I Am What I Am
Easter Sunday | April 4, 2021
1 Corinthians 15:1-15
Mark 16:1-8
Every three years I say the same thing: Mark’s account is my FAVORITE resurrection story out of all four gospels! I love that he leaves us hanging. When I read a book to Seth at bedtime, he hates it when I stop at the end of a chapter because he doesn’t like being left with a cliffhanger. But that’s exactly what Mark leaves us with—a cliffhanger. What happens next? Will the women go to the disciples? Will they believe them when they tell them what they saw and heard? Will they go on to Galilee? Will they see Jesus there? What will they say? What will they do?
Of course, like last week, we know the end of the story. We know that the women spoke—eventually. We know that the disciples believed—eventually. We know that they saw Jesus and spoke to him and broke bread with him. We know that they saw his scars and heard his voice. We know…because we’re here. Had no one said anything, the story and the Church would have died that day. But it didn’t. And so, here we are—staring into the empty tomb, listening to strange words about a man being raised, and being told to go and tell.
That’s why I love Mark’s account. Because the story isn’t over, yet. The end isn’t written. And we find ourselves in the midst of that first morning, bleary-eyed and gaping. What will we do next? What will we say? Who will we tell? Or will we return home like every other day and wait for the world to reset—to go back to normal?
If there’s any year that needs the words and story of Easter, it is this one. We need a promise of new life—new birth—a story that leads us out of the dark tombs of our homes and into the light of community. We need to hear about life and hope and gatherings and celebrations. We need those plans and promises for what is to come.
But we’re not there, yet. As Lutherans, our theology digs into the paradoxes of faith—particularly that annoying bit about ‘now but not yet.’ We are resurrected people now—but we’ve not yet been brought into the fullness of the resurrected life. We are alive now—but we have yet to experience the true and abundant and eternal life promised by Jesus. We celebrate now—but we know that less than a year from now, we’ll make the same Lenten journey to the cross and weep at the death of the God we swore to follow.
In a similar way, we are now seeing the hope and promise of life on the other side of this pandemic—but not yet. Many are vaccinated, but even they need to continue to take precautions. And this year, perhaps like no other year—that’s how it feels—has brought out the worst in us along the way. So, the question for us in this particular time and place is this: what does Easter mean for us as we continue to live in the shadow of this past year? What does it look like as we remember the 2.7 million lives lost to COVID? What does it mean when we are still raw from 2 mass shootings of domestic terrorism? What is the point of Easter when there is still chaos at the border, mass unemployment and food insecurity, pandemic-induced loneliness, depression, and anxiety, increased suicides and attempts, and an on-going scourge of racial and political tension, violence, and injustice in our streets and our institutions?
Does Easter have a word to speak to us when we still carry these fresh wounds upon our bodies, hearts, and minds?
Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians comes near the end of the letter. He has addressed all of the little squabbles and challenges the community at Corinth was having. But he saved this piece as the penultimate point around which everything else turns. He tells us plainly and simply that the good news is that Christ died, was buried, and was raised. He testifies that hundreds of people witnessed to Jesus’ resurrection. Even he, Paul, saw Jesus. And it changed his life.
He confesses that he once persecuted the same Church that he now helps lead. He doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t hide it. He doesn’t shy from it. Instead, he says “but by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace has not been in vain.”
Paul affirms that life in the wake of a risen Christ just isn’t the same. It doesn’t change who you’ve been, but it changes who you’re becoming. I often hear from our FEAST partners or people recovering from addiction that they ‘aren’t that person anymore.’ And I understand what they’re getting at. They want to emphasize that they have changed. That they’ve left that shell of themselves behind. But I think that that’s not quite what Jesus does—or calls us to do.
Instead, at his resurrection, he still bears the scars of the nails and the spear. He doesn’t shed them as if they are an unnecessary or shameful part of him—a part he’d like to forget. He bears them because it is a reminder of where he’s come from and the power behind where he’s going. It’s not quite the same for those of us who are ashamed of who we’ve been in the past, but it’s just as important. We aren’t to forget where we’ve been. We aren’t to ignore our past and pretend that we’ve moved on. In many ways, until we name and claim who we’ve been, we will never truly become who we’re capable of being.
The good news is that God has redeemed our history—the things we’ve said, the things we’ve failed at, the actions we regret, the people we’ve hurt. To completely abandon our history is to claim that we don’t need God’s redemption—that we can just walk away from our old selves and start something new.
But that’s neither our job nor is it within our power. Because that’s God’s wheelhouse. That’s God’s work—God’s lane, so to speak. It’s God’s privilege alone to make us new. And God does that not by helping us shed our old selves like a snake sheds its skin but by incorporating our history into God’s redemption story—taking what is broken and crafting something new—something whole—something glorious and beautiful. By building our new selves with the ashes of what we’ve left behind.
What’s hard about the now but not yet is that God’s redemption doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a one-and-done kind of thing. It’s not a matter of convincing ourselves of something or willing ourselves into being better. It is God’s labor of love, making us and creating us and forming us over and over, again and again. The point of Christ’s resurrection—at least in part—is that he is the first to be liberated from the tomb of death. All that death entails—hate, fear, sin, ugliness of heart and mind—Jesus takes all of that and bears it for us in his scars. It means that his body matters. And that liberation and salvation does NOT mean simply that we go to heaven when we die. Salvation is NOT about going to heaven when we die. Salvation is not about going to heaven.
Instead, the arc of Scripture tells us that salvation, redemption, liberation is about God making and remaking us new each day—each moment. It is about God taking all that we’ve been and all that we are and calling us forth into all that we can be. And so liberation, too, isn’t about getting back to normal—especially as we think about what is or was normal in light of this pandemic. Good news isn’t going back to the ways things were. Liberation is about making and remaking our world in a new way. Normal didn’t work. What we think of as normal was just a normalizing of greed, fear, hatred, power. God is anything but normal. God calls us to be so much better than normal.
God calls us to peer into the abyss of what we cannot even imagine—a future that has yet to be named, a tomb that holds no body, a life that is filled with possibility—and to go. Go. Run. Fly. Be the most beautiful ‘you’ anyone has ever seen. Don’t be normal. Don’t settle for normal. Bear your scars and tell the world, “I am what I am, and God is doing something marvelous with me—just as I am.”
Pastor Tobi White
Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church
Lincoln, NE
