B.S.?: An Easter Sermon

I want to teach you a new word today…”Lairos”

Can everyone say it.?  Lairos

Lairos…

Acolytes, say it.   Lairos

Choir… Lairos

Lairos

Does anyone know lairos?  What it means?

The first thing for you to know is that Lairos might have been a swear word. And I may pay wickedly for getting every one of you to swear in church.

Lairos is a Greek word that Luke uses in today’s Easter story … did you see it?  Well, we have the pg version. 

Lairos means Bull Sh… it means crap, garbage, dribble.  It’s the word that the disciples use when the Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joanna tell them that they have been to the tomb and Jesus is not there ad that he has has been raised…is alive.

the disciples scream… Lairos… BS

The PG,  English translation… that I just read says that the disciples thought it was an “idle tale” that they did not believe.  

Somehow this translation misses the power of lairos. 

But when the women proclaim He is risen.. they rise up and yell lairos.

Now I have to say… I don’t blame them.  Every person who has ever walked the earth that has died has stayed dead.    

Well, There are  a few exceptions…you’ll remember a guy named  Lazarus and of course Jesus.  But for the most part, when somebody dies they stay dead.   

And a  story about somebody coming back to life sounds a lot like  Lairos. 

Every once and a while doubt creeps into my own thinking… Could this possibly be?  A man coming back from the dead. 

Or sometimes  I wonder about creation ... I wonder, is there an intelligent creator behind all this or is it just physics?

Sometimes I wonder about life beyond sometime I wonder maybe just everything just fades to black when we close our eyes and die.  ….  

Sometimes I think this is whole faith thing might be lairos?  BS, Crap

Or maybe it isn’t…  

There have been a handful of moments in my life that say----- maybe there is more to life than meets the eye… that there is more to life than we can see or touch or taste or smell or prove or develop a mathematical equation for.    

Now I haven’t been to the empty tomb and I haven’t seen the risen Christ. I have never heard the voice of God… but I have had moments that seem like more than just coincidence. 

One morning in the late 1990’s I was on my way to work from Lancaster Pennsylvania to my job in Reading Pennsylvania.  The easiest way to get to Reading from Lancaster is to drive up the highway on Rt 222.    

This particular morning I had faith on my mind….I didn’t look like this yet… I had recently wandered back to church after many years away and I was wrestling with where God was in my life.  That particular morning was one of those times where you are so deep in your thoughts that you don’t notice anything around you.   

You’ve all had those moments driving right?  All of sudden you arrive somewhere, and you have no recollection of the trip. That morning was like that or at least till I got about halfway to work.

Like I said….That morning faith was on my mind… I was doing a lot of wondering about God...  And at one point I thought

“God, where are you?”

And at that very moment, I noticed a tractor-trailer bursting out of the morning fog going down the highway in the other direction and as I turned and looked over at the trailer…  Painted on the side of the truck in big black letters G-O-D.     

God!

Underneath it, the acronym was explained… guaranteed overnight delivery.

But at that moment I knew with every fiber of my being that this was more than coincidence and that God was in that moment. 

This was an empty tomb moment,  a resurrection moment when God came alive to me…no longer a being sitting on a throne in some distant corner of the universe, observing what’s going but alive in that moment.

It is a  moment that has anchored me to faith ever since and it gives me the conviction to stand here and like the women say he is risen, he is alive, he  alive in us and he is alive in this very moment springing forth.   

That moment helped to transform the way I see the world, the way I experience the world. 

But Easter is meant to do that too!

Easter isn’t just a commemoration of the day a man was raised…Easter is a mindset, a way of seeing the world differently that God gives us today …It’s like a pair glasses that we can take with us and see things differently  ---that transforms the way we look at death, that transforms at the difficulties of life, that transforms the way we look at things that are failing or dying.

I know that whenever I have something difficult to do… like give a sermon on Easter morning to 150 people—I step into this pulpit not alone but I step here knowing that God   he is alive in this moment and that the power of God is here to tap into, to give inspiration… to lift up.  To replace things like despair with hope

Death looks different because of Easter.  When I go to the hospital sit on the bedside of someone’s who’s dying I can look into their eyes and say we will meet again… that this is not the end... I can assure them that God isn’t on some throne in a distant corner but is walking with them through the valley of the shadow of death.   

  

If when stoop down and look through the doorway of the tomb and if all we see is lairos… well… we might just miss the power of resurrection alive in that moment 2000 years ago… alive in this moment and alive in every future moment out there.   

Lairos… maybe but, I don’t think so.

AMEN