Easter 2018
Emmett Till’s mother flat-out refused a closed casket or embalming at her son’s funeral in 1955, even though he had been beaten, lynched, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River before his body had been found three days after his murder.
She wanted the United States to see what a pair of white racists had done to her baby. What they denied doing on the witness stand in order to be acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury in just over an hour. What they openly admitted to doing as soon as double jeopardy protected them from criminal prosecution.
If Emmett Till had survived, he would have been seventy-six years old today, as old as Lisa Brown, the student plaintiff in the famous Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that led to integrated public schools in the United States.
Those days are really not so long ago. They were in many of y’all’s lifetimes.
So when a memorial to Till was vandalized last year—as a part of a significant increase in bigoted and racist vandalism since 2016—and a group of twenty-four high school students took time to leave handwritten notes covering the spaces where text and imagery had been stripped away by the vandals, I saw it as one living generation communicating with another.
I saw a younger generation saying to the older, “We want to remember our shared history. We want to learn from our shared history.” Indeed, as one of the students said to the Washington Post about what message she added to the Till memorial, “You can destroy this marker, but you cannot destroy history.”
You can destroy this marker, but you cannot destroy history.
Emmett Till did not need a shroud, or a closed coffin, or embalming, to be put to rest, because there was no rest. His corpse had to speak for him.
Nor, then, did Jesus need a shroud upon His resurrection today, Easter Sunday, because His corpse had already spoken for Him, and for His passion for a more loving and just kingdom. And that passion would go with Him from the empty tomb.
It is dawn, and with the Sabbath now concluded, the female followers of Jesus go to His tomb with spices to finish the hasty burial that Joseph of Arimathea had begun on the evening of Good Friday, before the sun set to mark the beginning of the Sabbath. They are the first to bear witness to Easter.
As you know—because you’re all here today—Jesus was not there. The women are greeted by two angels who tell them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” They wonder, but then remember Jesus’s own prophecies on the subject, and return to tell Jesus’s male followers that the tomb is empty.
Naturally, the men do not believe them, dismissing their testimony as “nonsense” or “idle tales.”
But Peter’s curiosity is piqued enough that he runs to the tomb and finds it empty, just as the women said it would be. He sees Jesus’s burial shroud, discarded, and he too wonders what it could mean.
In a sentence, what it means is that Jesus no longer requires the clothes of death because He is no longer dead. When He raises Lazarus in John 11, He has to instruct the crowd to unbind Lazarus from the burial shroud. But because Jesus, as the Son of God, has conquered death, He is able to remove His own shroud under His own power. There is no need for someone else to do it for Him.
But there is a need for Peter to see it in order for him to even begin to grasp what has just taken place. It doesn’t sink in right away—he “returned home, wondering what had happened.”
And honestly, it is a sublimely appropriate God experience.
For many of us, our faith in God cannot be reduced down to a single moment of eureka, even though that is often what gets focused upon. We make a big to-do about being born again, or about reciting the Sinner’s Prayer, and being able to trace back to a single moment when we just *knew.*
But what if we didn’t just know? What if the truth has always been something that approaches us step by step, day by day, slowly winning over our hearts and souls?
What if we, too, have been confronted with the evidence of a discarded shroud, yet still needed time to wonder what it meant?
Sometimes, it should take us no such time. It should have been evident right from the outset that the murder of Emmett Till, and the acquittal of his murderers, was a miscarriage of justice, just as it should be evident that Pontius Pilate’s sentence of death to Jesus was likewise a miscarriage of justice.
But we have to be reminded of these things, lest we repeat them. Racism did not end in the 1950s. Miscarriages of justice did not end with Jesus’s trial before Pilate. We would do well to remember such sins, especially when they remain present and on the rise, because our memory remains one of the great gifts God has given us with which to do good, and to hold fast to what is right.
As New Testament Sharon H. Ringe writes of Luke’s Easter story, “With the role of memory, however, the additional witnesses come into place. In fact, all who hear or read Luke’s Gospel join their ranks, for we also remember the words that give meaning and shape to the events to which we are to bear witness. We, the readers, become participants in the final chapter of Luke’s Gospel.”
We become participants as the women were. We become participants as Peter was. Like them, we are still confronted with death, and with our means of creating death, and are left to wonder.
May we take our wonderment for shrouds, then, and pair it with action and compassion. May we take the Easter story of the Resurrection of the Lord and become not just participants in it, but active participants.
May we respond proactively to the Good News that the tomb is empty, that the Lord has risen, and that with His resurrection, life and love eternal has indeed conquered sin and death.
We can choose today to depart from God’s house still clothed in the shrouds that tie us down to death. Nothing is stopping us.
Or, we can choose to go forth clothed in the Holy Spirit that has
brought us here today.
What will you choose to be clothed in?
What memories will you choose to take with you?
What level of participation in the Resurrection will you choose to exert?
Because for all that has been accomplished on this day, so much more remains left undone. Easter was not—is not—a finish line. It is a starting line. Nearly two thousand years ago, it laid the path for beginning of the church fifty days from now on Pentecost, and today, it can lay a path forward for you as well, a path towards a more just, more compassionate, more loving world.
The Easter story does not end the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. There are post-resurrection appearances of Jesus to document, Great Commissions to be given, wounds for Thomas to see and believe. In Luke’s case, there is an entire other volume to write—Acts of the Apostles—to tell the story of how a carpenter from Galilee and His followers began to change the world.
That is what Easter is about as well—not just everything that led up to it, but everything that came after it, and was inspired by it.
Because ultimately, if we are not changed by the Resurrection, and do not in turn change the world and build the kingdom, then the Resurrection was for naught. Jesus died and rose for nothing.
We are the reason that Jesus resurrected. God loves us exactly that much.
May we respond to that divine love with our own love on this Easter, and on all Easters.
May we set down the shroud, and our wonderment at it, and pick up the lesson of our memories and history.
May we be the church that remembers, and then acts, with the Risen Lord in our hearts.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
April 1, 2018