Easter Saturday April 11. Sunday Gospel Thomas and the Risen Lord

Resurrection life dwells—abides—in us. Rob Bell says that “Resurrection means God has not given up on the world because this world matters”:

This world of dirt and blood and sweat and skin and light and water. This world that God is redeeming and restoring and renewing. Greed and violence and abuse—they are not right—and they cannot last. They belong to death and death does not belong.
Resurrection says that what we do with our lives matters…in this body the one that we inhabit right now. Every act of compassion matters. Every work of art that celebrates the good and the true matters. Every fair and honest act of business and trade. Every kind word. They all belong and they will all go on in God’s good world. Nothing will be forgotten. Nothing will be wasted.

Jesus expects us to have faith amid the darkness. As Christ pulled the hand of Thomas toward his sacred, transfigured wounds, he said to him “Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. But believe!”
“My Lord and my God!” Thomas exclaimed. Then Jesus tells him, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me.”
John Updike, a contemporary American writer, was one of those who, like us, never saw the resurrected Christ for himself and yet he believed.
In 1960, as a young man, he entered a poetry contest at a Methodist church in Massachusetts. He won the prize: $100. And he gave the money back to the church, but the real miracle is the poem itself, “Seven Stanzas at Easter”:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Now that’s a description of Easter. It’s material and it’s supernatural all at once.
And so, with Updike and with the Magdalene, through tears—even as we suffer and rejoice and believe and expect a miracle in this space between Holy Saturday and Easter—we find ourselves once again on the road to Bethany and, with Martha, we encounter Jesus, and we hear the words of the Teacher:

“I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this?”

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/imagochristi/2015/04/keeping-it-real-an-easter-sermon/#ixzz3X0bK8kMq