Easter Day

Today is “The Sunday of the Resurrection,” at least according to the liturgical calendar in the Book of Common Prayer. But you’re not going to be able to go into Walgreens and buy “Sunday of the Resurrection Chocolate Rabbits.” There are no “Sunday of the Resurrection” sales at Walmart this week.

No, everyone says that today is Easter. The name “Easter” comes from a name used by the ancient nature religions to refer to the season of spring. As a result, our society finds it easy to celebrate this day with eggs and bunnies and flowers, all those symbols of new life that everyone can understand. It doesn’t matter if you are a Christian or a tree-hugging Wiccan, you get the picture.

I remember a commercial in which a child asks his mother if the Easter Bunny comes down the chimney just like Santa Claus bringing gifts. And he wanted to know why a rabbit brings eggs. Wouldn’t a chicken do that? He was all confused. Whatever the confusion that might be in the symbols and rituals of Easter, it is our rite of spring that celebrates the return of life and long days after the darkness of winter.

The fact that the Resurrection of Our Lord is the only festival of the church year that is set by the cycle of nature (Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox) reinforces this tendency to understand this day as merely a commemoration of the larger cycle of nature and the change of seasons.

As complicated as that sounds, it makes good sense, since it means that Easter coincides with the greening of the earth (at least in the northern hemisphere). Christ is risen and the whole, natural world around us seems to come to life. The crocus and daffodils will be peeping out of the soil up north and bringing the first colors to the brown, dead landscape. Here in Florida it means that jasmine and gardenias are in full bloom, offering up their tremendous scent around the neighborhood.  It all seems like a natural connection between faith and the creative power of God.

It is also a misleading connection. Spring is a natural event. Its return every year is inexorable and irreversible. Buy a tulip bulb in fall up north and it looks dead. Well, maybe it looks a little like an onion with its thin skin and scraggly roots. That’s the way bulbs are. You know that all you need to do is plant them and wait for spring. When spring comes, sure enough, they will shove through the soil alive and burst with color. It seems like a miracle, but we know that it’s a completely natural process.

Resurrection, though, is another matter. It is utterly unnatural. When someone dies and is put in the ground, that’s it. We don’t wait for the person to reappear next spring along with the blooming gardenias. When someone dies, we say, “Good-bye” and go on with our lives trying to adjust to a life without someone you know will never return. As far as we know, the only place spring happens in a cemetery is on the graves and not in them.

Saint Peter, in today’s lesson, has a different point of view. He said, “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear (to us).” 

But …Peter, says. This resurrection things is God’s protest against this world as it is. It is God’s way of reversing the inevitable, irreversible and inexorable. A new kind of world has now begun!

Easter is a day for Christians to pump their fists in the air and say, “Yes!” Yes is what Easter is about. God’s yes to humanity, as God grants to us the gift of immortality. God’s yes to Jesus and all Jesus taught us about the meaning of life. God’s yes to the victory of life over death, love over hate, faith over fear, hope over despair. Everything about Easter says, “Yes!” 

Easter says that the people who are buried in cemeteries who are in Christ are not dead at all. They are alive in Christ right now and will one day receive their new bodies, just as Jesus received his new body at Easter. What can we say to this, but “Yes!”? 

Presbyterian pastor Craig Barnes compares our human struggle to that of a person pushing against a huge stone – a stone like the one that blocked the entrance to Christ’s tomb. He writes that we have all been pushing against something for a long time. And we push hard. 

“Maybe we’ve been pushing against a supervisor who is hard to satisfy, or against the threat of having our job downsized. Or maybe we’re pushing against a marriage that seems destined for the ditch. Or maybe pushing against chronic pain, against depression, against loneliness and grief, or against some other obstacle that is between us and our dreams.” For the past two years we’ve all been pushing against the anxiety caused by the Coronavirus.

We work so hard to save our lives. We push and push and push, and in the end, Barnes says, “in one of the worst ironies of life,” it seems all that waits on the other side is death.

But then we come here on Easter morning and we realize that the stone that we have been pushing against has been rolled away – the stone of our mortality, the stone of our inadequacy, the stone of our impurity. God has given us His divine “Yes!” and suddenly we have a new picture of our lives.

That supervisor will not get the best of us, the loss of a job will not destroy us; neither will the loss of a marriage, the loss of a dream or even our failing health. These tragedies that come to us all do not have the power to destroy us because, in Easter, God has given us His “Yes!” In Easter, God says to us there is nothing in this world or the next that will defeat one of God’s children.

You may have difficulty believing … not just the resurrection of our Lord but how God can continue to love you in the midst of the mess that is your life. But you are here this morning because you knew that here you would once again hear that unnatural, unexpected but. You came longing to hear that this world and your life are not inexorably, irreversibly, and inevitably bound for death. The tomb is empty. For, in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead!

There’s only one way to respond to that good news. Alleluia! Christ is risen!  The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!