Love Wins - Sermon Transcript

Well, good morning, friends.

My name is Mitchell, and I serve as a senior minister here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas.

And it is so good to be here with you all on Easter morning.

I mean that.

It is a joy.

And so whether this has been, you know, your first Easter with us, or whether you have been here for decades, I'm grateful that you have made time to worship.

 to proclaim the good news of the gospel once again on this glorious day.

And I am grateful for those who, especially for those who it's their first time here.

You know, our church's mission to magnify God's love for all people by creating space for belonging, purpose, justice, and joy really starts with this idea of belonging.

And so if you need a faith community to belong to,

 know that we would love for you to find a home here.

I also begin this sermon with a bit of a confession.

I have been working on this thing for quite a bit, much longer than I'm used to.

And if you were in the pastor's Bible study this past Sunday, that is not news to you, as I sort of struggled to make sense of what we were going to get into today.

I've read commentaries and

 I've spent time reading others' interpretations of the Greek, and I've prayed over this text more than I've really prayed over anything in recent memory.

I've been in my office in the late afternoon sipping cold coffee.

I don't know why I'm sipping cold coffee.

We can have warm coffee anytime we'd like in the staff offices, but...

 I've been sipping cold coffee, staring at a blank page more times than I care to admit, and I am still at awe of how hard this sermon has been over the past several weeks.

I've had thoughts in the shower, felt like a breakthrough, like I kind of got my head around it, my hands around it, and it turned out to be nothing.

And after all of that, after all this sort of struggle I've had with the text, I remain committed

 I remain confident that the title that I penciled in back in August still holds up, and it's really two words.

Love Wins.

Love Wins.

Now my son Cash, who's in second grade, could have told me that on Ash Wednesday and saved me a lot of time.

I genuinely did not need six weeks in a Greek lexicon to get here, and yet here we are anyway.

And so, here's what I've come to believe.

 The simplest things.

The simplest things are almost always the hardest things to actually hold on to.

Saying love wins in February is easy.

Saying it when the circumstances you face aren't changed by its proclamation becomes second nature to us as Christians.

But standing in front of a tomb

 And meaning it is something else entirely.

And that is what we're here for this morning.

For those of you who have been with us through this Lenten season, you know what we've been carrying together.

Seven weeks of asking what love, divine love, actually looks like.

Especially when it costs us something.

Love that winds the circle past what is...

 Comfortable.

Love that waits without controlling.

Love that walks into the face of rejection and chooses to love even as those around it don't.

And all of this sort of love, this divine love, has been risky every single week.

And here on this morning, on this Easter Sunday, is where there are not, we see if it holds.

 And so, I invite us to hear the Easter story proclaimed once again as you rise and embody your spirit for the reading of the Gospel.

From the Gospel of Luke, the 24th chapter, verses 1 through 12.

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn...

 They went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.

They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body.

And while they were perplexed about this, suddenly, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them and the women were terrified and they bowed their faces to the ground.

But the men said to them, why do you look for the living among the dead?

 He is not here, but he has risen.

Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified on the third day, rise again?

And then they remembered his words.

And returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.

And now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with whom

 with them who told this to the apostles.

But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

But Peter got up and ran to the tomb, stooping in and looking in.

He saw the linen clothes by themselves, and then he went home amazed at what had happened.

For the word of God in Scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

You may be seated.

 Will you pray with me?

May the words of my mouth and meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer.

You are the one who refuses to let love be the last casualty.

Help us to remember.

Amen.

 Here's the thing about today, and maybe this is why I struggled so much writing this particular Easter sermon.

You already know the story.

It's not new.

You already know how this story ends.

Every single person I imagine in this room already knows how the gospel concludes.

The tomb is empty.

Christ is risen.

Love wins.

 You knew that before you got dressed this morning.

You knew it before you fought your way downtown to find a parking spot.

You knew it before the brass played and the lilies arrived and someone handed you a bulletin.

The Easter story then is not a mystery that is waiting for us to solve it.

It is not information that you are lacking.

This is the most told story in the history of the Christian church, and most of us have been hearing it since before we could even read.

 The real question this morning is not whether you know the story.

The question is whether you can remember it.

And I want to be careful about that word because I do not mean it casually.

There is a difference between knowing something and being able to find it when you need it.

 My entire life seems to be teaching me this lesson as I am stuck in this theme.

I know this about myself better than I know almost anything.

