Saturday, April 11, 2015

Easter Sunday 2015

It’s Easter! We’ve been waiting a long time - forty days - to finally be able to say, “Alleluia!” and to greet each other with Happy Easter and to put Lent behind us. Do you see Easter? Do you see the new life God has brought? Isaiah saw it - “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food. And he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces!” Do you see it? Do you see this new life?

We have talked about Jesus being abandoned by his friends, and about him dying alone on the cross. We have talked about repentance during Lent, and about the ways in which we have caused or brought death to others. But now it is Easter. Now it is time to proclaim that Christ has risen and that God brings new life after death, and that God will continue to bring new life. It is time to echo the psalmist from earlier, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!” It is finally the day to be like the “other disciple” in the Gospel reading this morning, who looked into the tomb of Jesus and saw no body, saw no Jesus, but saw only empty burial clothes. It is the day to proclaim that death is empty - that as much pain and suffering as it brings, it does not have the final word. That word belongs to God, who raised Jesus from the dead. No matter where death has been, we are given new life. It is Easter - do you see it?!?

The Easter lilies, the brightly-coloured clothes, the chocolate you may or may not have eaten this morning, the hot-cross buns, the presence of friends and family, the white paraments on the altar, the joyful hymns - these things tell us that it’s Easter. (We’ll pretend that it’s sunny outside and there’s no snow, too.) When we left the church on Good Friday, it was empty and quiet and dim. Now it’s full, and buzzing, and bright. God has given the world new life. Do you see it?

You may have started to wonder why I keep asking whether you’ve seen Easter. I’m asking because, actually, it’s not always easy to see Easter, even on Easter morning. Sometimes, even with all of the celebration and joy around us on this day, it can still be hard to really feel the joy or new life that we keep proclaiming. Maybe things aren’t going very well in your life right now. Maybe things at home are tense and your family isn’t as close as you wish you could be, like the band of disciples who found themselves scattered on Sunday morning, wondering how come they had abandoned Jesus a few days earlier and how things had got to this point. Maybe you’re preoccupied with your health - struggling with physical or mental pain that makes it impossible for you to see or feel anything truly good or lasting this morning. 

Maybe you’re too overwhelmed with grief to feel or see Easter. Maybe you’ve lost someone you love this year, and this is the first Easter without them. It can be hard to see new life when there’s a body missing next to you in the pew. It can be hard to participate fully in the celebration and meals when one of the chairs at the table is empty. Peter, and the disciple whom Jesus loved, and Mary felt like this, I think. Their grief at losing Jesus stopped them from seeing new life. Mary couldn’t stop weeping.

Maybe you’re looking around and remembering when the church was packed completely full on Easter Sunday, when there were tens of children in their Sunday best, smiling from ear-to-ear, when communion went on forever because of all the people. Maybe the friendly faces that you remember seeing every Easter for years are getting fewer and fewer. And so maybe it’s hard to see Easter and the promise of new life in this place, on this morning.

I don’t want to pretend that just because the calendar says that today is Easter Sunday that we automatically feel that death has no more power over us and that we and the world are filled with new life. It doesn’t always work that way. In fact, it seldom works that way. The disciples didn’t see it right away. Mary didn’t see it right away. We don’t see it right away.

This is normal. And it happens because new life is - well - new. It’s not like anything we’ve seen before. We have a hard time recognizing when God is doing something new, because we’re looking for something that we know, something familiar, something that brought us joy in the past. But what we know is not new. It’s old, and it’s dying, if it’s not already dead. Resurrection life, the new life that we see in Christ - we wouldn’t recognize it unless someone pointed it out to us. We’re not conditioned to see Easter without help. We’re not able to see new life without God.

On Maundy Thursday, I said that Jesus knew this would happen. Jesus knew that we wouldn’t be able to recognize new life when we saw it, so Jesus gave us signs. Jesus showed us that wherever we see acts of service-in-love, we are seeing the kingdom of God coming into the world. He washed his disciples’ feet, and on Maundy Thursday we washed one another’s hands, and that act of service was a sign of God’s new life in the world. Whenever we see people helping one another, out of love and not out of self-interest, we are seeing Jesus’ new life in the world. We are seeing Easter.

