Colourful Dreamer

This sermon can be listened to here   Gate Pa – Year B   Easter Sunday 2021 Readings: First Reading:             Isaiah 25:6-9                             Second Reading:        Acts 10:34-43                           Gospel:                         Mark 16:1-8    What I want to say: Why is Mark’s account of the resurrection so short. Is something missing, or did Mark do this deliberately? Is he inviting a conversation about how Jesus went ahead to where his hearers were and are? Nadia Bolz-Weber says that “Eas...

In her book Pastrix [1] , Nadia Bolz-Weber describes Easter as “a story about flesh and dirt and bodies and confusion. And it is a story about how God never seems to adhere to our expectations of what a proper God would do, as in not get himself killed in a totally avoidable way. Jesus did not seem very impressive at Easter. Not in the churchy sense and certainly not if Mary Magdalene mistook him for a gardener. Perhaps Mary Magdalene thought Jesus was the gardener because Jesus still had the dirt from his tomb under his nails…. Depictions of Christ never show dirt under his nails. He looks more like a wingless angel than a gardener…. My experience however is the God of Easter is a God with dirt under his nails. Resurrection never feels like being made clean and nice and pious like in those easter pictures. Instead, what I subconsciously know is that God is not interested in making me spiffy. God is interested in making me new. And new is not perfect. In the Easter story itself, ne...