EASTER DAY 2016 LUKE 24:1-12As every parent, law enforcement officer, and township employee knows there are two ways to make people clean up after themselves. You can be the bad cop. You can nag, organize a guilt trip, make blood curdling threats of fines, time-outs, or even jail. Or you can be the good cop, and encourage responsible behavior by positive reinforcement. Well, a few years ago a city in the Netherlands went full good cop in an effort to tackle their litter problem. Down came the threatening signs warning of fines for litter louts, and in came new bins. Bins with a difference. Bins that would make it worthwhile to drop your empty chip packets into them. The bins did not give out money if that is what you’re thinking, materialists. No, these bins were programed to tell jokes. Inside each trash can was a little device that would play pre-recorded funnies every time a piece of garbage was deposited. And it worked. The litter problem was solved overnight. Now these bins were color coded according to different types of joke. So, say you have a sweet wrapper and there are three bins in the street; if you are in the mood for a knock knock joke, you could drop your trash in the green bin. If you fancy a doctor doctor joke you’d place it in the red bin. And if for some twisted reason you are interested in knowing what happened when an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman went into a pub then the Union Jack colored bin is for you. I think this could work here. If a presidential candidate promised this I’d vote for them.

Joking with Junk. Laughing at litter. Giggling at garbage. Sounds easy, feels hard. How do you laugh at the garbage of life – the junk that messes up not our streets but our heads, the trash that makes us cry, that pierces our souls, that breaks our hearts? I know a young man who does just that. He giggles at the garbage of life, and at one piece of waste, in particular. Death. He’s able to laugh at this piece of rubbish, our final enemy, as Paul puts it in today’s epistle lesson, because he has looked fully and intently into its eyes; he’s contemplated its chilling touch, and it has changed him. He knows that one he will die, hopefully not for several decades yet, but between now and then helives with the Easter faith. Christ is risen, and he will follow one day.

There’s a place in creation we dare not visit unless... (Read the full Sermon here: Easter - Trash Talk )