I lose things.

Like real things, I lose things a lot.

It's one of my most consistent and least charming qualities.

Keys, wallet, phone, a kid's water bottle.

 Shoelaces you spend too much time tracking down to buy the day before Easter for your Allen Edmund dress shoes.

Whatever I was just holding 30 seconds ago, I can easily misplace it.

 And the particular frustration of losing something is never that it has ceased to exist.

That's obviously true.

It is that I know it is somewhere.

It's in the house.

I just cannot locate it in the moment when I actually need it.

And I will spend 20 minutes tearing apart every room only to find that thing that I'm missing sitting exactly where it was supposed to be the whole time.

 My wife, Eli, though, has this gift for resolving this clear character flaw of mine.

She can walk into a room and take one look and find the thing that I've been searching for for the better part of an hour.

And most of the time she does it with patience that is either deeply loving or she's deeply amused, probably a little bit of both, because the thing was never gone.

I just lost my ability, right, to find it.

 Now, not to belittle the Easter story by comparing the resurrection account to my shoelaces, but this is often what happens to us in the middle of ordinary life.

We know that love wins.

Most of us have known it for a long time, but then life does what life does because the world is not neutral on this.

 The world is not simply indifferent to whether or not we remember the pace of our lives, the noise of our culture, the relentless demands of work and family, and the thousands of small emergencies that fill out all of our days.

All of it is moving in one direction, one clear direction, and that direction is not towards remembering.

It's towards forgetting.

 We live in a time and place that's extraordinarily good at making the urgent, the urgent feel more real than the truth.

The notifications that pull us away from the conversation, the deadlines that crowd out our prayer life, the crisis of the moment that helps us swallow the convictions we've held for a lifetime, we are good at forgetting.

And we're not bad people for this.

 We're not bad because we forget.

We're just people.

Finite human beings with finite attention spans and limited energy living in a time that is asking more of us than we can give at any single moment.

But the cumulative effect of this, the cumulative effect of all that is

 is that we forget and that the forgetting is real.

You do not lose the Easter story all at once.

You lose it the way you lose anything, gradually, incrementally, one distraction at a time, one disappointment at a time, one moment where you reach for the truest thing you knew and could not find it.

And then it happens again and again

 And again, until somewhere along the way, the story that was supposed to be the center of everything starts to feel like something you used to know, something you believe in theory but cannot quite access it or practice it, something that belongs to a version of you that had more time or more faith or fewer reasons to be tired.

 And the world is patient about this.

The empire does not need to defeat the Easter story directly.

It just needs to keep us busy enough that we stop reaching for it.

It just needs the noise to stay loud enough that the still small voice gets harder and harder to hear.

It just needs us to keep our eyes down long enough that we forget to look up.

That is not a new problem though for us.

 For humanity, that may very well be the oldest problem.

And it is exactly the human condition that the author of Luke is describing in this text.

Not ignorance, not malice, just the ordinary heartbreaking difficulty of holding on to the truest thing we know when everything around us is insisting otherwise.

 What makes Luke so provocative, so unsettling, so relentlessly honest is that the author has been telling us the truth about this the entire time.

The whole gospel of Luke is built around it.

And if you read it from beginning to end, which I encourage you,

 to do, you start to see that Luke is not surprised by any of this.

Not the forgetting, not the dismissal, not the men around the table reaching for the language of derangement when the women walk in with the most important news in human history.

Luke has been preparing us for this moment since the very first chapter.

 A young woman, Jesus' mother, in a small town in Galilee, opens her mouth and sings.

She has no power, no standing, no platform.

She is nobody measured by the world's standards.

And yet what comes out of her is not a timid prayer of resignation.

It is a proclamation.

 A proclamation that's sung in the past tense as though what she is describing has already happened.

She sings, he has brought down the powerful from their thrones.

God has lifted up the lowly.

Mary's not describing something completed.

She's describing, though, something that is certain.

 She is so sure of what God is doing, is going to do, that she sings it as if it's already done.

That song is the theological thesis for the entire gospel of Luke.

And Luke essentially spends the next 23 chapters proving it to be true.

Over and over and over, the author shows us who gets seen, who gets heard, who ends up in the room when something holy happens.

 the shepherd in their fields, the tax collector, the woman who lost her coin, the father who runs down the road, the thief on the cross, the Samaritan who stops, the lowly are lifted, the hungry are filled, the powerful not getting the last word.

