Transcript
Practice Resurrection: But
First Baptist Richmond, April 20, 2025
Resurrection of the Lord
Luke 24:1-12
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.
I’m so glad to see you this morning, but a little surprised that you stayed for the sermon, because the Easter message is always the same, isn’t it? I say, “Christ is risen,” and you say,
Christ is risen indeed!
Perfect. But hold that thought if you will because I need to tell you a story that no one could have predicted, a story about my coffeemaker.
I’m the one who makes the coffee at my house. I get up early, go downstairs, turn on the thousand-watt lights in the kitchen and wait for my eyes to adjust. I pour out the old, cold coffee from the day before, rinse the carafe, and put it back in its place. I dump out the old coffee grounds, rinse the basket, and put in a fresh filter. I fill the coffee grinder almost to the top with rich, dark beans and grind them for a full thirty seconds. I dump them into the filter, put the basket in the coffeemaker, fill the reservoir to the 8-cup line with clean, cold water, and push the button. And then I go to the living room to say my prayers while the coffee brews.
It’s a ritual, and I’ve done it so many times I can almost do it in my sleep. Almost, I say. Not long ago I came back into the kitchen after saying my prayers and found that something had gone terribly wrong. There was hot coffee all over
the counter with little grounds floating on top. It had spilled off onto the floor, it had seeped under the flat, rectangular basket next to the stove where we keep the salt shaker, the pepper grinder, the sugar bowl, the olive oil, the tea bags, the coffee beans, the coffee grinder, and our collection of wooden spoons. It was still dripping off the counter onto the floor when I got there and that’s when I saw the carafe, the one that should have been in its usual place in the coffeemaker, sitting next to the sink. So, it was my fault. I was the one who had made this mess and I was the one who was going to have to clean it up. But it was such a big mess I didn’t know if I could do it. For a full minute I thought about just putting a “For Sale” sign in front of the house.
In the end, I rolled up my sleeves and went to work. I used a sponge to soak up most of the coffee on the counter and squeezed it into the sink. I removed all those items from the flat, rectangular basket, carried it to the sink and hosed it down before setting it aside to dry. I got the mop out of the broom closet and mopped and rinsed the floor. I got a new sponge, and used some heavy duty cleaner with bleach in it to wipe down the counter from one end to the other. It took about thirty minutes, but when I was finished everything was as good as new. I started all over again, and made a pot of fresh, hot coffee.
It was delicious.
What does that story have to do with Easter? Only this: today I’m starting a sermon series called “Practice Resurrection,” and there’s something about taking a huge mess and making things right again that feels like that, like practicing resurrection. That kitchen was as good as dead, but I brought it back to life again. The title of the series comes from a poem by Wendell Berry—an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer—whose
parents were members of my church in Kentucky. Sometimes Wendell would come to church with them, and sit there in the pews, and when he did I was always careful to mind my grammar, not to split any infinitives or dangle any participles: there was an award-winning poet in the house.
The poem that gave this series its title is called, “Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” written on one of those days when Wendell may have been bouncing around the farm on his tractor feeling especially critical of the culture. It begins:
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
The poem goes on from there, but I think you get the idea. Berry is asking us to rise from the deadly monotony of everyday life, to brush its dirt from our grave clothes, to do something radically different and joyfully unpredictable. “Love someone who does not deserve it,” he writes. “Ask the questions that have no answers.” And finally, at the end of the poem, “Practice resurrection.”
In some small way that’s what I was doing on the morning of the great
coffee catastrophe. I had basically murdered the kitchen, but… I had the power to bring it back to life again, and so I got started, and in the end everything was as good as new. Did you catch the word but in that last sentence? Grammatically speaking, it’s a conjunction, a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses. It acts as a bridge, linking together different parts of sentences. Technically, it’s a “coordinating conjunction,” but when it is used in the Bible it can be so much more. I sometimes call it, the “divine conjunction.”
A blogger named Jen Oshman claims that “but” is her favorite word in the Bible (she cannot lie). She writes, “Throughout Scripture we see ‘but God,’ or ‘but Christ,’ or ‘but when….’ Something was lost, but now it’s found. Someone was dead, but is now alive. A person was blind, but now can see. There was no way, but God made a way. The word ‘but’ in Scripture often introduces the message of the gracious and compassionate intervention of God,” she writes. “This simple term captures the nature of our God. He redeems, resurrects, and makes all things new. All seems lost and then we hear, ‘but God.’ He intervenes. He saves.”i
The Easter story may be the ultimate example. If you read back through the passion narrative in Luke’s Gospel you can see how hopeless the situation was. Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane until his sweat became like great drops of blood, begging the Father to remove the cup of suffering, and yet, as he concluded, “Not my will but thine be done.” But then Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, Peter sliced off somebody’s ear, Roman soldiers dragged Jesus to the home of the high priest, and there, while they were mocking and beating Jesus inside the house, Peter was denying him outside, claiming three times that he never knew the man.