And Jesus showed us that when we are forgiven and when we forgive others, that too is new life. Here in the church, we see that new life in baptism and in our weekly communion. In the body and blood of Christ, we are given new life because God forgives us. No matter what we have done in the week, no matter how dark our hearts, we come to communion and hear the words, “The body of Christ given for you.” “The blood of Christ shed for you.” Forgiveness. For you. Easter - for you.

But God, whose love for the world is greater than we can possibly imagine, isn’t content to let new life remain contained in the church. These signs of new life in the world are everywhere, although not in forms we would immediately recognize. God is bringing new life to new places and to new people. For instance, today’s 15-to-22 year olds have the highest rate of volunteering in the past fifty years. They do more volunteer work than their parents, and they have been described as the new “We” generation, turning things around from the previous “Me” generation. This is the same group of kids who wear outrageous clothes, are always on their phones, and who seem to have no shame when it comes to the company they keep, the music they listen to, or the people they love. They do not look like what we would expect good, church-going Christian youth to look like. But that’s because they’re not. They don’t go to church, a lot of them don’t know what being Christian means, and yet they are living out what Jesus tells us will bring the kingdom. They are serving in love. They give up their time for others. They stand up for those who are bullied. If we can get past their unconventional looks, we will see that they are God’s signs of new life. They are signs of Easter.

Israel and Palestine - definitely not two countries we would normally associate with signs of new life. If I were to tell you that there are powerful signs of forgiveness in a land that is the site of intense persecution and intense suffering, committed and endured by both Palestinians and Israelis, would you believe me? And yet there is an organization in Israel, called The Parents’ Circle, made up of Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children in the conflict, who come together regularly to offer support to one another in their grieving and to provide forums for dialogue. Israeli parents who have lost their sons and daughters to Palestinian militants, and Palestinian parents who have lost their sons and daughters to Israeli soldiers. Neither group has reason to forgive the other, and yet rather than clinging to bitterness and hatred towards someone who has caused the death of their children, they are forgiving one another and embracing each other and sharing in mutual pain. The Parents Circle hosts camps every summer for fifty Israeli and Palestinian teenagers, and they hold dialogue workshops in schools that touch 25,000 students a year. We would obviously not call this group Christian, and yet can we even match them for forgiveness? When God brings new life, it is often unrecognizable to us. But here is God bringing new life to the world. Here is Easter.


Have you helped anyone today for no other reason than that they needed a hand? Have you forgiven anyone recently, whether for something large or small? Have you been kind to a stranger, or showed them hospitality? Have you received forgiveness for something you’ve done? Have you been helped by someone when you were in need? These moments are signs of new life from God. They are signs that Easter is here. Not completely, not entirely. It’s not the case that every single moment of our days are made of this kind of life - of service and forgiveness and love. Not even the majority of our days look like this. Most of the time our lives do not look very much like Easter at all, which is why we have a hard time recognizing it when it comes. We’re not used to looking for it - we’ve become accustomed to the world as we know it, a world that died on Good Friday. But I see Easter. I see Easter in those of you who are sitting here this morning, who have prepared a wonderful breakfast for us, who have come because it would make someone else happy, who are here even though it is painful to be here without loved ones, who are here to experience forgiveness in Holy Communion. I see Easter in a world where teenagers give up their time to serve at food banks, where the parents of children killed by soldiers forgive those soldiers and offer support to their enemies. I see Easter in the two Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to my door on Saturday morning while I was working on this sermon, who wanted to share the message of Christ’s sacrifice with me, and whose theology I deeply disagree with. Yet they were serving in love. They were, despite our theological disagreements, bringing signs of God’s new life. I see Easter and new life in all the big and small acts of kindness and charity and forgiveness and love around the world. This is what Christ has shown us, this is what God has given to us. I see it. Easter is here. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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