Mary knew it before any of it began, and Luke has been asking us to remember alongside her ever since.

 And now we're in chapter 24.

The women come to the tomb before dawn.

They come with spices because love does not abandon what it loves even after death.

They find the stone has been rolled away.

And two men in dazzling clothes are there.

And the women are terrified and they bow their faces to the ground.

And the men say to them something remarkable.

 They do not say to them something new.

They do not give them an announcement that they have never heard before.

They simply say, remember.

Remember.

 Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee, it was always there.

Everything they needed was already in them and they had been given the truth.

They just needed someone to help them find it again.

And they remembered his words again.

 And that remembering changed everything.

Then they went and told the disciples.

And the author of Luke connects the story to the constant lack of memory we face.

Because when the women return to tell the good news of the resurrection, the women are quickly dismissed.

 The word that the disciples reach for when they hear the woman's report, the Greek word here is leros.

Our English translations tend to say idle tale, but leros is not simply an idle tale.

It's a state of delirium.

 It's the incoherent babbling of someone whose fever has broken their hold on reality.

It is the most dismissive word that they could have probably used.

And the first Easter proclamation in human history is delivered by women who have encountered the risen Christ.

And the men, the men around the table, they call it a fever dream.

 And if you've been paying attention to Luke all along, this is not a surprise.

This is essentially the point.

Mary's saying it in chapter one, the lowly will be lifted, the powerful will not get the last word.

And here at the very end of Luke, the author shows us this pattern completing itself one final time.

The witnesses the world would dismiss are still the ones who carry the truth.

The insiders who should know better reach for the language of contempt and dismissiveness.

 The great reversal is finishing exactly the way Mary said it would.

The world has always called love's proclamation nonsense.

It was called that on the first Easter morning.

It's still called that today.

 Every time someone says the hungry should be fed, the unhoused deserve dignity, the vulnerable are worth protecting, and that love is stronger than fear, there is a voice somewhere reaching for a dismissive retort.

The world says love, divine love, like this is naive.

It's sentimental, delusional.

 that those who proclaim it don't understand how the world actually works.

And yet on today, we proclaim the tomb is empty anyway.

 Notice that Peter cannot quite write it off.

He cannot quite stay at the table.

Something in him will not let him stop reaching toward what he already knows somewhere deep down.

So he gets up and he runs to the tomb and he stoops in and he looks in and he sees the linen cloths lying there by themselves.

And the text says that Peter goes home amazed, not believing yet fully, not preaching the good news of the resurrection, not running to tell anyone

 Peter is just amazed, turning something over in his mind that he does not yet have the words for.

Something has shifted and he cannot name it yet, but he cannot unfeel it either.

I find enormous comfort in Peter in this moment because I think a lot of us are more like Peter than we are like the women.

We're not quite ready to

 to call the resurrection story a fever dream, but we're not quite ready to go tell anyone either.

We're somewhere in between, running towards the doom because something in us will not stay seated and leaving a maze because what we found is more than we expected, even though we cannot yet say what we actually believe.

And that is the good news of today.

The good news of the gospel is that, well, that's enough.

 That is more than enough for the gospel of Luke to work with because here's the truth, the resurrection does not wait for you to have your confession fully formed.

It does not wait for your certainty to catch up with your longing.

It's already happened.

The

 tomb is already empty the story has already turned and the invitation this morning is not to perform a belief you do not feel it is simply to let what is true be true to let the thing you already know just come back to the surface

 Everything love risked across these past seven weeks turns out to have been right.

Good Friday was indeed real.

The grief was real.

The cross was everything that the empire wanted it to be.

And the empire's logic turned out to be hollow anyway.

Death told the world.

It was the final authority.

And on Easter morning, we learn that the resurrection proved it was lying.

 And in doing so, Mary's song is once again reaffirmed.

The powerful were brought down from their throne, so lowly were lifted up.

Mary sang it before it happened, and Luke spent 24 chapters proving she was right.

And on the first day of the week at early dawn, before anyone was ready, before the disciples had been moving towards the story, dismissing the women's proclamation,

 Before any of it, the tomb was already empty.

Love wins.

But Cash could have told you that back in February.

As it turns out, the truest and hardest and most necessary thing any of us will ever say is love wins.

And this morning, on this Easter Sunday, we are not here to learn it for the first time.

 We're simply here to remember it.

In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Alleluia.

Amen.