Easter Sunday 2015

         Today we celebrate new life. Today we celebrate victory over sin and death. It is right for us to wear bright colors and adorn the church with flowers. We feast. We laugh. We eat chocolate. We surround ourselves with signs of new life. It was a long winter and it’s great to think about another season.

         Is it enough? The signs of spring are wonderful, but are they resurrection? The natural cycle of things is marvelous. Today we rejoice in the upswing. New things are happening! Life is springing from the earth. However, the natural order has its downside. Whatever lives also dies. The seed becomes a flower only long enough to produce another source of seed to die again. Easter is about more than inevitable cycles of life and death.

         Jesus shows us a new thing, a new way. Jesus lived among us as a human person. He ate, he walked, he grew tired, he wept. He also proclaimed a new reality, the kingdom of God. Jesus knew the way that things were, and he invited us to choose another way. The resurrection is all about choosing a new reality while living in the old. Jesus upends the old structures of domination and retribution and he opens a way for us to live in a new world of freedom and reconciliation.

         The old reality condemns Jesus to death. The old reality is about control and scarcity, and old systems hold on to old power. The new reality is about forgiveness and freedom. There is no dominance of the strong over the weak. There is no status determined by wealth; there is only the grace of God available to all.

         This is shown in how the truth is revealed. We’d expect the beginning of a new world to be announced by God with hosts of angels and brightness and glory. Instead, the news is first given to helpless women, alone and afraid in a graveyard. How this turns everything on its head! In a time when women were not trusted with anything, the first news comes to them. They didn’t have the strength to roll the stone away. They still fled in terror. Yet God chose them to be the first witnesses.

         God still invites us to believe the impossible news. We are not only witnesses to resurrection we participate in it. When we are baptized, we join Jesus in death and resurrection. We also live in two worlds. We live in this world, still under the power of rules and control, wealth and fear. We have to make our way and share what we have along the way. We are also part of another world. We also live in a world of generosity and forgiveness, humility and courage. We know that God loves us and that love is unbreakable. We know that the life we have begun with God will never die.

         Which world do we choose to live in? We so often forget where we are. We see the empty tomb and we are quick to locate it far away in time and space. The tomb is not a place from an ancient time. For us it is a door. It is a threshold into another way of living. In the book, The Soul of Money, Lynne Twist writes that there are three great lies. “There’s never enough. More is better. That’s just the way it is.” Rejecting the first two lies might make a good stewardship sermon someday. Today I’d like to respond to the third, “That’s just the way it is.”

         We often live with a kind of amnesia. We hear the truth from God. It touches our hearts. We long to believe it. God loves us. We are forgiven. We can live with generosity and without fear. If we only lived these few simple truths as if they were true, think how different the world would be. In our fear we protect ourselves. We cut ourselves off from others so that they cannot hurt us. We hoard and amass our belongings as if there was no one else to help us. We take drugs to mask our pain or escape through endless choices of entertainment. We live as if Easter never happened.

         The lie is, “That’s just the way it is.” We can reject that lie. God rejects that lie. That lie is the tomb. Jesus walks right out of it. We can too. When you celebrate Easter today, begin with love. When you sense fear, question your anxiety. Will you, in fact have enough? Those who have power over you or those who threaten your peace, do they, in fact have the last word? Beyond the daily struggles of our life, how can you offer reconciliation? Who can you forgive, or confront, or love? Within the constraints of your resources, where are you free? What can you do that you have been afraid to do? What can you risk that you are afraid to lose?

         We are witnesses to resurrection. We still have our two feet firmly planted in this world. Our allegiance is to another. Our true life is with God and cannot be lost. We can give up looking for dead answers among the dead. Jesus invites us to celebrate our life and to share life all around us. Jesus is risen and so are we.