Isaiah 25: 7,8; Matthew 28: 5-10

Story Editing

Today the story of Jesus of Nazareth takes a dramatic turn for the better, just days after we observed Good Friday, the day of His crucifixion.  It is the story of Jesus coming alive in our lives again.  The Easter events radically change the story.  They edit the story of Jesus if you will.  In Matthew we see them described very matter of fact: they see an angel, they see Jesus, He greets them.  But Isaiah is much more poetic about what this experience might mean:”God will destroy on this mountain  (the hill called Mt. Zion presumably) the shroud that is cast over all peoples (and Jesus incidentally), the sheet that is spread over all nations; God  will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of God’s people God will take away from the earth, for the Lord has spoken.”  That describes much more what the disciples must have been feeling.

In psychotherapy strategies these days the concept of “story editing” is quite popular.  People who come in for counseling and need help have a story of their life they have written with a special twist and perspective. Often that story will be a negative or dysfunctional one.  That would not be so bad if they wouldn’t let that story influence the way they live their life.  Because they believe in the story they often are not able to live an effective life.  It gets in the way, you see.  So the therapist helps the person to edit the story, help them write a different spin to it, give it an alternative potential ending.

Geraldine Finucane, widow of Pat Finucane, was interviewed on the BBC’s HardTalk a few days ago.  She has been on a tireless twenty-five year campaign to find out who murdered her husband in Northern Ireland during what the Northern Irish call “The Troubles.”  She had gotten to know him in Dublin.  She was a Protestant and he a Roman Catholic.  They married across religious boundaries which in Northern Ireland was a big thing.  Raised middle class she wasn’t too aware of the problem.  Her husband who represented the Irish Republican Army leadership as an attorney was suspected of being in the IRA.   That was the story and Geraldine had come on tv to give a totally different story, the one she knew. She was there to edit the story of her husband’s life.

Reporters Katty Kay and Claire Shipman have just written a book entitled “The Confidence Code.” They write about what their research showed them particularly about women.   Confidence is not the same as self-esteem which is more a sense of good feeling about yourself in a world that values you.  No confidence is that what makes us turn our thoughts into actions.  They found out that confidence to a large degree is genetic. They also found out that most women are far less confident than men in general, that they always think they did worse on tests than their male counterparts and  that they don’t speak up as much.  They say this is so partly because women are supposed to be the good girls and they rewarded for being that way, that if life was one long school, women would completely dominate.  Men will ask for promotions much sooner than women, they found out.  Women often want to know that they are a hundred percent qualified. This is interesting, it is almost as if society has asked women to write their story a certain way.  So they need to edit the story of their life in the working world, be more confident by challenging conventional thinking.   Story editing.

Friends, the Resurrection of the Lord edits our human story.  Like the person in the therapist’s office who must challenge her or his thinking as a victim or a loser or an unworthy person, we must allow Easter to edit our story, in a sense rewrite it as a story of hope instead of despair, life instead of death.  When you see people remember the Rwanda genocide last week and you think of school children kidnapped in Nigeria and you think of that senseless tragedy in Korean waters with all those bright-eyed teenagers, we need Easter. How much worse would it be if we were all convinced that this life is all there was. When you watch the news, the way the story gets edited is different depending on what you channel watch.  God doesn’t cause tragedies but God is present with the suffering.

Friends, how has your life been edited by the Easter story? How has it changed how you live your life and the way you treat others and decisions that you make? How has it changed the attitude you get up with in the morning? How does it give meaning to your life? And if it doesn’t make any difference, shouldn’t it?  Let God edit Your life toward hope and then reach out to those who are in despair so they too can begin to edit their story the way they need to. Thanks be to God.