Homily preached on Easter Sunday, April 9, 2023, at Holy Wisdom Monastery, Middleton, WI
One of the characters in John Irving’s masterful novel A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY calls Easter “the main event” for Christians. He explains that any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas, but that one who does not believe in the resurrection is not really a believer. To take this even further, Biblical scholars Borg & Crossan in their powerfully written overview of Jesus’ final days in Jerusalem (THE LAST WEEK) add this:
“Without Easter, we wouldn’t know about Jesus” Ok, let that soak in for a moment. “Without Easter, we wouldn’t know about Jesus.” Then they continue: “If his story had ended with his crucifixion, he most likely would have been forgotten – another Jew crucified by the Roman Empire in a bloody century that witnessed thousands of such executions….Indeed, without Easter, we wouldn’t even have ‘Good Friday,’ for there would have been no abiding community to remember and give meaning to his death.”
Easter apparently is the real deal, the big hurrah! But that just leaves me wondering, if Easter is “the main event,” why then in my senior years after four plus decades of preaching Easter sermons in various congregations have I become what Christian Century writer Heidi Haverkamp (oblate of Holy Wisdom Monastery), calls an “Easter Grinch”? Sure, Easter is central for Christianity and no doubt without it we wouldn‘t have ever heard about Jesus. Wouldn’t you think after all these years the resurrection wouldn’t continue to present me with a sizeable problem? But it does.
Perhaps some of you are like me as well and want things explained and sorted out rationally, decently and in order, to call up the mantra of my Presbyterian theological training. To quote Heidi Haverkamp again: “The longer I live, the less I know how to approach this unscientific but irrepressible story of resurrection.” That describes me to a tee, and like the Reverend Haverkamp, “I feel less like the confident preacher in a pulpit and more like someone who is faithful but has gotten a little lost, bumping into things, still seeking the living God but with a sense that a living faith is less about being certain and more about keeping my eyes open.”
And here it’s Easter once again and the resurrection confronts me. I am hopeful I do so with my eyes open, and also with an open mind and heart. For one like me who likes to think, who wants to reason out my faith, the resurrection defies all logic. You see, I grew up in churches steeped in a very heady kind of liberal Protestant ethos where ritual and emotion were shunned for reasoned discourse and a plain and unadorned style of worship dominated by a well-crafted sermon. I can practically say that we feared feeling when it came to matters of faith. I still remember well when some of my Methodist elders examined me for ordination, one of them rather rudely accused me to being a closet Unitarian. But perhaps she was not too far from the mark. In my world of religious life, emotion and feeling always lost out to reason every time. Emotion is scary. Reason is the rock.
And yet…and yet I ask myself, do I believe in resurrection? And my answer is, Yes, I do. But how? But why? Whether or not I came to this place in the right way, I am not sure. But I have no reticence about commending resurrection to anyone – but not so much as a doctrine to be believed when reciting an old creed but as a reality to be experienced, not as a tenet to be held as true but as a harbinger of hope. I resonate with Paul who made this brash assertion to the Christians in Corinth long before any of the Gospel accounts were penned: “If Christ has not been raised, then…faith has been in vain” (I Cor. 15:14). Now that speaks to my head and to my heart because Paul is not nailing down some fact of history here; rather he is asserting a conviction about things not seen, indeed an assurance of things hoped for! Anyone can be a Christmas Christian, but Eater requires something more.
So while the fact of an empty tomb continues to be stumbling block for me, and since neither my head nor my heart alone can bring me to a resurrection faith, I come down in a place that is just right for me. It’s place that is way beyond some utterly unique spectacular event two thousand years ago to something even better I think, to a more-than-factual place where we do not merely ask, “Did it happen or not?” but rather open ourselves to a larger and more significant question, “What does it mean?”
Easter and the resurrection it announces are all about what it means, and it is in that question about meaning that I take heart because I find myself in some really good company.
In this morning’s Gospel, with John’s figurative language describing the indescribable, we find Peter, the chief of the apostles, and Mary Magdalene, sometimes called the first Christian, who both go to the tomb at dawn. I see myself in both of them, in their state of confusion and bumbling. Their expectations were minimal. Given what they had gone through in the previous days, it’s totally understandable that in their sleep-deprived, foggy and distraught states, they had no idea whatsoever how to understand what they were experiencing, seeing, feeling. Peter just runs away. Mary stays but thinks she is talking to the gardener. Yet in the very depths of both their lives worst moments, God was at work both in grace and in hope.
And it is to that very same grace and hope that I can testify to this morning. And I testify to it because I have seen it myself – in myself and in others. I have no other answer than resurrection.
How is it that amid the deafening silence of unwelcome solitude we can sense the possibility of fellowship? How is it that battered by despair, we suddenly catch a glimmer of positive promise? How is it that grinding grief opens our lives to a comfort we never knew existed? How is it that standing amid the devastation wrought by our own wrongdoing, we discover the stirrings of forgiveness? How is it that at the very moment we think everything is over, we discover there is a future that waits to be? How is it that such transformation happens? Because God is at work. Because God is bringing the best from the worst, life from death, because God’s business is resurrection! And so I believe in resurrection.
Resurrection changes everything. Moments of doubt and despair become occasions for growth in goodness. Hurt, disappointment, tears, rejection become moments of transformational hope. Easter is confirmation that God does God’s thing which is resurrection. And that is why I believe it. Easter is not some date on a calendar to be observed to remember something that happened once long ago. I believe in the resurrection because it has been and continues to be the lived experience of Christians throughout the centuries.
I must be honest and say that God’s work of resurrection both fills me with hope and sets me on edge. We simply do not know when or where we may encounter God. It could happen anywhere at any time amid any sort of circumstances.
Mystery pulsates at the heart of reality. And rock-bottom, reality is about resurrection. We don’t know how but we do know it happens because we have seen it, felt it, known it – with our eyes, with our minds, and with our hearts. Meet God we will – sooner or later, here or there, at one time or another.
This is where the whole truth of Easter becomes even better than we ever thought possible. Like Mary Magdalene and her friends of old, early some morning, perhaps we to make our way to the tomb of our lost love, the sepulcher of our dead dreams, our ruined reputation, our devastated faith. Or perhaps late some evening behind locked doors we look starkly into the depths of our despair, hopelessness and depression. And there – right there! JUST WHEN WE ARE READY TO GIVE UP, TO GIVE IN, WE FIND God or realize that God has found us.
We don’t need an angel in shining raiment to tell us what happened; we will know firsthand the beyond-joyful-reality of resurrection. All of which confirms why the Easter greeting we exchange is not spoken in past tense but rather is profoundly present tense “Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed!” Not just then, but now, because God is ever and always at work, and the power of resurrection will come to life in me and in you, just as it did in Jesus!
Thursday night as Lee and I gathered around a dining room table with some friends both old and new to share a meal in fellowship and to remember Jesus’ gathering with his disciples in the Upper Room long ago, we closed the evening with a prayer that just shouts resurrection. The resurrection I believe in. Will you pray with me?
We thank you, Loving God, for life in the Spirit of Jesus: For gladness in this bread and cup, for love that cannot die, for peace the world cannot give, for joy in the company of friends, for the glory and beauty of creation, and for the mission of justice Jesus handed on to us. Give us the gifts of this Holy Communion: oneness of heart, love for neighbors, forgiveness of enemies, the will to serve you every day, and life that never ends. This we ask in the name of Jesus, who calls us to follow him on the way. Amen.