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April 4, 2021 Luke 24:1-12                                                            

Low in the grave he lay, Jesus my Savior,

waiting the coming day, Jesus my Lord!

Up from the grave he arose;

with a mighty triumph o’er his foes;

he arose a victor from the dark domain,

and he lives forever, with his saints to reign.

He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose!

This 150-year-old hymn was an Easter favorite of my dad’s.  He loved to sing it loudly and joyfully on Easter Sunday, either with the church choir or just on his own at home, in the car, wherever.  My brothers and I all have that hymn ringing in our ears on Easter Sundays. It has become a favorite of mine and is even more meaningful to me this year after the death of my father.

Resurrection hymns usually contrast Jesus in the tomb with the risen Jesus, for indeed that is central to the gospel and central to our belief as Christians.  You will listen a bit later to the personal statement of faith prepared by Santos/Brionah.  I want to encourage you to listen closely to the way he/she describes faith in Jesus.  You can read the statements of faith of both of our confirmands on the back of the bulletin this morning.  Santos and Brionah are very clear that Jesus is the one who died on a cross for our sins and who rose from the dead, or came back from the grave.  In their own words they are saying “Up from the grave he arose; with a mighty triumph o’er his foes; he arose a victor from the dark domain, and he lives forever”, the Son of God, our Savior and our King.

The story from Luke is familiar.  The women get up in the dark, carrying the spices they had prepared to ritually care for Jesus’ body. They were carrying out their traditional tasks after the death of a loved one.  Luke gives us the names of three of the women but indicates that there were others with them.  It was a group of women, likely the same group who had watched Jesus’ body being taken down off the cross and placed into the tomb on Friday before the sabbath began.  Both Mary Magdalene and Joanna had been identified earlier in Luke’s gospel as women healed by Jesus who responded to his gift by joining the ranks of the women who funded the travels of Jesus and his male disciples. They were tied to the Galilean portion of Jesus’ ministry, and had traveled the distance to Jerusalem with their male counterparts, now called the Eleven because Judas is no longer included in the original dozen disciples.

The group of women would never have expected to find the tomb open, or to NOT find the body.  If you were headed to a cemetery to place flowers on the grave of your loved one, would it have occurred to you to wonder whether he had left his peaceful rest, leaving an empty, open coffin staring at you?  As NT Wright reminds us, “Easter is always a surprise.” He goes on to say, “From the beginning, the gospel is good news not least because it dares to tell us things we didn’t expect, weren’t inclined to believe, and couldn’t understand.  Did we expect the gospel would be something obvious, something we could have dreamed up for ourselves?”

The missing body was not anything the women (or the male disciples for that matter) would have dreamed up, despite the multiple times Jesus brings it up during his teachable moments with them.  He clearly predicts that he will be arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, and that he will rise again on the third day.  The words apparently went in one ear and out the other.  They physically heard Jesus but did not truly hear and understand him. That can happen to us when we don’t want to hear something, when the news is either bad or frightening or uncomfortable in some way.   We can hear it on one level, but we don’t appropriate it, truly receive it or remember it for very long.  It gets pushed back into the crevices of the mind.

In a state of utter confusion at the missing body, the women are suddenly joined by two men in dazzling clothing.  Angels?  Messengers from God?  Luke describes this moment as a double testimony—not just one voice but two– reminding the startled women of what Jesus had previously said to them. We can remember the other time that two men showed up with dazzling clothing involved—when Jesus was met by Moses and Elijah on the mountaintop.  At that time, their conversation was about his impending departure, his movement from his earthly ministry to his next assignment.  Before and after the hike up the mountain, Jesus had told his closest associates to expect the Son of Man to be betrayed, to undergo great suffering, to be rejected by the Jewish leaders, to be killed and then raised from the dead on the third day.

Ahhh, they say.  Yes, now that you bring it up, we do remember him saying something like that.  The women, on their own initiative, leave to get the word out to the Eleven and the rest.  They must be holed up somewhere in mourning, and the women clearly know exactly where they are.  No one gives this group of women instructions to go and tell the others—they do that on their own.  Their male counterparts couldn’t believe their story.  To them it sounded like an idle tale, utter nonsense.  We can’t fault the Eleven men too much, as the women couldn’t believe their eyes either.  None of them really expected this would happen.  It is a hard thing to believe—that someone who was placed in a tomb one day was no longer there on the third day.  Could he really be alive?  Could the words of the two men in dazzling clothing be true, that there is no need to look for the living among the dead?  According to them, Jesus is alive!  Jesus had said it himself in his teaching about what to expect at the resurrection:  in speaking about God, he said, “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all are alive.”  God is the God of the living, and Jesus is no longer dead but alive.

