Happy Easter. I have
to admit those words are hard to say this morning. Easter is supposed to be time of great joy: a
welcoming of new life, new possibilities into the world at spring time. It is reveling in the triumph of life over
death – and I don’t feel it this year.
With everything going on, with the attacks in Belgium that happened
earlier this week, with the bombings in turkey and elsewhere that the media
failed to report, I just feel … numb.
And that’s just with everything going on over there; over here it isn’t
any better. As Americans we live in the
wealthiest nation on the planet, and yet despite this we lead the
industrialized world in child poverty, and we use that wealth to have by far
the highest incarceration rate in the world. Whereas similar countries like
Germany incarcerate 76 out of 100,000, Italy 85, and Saudi Arabia 161, the U.S.
manages to find ways to imprison a whopping 716 people out of 100,000. Child sex trafficking continues to rise, making
up 40% of all human trafficking cases and the FBI has identified the twin
cities as one of 13 US cities with high incidents of child prostitution. Agencies say you cannot be homeless for 24
hours in the twin cities before you are approached to enter a prostitution
ring, and the fact is reports also say they only ask so many times. Urban food deserts are on the rise, our inner
city poor have to travel miles to even get to store that has fresh produce and
healthy things to eat, slavery is a real thing on our shores AGAIN, and not only
does our elected leadership continuously do nothing about any of it, but as a
pastor who also is a law school graduate, it infuriates me that I am
continually asked to support one of two parties whose frontrunners are either
scandal ridden lawbreakers or people who actively advocate war crimes. So, no, I must confess I’m not feeling it
this Easter season. Everything we’ve
done today feels rote, a ritual done because it is expected, not because it is relevant.
And so
I ask myself, how did we get to this place, how did we end up this way as a
nation? Easter has always been the
highest point of the Christian year.
Indeed, from what I can tell about the Earliest Church from the writings
and structures they left behind, every Sunday used to be an Easter, every
Sunday was a celebration of the continuous renewal of God’s blessings of life
and when Easter itself actually came around – THAT was a blowout party. How can it be that Easter, a day that had so
much joyous meaning for our ancestors that they would sooner be put to death
than abandon it, how can it be that this day has dwindled down to a mere tale,
an hour long service where we sing sunny hymns and act joyously for a little
bit, only to go home afterward unchanged?
For the Christian, Easter is not just a holiday, it is not just a day
where we dress up nicely and allow our children to ingest copious amounts of
sugar to move on to a nice ham dinner afterward, Easter is the celebrated
Supreme Reality. Through the eyes of
Easter, Death is an aberration, a disease well on its way to being cured. Through the Eyes of Easter, this body, this
world, this existence, are not a dime-store knock offs. We in fact would not be better off if we were
never born; that this physical life of ours contains blessings that not one
other creature in this universe gets to experience. Through the eyes of Easter, I see that Good
wins. That evil cannot have the
day. That all suffering is fleeting, and
that one day cruelty, injustice, hatred, and pain will all be things of the
past.
And so
I cried out to my God and my Savior, “What happened?” Easter is supposed to be the Christian
identity, how can we live out the joys of Easter, how can we embody its
meaning, how can we make it relevant to people, when we ourselves have never once
experienced it? Where … did Easter … go?
I
remember many an Easter from my own childhood.
We’d wake up that Sunday, my brother and I, and we’d go hunting for our
Easter baskets. The sun was usually up,
the air crisp; we’d find our Easter baskets and devour the chocolate rabbit plus
a few jelly beans before breakfast. Mom
would make pancakes and sausage, but the end result was always the same on
Easter Sunday – The church would swell up as exhausted parents would force
their children to sit still on a sugar high for an hour. The pastor would muddle through a sermon, having
already done a Good Friday (and sometimes a Maundy Thursday service), learning
to crack a joke when a child’s energy levels exceeded the fear of their
parents.
My
parents brought me to church every Sunday, not just Easter, but they didn’t
really believe. Like many today they
were agnostics and practical atheists.
They didn’t really believe in Jesus or any of this resurrection
stuff. Like the Greeks and their
festivals to Zeus, so was Easter to the Christians – a people thoughtlessly playing
out their stories and that was about it.
They didn’t come to church, they didn’t bring me and my brother to
church, because they believed they were imparting essential life truths to us;
they brought us to church to appease their own parents and the society around
them. In truth, as a pastor I don’t really
blame them.
