The Church of the Ascension
Easter, April 8, 2007

In the name of the Risen Lord: AMEN.

The first year after I left St. James’, the new Rector stood up on Easter morning before the large crowd, began his sermon with the typical, “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” seated the crowd, and said, “It is all true.  AMEN.”   Without another word, he sat down.  The startled quiet gave way in a moment to a snicker or two, and then the creed was begun and off they went!  Not surprisingly, the response was varied: some frankly were delighted to “get the whole thing over” so quickly; others felt cheated and were outraged; and the other clergy no doubt both admired his nerve and resented his not having struggled for hours to write a brilliant sermon.

I can’t imagine ever doing such a thing in part because I love words, not to mention the sound of my voice too much to miss the opportunity to preach to an Easter crowd!  What I do clearly appreciate, though, about his rather dramatic rendering that morning is the implied admission that no amount of words nor any learned arrangement of them can do justice to this amazing event.  Today is the seminal moment of the Christian experience.  The images recalled in the services of the past week, the oddly triumphant, yet doomed entrance to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the powerful institution of the Lord’s Supper and Jesus’ extraordinary command to love, to love particularly and distinctly, the violence and degradation of death on Good Friday, the dank darkness of the grave yesterday – all images redeemed by the earth-shaking surprise of the resurrection.  Just when darkness seemed to have ruled the day, hope emerged and life began anew – an act, a gift of our faith repeated again and again in the course of our lives.  Hope, though often wounded, never loses to darkness.  Our claim as Easter Christians rests on that premise.

This awareness was brought home to me again this week by a contact from someone out of my distant past.  My college chaplain, a man whom I loved and admired so much and now rarely if ever see, contacted me by email this week.  His being in touch derived from seeing a picture of me that some mutual friends had taken on a recent visit to Staten Island.  They snapped a shot of me standing on the steps of the church in my black cassock on a snowy Friday morning.  My recollection of the picture, looking at it as I did through the little digital window, was that I cut a fairly impressive figure.  My old friend, though, upon seeing the photo wrote that he hardly recognized me, marveling that the old white headed man in the black robe could really be I!  I forgave him for that unkindness because of what he also wrote.  Just at the end of his email, he typed these words:  “In your sermon this week, try to have something good to say. Easter is the best chance we ever have - for Easter is the birthday of hope.

And so it is - the birthday of hope.  No matter how dark it has been; no matter how dark it will be again; on this day hope that never ends is born.  Easter, you see, is less about believing than about knowing – about knowing in that deep space in our souls that even though we were and that we are sometimes dead, sometimes the worst kind of dead, the living dead, we don’t have to be.  Easter means that we do not have to remain dead, that we can choose to experience the hope of resurrection, that we can seek life among the living rather than remaining among the dead.

Luke’s story of Easter varies a bit from the others; each has its own arrangement of the details.  In his account, two men in dazzling Easter clothes confront the terrified women.  Just a gender note here: they were terrified for sure….but they were present which is more than can be said about a well-known group of more frequently painted men!These other worldly figures in white, whoever they were, asked the women a question that haunts me:  “Why do you look,” they asked, “for the living among the dead?  If you are looking for life, sisters, you are looking in the wrong place.” 

Among all the life lessons that the reality of Easter gives us, surely this one is near the top of the list.  If we want to be alive, if we want a life, then what in the world are doing spending all our time searching in places where there is no life or even worse not searching at all?  The holy men in white were so clear: why look here among the dead when what you really want resides among the living.

It strikes me that the women knew what they were looking for whether they could express it or not; they knew that they were looking for the life which they had glimpsed in the person of Jesus.  It is not a surprise that it is the women – all joking aside – who came to the grave.  Of course, on one level it is true that anointing with spices fell within the role of women; but beyond that, these women, products and victims of an era which rendered them unquestionably invisible, had seen and even more importantly had been seen by Jesus.  Who they were had been recognized in way that their culture would not allow.  Jesus looked them in the eye and saw them for the children of God they were, and the presumed loss of that gaze struck them at the core of their beings.  They were looking for the living, for the life they had come to know as they had never known it before. 

Sadly, though, they were looking in the wrong place.  But by God and with thanks to God, they were looking.  God bless these women; they showed us that even when life crumbles, the first step in living a life of resurrection is to never give up on it and to keep looking for it.  For when we look, though our guideposts are rarely strangely dressed men in white, when we look, we find.  That is the promise of Easter: when we look for life we find it.  It may not look like we want it to or imagined that it might; but if we look for life, God is faithful that we will find it.

My friends, my Easter prayer for each of us and for this church, here and beyond, is twofold.  First, my prayer is that we shall never forget to look, that we shall without shame or embarrassment continue to hold out the hope and conviction of the resurrection.  There is so much despair in this world that some of us have lost hope.  Though we might not be willing to admit it to ourselves, our lives show it.  The cynicism of the world tells us to stop looking, that it is all a fairy tale.  These faithful women went about their lives with eyes wide open; cynics among them might have told them to circle the wagons and stay home that morning or even that they had simply imagined the messengers; but because of their hope, they had eyes to see and ears to hear.  And the message of Easter was told and heard.

And my second prayer is that we when we do choose to look, we shall not waste our time looking for life where there is only death.  Mirages of life lurk all around us, often wrapped in things that look good and are in part:  ambition and acquisition, consumption and competition, success and sensuality.  There is good in each of those things; but they do not hold the meaning of life for us.  Real meaning comes only from a life in Christ, the risen one, the one who calls us to a path of service and generosity, to a commitment to justice and peace, to a life of loving when hating or ignoring would be easier.

Why do we look for the living among the dead?  Why, indeed?  The incredible good news of Easter is that Christ is risen and calls each of us to the fullness of life that comes only from living with him.