Sermon for Easter Day

Trinity Church
April 24, 2011

Acts 10:34-43
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10

    Life and death. Life and death.
    These two have been the church’s theme throughout last week, Holy Week. We have walked the way of the cross. Followed Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem, filling the city with hope as a lively, adoring crowd ran along beside him, a crowd overflowing with joy and life. But then we watched with horror as the crowds that had praised him so, the crowd in whom he had inspired such jubilant life, turned on him and demanded his death. Life and Death.
    On Thursday we gathered with Jesus and his friends as, once more, he shared a meal with them. He gave them bread and wine as a way to keep his life ever present to them, not just as a memory, but as sound and taste and touch and sight and smell. We shared a meal together here that night and we heard the words “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe. You bring forth bread from the earth; and on this night you have given us the bread of life.” You have given us the Bread of Life and a way to have you always with us even after your death. Life and Death.
    And on Friday, Good Friday, we stood at the foot of the cross as he said, "It is finished. My work is done. "Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit . . . They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths . . . and in the garden there was a new tomb . . .  they laid Jesus there.” [JN 19.30 ff.] A life too good for governments and religions and ordinary people to bear, dead on a cross. Laid in a tomb. Life and death. And life and death. And life and death.
    And then comes today. Easter Day. Today Mary Magdalene and another Mary, two women Jesus had made feel so alive, have come to a place of death, a tomb, to do appropriate honor to one whom they loved who has died. To honor one who had brought such life to them and now was dead.
    And they hear news too incredible and confusing to believe. “He has been raised from the dead.”[Mt. 28.7]
    So maybe it isn’t just life and death. Maybe it is life and death and life again.
    Life and death and life again. That is the message of Easter Day. That is God’s message to each of us, to each of you, this day.
    Somewhere along the way Christianity got sidetracked. It got to be about a transaction between us and God. A “we-do-something-and-God-does-something-back” kind of arrangement: We are good and God rewards us. We are bad and God punishes us. And if we’re really, really bad, God punishes us forever. A message about the gift of life became a message about rules and fears and threats and obligations.
    But that is not what Christianity is about. Christianity is about learning what life is all about, about how all creation is put together and who’s in charge of it and how we fit into all of that. And, while it is very important that Jesus’s friends saw and believed that though he was dead yet he lived, that is only part of it. That Jesus was dead and yet he lives is a message, it is a revelation – it is the revealing to you and me of the nature of creation. Easter Day reveals to us the truth about our existence –  that the ultimate rule and pattern of the universe is not Life and Death, but Life and Death and Life again.
    Those two Marys saw Jesus right before their eyes. “ Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me."
    “Now You have seen me alive,” he says, “now go tell the others that too shall see me.”
    They saw Jesus. If only you and I could have that experience too. Maybe then we could have more faith that the message of Easter is true. That the pattern and meaning of it all is “Life and death and life again.”
    But where should we look? And would we know him if we saw him? That is the challenge life offers us: Where and how to see the living Jesus.
    It is a cliché, of course, to invite you to look at spring time bursting out all around us – but in my experience, clichés got to be clichés because the keep being true over and over and over. Winter gives way to spring, again and again and again. It is a glimpse of the way God has created the universe to work. Life and death and life again.
    Yes, spring and summer do go down to winter again, and life can be looked at that way if we choose. But “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” [JN 12.24-25] Grain does not live so that it may die, it dies so that it may have even greater life. But you know that instinctively, don’t you? That the emerging life and beauty of spring are truer to God’s ultimate purpose than the death that is winter. You know it because that is the way God made you – to value life and to know that it is meant to be yours. Life and death and life again.
    But that, of course, is not our only clue.  Far from it – If we have eyes to see.
    Have you ever experienced forgiveness? Have you ever been a part of a relationship that was caught up in the deadly cords of hurt and resentment and anger? Of course you have – and I truly, deeply hope that at some point in your life you have also known the mending of the broken relationship –the healing of the hurt, the letting go of the resentment, the subsiding of the anger. If you have, and I pray you have, you know that the anger and the resentment are deadly. They weigh you down to the earth. And the reconciliation, the forgiveness, the healing brings joy and hope and strength and peace. Once-deadly relationships can be restored to life. Life and death and life again. To know that experience is to know Jesus, to glimpse the power of his reconciling love. Love that brings life to dead relationships can only be expected to bring life to us. That is where we must look to see Jesus – in the healing of division, in the forgiving and being forgiven that free us from the cords of deadly resentment and fear.
    Anger and resentment and fear have no life to offer us. Forgiveness and reconciliation –  person to person, race to race, nation to nation – there is where Jesus is to be found. It is where he has gone ahead of us and waits to see us there.
    Life and death and life again.
    Today we have the privilege and the joy of baptizing two young children. In a few moments they shall be baptized as all Christians have been.
        A their baptisms, as at our own, they will approach waters of chaos and death. “In [the waters of Baptism] we are buried with Christ in his death.”[BCP] Those threatening, deadly waters will wash over them. And then they shall, as we once did, emerge on the other side of that water, full of new life. Born again into a  Life that can never be taken away. We will receive them unconditionally into God’s family, God’s household, the Church, just as God receives us unconditionally into everlasting life with him. In Baptism, we all have died, and now our life is hidden with Christ in God. [COL 3.3]
    Life and death and life again. It is the deep, enduring, unchangeable truth at the heart of creation. A truth that you already know because nature and your own experience tell you so. A truth that we reenact and recreate here today. You have only to look at these children and at that font to see Jesus. He has gone there ahead of us, and there we can see him, if we will.
    That is the message of Easter Day. The message of every moment of our lives. In Christ we have already died. That is behind us now. And we have been raised to the new, unending life God has always intended for us.
    Christ is risen, and so, in the power of his love shall we all also be.
    Alleuia, Christ is risen. The lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.