An Easter Sermon

Easter Sermon The Dover Church
Easter, April 24, 2011 Scripture: John 20:1-18


I can’t tell you how many Easter sermons I have heard and read in which the preacher tried to explain what happened on that first Easter. To my way of thinking, that’s looking at the whole thing backwards, essentially ducking the moment of truth. "What happened? is just not the significant question. "What’s going to happen now? What am I going to do about it?” Now those are the questions that'll get you somewhere. I know that it sounds like heresy, but the Resurrection is not something you believe in, as in a fact you just have to make up your mind one way or the other about. No. The Resurrection is something, you be-live, something you live into, after which your mind will sort itself out. Be-living the Resurrection leads to be-lieving what happened.
Many of you may have heard of Viktor Frankl, a famous Viennese psychiatrist of the 20th century, who survived the Nazi concentration camps. After the war, he devoted himself to understanding how some people were able to survive the death camps while others perished. What was it that kept some people going in spite of everything that was designed to destroy them while others succumbed? The answer Frankl came to was quite simple. Survivors felt that they had something to live for, something besides themselves which they wanted to survive for. All of them had a vision in their minds' eye, day in and day out, week in and week out, year in and year out, a vision of a loved one for whom they were determined to live: a spouse, a child, a parent, a sibling, another relative or friend. Without that vision to sustain them through the starvation and disease, the brutality and overwork, the sudden and intentional death all around them, they all said they could never have made it. Those who succumbed had lost that hope, had had that hope taken from them, so that the dehumanizing depravity did them in. While the dead were crushed by the unbelievable, the survivors did the unbelievable and lived.
While many of us here have been through hard times in our lives, I don’t think any of us have gone through anything like that Viktor Frankl and the other survivors of the death camps. Maybe because we have not been in such dire straits, we tend not to live our lives with such a clear, compelling, propelling and inspiring daily motivation of exactly what we are living for. We’re more like Mary, who stumbles accidentally into Easter and the Resurrection. Like Frankl and the survivors, Mary had a vision of a loved one which brought her to the tomb that Sunday morning. By all accounts, her relationship with Jesus was one of deep, mutual love. Jesus had welcomed her into the circle of his friends, cleansed her heart, mind and life of the things which had been getting in her way. Mary had followed Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem. When all the other disciples fled in fear, Mary stayed somewhere close by, close enough that she was a witness along with Jesus’ mother of the Crucifixion, close enough to know where the body had been buried. Those of you who have lost a loved one know her heartache on Friday night and all day Saturday as she thought of her loss and probably replayed in her memory both the scenes of happy times with Jesus and then the physical horror and emotional pain of Good Friday. It was the vision of love for Jesus and Jesus’ love for her that brought her to the tomb that Easter morning. It was that vision of love which made her the first witness to Easter, but she was still stuck in the past with what happened. She was not prepared for what was going to happen next, let alone what she was going to do about it.
This, my friends, is one of the truest stories I know because I live it all the time. I’ll be plugging away at my job, digging through a pile of e-mails, paperwork and administrative details, going to meetings which look like they’re only going to result in more meetings, taking care of this and following up on that, gradually feeling more and more buried under the weight of it all, feeling less and less joyful in my work, thirsting for the Holy Spirit in my work, when something unexpected will happen, someone will show up to talk about where God is their life or the state of their spirit, the light will shine and I will remember that my job is not a job but my ministry to which God called me. And I will remember my joy and begin living it again.
I’ll be trying to take care of the million and one things that go into a marriage and sharing the responsibility for a home, making lists and working my way through them, checking with my wife if we’re on track, running here and there, gradually feeling more and more buried beneath the burden of it all, feeling less and less joyful and more and more stressed out and daunted by the sure and certain knowledge that every time one thing gets knocked off the list two more will be added, when something so absolutely ordinary yet seemingly unexpected in the face of the chores and responsibilities will happen: my wife will give me a kiss when I get home, she’ll tell me that she loves me, we’ll have a particularly pleasant supper, we’ll enjoy talking with one another while the boys play, we’ll go for a walk with the dog and not talk about our work, and just like that the light will shine and I will remember that this isn’t a burden. This is my life which I love. And I will remember my joy and begin living it again.
I’ll be swimming in the sea of parenthood, getting small boys up in the morning, fed, dressed and off to school, or fed, washed, read to and put to bed at night, and in between sorting out squabbles over one thing or another, helping with homework or playing with trucks, reading teacher evaluations and making my own assessments, jumping here or there to keep them from accidentally hurting themselves, trying to teach them by word and example to be kind, loving, moral and intellectually curious little Christian people, and I’ll be getting more and more tired, less and less focused, more and more frustrated, and find myself wondering how it was genetically or environmentally possible that two such nice people as Marie-Laure and I could have possibly given birth to not one but two little Attila the Huns with bad table manners, questionable morals, doubtful intelligence, and less than promising futures unless they go into slapstick comedy, when suddenly something altogether ordinary yet somehow unexpected amidst the hustle and bustle of parenthood happens: one of them will take my hand as we go up to bed and I’ll feel the warmth of life, one of them will climb into my lap before supper and tell me about his day and what he learned or the fun he had with friends, one or both of them will suddenly look up at me with a smile and say, “I love you, Daddy,” and I will remember that this is as good as it gets. This is exactly the life I love, my joy will return and I will begin living it again.
All too often I am an accidental Easter person, just like Mary. As I was writing this sermon I found myself feeling disappointed with myself. “You know better, Max. Why can’t you be intentional about being an Easter person and live the Resurrection all the time? Why do you allow yourself to just stumble along through life, missing out on your joy until you bumble into it unexpectedly over and over again?” Good questions, wouldn’t you say? Do you ever wonder the same thing to yourselves?
Viktor Frankl found that that something worth living for, that joy, was always something more than the self, some one else, something else. Jesus and the prophets put it like this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your strength and all your mind and you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. Do this and you shall live.” So how are you going to do that today? How are you going to love God today? How are you going to love your neighbor today? How are you going to love yourself today? Here is what I am going to do this year. I going to do my very best to get up every morning with one thought in mind: what is worth living for today? How am I going to live my joy today? By the grace of our Lord, I’m going to do it. I am a mature enough Christian to know that some days will be better than others. But that’s what I am going to live for. I’m gonna be living the Resurrection because I believe my Lord lives.