The religious authorities, who had accused Jesus of blasphemy, of making himself equal to God, brought him before Pilate and accused him of insurrection, of making himself equal to the emperor. Pilate didn’t believe them, he found no reason to condemn him, but they kept insisting until he gave in, turning Jesus over to be flogged and crucified. Other Gospels say more about his torture and humiliation in front of the Roman soldiers, but in the end there he was, nailed to a cross between two thieves. He suffered and died one of the most horrific deaths known to humankind, and when it was over he was as dead as dead can be. Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for his body. He took it down from the cross, wrapped it in a linen shroud, and placed it in a tomb that had never been used.
Luke tells us that the women watched from a distance, noting where his body had been laid, and then they returned and prepared spices and ointments so they could give him a proper burial. On the Sabbath day they rested, according to the commandment, but they must have been thinking about what they would find when they went to the tomb the next morning. If you’ve ever seen the movie, The Passion of the Christ, you could get the idea that no human being has ever been so badly beaten or so brutally murdered, and you could get the idea that when they placed his mangled body in the tomb no one had ever been so thoroughly dead. That might have been the end of the story.
But.
It’s the first word in chapter 24. “But…” when they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared, they found the stone rolled away, and when they went inside they did not find his body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified, and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said, “Why do you
look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that all of this was going to happen but that, in the end, he was going to rise again?” And then they did remember, because these women who had come to the tomb had been part of Jesus’ inner circle. They had traveled with him and his disciples. They had provided for them out of their means. They had heard everything Jesus said to the Twelve. And so they went running back to them to tell them this incredible good news.
But.
And here that word is not used as a divine conjunction; it is used as a human conjunction. The women told the disciples the incredible story of Jesus’ resurrection but…they didn’t believe them. To them it sounded like “an idle tale.” They dismissed it. And out of their many faithless moments as disciples, this may have been the most faithless. But Peter, who had done far worse than that, who was, in fact, still trying to climb out of the hole he had dug for himself by denying Jesus three times, ran to the tomb where he found everything just as the women had said. Luke says that he went home “amazed,” and I can just imagine the first shivers of resurrection joy beginning to creep up his spine.
When I made that mess in the kitchen it wasn’t easy, but I had the power to clean it up. And there are lots of things like that we can do. I was at the United Nations in New York last week with a special delegation from the Baptist World Alliance. We were talking about the UN’s sustainable development goals—the seventeen things we humans can do to improve life on the planet—things like protecting the environment, reducing inequality, eliminating hunger, eradicating poverty, practicing sustainable consumption, building inclusive communities, strengthening global partnerships, providing equal education, fighting for gender
equity, and adding the goal we had come to advocate for—restorative racial justice. These are all good things and all things we can do, things we should do.
But.
There are some things humans can’t do, some things only God can do. Raising Jesus from the dead was certainly one of those things but it gives us hope that if God can do that, then God can raise up other things as well—including us. Sometimes when I’m counseling with people they will tell me how everything came crashing down around them: how they lost their job, their apartment, their life partner, and their hope for the future. They sit in my study with their head in their hands as if there were no way forward. But I tell them: “This story is not over. You may have come to the end of this chapter, but not the end of this book.” I say, “Let’s imagine that you are looking at a blank page. You don’t know yet what you’re going to write on it: nobody does. But let’s imagine that it’s the first page in the next chapter of the story of your life. Anything is possible.”
Where did I get that? Maybe from the Gospel of Luke, where chapter 23 ends in the most hopeless way imaginable, with the cold, stiff, broken, blood-soaked body of Jesus lying in a borrowed tomb. You could easily conclude that his story is over. And then you turn the page, and the first word you read is that divine conjunction: But. But God. But God wasn’t finished yet. He was just getting started. He rolled up his sleeves and went to work. He bent over that cold, lifeless corpse. He breathed the breath of life into its lungs. And Jesus wasn’t only resuscitated, he was resurrected. He rose to a whole new life. As he himself puts it for those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, “It was necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory.” His glory! Meaning life at a whole different level, meaning the kind Jesus often referred to as
“the life of the ages.”
We don’t have the power to do that. We can’t raise ourselves, or others, or the world around us to that kind of glorious life. Only God can do that. But God can do that! God can raise the dead! And when we practice resurrection we take that kind of faith, that kind of hope, and apply it to our own mundane lives, to our own weary world. We roll up our sleeves and join God in the work of making all things new. It isn’t easy. It will make us tired. But (there’s that word again) God’s story isn’t over. We don’t know yet how it will turn out. But I know this: if God is the author then this story (and your story too) will have a happy ending. That’s just the way God works.
So, when they come to me and tell me that it’s over, that there’s no use hoping anymore, that Jesus is dead and buried, I say, “That’s not what I heard.” And when they say, “Oh, yeah? What did you hear?” I say, “I heard that Christ is risen.” And you say,
Christ is risen indeed!
—Jim Somerville © 2025
