Immovable Stones

The goal of this sermon is to focus on God's ability to change things that we can't. The stone being rolled away from Jesus' tomb is an example of this. We usually focus on the stone and on our inability to move it, just like the women who went to the tomb on Easter morning. Although I chose to use the continuing decline in church attendance as an example of a stone, I could have used many other examples. Some are global, some are national, some are personal. Where have you seen God rolling away a stone in your life?

Preachers on Easter Sunday (and on the Sundays following Easter) have a wealth of scriptural texts to choose from. After all, there are four different Easter stories in the gospels; and each one has unique details that would make a great sermon!

·   Luke, for example, repeats the angels’ question to the women at the tomb – “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” That’s a great question to preach on!
·   Matthew offers the Great Commission – “Go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” We can’t be reminded of that often enough.
·  John shows us Mary Magdalene, weeping at the tomb and searching for Jesus’ body, when all the time the risen Christ is standing right in front of her! That story is impossible to resist.
And then – there’s Mark. Mark’s version of the Easter story is almost never chosen for an Easter Sunday sermon. Poor Mark! His story is like the uncoordinated teenager who always gets chosen last for a game of dodge ball!

But there’s a good reason for that. The ending of Mark’s Easter story just isn’t very satisfying. Mark doesn’t show us any appearances of the resurrected Jesus at all. There aren’t any meetings with joyful disciples; no instructions for us as Jesus’ followers; not even a couple of last words for us to use as a tagline on our worship bulletin. No, Mark ends his gospel with the women who had come to the tomb running away in fear and confusion. See what I mean by an unsatisfying ending? His ending apparently wasn’t satisfying to the early church, either. Someone in the first century of the church – a scribe, perhaps, who was making a copy of Mark’s gospel – tried to fix his ending by adding a few more lines. Those extra lines are in our Bibles today as verses 9-20 of chapter 16. There’s nothing wrong with those lines; but Mark didn’t write them. His gospel ends on a note of confusion and fear. No wonder Mark’s gospel isn’t preached very often on Easter Sunday!

But there is one important detail in Mark’s Easter story that the other gospels have left out. Mark tells us about the concern of the women who go to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning. They’re worried about how they’re going to get the stone rolled away from the tomb. This is the way Mark puts it: “As they went to the tomb, they kept asking each other, ‘Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb?’” It appears to have been their only subject of conversation on that morning. “How are we going to get that stone pushed away?”

Now, that’s a very reasonable worry. The stone that sealed the entrance of a tomb was actually a huge stone wheel that rolled in a groove cut into the floor of the tomb entrance. A stone like that was 4-5 feet in diameter, and would have weighed several hundred pounds. How would a few women roll it away? How, indeed! Of course, we know that when they got to the tomb, the stone had already been rolled away. And the readers of Mark’s story would have known it, too. The same God who raised Jesus from the dead had also rolled back the stone. Isn’t it a wonderful bit of irony? The women wasted all that time worrying about how they would get the stone out of the way, when all the time, God was taking care of the problem.

I wonder if Mark isn’t giving his readers a message by including the women’s worry in his story. Of course, we aren’t sure who Mark’s readers really were; but our best guess is that they were a small community of Christians who were in the midst of persecution. An audience like that would have identified with the confused, frightened women who ran away from the tomb on that first Easter morning. They must have wondered why they were so hated. Where was the risen Lord whose name they confessed? It must have been so easy for them to focus on their problems instead of looking for the possibilities that Christ offered them! They were just like those women on their way to the tomb, worrying about how they would roll away the stone; when all the time, God had taken care of the problem.

It sounds like some of us today, doesn’t it? We fuss and fret; we moan and groan; we stew and swear; and all about things that God has promised to take care of for us! When we actually get to the problem we're concerned about, oftentimes it is no longer a problem!

Now, let me be clear. God only helps us move immovable stones. God doesn’t dump pebbles out of our shoes. There are lots of things that we can – and should – do for ourselves. We can’t expect God to feed a hungry world, for example, when we’re not willing to share what we have. But we can expect God to intervene in a situation in which we have no power. The trouble is that we never expect God to actually do it.

I’m reminded of that fact every time that I attend a gathering of the wider church. Someone – usually one of my clergy colleagues -- will start bemoaning the fact that our churches aren’t as full as they were 60 years ago. Someone else will join in, and pretty soon, everyone is singing the refrain: “Oh, what will happen to the church? It’s dying off. Pretty soon there won’t be anybody left…” Have you heard that refrain? I sure have! Now, it’s true that many churches have a long way to go in learning how to be truly welcoming congregations. Many church buildings, for example, are old; and because of the way they were built, they are inaccessible to people who use wheelchairs or walkers. But there are plenty of people who can get into church buildings, regardless of whether a church is old or new. The trouble is that 7-day-a-week businesses, Sunday morning soccer, and plain old fatigue keep many people away from church week after week after week. And there’s absolutely nothing that we can do about that!

But if Easter tells us anything, it tells us that God moves in unexpected ways to overcome obstacles that we could never dream of overcoming by ourselves! Kind of like raising Jesus from the dead… And the church of Jesus Christ isn’t dead, either. I am convinced that God is rolling away the stone from its tomb, too, and raising it up in a brand new way. I frequently read in news magazines that people in America describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Lots of pastors are very discouraged by that. They think that it means that the church has become irrelevant. But what if all these “spiritual but not religious” people are just looking for Jesus Christ in new ways? What if they’re ready to listen to the story we have to tell them? What if they want to hear about a savior whose message is love and grace, not judgment and condemnation? What if they’re ready for us to connect with them?

It sounds to me as though God has rolled away the stone from the tomb once again. There’s nothing to keep us from seeing the face of the risen Christ in the world. Maybe we should go out into the world and expect to meet him!