As the
first generation after the 2nd world war and as the first generation
to really go to college, they had questions honestly raised by their education,
questions that quite frankly their rural blue-collar parents had no idea how to
answer. A factory or an office worker
knows little of history or the historical process and the only archeology a
farmer engages in is when the plow happens to dig something up. Of course, as a man with a law degree who
graduated seminary, I now know those questions could have been answered. The scholarship to answer those basic
questions of faith had been around since at least the forties; my parents
simply chose not to look for them. At
the end of the day, feeling forced into doing something they didn’t want to do,
it was easier to surround themselves with shallow worldly questions than to be
honest and seek after deep spiritual answers.
Of
course, I don’t really blame my grandparents for this either. Times were changing and changing fast. Their children moved far away into the city,
got an education. They entered into a
profession, instead of just finding a job.
As a nation we went from horse drawn buggies to muscle cars and
propeller planes to jets that broke the sound barrier. Computers, smart watches, and phones that
most people don’t talk on but just use to take pictures and text. Gay Marriage, Transgendered people, multiple
religions, it was a dizzying array of changes to throw at a people who grew up
having their milk delivered by wagon. To
ensure their children didn’t lose their roots, they did what their own parents
did to them and what their parents did to them: they used the power of the
family to drive their children into their place. They called, they nagged, they threatened to cut
people from their will and at times even exiled their own children to make an
example to the rest of the family. They
didn’t foster faith so much as they drove home the words and practices that
made themselves feel comfortable. They
didn’t love their children no matter what, if they wanted to do that they would
have journeyed with them in their questions instead of insisting they repeat
the supposed answers. When their
children asked them if Jesus was real or if the resurrection was myth they
could have responded “I believe so, but that’s what I was taught. Let’s ask our pastor, or let’s see if we can
go to a seminary professor and see what they have to say. In fact, let’s make a project of it this
year. Let’s talk to many pastors and
lots of different professors and see if we can’t help.” To be honest, however, I don’t know that my
grandparents ever made their children feel safe enough to ask those
questions. Tradition has been called the
“Tyranny of the Dead”, and with every act that my grandparents did to isolate
their children, to manipulate family, it was done with exactly one haunted look
in their eyes – the look that asked “What would my parents think if they were
alive today.”
Ladies
and Gentlemen, I propose to you that we are not achieving the Easter Experience
because none of us want to go through Good Friday to get it. We all want the incredible joy, the freedom,
and the triumph that Easter represents, but we refuse to put to death the
things that are keeping us from it. Like
a dog with a large stick, we want to hold on to the things we feel entitled to
and yet we remain baffled when we can’t seem to get through the door. Christianity began as a Jewish sect, and to
experience the phenomenal life-changing joy of the Resurrection they had to put
down everything that they were raised to value.
The Jewish people of the first century commonly believed in a Messiah of
War, that violent righteousness and vindication would ever somehow inaugurate God’s
kingdom of Peace. That had to die. Many Jews dreamed of a Jewish theological
state, that tenets of true Jewish religion would become enforceable by law. That had to be killed. The Jews of that era also believed that the Jewish
way made them better than everybody else and they believed that the gentiles
could never be the people of God, too. That
racism had to be put down. Everything
they hoped for, everything they felt entitled to, everything they ever believed
in, all of it had to be shattered and the broken pieces of their desires piled
up in a heap at the foot of the cross before they could experience the
fulfillment of God’s promises to them and before the enduring pieces of their
faith would be revealed. It is no
different for us. Easter, ladies and gentlemen, was the good
news no one was looking for or even would have wanted, but once lived it was
the joy that could not be stamped out.
We can have that Joy too. Even in
today’s world that seems to create one new nightmare after another, we too can
experience victory. It is not gone, it
is not irrelevant. We too can embody the
resurrection reality and when confronted with those nightmares we can know it’s
just a dream. The terrible evils that we
encounter are passing, we will one day wake up from them. But even so, through Easter we are given
power and we are reminded that even though we are asleep we can still control
the dream. What makes a nightmare a
nightmare is the feeling of our own powerlessness. Easter tells us that powerlessness IS A
LIE. The world as we experience is not
the world as it has to be, it can change!
But it takes us putting down that which makes us a nightmare to
others. It takes us going through our
own Good Friday and trusting God to pick up what’s left.
So,
ladies and gentlemen, what will it be?
Will this Easter be just another themed Sunday, one out of 52 others but
with a duck or a bunny motif, one where we sing sunny songs and then return to
the world at large; to our businesses, to our homes, to our lives that force us
to be fake people eternally hiding behind a shallow mask, serving a world that
literally just wants you to pay bills, mop floors and die? Do we want that or do you want something
more? Because a better life is waiting
for you if you do.
Amen and Amen.
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