The key question here is what these closest friends and the supporting group of women will do with this amazing news.  Will they actually get it? Is it now something that they can truly hear and receive in their hearts?  It is the same question that confronts us two millennia later.  Do we actually get it?  Can we truly hear this good news and receive it in our hearts?

Hearing and believing the news that Jesus, who was once truly dead, is now truly alive is not automatic for us either.  It IS still a surprise, an unexpected occurrence, and as we say, it is something we must take on faith, because there is no logical, physical explanation of a human rising from the grave.  If you can believe this truth, if you can imbed it into your heart, into your very soul, you carry with you an enduring hope and joy that is not dependent on your outer circumstances.  I think of the words that are often repeated at a graveside service.  Standing in the cemetery with a coffin ready to be lowered into the earth, to its final resting place, we hear these words: “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

Amidst our tears, surrounded by loved ones and friends who care about us, we CAN stand at the grave and sing Alleluia.  We praise God because we know that this may be the final resting place for a physical body, but it is not the end for our loved one.  Life continues, life in new surroundings, life encased in a new, spiritual body which we can only imagine on this side of the grave.  When we truly hear this good news of Christ’s resurrection, we approach death in a different way.

When we truly hear this good news of Christ’s resurrection, we also approach life in a different way.  It changes our perspective, softens those judgmental attitudes, melts away the harsh words.  To believe that he did rise up from the grave, triumphant over his foes, victorious over the domain of the evil one, living forever as ruler of all enables us to be courageous in the face of injustice, to be committed to caring for God’s creation, to be faithful in acts of service, to seek the good in all who surround us.  God is the God of the living, for to God all are alive.  We are alive here and now, living each day as those who do not fear tomorrow.  Let us truly live for today, consistently grateful for the gift of our risen Lord. Let us sing Alleluia, Praise the Lord!

Luke 21:1-4

I remember the senior pastor I worked alongside in North Carolina telling me more than once, “Deborah, we don’t have to worry about challenging our church members too strongly with respect to their financial giving because Presbyterians definitely know how to hold onto their wallets.”  Of course we do!  If we pay attention, generally we know what we can afford and what we can’t.  We also know how easily we can get in trouble financially when we forget what it is that we can afford and spend more than we have.  In general, we know the level of generosity that is comfortable for us and the level of generosity that becomes uncomfortable for us.  We know how to hold on to our wallets. 

We each have a personal value system about how money is spent or saved, one that is often an outgrowth of what we learned as children.  Perhaps you did not agree with the value system you were exposed to growing up, so as an adult, you intentionally shape a new value system regarding money.  Or perhaps you saw the great benefits of the value system you were exposed to growing up, so you continue to employ a similar system of values with respect to your own wallet as an adult.

            As we move through this season of Lent together, I do hope you are making use of the envelopes in your Lenten packet, one marked for each Sunday of Lent.  The purple sheet with a scripture reading, reflection, discussion questions and a suggested prayer are worthwhile to ponder throughout the week.  They were chosen specifically for HRPC from the complete Lenten devotional book by Rev. Jill Duffield, senior pastor at First Presbyterian in Greensboro, NC.  She titles her devotional:  Lent in Plain Sight.  Duffield focuses each week on a different ordinary object.  I want you to know that this week I sent a note to Rev. Duffield to let her know how we are making use of her devotional for our congregation during Lent 2021.  She was thrilled and told me that my note made her week!

Thus far we have looked at the ordinary objects of ashes and oil.  This week our ordinary object is coins.  You can do a little exploring yourself about how often coins are mentioned in the New Testament.  Look it up—only once in John, with the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers in the temple, but coin or coins are mentioned in the other gospels several times.   When you go broader and look at how often money is mentioned, you will find an entire column of citations in very small print in a concordance, with about half of them in the Old Testament and half of them in the New Testament.

            Jesus has an opinion about coins.  Like the rest of us, he carries a value system about how money is used which he expresses in several different encounters, in teaching the disciples, and in examples in preaching through some of his parables.  The text we heard today from the gospel of Luke tells about the poor widow who contributes two small copper coins to the temple treasury.  These are the smallest denomination of coins in the Greek empire, like a penny for us.  The pennies that are worth so little that when people drop one by mistake, many do not even bother to pick up the coin at all.  The widow could have purchased three grapes with her two coins.  They would not even have been enough to purchase a sparrow for an offering in the temple.  Almost nothing.  Yet it was all she had.  Jesus cares not about the amount of her gift, but about the motivation and the generosity of her spirit.  What would she live on tomorrow?  Somehow she trusts that help will come her way, and to her it is more important to give what she can while she is able.  Tomorrow is another day with its own challenges and surprises.

