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Years ago, I hopped in an elevator in the old state of Illinois building—the Bilandic building on LaSalle—one of those old early 20th century skyscrapers built 100 years ago. Up and up went the elevator until suddenly, the car lurched, groaned and grated to a clanking stop. No one ever wants to be in this position. Ever. I don’t remember having anything on me. No phone, no wallet, no ID that they would be able to pull from my pocket to identify my body when the metal box plummeted to the basement. I even don’t remember one of those emergency phones in the elevator that they always have in movies. I do remember starting to feel weak in the knees. I was physically enclosed. Without a way out. My mind went blank.
On Easter morning, Mary and Mary Magdalene made their way to the tomb of Jesus in the cold dark fog of dawn. The gospel of Luke tells us tell us they went with spices to care for Jesus’ dead body. The gospel of John tells us that Mary Magdalene was so devastated and grief stricken that she was disoriented. In all the versions, the women go to the tomb in the aftermath of a horrific crucifixion with very reasonable expectations to find Jesus dead body. He is dead. The story is over. They are going through the motions of what happens next.
As they arrive, the ground jolts and shakes with an earthquake. An angel who flashed like lightening with clothes as white as snow, bursts onto the scene. This resplendent visitor rolls back the stone from Jesus’ tomb and plops on it, looking at them. “Not here,” the angel says. “He has been raised.”
Impossible.
Hope is not just exhausted, The possibilities are supposed to be dead. The end is the end. The curtain has closed. But the ground shakes...
“Come have a look,” the angel says. Their knees wobble and they step inside.
…Just when we think we have a grasp on reality. Just when we’re confident the dust has settled…
“He’s gone,” angel says to the women. “He beat you to it. He’s already on the road. On his way to Galilee.”
…Just when we’re sure the four walls have closed and are sealed, Just when we’re certain that the worst is true, … God refuses our finality.
God is not bound--not restrained--by our smallest reading of reality. For all we think we have it figured out, what we see is still smaller than what God sees.
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Let’s pause it for a moment here between the angel telling the women that Jesus has been raised and them switching lanes and immediately flipping to joy. Let’s pause the Hallelujah chorus for a few minutes because where the women stand there grasping at reality, that’s where I step in:
I know what it’s like to feel cramped. Put imagination in a tight corner and she becomes a noisy little factory of dread, a workshop churning out worst-case scenarios. I know what it’s like to feel constrained. To feel the elevator lurch to a stop and to be flooded with worry. To come up against a wall—to persist like heck--and be defeated.
Sometimes, I think we face problems that are impossible to crack: Wars rage and the headlines come at us so fast that we’re paralyzed and can’t imagine peace. The planet groans. An ice sheet cracks, the oceans warm, and it feels like the way forward is growing narrower by the day.
This happens close to home too: Our relationship frays with a loved one and suddenly, the whole map goes blurry. Or we live pay check to paycheck, barely treading water, legs worn out, our vision flat and cramped by demands of life.
Easter knows thatdeath is real. It doesn’t deny death. It forms a breach. It reaches in, knocks down walls, kneels beside us grasping our hand and helps us look up. It blows open what is possible
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Back to the elevator. So, there was another person aboard with me that day when I got stuck. And he happened to have a big box of tools with him. It only a minute or two for him to start bracing himself and trying to pull the door open. (Forcing open the doors would have never occurred to me to try. Never. What occurred to me was to stay in my little corner, without dislodging the elevator, trying to breathe as little as possible--which admittedly was starting to get close to hyperventilating.) My elevator-companion braced himself, and pushed and pried and finally wrenched the doors open. I watched, puffing in the corner. He was—it turned out—an elevator repair man. (Yes, this is a real story).
We were between floors. I could see the legs of the people from the floor above and the celling tiles of the other. I was disoriented. We were stuck between where we were coming from and where we were going.
“Hop out,” my elevator-angel said cheerfully and stepped aside. I crawled out.
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It’s one thing to feel blocked in. But Easter is more than getting unstuck. Mary and Mary Mag are standing there in the tomb and suddenly, everything they had thought to be true unfolded. Their cramped imaginations stretched and spread out. The world is no longer the same.
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On Good Friday, the world is trapped, suffocating with no way out. And then, God pierces the despair, breaks through the numbness and forces the doors open. And we stand there blinking, disoriented, drawing in air trying to figure out this newness, Trying to figure out how to step out.
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Some of what weighs on us and cramps us is close to home, some of it as wide as the world. You are not crazy to feel the weight of the world right now. I can’t say what you all are bringing with you this morning—stress from home, worries about your health, fear for the future, despair for the state of the world. You are not crazy to feel the heaviness of whatever tough situations you have in your life and in our world. But you do not have to believe that cruelty, violence, exhaustion, and impossible problems are the truest things.
We are often hindered by what we have decided is impossible.
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In the resurrection God wrenches open the doors of what is impossible and shows another way. God opens our cramped imaginations to see beyond our fears and then invites us to participate. This matters not just for our private lives but for the life we share in common too. Places like this--like LMC--are meant to help us see beyond the cramped, fearful version reality. We need places that teach us to resist vengeance, to practice mercy, to walk with courage and love. We need what one of my favorite theologians, Walter Brueggemann, calls “moral imagination that can lead us to more just and whole ways of living.
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Mary Magdalene and Mary run from the garden that morning with fear and joy. They are comforted, of course, but they are also changed. They left as storytellers. Their sense of reality and what is possible has been blown open. And they run to share the Good News. This is resurrection: Not just comfort but changed vision. Not just relief but new possibility. The world is larger than we thought.
Christ is risen, he is risen indeed. Alleluia.
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