Homily Easter Vigil 4-110-04
A woman was asked if her husband
believed in reincarnation.” Are you kidding?” she replied. “Why, he doesn’t
even believe in life after dinner!”
There is a Sufi Tale:
A dead man suddenly came to life and
began to pound on the lid of the coffin.
The lid was raised; the man sat
up. “What are you doing?” he said to the assembled crowd.
“I am not dead.”
His words were met with silent
disbelief. Finally one of the mourners said, “Fried, both the doctors and the
priests have certified that you are dead. So dead you are.”
And he was duly buried.
This feast we celebrate tonight is about coming alive – about
new birth – about resurrection – about going beyond death and the cross and the
suffering.
The story tells us that Mary went to the tomb and found it empty
- and then she was commissioned to go forth and tell the story – to shout the
story – to make the whole thing known. And she is still telling us today – and
trying to get us to believe it.
Edward Hays in one of his little meditations wonders what, as
Mary was running through he streets of
Of course is the long tradition of Easter bonnets and new
Easter clothes and the tradition is directly connected
to the Easter Sacrament of Baptism.
Newly baptized adults originally were given white robes which they wore
throughout Easter week. This custom soon
expanded so that all Christians began to wear new clothes on Easter.
Newness fits Easter like a glove. The Easter ritual calls for new candles, new
altar breads, new fire, new water to be blessed – all
is to be new on this great feast. This
mother of all Sundays and all holy days has about her a
pungent perfume of newness; the feast is as new as the rising sun. So hopefully
we’re wearing something new today.
There’s an old Irish saying, “If you don’t wear something new
on Easter – and you can afford it – then bad luck will come upon you.” The Irish also say that Christmas is about
good food, drink and presents, and Easter is about new clothes.
In America in the post Civil War days, nannies would tell
their children, “If you don’t wear
something new on Easter – even new drawers – the crows will peck your eyes out,
and when you go to church the birds will dirty you.” The wearing of something
new, then, was more than a mater ob being in style; it was necessary for
protection!
But of course its not just clothes that we wear – we wear out
habits.
Ernie Larsen in his book Who’s Driving the Bus – Co-dependent Business Behaviors of Workaholics,
Perfectionists, Martyrs, Tap Dancers, Caretakers & People Pleases
states that nearly 98% of what we do is habit! That can be good news, however,
since not all habits are bad! What
Easter impels us to do is to wear new ones. What our Lent has been has been
time to prepare for this newness. What Mary Magdalene and the others were
running around the streets of
The Gospel tells us that what they were telling the others –
what they were shouting about was thought to be all sorts of nonsense. They
didn’t want to hear it.
In a sense Mary and the other women are still running and
shouting and trying to get us to believe that what Jesus has done calls for
some radical change. We need not to just change our hats – we need t change our
direction, our habits, our whole way of being. What Jesus has done is
overwhelming.
But perhaps we tend to resist what is overwhelming – makes
sense – we don’t want to be overwhelmed.
We have had over two thousand years of celebrating this great
feast – of saying that this Jesus has risen – has overturned the course – has
re-written the rules – has defeated the status quo – and yet do we live much
differently than those of Jesus’ day? Of course our civilization is advanced!
We have dishwashers and the like! But do we still deny truth and destroy innocence.
Do we resist love and insist on power. If Jesus walked the earth in the same
way today as then would he meet a different fate? Would his Word be any more welcomed?
We can make of Easter a pretty card – a fancy bonnet – some
colored eggs. We can enjoy it as a festival of spring and talk about
butterflies. But the reality is that it is about Jesus and what he taught and
how he lived and why he died and that he rose.
The fact is that this Jesus said that it’s easier for a camel
to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Reign of
God. He said to seek first God’s reign which he described as feeding the hungry
and giving drink to the thirsty. In short, being concerned
about others. He told those disturbing stories about the rich man and
Lazarus at the gate; about the man who built bigger and bigger barns- security
annuities – only to die that night without having kissed his children.
He spoke about forgiving one’s enemies as a condition for
being forgiven ourselves, for being whole. He said that we do not live by bread
alone. He asked: What does it profit us if we gain the whole world and loses
our very souls? He spoke of treating
women and men with respect and not even lusting after them in one’s heart. He spoke of compassion and he gave everyone
he met a second chance. He said that we
were to absolutely and without equivocation believe in
God and God’s wild, wild love for us and that we count far more than the
sparrow that falls to the ground.
And what’s more – and this is essential- he actually did
those things. He fed the poor and healed
the sick and took time with friends and prayed and threw out the
money-changers, hugged children, and had little patience with hypocrites,
religious or otherwise. He was countercultural – he changed the rules – he
challenged people to change their habits – their ways of doing things. You can
see that, in the long run, his culture could do nothing but pin him to a
cross. And so they did.
But His God turns right around and sets him free and he’s at
his mischief again! And so what do we
do.
Perhaps what we have done – because we would never nail him
to the cross – is that we’ve made it all over to our image – we’ve taken care
of our comfort level. We make Jesus over
to our image so we can go on living our lives and being very much a part of our
culture so that no one knows we’re Christians.
Sometimes what we call religion – what we call our belief
system – is just what is comfortable and won’t get us in trouble.
Christians for centuries have decided what Jesus was for and
against – and so often it’s just what they have decided to be for or against.
Jesus didn’t talk about a lot of our issues. The Jesus who
changed the way of looking and thinking told about the value of love and
inclusiveness and forgiveness and mercy and seeing in the face of each person
the face of God, the child of God. This is what he did. This is why he died.
This is why God freed him again so that maybe we’d get the point. Maybe we’d
learn new habits.
Have we?
Do we love as Jesus loved?
Or do we pick and choose?
Do we forgive and forgive and forgive? Or do we say there are
some exceptions to that need?
Do we look at everyone we meet and see that child of God that
we can embrace? Or do we go with the flow and decide that he couldn’t have
meant everyone.
Is Easter about Jesus turning the tables and creating a new
way of approaching things…..or is it about new hats and pretty colors and what
feels good for us.
We gather as a community to celebrate this resurrection.
But we also gather to remind one another to put on newness –
to walk in newness. To become the new culture that Jesus rose for.
A culture that loves wildly and
forgives with abandon and is blind to differences and is open to possibilities. It’s a culture that lives without
fear – because this resurrection has defeated fear. The Jesus culture – if we
could ever get it would establish finally the reign of our loving God.