            Jesus lifts up the widow’s value system as he is sitting outside the temple watching worshipers file in.  He describes her value system as one which views money, even a very small amount, as a means to show devotion to God.  In the process, he clearly puts down the view of money held by the rich people who are also on their way into worship, the ones who carelessly drop money into the offering box.  For the rich, it was simply skimming some money off the top, and any amount they put in would not have been noticed in their bank accounts or their wallets.  Listen to this parable provided by NT Wright, a British scholar and preacher:  suppose you have two balloons filled with air.  One is quite small and the other is very large.  You untie the balloons and release the same amount of air from both balloons.  The small one is completely deflated, while the large one does not really look any different! 

This temple treasury was a box for what we might call a free-will offering—worshipers could give what they wanted to give.  The funds would have been used by the temple leaders to keep up the building, pay the priests, basically run the entire Jewish religious community.    Some point out that this religious institution had a bad reputation of ignoring the needs of vulnerable people like poor widows, and that women like the one in this story definitely did not benefit from this kind of temple-centered economic system which was known for exploiting the vulnerable ones in society.  Others say that the temple as an institution must not have exploited the vulnerable, or Jesus would have told her to keep her money instead of depositing it in the offering plate.  Based on the descriptions we find elsewhere in the gospels, I tend to lean into the idea that the faith institution of Jesus’ day did exploit the poor.   This makes me think of the people today who really don’t have money to spare who get sucked into giving and giving and giving to a televangelist, or maybe a radio religious personality, thinking their sacrificial giving will reap blessings for them as individuals or as a family while they run the risk of eviction or malnutrition.  When an economic system centers on one pastor or one faith institution which takes advantage of poor families, that is a current day exploitation of faith-based generosity.

One Lenten practice worth trying is to take stock of your own value system around spending and saving coins of any value.  It starts to really hit home when we ask ourselves questions like the ones Jill Duffield explores in one of her reflections in the Lenten devotional—some of them are questions Hunting Ridge (and many other congregations) have struggled with over the years, and even very recently.  Questions like, should we maintain a comfortable nest egg so we will have the funds for a rainy day?  After all, our building is old.  Or instead, should we empty our accounts and spread the wealth to those in our community and beyond who are in financial need? What about the thousands of dollars spent on refurbishing an organ?  Some will say—well, we got donations to cover the cost here at Hunting Ridge.  And yes we did.  But what is the value system at play in refurbishing an organ for our enjoyment instead of building a playground for children in the inner city, for example?  And how about putting out money to redecorate the fellowship hall?  Or to put in an elevator?  Is it simply frivolous spending or perhaps a way to make our worship and fellowship spaces accessible to all?  What about raising funds and setting aside annual budget dollars to fund a mission trip or to send our youth to conferences in the summer?   Yes indeed, as Duffield says, “questions about money bring to the surface deeply held opinions and emotions”.  Certainly,  these kinds of debates illustrate our varied value systems, and quickly!  Duffield shares a marvelous example: “I remember vividly a conversation with a fellow Presbyterian attending a workshop on stewardship.  He told me how angry his father would get at his mother for taking a portion of their family’s crops and chickens’ eggs to the pastor.  What his mother saw as faithful, his father saw as foolish.”   What do you think?  Was it faithful or foolish?  It depends on your value system, on how you look at coins and spending and saving. 

I am reminded of another event shared in Matthew’s gospel, the 26^th chapter.  It is getting close to the end of Jesus’ life.  He is in Jerusalem having dinner at the home of Simon the leper (not Simon Peter the disciple!).  A woman came in and poured a bottle full of expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet, anointing him in a very worshipful act.  The disvalue system for money, were quick to get angry.  They asked Jesus: “Why are you allowing this kind of waste of resources?  If she has this expensive perfume and wants to honor you, why does she not sell it for a large sum and give the money to the poor?”

Remember, Jesus has a different value system for money.  He berates the disciples for putting the woman down, telling them that she has performed a valuable act of devotion, pouring out her precious resource to essentially prepare him for burial.  Jesus knows the end is coming.  As a matter of fact, immediately after this event, Matthew tells us that Judas leaves the group and finds the chief priests, agreeing to betray Jesus into their hands.  Jesus recognizes that the woman knows she should express her devotion while she can.  Jesus is not going to be around forever.  In Jesus’ mind, this is not a waste, but appropriate devotion.  Faithfulness, not foolishness.

What is a faithful way to look at the coins we have at our disposal?  What is a foolish way to look at them?  We likely will have different answers.  I wonder what we would learn about each other if we had conversations around the use of money in general and the use of money in the life of the church?  Perhaps each of us would grow as we listen to others.  Amen.