SERMON: Easter Day
God, may my words be loving and true. Amen.
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen:
not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
This quote from the Christian writer C. S. Lewis offers an invitation into the resurrection. Not simply to see it, but by the light of resurrection to see and experience the world itself.
The resurrection calls us, challenges us, demands of us … not simply to become keepers of the singular story of Jesus’ resurrection, but to be witnesses to the unfolding story of new life in the midst of the world.
At one level the story of the resurrection is straightforward. Jesus, who was born in ancient Palestine, under military occupation, who lived a life of mercy, proclaiming peace and justice, serving the poor and healing the sick … Having been hanged on a cross by the military but 3 days ago, is seen again alive. The forces of death in their unending march are shown to be undone. Resurrection! Hallelujah!
Life has triumphed over death. Love over hatred. Liberation over violence. Lightness over the heavy weight of oppression.
And yet, as we pull on the thread of this singular story, what is striking and strange about it, is this story’s place within the common and close stories of our world.
The story which leads to the killing post of good Friday is told again and again and tragically again in our world. All of us in our own way have seen the world end. Our world is marked by so much war that many no longer make the news … Our lives are marked by so much loss that we look around, life carrying on around us: “how can things just carry on … ? do they not know that the one I loved is gone?”
The story of Good Friday is a story that is about us, and our world. It’s a story about God’s place within our lives and within our world. Indeed it is precisely this, it is a story that says that God is with us on the threshold of the world - when everything is ending, and when we seem the furthest place from love … That is where the God who is love seeks to invest God’s very own life.
While we may be able to understand that Good Friday is our story, it feels altogether harder to think that Easter Sunday is a story about us too. Crucifixion we know, but resurrection …
And yet, that the resurrection is your story is precisely what we proclaim today. That this hope, this justice, this new life is yours. All that belongs to Christ may be yours.
Let us not be naive, this is not the proclamation that everything hard about the world and each of our lives will suddenly be washed away. The resurrection is always the story of the crucified one. But if God goes with us to the threshold of death, then God goes with us beyond the threshold.
What shifts in the movement from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, from crucifixion to resurrection, is a movement from God entering into our own story to us entering into God’s story.
What we need to get right, then, about resurrection is who God is. What we need to get right is the story God is telling about the world which God loves. This is why the version of the story we heard today has an earthquake, because earthquakes in the Christian and Jewish scriptures are signs that God is telling us who God is. That God is shaking things up in the world, and calling people into a promise.
The theology of the Uniting Church puts it this way:
“In raising Jesus to live and reign, God confirmed and completed the witness which Jesus bore to God on earth, reasserted claim over the whole of creation, pardoned sinners, and made in Jesus a representative beginning of a new order of justice and love.”
(Basis of Union, #3)
The story which God is telling about the world is one marked by justice and love. For all the truth that the world is full of despair, unchecked cruelty, loss beyond words … The call of resurrection is to live God’s story of justice and love right in the midst of it. To witness that even as the world hurts and harms, that new life, new beginnings, change and cherishing, kindness kindling, love … and justice, which is simply what love looks like in public.
Even as the world seems to be turning towards decay. When we go out in the world, when we respond to the call to witness resurrection, the risen crucified one appears. Did you notice that in the version of the story we heard? The angel does not say to Mary and Mary, “stay here and bask in the glow of resurrection.” The angel says, “Go! Witness.”
As they are going in reverence and joy, that is when they see the resurrected Jesus fully. And Jesus does not say, “stay here and bask in the glow of resurrection.” Jesus says, “Go! Witness.”
This is the call of resurrection. To live our lives by the story of God, not to turn away from the realities of the world but to go deeper into our world with reverence and joy, witnessing that God’s love and justice are the truest story to be told. That the God who is with us at the threshold of the world, is with us beyond it. That we live our lives with the love that never lets us go.