Sermon of the Week:
Again & Again: The Sun Rises
An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on April 4, 2021.
Easter Sunday ~ Resurrection of the Lord
Keywords: Day of Resurrection, Mark, Empty Tomb, Sunrise, Esau McCulley. #pcusa
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
and Mark 16:1-8
Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.
There is a line, in a Psalm,
That rings through my ears
Whenever I read Mark’s Resurrection story.
Weeping may linger for the night,
But joy comes with the morning…
Typical for Mark, the details are scarce:
The scene opens with three women,
on the first day of the week
walking to the place where Jesus’ body lay.
They were preoccupied with their task, their duty,
wondering if they’d find someone to help them roll away that stone…
Mark tells us it was early, so very early,
Quote, “when the sun had risen.”
So it was dark. Then it was sunrise.
These women, focused, on their way to the tomb…
Do you think they noticed the sunrise, peeking up over the horizon?
Did they see it?
Weeping may linger for the night,
But joy comes with the morning…
///
Mark doesn’t tell us whether they noticed or not,
But they had a lot weighing them down, surely.
They’d be forgiven if they paid it no mind.
It had been quite a week.
They had important work to do, as well.
The preparation of a body for a proper burial isn’t a simple thing.
There was a process, handed down over the centuries,
An act of love for the dearly departed…
All of that would have been weighing on them,
Along with everything else from the crazy, stressful, chaotic week that just concluded.
Maybe they were paying attention
To the reality that it was not all that safe for them to be out and about
On the streets of Jerusalem
For those who were close to Jesus.
There was a crowd, demanding his death, just two days ago.
So there was that, too.
That must have been disconcerting, causing them to move cautiously, deliberately.
This wasn’t a leisurely stroll to the tomb.
And then, of course, there was the simple fact
That someone they loved, their friend, was dead.
In other words, had THEIR weeping lingered through the night
Everyone would understand.
Maybe they were weeping as they walked together that Easter morning.
///
Did they notice the sunrise?
They had a lot on their mind.
I’m guessing the sun rose without a second thought.
That would make it like most sunrises for most people.
Most people don’t notice the sunrise.
Same for me, I confess.
Whenever I’m up that early,
unless it is the most spectacular of sunrises
I rarely, if ever, pay much attention to it.
All of this prompted me to research
The mechanics of a sunrise.
It is simply astonishing, the physics of it all.
A sunrise is the result of the Earth spinning at nearly a thousand miles per hour,[i]
Travelling an orbit of 584 million miles,
Around a star that’s a million times the size of our planet…
Taking in the magnitude of all that is dizzying.
Thinking about it fills me with a sense of awe, of gratitude, of amazement.
But most of the time I barely give the rising sun a thought at all.
I’m a night person,
So I get up begrudgingly,
And if I have my way I often sleep right through the day’s sunrise.
Lately, though, I’ve been up getting up early.
We have new pups who need a morning walk.
And sometimes, sure, Brook and I make note of the rising sun
Maybe if it is extra,
purple and pink, or if the clouds fall just right…
But that’s the exception that proves the rule:
Most of the time the sunrise just happens,
Without fanfare, without any notice given,
This incredible, breathtaking moment
When night gives way to day
And tomorrow is finally here…
It usually comes and goes, unnoticed,
As I’m just doing everyday things,
Like walking my dogs, looking out for squirrels to avoid
Thinking about my to-do list and the start of my day….
Denise Anderson suggests that,
Because we’ve come to expect sunrises every day,
we’re not always impressed by them….
That doesn’t make them any less awesome, or miraculous.[ii]
And there’s significant truth to that.
The things we experience over and over again,
That we come to expect, like the sunrise,
they don’t stand out without effort.
We often don’t pay them no nevermind.
This is one reason we put such focus on remembering,
On intentionality, on doing things together
Like sharing a common meal, sharing the Lord’s supper,
which we’ll do a bit later this morning.
These practices help us name things
Important things, that we might otherwise let pass by, unawares.
And what I love about Mark,
What I love about his telling of the Easter Gospel
Is that it is so different;
it helps shake us from this tendency within us to let important things pass by,
if we can but listen, and let Mark’s Gospel shake us.
It is possible, don’t you think,
That Easter can be as familiar to us as the Sunrise.
Something that returns to us, rhythmically, like clockwork,
Year after year,
So repetitively that we barely notice a world spinning so fast
Barely notice the transition from yesterday to today,
Barely notice that everything, suddenly, is different?
Like night and day.
///
We know the Easter story, most of us do, I imagine,
And even if you’re new to the Christian faith, or checking it out again after a while,
You probably have the broad details down. [Read more…]