the list of people we hate”?  Can those different messages even be reconciled? 

Did Jesus say “forgive one another” but someone else who calls themselves “Christian” defined the rules of being Christian and insisted that means excluding other people and then doubled-down on their perspective because of what they call “righteousness”? 

So what DID Jesus tell you?  I went back and reviewed Luke’s Gospel.  If you’ve ever seen a red-letter Bible where the words of Jesus are printed in red, you can scan pretty quickly. 

I’ve read and preached on Luke’s Gospel lots of times, and I thought I knew a lot about Jesus, and I was frankly surprised at what I found.  You’d think I would know by now, but I forget stuff, and the story of God is a very very big story.  And also, frequently God is at work within the surprising moments. 

So today, the part of Luke’s Gospel that we’re focusing on is a weird part because Jesus isn’t in it.  If this was a play, Jesus has no lines.  But we’re supposed to remember the things he said, and he said a lot of things.  Fear not: I won’t review them all right now.  We review Jesus’s words every Sunday all year long.  But I’ll hit a few highlights so that you can remember what Jesus told you. 

Luke’s gospel is where Jesus preached the “sermon on the plain,” on level ground with his listeners, where he said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,  for yours is the kingdom of God.“Blessed are you who are hungry now,  for you will be filled.“Blessed are you who weep now,  for you will laugh.“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.”[2]

Luke’s gospel is also the one where Jesus has words of woe for people who are rich and whose bellies are full of food and who are laughing and who have excellent reputations—your happiness and your good fortune or whatever, you didn’t earn it and you’re not gonna keep it forever anyway, so just keep that in mind. 

But where did Jesus start, anyway?  Luke’s Gospel is where Jesus gets an origin story.  We hear about his parents and the rocky moments at the start of their marriage, and some really terrific, prophetic poetry from his mother Mary[3] and his cousin Zechariah.[4] We hear about Jesus’s birth, far away from the centers of power, and the sheep herders who showed up to visit. 

There’s two chapters of all this backstory before Jesus ever speaks, and his first line is what he utters as a 12-year old, after his own parents lost him in the city of Jerusalem at a Passover festival.  And sweet little Jesus, just so innocent and apparently unafraid of disappointing his parents, says “Why were you searching for me?  Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” And then the story skips ahead some years until Jesus and his cousin John the Baptist are adults, and John the Baptist is prophesying and baptizing in the wilderness, and even Jesus is baptized, still saying nothing until he has a whole conversation with the devil[5] which is pretty interesting but then he goes back to his hometown, where he grew up, where everybody knows him. 

Back in the synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus reads from the ancient prophet Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[6] 

Then he dramatically rolls up the scroll and says “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  Which makes everybody pretty mad because, the nerve of this guy to claim God’s power.  And Jesus explains how prophets always get rejected by their own, how even God’s people have suffered but it was the outsiders who saved the day.  The faithful synagogue folks almost threw Jesus off a cliff that day, but he got away. 

Remember what he told you—about healing, and how God’s healing work has been going on for generations, ever since Isaiah and all the prophets that came before him.  Jesus died, and that death was real, and later in the story of Luke’s gospel we’ll encounter the risen Christ, his resurrected body still bearing the scars of crucifixion.  Scars only form in skin that is living.  Scars are evidence of healing.  Bodies remember. 

Remember what he told you about freedom.  Don’t forget the story because the story isn’t over. 

Remember what he told you, and don’t be afraid to edit out the theological stuff that doesn’t make sense in light of Jesus’s own words.  Some people call this process “deconstructing,” which is its own kind of grief and also a journey towards healing.  Jesus is still releasing captives and letting the oppressed go free.  Christianity is about raising the dead.  The story continues. 

How will you tell the story? 

Amen.

Pastor Cheryl

[1] She said something like this; I don’t have a transcript of her address but I did take my own notes. 

[2] Luke 6:20-26

[3] Luke 1:46-55, Mary’s Magnificat

[4] Luke 1:67-79, song of Zechariah about John the Baptist

[5] Luke 4:1-12

[6] Luke 4:18-19, quoting Isaiah 61:1-2