EASTER BREAKFAST BY THE SHORE

(Preached on Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005)

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 to you.                                            -Matthew 28:7

 

What an ordinary scene.  So everyday. 

Here are seven fishermen squatting around a fire in a circle after working all night in the boats on the Sea, and Jesus offering them breakfast.

Few of our meals are more ordinary than breakfast. 

Most of us eat the same thing from breakfast every morning, without fail.  (For me, it is a banana, yogurt, orange juice and hot tea with honey.)

Few of our meals are more ritualized, more predictable, and more humdrum than breakfast. 

Breakfast is not the meal where we look for creativity.  Rather, what we look for is routine, something to help us get up and get going in the morning. 

And on this morning, Jesus, the risen Christ, meets with seven of his disciples on a beach in Galilee, two weeks after Easter, to share breakfast.

 

Isn’t it amazing the disciples were back at work? 

I mean, if you had come face-to-face with a person resurrected from the dead, on two occasions no less, would you be able to go back home and go back to work?

And yet, isn’t that what we all do?

We are all here, in record numbers for a Sunday morning, on Easter, because there is something special, something powerful, something amazing about it that draws us here.

There is something wonderful and reassuring for us about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and so we gather to celebrate it.

But most of us think of resurrection as something that happens to us after we die, when we are taken up into another world.

So we honor and celebrate the truth about resurrection once a year and then we go back to work.

 

But the resurrection of Jesus did not happen in the distant future, did not occur in some other world, it was here and it was now.

When the risen Christ encountered his disciples, they were not up in heaven; they were out in Galilee.  They weren’t strumming on harps of gold, they were pulling in their nets.

Perhaps that’s why they didn’t say much to Jesus around that campfire over breakfast. 

Perhaps they were all in a bit of shock.

For what they were experiencing was resurrection having been moved from future tense to the present tense.

 

Easter Day is not primarily about some general theme of life after death. 

It is not about general survival.

It is specifically about one special person who was raised up by God, and who made himself known to those who loved him dearly and who had tried to follow his way of living.

Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph, prophet and teacher from Galilee, the man who was crucified, is the person Easter is about.

In raising this particular man God emphatically refuted the evil ways of those men who had plotted Jesus’ downfall and had jeered him all the way to the cross. 

In raising this particular man God has placed a seal of approval on all that Jesus was, did and taught.

His way is the true way to live if we want to be truly human.

God did not raise up any other marvelous and wonderful person in history: not Moses, not Socrates or Plato, not Michelangelo, nor Shakespeare, Mozart, or Einstein. 

God did not raise up Gandhi, or Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, Jr.

None of these receive the full divine seal of approval.

 

The message of Easter is that God raised up Jesus of Nazareth and by doing so, God said a momentous YES to this obscure Galilean prophet. 

By doing so God is saying, loud and clear that everything this man taught is to be taken seriously by all the rest of us.

This man whom God raised is the same man who told us to take a long look at the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, and to learn from them instead of from our money driven way of life.

The person God raised is the same one who dared to say “Blessed are the peacemakers.  Blessed are the poor, the gentle, and the merciful!”

It is the same man who stunned his listeners by asserting: “Love your enemies, pray for those who abuse you.”

God raised up the fellow who was relaxed in the company of tax collectors, prostitutes and other outsiders, and went on to say that many of them would be welcomed to God’s banquet table long before those self-righteous people on display at church.

This Jesus, who insisted that we cannot serve both God and money, who declared that the truly great people are those who put themselves last, and who told us stories about prodigal fathers and sons, about Good Samaritans, about marvelous parties and banquets.

This person is the man who is the core message of Easter.

 

Without the message of Easter, we are to be pitied.

Make no mistake about it. 

On that terrible Friday, when a broken body was taken down from a cross and given a hasty burial in a borrowed tomb, at that point all that Jesus did and said appeared to be discredited as useless in this real world. 

Without the message of Easter his powerful words of forgiveness from the cross, sound like nothing more than a pitiful plea from a broken man.

He and his message were finished, and the disciples were a spent force forever. 

They were in hiding.  Their master had got it wrong.

Back to the real world where greed, hatred, cunning, revenge, and brute power rules supreme.  Jesus had lost.

 

But a couple of days later, something remarkable happened that changed everything.  This same Jesus was raised up alive, and appeared first to the women and then to the men who had loved and trusted him. 

Now suddenly his life and teachings, his loving, creative, merciful, strong-minded and generous-hearted way of life reverberate with power.  Suddenly everything about him is to be taken absolutely and totally seriously. 

Suddenly resurrection is not just a once-and-future wish but it has become an immediate, undeniable force to be reckoned with.

Suddenly Easter has become, not just a noun, but a verb.

Easter is not just a day to celebrate, but a way to live life.

Resurrection is not just something we hope for in the future, but it is something we can practice and experience in our daily lives.

Some of the ways we can begin to practice resurrection are:

-to listen to others with an openness that affirms that all things can be made new;

-live with enthusiasm (when you can laugh and sing and relish life, you are practicing resurrection);

-nurture yourself — east right, exercise, get plenty of rest — and you will help God resurrect your body;

-accept your identity as a child of God and your mission as a copartner with the Holy One in the ongoing creation of life and the world.

As we take seriously the teachings and life of Jesus, the reality of resurrection power will become stronger in our lives.