St Luke’s, Havelock North – Easter 2007 - Sermon

I was thinking about Easter during the week and I was trying to decide if Easter was a movie, who would direct it? And I decided David Lynch.

Are we familiar with David Lynch? Remember the TV series, Twin Peaks? It was an exercise in advanced weirdness. There were always dancing dwarves and talking dogs and nothing was ever quite what it seemed to be, and that’s perfect, I decided, for Easter.

Today is, of course, the second of the Big Two days on the Christian calendar. Much as I might personally like to see Pentecost and perhaps All Saints’ take on a similar status, the fact is that only Easter and Christmas have ever really caught the public’s imagination in this part of the world, and even then only one of them is reasonably true to its origins.

Christmas is lovely and family-friendly – the Ron Howard movie of the religious world. Most people these days are up to speed on the Passion and Good Friday thanks to Mel Gibson, but the fluffy bunnies and chocolate eggs of the commercial Easter are a long way from the story we’ve heard in the gospel this morning.

The real Easter story is as weird as a David Lynch screenplay. Here we have the women, Jesus’ friends and family, arriving at his tomb to finish off the funeral preparations. They saw him die, they watched him laid to rest, naturally then they assume he’ll be there, but things are not quite what they seem to be.

The first clue is the missing body, the second the two men in dazzling clothes, the third, it all sounds oddly familiar. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

The trick to watching Twin Peaks, for those who suffered to the bitter end, was to suspend your disbelief just enough to recognise the possibilities among the improbabilities. Sure it was mostly unbelievable, certainly there was lots left unexplained, but in the end it all made a certain kind of twisted not-very-likely sort of sense. A bit like Easter really.

None of what we celebrate today makes much sense. Very little of the Easter story is at all believable. In fact about the only bit that sounds at all accurate is that the disciples didn’t believe what the women told them. Yet beyond all that, in spite of it, it all makes a kind of twisted sense. It fits. In the midst of the wider, bigger story of God’s interaction with humanity and the whole unlikely history of God’s people, Easter fits.

The Easter message says that in the midst of defeat and despair things are not quite as they seem to be. New life is always possible, even when it’s not particularly probable. That is the Easter promise.

It’s not that easy to accept, of course. You have to suspend your doubts and your prejudices for a bit – that’s what we call faith. But if we do that – if we allow ourselves to look where we might not normally look, and believe what we might not normally believe, then perhaps we can begin to understand.

Dwarves can dance, dogs can talk, Christ is risen. Now that’s a movie worth seeing. Thanks be to God.