An Idle Tale? Or a Miracle? by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer
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Trinity Episcopal Church
Easter Sunday 2016
March 27, 2016
1 Cor 15: 19-26 Luke 24:1-12
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
God is good! All the time! All the time? God is good!
It is a joy to welcome you all here this morning as we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord. You know, I always remark on how different this, our greatest Christian holiday, is from Christmas, which is the world’s greatest Christian holiday. The lead up to Christmas is pure craziness – and we all know it and, for the most part, participate in it. My evidence for that? We hold a service each year the week before Christmas which we call “A Service of Hope and Remembrance” for people who want to take a break from the shopping and the cards and the lights and the preparations and the whatever. And we have 15 or 20 people who show up, including the four of five of us who have to be here. And that’s how we lead up to the greatest secular Christian holiday. Liturgical Advent is pretty much a non-starter for the 21st century world.
By contrast, the lead up to Easter, our greatest Christian holiday, is quiet, somber, reflective leading up to a week that is marked by false accusations, arrest of an innocent man, and his subsequent trial in the court of popular opinion, brutal torture and death. No kings, no heavenly hosts, no presents. There is a Good Friday, not a Black Friday – have you ever thought of the irony of that? A Friday that observed a crucifixion of an innocent man is the lead in to Easter and the Friday that kicks off our
annual paroxysm of overspending and hyperactivity is the lead in to Christmas.
The comparison draws us to St. Paul’s words in his first letter to the church in Corinth. Now when we hear this passage, our attention tends to be drawn into the main body of the passage, the part about “since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also to come through a human being.” Professional theologians – because you know, we are all theologians, most of us just don’t get paid for it – professional theologians and leaders of the church have spent the better part of 2000 years arguing over the meaning of Christ’s death. This passage has been one of the keys to those who advocate for a theory known as “substitutionary atonement” – don’t worry, there won’t be a test on this before you’re allowed to receive communion. The Substitutionary Atonement theory holds that since Adam and Eve committed the first sin, it would take the sacrifice of a human who was acceptable to God in order to reconcile the human race back to God. And since a mere human could never please God, it had to be a God-human, like Jesus, to be sacrificed. Now I’ve never been a big fan of the substitutionary atonement theory. And it seems to me that there is over 1000 or so years of Jewish history that is a part of our own Christian tradition that would indicate God had a pretty good stake in the world in supporting his chosen people before the arrival of Jesus. But that’s what this passage from 1st Corinthians is usually understood to stand for.
But I want to take us back to the very opening line of the passage: If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. The Arabic translation of the opening phrase renders it, "if we from Christ, and by him, expect happiness in this world only." If we hope in Christ only for the things of this life; if our hope in Him is bounded by this earthly life, and confined to the things of it, and does not reach to the things of another life, the things of eternity, the invisible glories of another world, to be enjoyed in soul and body, then we, who should know better, are to be pitied.
And this is why the secularization of Christmas is so devastating: If the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus is so trivialized, we lose the significance of God so identifying with God’s creation that God takes on a human nature. Beliefs which we have held central throughout the ages—such as the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus, and such as the truth of the Resurrection – have become a part of our Western culture, and in the process, I dare say we can begin to take them for granted. We become comfortable thinking of Jesus as brother, teacher, rabbi, prophet – all of which are roles he indeed models for us. And that is comfortable for us – that is something that we can relate to and still stay within our own human comfort zones. The danger here, however, is that it leads us down the path of secularization of Christianity in general that has lured many of us Christians into relying on what can easily become a secular belief system.
This was the subject of an editorial in the British magazine, The Spectator a few years back. Pointing out that “it is Easter, not Christmas, that makes Christianity such a radical religion. In a world where we are invited to worship strength and power, the symbol of churchgoers is a man defeated, despised and rejected. The story of the passion and the Resurrection is one of pain as well as joy, the worst suffering before the greatest jubilation. But when religion and the secular culture become too intertwined – as they have become ever since Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century – Christianity ceases to become the counter-cultural movement that Jesus founded, and it becomes one more appendage of the dominant culture.
As the Spectator editorial observed, if you’re not a believer, there’s no story which has more to say about the hope and despair of being human. If you are a believer, it’s the most important event in history. Last night at our Easter Vigil, Pastor George Chien told a modern version of Ezekiel’s story of the dry bones – you know, where the prophet observes a valley of dry bones that, through invocation of the Holy Spirit, miraculously move from mere bones to being connected by ligaments and muscle and gradually are enfleshed and ultimately, by a prophetic infusion of God’s spirit, the formerly dry bones take on new life as part of God’s creation. The point of Pastor George’s modernized story is that the institutional church, by its centuries long courtship with social institutions, has lost the zeal and the energy – can I say the life? – of the movement that the risen Christ began 2000 years ago.
And what Paul is saying in verse 19 is that if we’re not ready to believe and to proclaim that Jesus has risen from the dead, then all we get out of our faith is a little inspiration for the few short years of our lives, and we’re a pretty sorry lot. But if Christ is raised, and we believe that, then he is only the first in a long legacy of folk who are leaving the cemeteries, for whom even before their remains arrive there, their souls are in the nearer presence of our risen Lord. Are we ready to embrace the challenge presented by following in the footsteps of a Lord who rose from the dead? Or are we more comfortable adoring a Lord who did all the heavy lifting and expects nothing of us. Or are we more comfortable with the friendship of a quaint rabbi who left us some examples to live by but is not present in the world today.
On Good Friday, as part of the annual Asylum Hill Christian Community procession among seven of the Asylum Hill Pastor Kari Nicewander of Immanuel Congregational had been assigned to preach on the crucifixion and death from the Gospel according to John. To illustrate the finality of the death of Jesus’ human body, she took a glass and smashed it on the stone floor next to the pulpit.
“Shattered glass,” she said. That’s what happened to Jesus body – something that had been whole was totally shattered after being beaten, flogged, tortured, crucified, stuck with a spear – Jesus body was dead. That’s what the onlookers saw – that’s what Joseph and Nicodemus buried. That’s what the women expected to find the next morning when they arrived with their spices.
But as God always does, God made the unexpected happen. Our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry reminds us in his Easter message; this was not a fairy tale that happened on that first Easter morning. This was God at work. “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” the angels ask the women. “Didn’t you believe it when Jesus said ‘that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again?’ You didn’t hear that? Oh, but wait a minute, you weren’t expecting a miracle, were you? That was just the rabbi saying that. Well guess what, this was a miracle that just happened here.”
And even when they go back to the disciples – the ALL MALE DISCIPLES guys, the ladies are quick to remind us – the disciples didn’t believe them. Luke tells us, “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” And only Peter goes down to check it out for himself.
Shattered glass. That’s what we expect when we drop a glass onto a stone floor. A dead body, that’s what we expect after a crucifixion. But God is always bigger than what appears on the surface of things. St. Paul reminds us that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” And that is what we celebrate at Easter – the ultimate triumph of hope over death.
What do you see on this Easter morning – a broken glass or an empty tomb? The shattered life of a faithful rabbi, or a risen Savior? Is the Easter story an idle tale, or is it a miracle that calls us to unimaginable new life? The risen Christ challenges us – as did Jesus – to lift our gaze higher than what we can see. The risen Christ challenges us to think and feel and trust beyond the confines of our human bodies, beyond the limited imaginations of our human minds, to do more than believe in the possibility of miracles, yes, can I say, even to expect them. Amen.