The Rev. Dr. John F. McCard, Rector
Don’t look for the living among the dead.
O God be in my mouth as I speak for you and fill this place with your great grace, that we may leave this place less of what we use to be and more of what we ought to be, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Amen
“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not
here but has risen.”
What does Easter mean to you? Does Jesus’ resurrection
make a difference in how you live your life? Or is Easter just some dusty
historic event that happened 2,000 years ago?
Do you come to church out of a sense of obligation? Guilt?
Perhaps, Fear? It is hard to deny that the good news of Easter can at times be
overwhelmed by newspaper headlines. Among the suicide bombers, poverty, and
violence of the world, Easter’s message of resurrection and hope can seem
abstract and remote from our human experience.
I have always believed, though, that spiritual wholeness
begins when we learn how to take what seems abstract and let those beliefs,
those commitments transform our lives in new and undiscovered ways.
Take for example the twelve points of the Scout Law: Any
Scouts present today? Remember how we memorized it: A Scout is: trustworthy,
loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave,
clean and reverent. Between you and me, on a good day, I probably only got
about five out of twelve.
But as I struggled to live them out, I also discovered
these simple virtues are what give human life meaning, even, if our devotion to
them is not always consistent.
The following story from the creator of peanuts, the late
Charles Schultz will illustrate what I mean.
The cartoon starts with Linus tell his sister Lucy that he
wants to be a doctor when he grows up. Lucy looks horrified, you can’t do that
she says, If you want to be a doctor you have to love humanity, and you don’t. In
the last panel of the cartoon, Linus corrects his sister. He tells her that he does
love humanity. It is just people that he can’t stand.
Charles Schultz had a wonderful way of capturing the rich
complexity of our moral choices. Whether you are /sitting in a pumpkin patch/
or /directing a Christmas pageant/ Schultz knew that a meaningful human life
demands involvement.
And while many Scouts recite the Scout Law, there comes a
time when we must roll up our sleeves and get down to the nitty gritty of
living out those abstract ideals.
The same holds true for Christians.
Life in Christ demands our active participation in this
world.
God so loved the world that he sent his son and we can
only live full incarnate lives when we are involved in this world of God’s
creation.
A good friend of mine who has raised four children wrote
about the importance of this involvement in the following way:
I have sweat in the hot sun, teaching four children to
catch and hit a ball, to swing a tennis racket and shoot a free throw. I have
built blocks and played games I detest with and for my children. I have watched
countless basketball games made up largely of bad passes, traveling violations
and shots that missed both rim and backboard. I have sat through piano
recitals, band concerts, school programs….
I have run beside a bicycle ready to catch a child who
might fall while learning to ride. (this is by the way very hard) I have spent
hours finding perfectly decent (cheap) clothing in stores, only to have those
choices rejected as somehow not exactly what they had in mind. And finally, I
have had to fight for the right to eat at Burger King rather than McDonald’s.
Of course my friend, goes on to write that what he has
written overlooks a great deal.
Particularly the great joy that children have
brought to his life and they way the gift of their lives had enriched
his own…and actually, to be honest, he hadn’t really resented so much the
litany above, except, perhaps, the part about eating at McDonalds.
My friend realized that the obligations of being a parent
demand that we make ourselves vulnerable to each other through these
relationships.
For it is only through vulnerability to the other
that these abstract ideals began to become real. Vulnerability usually gets a
bad rap in contemporary culture.
We are encouraged to be rugged individualists, people who
do not need each other. We all know there can only be one American Idol
or Apprentice.
But that my friends is not a Christian message. And it is
not the message that the church preaches to people at Easter. The Bible tells
us that Christ was obedient to God, even though, this obedience involved his
death on the cross.
And when you take time to study Jesus’ life, we see that
it was a life of vulnerability. A life that took great risks, a life that was
lived among others in relationship.
He had close friends, who loved him deeply, and enemies
who conspired to kill him. He was not afraid to stand outside the tomb of a
close friend weeping or in anger, make a whip of cords and chase moneychangers
out of God’s house.
For our Lord, the message was clear, a life that is lived
devoted to God is not meant to be distant or abstract from daily human experience.
For us, the challenge is to put aside the chocolate
eggs and see Easter as a time, that we, like Christ, must come to terms
with our own sense of vulnerability.
A true Easter celebration of resurrection arises only in
the shadow of the cross. Easter comes to all of us in moments of human
desolation, in times of pain and suffering, when we are forced to confront the
reality that all of us in some way, at some point in our lives feel God
forsaken.
In his book, A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis wrote about
the grief of losing his wife.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am
not afraid, but the sensation is being afraid. The same fluttering in the
stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep swallowing. At other times,
it feels like being mildly drunk or concussed. There is a sort of invisible
blanket between the world and me. Meanwhile where is God? This one of the most
disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of
needing him…you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to him when your need
is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find?
“A door slammed in your face and a sound bolting and
double bolting on the inside. After that silence…Why is so present a commander
in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen
gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively.
“But don’t come talking to me about the consolation of
religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
Lewis found his own sense of God’s presence on the other
side of the pain and suffering of Good Friday. A sense that God had taken what
he suffered and through the story of Christ had redeemed and reclaimed that
suffering for his own.
For Lewis, resurrection hope became real when he
confronted his own fear and his vulnerability.
And that is where most people get Easter wrong.
Easter is not about showing up at church and thinking
everything is going to be all right. The fragility of human life teaches us
that is not possible. We cannot inoculate ourselves from suffering in our
present world.
Nor is Easter some kind of dry theological doctrine
debated in the pages of Time magazine or on the History Channel.
For if Easter is only about having the right type of
belief, it will deny the necessity of relationship and intimacy that are such
an important part of human life.
If we allow this to happen, Easter will become a day where
we dress up for church but feel there is something missing in our lives.
To get back to Peanuts for a moment, this type of Easter
might make us love humanity.
But in doing so we forget the great joy, and yes the pain,
that comes from the relationships we have with those we love.
And we must never let Easter become something abstract.
A true Easter does not ignore the pain and suffering of
human life but fully embraces our own fragile mortality.
Easter becomes real when we give up our feeble attempts to
control human life, to make ourselves gods, when we stop obsessing about our
finances, our security, our relationships, our past sins,
When we step aside and give it all back to God, that is
precisely the moment that something miraculous and amazing begins to happen.
That is the moment we begin to live Easter lives, to
invite God to resurrect our hopes, our dreams in the shadow of the cross of
human life.
On that first Easter morning, the women that knew and
loved Jesus came to bury their dreams….this is the morning that God is
waiting to bring your dreams to life.
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!