What a difference even less than a year can make. Last year, I ended our Easter Vigil sermon with these words:
“That empty tomb also is God’s call to us to action—and that action is ever, insistently, love. Love not just as a fleeting fancy but as a way of life. Love that is a joyful choice and rebuke of the ways of despair, helplessness, and hopelessness that embues so much of our world today. Love that is necessary for eternal life, and indeed, as the resurrection promises us, we can live a life shaped by resurrection right now, and can have eternal life not off in the distant future but now.
It is this kind of fullness and hope that takes hold of us when we encounter that same empty tomb with wonder and amazement—wonder and amazement that we are made new persons in Christ, in all our diversity and difference unified by being children of God, wondrously made in God’s image. We are awakened to a reverence for each other and creation, called to cast off our divisions as decisively as Jesus cast off the burial shroud and walked out into the life.
This is the night when darkness has been put to flight, and sin and death are washed away. Resurrection is new life-- not just the old life given back, but a life transformed. A life based on mercy, a life that empties itself out for love—only to find that love rushes back in, as strong and as resolute as the tide.”
Our lives have certainly been transformed in the last few weeks, but transformed by uncertainty and anxiety—probably much as those disciples felt, scattered to the four winds as is implied in our gospel tonight. If we examine how we got here, though, there are lessons we can learn. Like the fact that scarcity is profitable, but also terrifying to those who end up being shut out. That short-term profits really are no substitute for long-term preparedness and equity in being able to be healthy and safe. That, contrary to the mantra we’ve had pounded into our heads since the 1980s, greed is NOT good.
One of the disciplines that is highlighted during Lent is the discipline of self-examination and confession. For any of you who came to our book group on Tuesday nights, you will remember how much we discussed this each week as we made our way through Rowan Williams’s book Being Disciples.
True confession is not possible without self-examination, as Williams pointed out. Self-knowledge is only possible if we cultivate honesty, as well as stillness. From these two gifts we learn and grow, even when what we learn about ourselves surprises us. And often, when we DO that examination, we are taken aback. Even St. Paul acknowledged this when he once confessed, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
The poet John Donne spoke of much the same thing in his poem entitled “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward:”
Let man’s Soul be a Sphere, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey:
Pleasure or business, so, our Souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the West
This day, when my Soul’s form bends toward the East.
Donne describes our souls as spheres, like planets. Each of us has a course that we intend to run. But something has to set us into motion. For Donne, the primary mover of our lives as Christians should be devotion to Christ. Yet, in truth, we often are set in motion by a host of other forces, what Donne calls “foreign motions,” that attract and pull us, adjusting our course, possibly from the one we had originally envisioned.
If we are living the examined life, we realize how turned around we can get. Rather than being devoted to the gospel as we mean to be with the best intentions, we get wrapped up in our own cares and concerns. And too often, they are not the things that bring us love, or community, or peace. That westward movement is the way of human authority, the sin of Adam and Eve that led humans to test their freedom through disobedience that still stalks us today.
Yet the events of this night remind us that God’s love, the power of life itself, cannot be held behind the sealed stone of any tomb. That power, the power of Love, is what calls us here tonight. Thanks be to God, we are reminded here tonight that no matter how much we have gone astray, nothing is impossible through Christ.
Our gospel from Matthew tonight shows us clearly the two directions that contend to reign in our lives. The guards that are there at the tomb are there because of the arrogance of human authority, an authority that believes it has the final say of life and death to those it considers an enemy. Despite the tomb being sealed by the Roman and Judean authorities, the angel rolls back the stone and sits upon it, another symbolic reinforcement of how God’s power supersedes and conquers that of worldly empire. In my mind’s eye, I have a picture that’s like a combination of Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker and the Greek Winged Victory statue in the Louvre. There that angel sits, victorious, on the stone that we try so hard to seal against our hearts, while those two guards are passed out cold on the ground next to it.
See,-- and we need this reminder right now more than ever!-- there is no guard that can prevent Love from destroying the chains of death itself. We are called tonight to stand with the two Marys, to see, and what we see changes us forever, urging us once again to turn from the Westward to the East, toward the light of impossible hope and unconquerable Love, Love that calls us to reconciliation with God and one another. Easter is the day that the universe is changed forever.
It’s the dawning of the day we are challenged to do the one thing that truly scares many of us: to embrace the mystery of God’s love for all of us—wonderful and beyond our knowing, as we heard a few moments ago. By faith, we have come this far, tottering like toddlers on the feet of hope—and God has not brought us this far to abandon us now at the grave.
God
Has
Not
Brought
Us
This
Far
To
Abandon
Us
Now
At
The
Grave.
The Resurrected One calls us to resurrection, too, which is scary and thrilling and incredible all at once. Those who have been willing to let go of all that has unbalanced our world and instead have embraced resurrection with Christ will be changed down to the very center of their being. One who has been resurrected has been turned, and turned hard, from death to life, from sorrow to joy, from West to East.
Even in our altered circumstances and in the midst of the unknown, Jesus IS risen, and is calling us to use the sight of suffering of so many before us as an opportunity to jettison all that contributed to the suffering around us. Instead, our resurrection lives CAN be lives where we embrace life over death and need, where we place the well-being of each other, compassion, grace, generosity, and mercy at the center of our rebuilt lives. For such is the sweetness offered to us in the Kingdom of God.
In turning toward reconciliation and resurrection, we called to shake off who we have been, and turn instead to embody who we are called to be. It’s not enough for us to see the glory of resurrection and what promises it holds for ourselves. We are called to witness to that resurrection and how it continues to work in a world that desperately needs to see it and be transformed, too. And that resurrection must be seen through us, as we rise too into new life, now, choosing to set our faces and hearts toward Christ.
This is good news: the resurrection of Jesus is not a singular event in time. Jesus continues to rise again, continually, and we are called to witness to that resurrection with joy and gladness, and most of all, love that binds us and makes us one.
What does Christ’s resurrection mean for us today? It means that we live in Christ, and Christ lives in us, this moment and throughout our lives and beyond. Christ will never desert us. We only have to turn and embrace that love, trust in that love, for that is the way not just of devotion but of life, of self-giving, itself. Christ seeks to rise in our hearts right now, turning us to the East, toward resurrection within us and for the world.
Jesus, in rising from the grave, has given us everything, and in doing so, calls us to share in that holy work by being true disciples witnessing and being the resurrected Christ in and for each other and all creation. Let us seize hold of a resurrection life, for the hope and healing of the entire world.
Alleluia!
Preached at the 8:00 pm Great Vigil of Easter in time of pandemic, April 11, 2020, online at St. Martin's Church Facebook page.
Readings:
Genesis 1:1-2:4a [The Story of Creation]
Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea]
Isaiah 55:1-11 [Salvation offered freely to all]
Ezekiel 36:24-28 [A new heart and a new spirit]
Zephaniah 3:14-20 [The gathering of God's people]
Romans 6:3-11
Matthew 28:1-10
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