Easter Sunday: Irrepressible God
Link to video: https://www.facebook.com/138797592802860/videos/1083483335371899
Thumbnail image by George Hodan, used under https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
April 12, 2020—Easter Sunday
This may seem like a pretty odd way to celebrate Easter. But as my colleague Emily Heath observed: “The first Easter didn’t happen in a church [either]. It happened outside of an empty tomb, while all the disciples were sequestered in a home, grief-stricken and wondering what was going on. So, we’re all … keeping things pretty biblical this Easter.”
The churches are, for the most part, empty. Which is difficult, for those of us who are accustomed to celebrating the Lord’s resurrection with fanfares and lilies and choirs singing Alleluia. It’s hard to have to give up the festivity, the champagne Eucharist, the chaotic joy of the egg hunt, and the expansive coffee hour.
It is a loss, a sacrifice, a grief: our church is empty.
But we arrive on Easter morning, to be reminded that emptiness can be good news. That it isn’t an indication of absence; it’s a sign that the irrepressible aliveness of God is out and on the move!
You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the angel says to the disciples. He is not here; he is gone before you into Galilee, into the world. Go, and tell that he is risen. Go! Go out there, into the world. You will find him out there, out with the people he has always sought, out with the last and the least and the lost. Out with all those who long for the presence of “God with them.” Out with all who hunger for the kingdom of God, whether they use that language or another to describe it. He is there … and he is alive … so you should be too!
Jesus is not in the empty tomb. We are not in our empty church. We are out here, and we are alive, and we have been given the gift of needing to find Jesus wherever he might be. Wherever we might be!
We can’t go to church to see the resurrection. Which helps us remember that church was only ever the place to celebrate the resurrection. The place to see resurrection is out in Galilee, out in the world, out in all the places that our irrepressibly alive God shows up.
Of course, this is a strange and hard time for us to follow the instruction to go out into the world. Yes, we venture out into the virtual world, and there are certainly places in which we can seek out the living God who will nurture our spirits and sustain us in the midst of hard times. And I urge you to find those places, rather than those places that offer only bitterness, disdain and despair.
But as for tangible encounters with resurrection, we might need to begin closer to home. Even just mentally, let’s start … in the garden. That is, after all, where so much of this week’s sacred story has occurred: in the garden. The garden that evokes Eden, where humanity walked with God at our birth. The garden, in which life and death were and always are so intimately intertwined.
Jesus too went to the garden to be with God. To the Garden of Gethsemane, on the night before his trial. He went to a garden, where life and death comingle, to wrestle with what was to come. He went to the garden, to take that eternal cycle of death and rebirth into himself, to carry him through as he was betrayed and handed over to the authorities.
And they tried him, they put him to death, and they laid him in a tomb. John tells us that tomb … was in a garden. Which was, then, the place that Mary Magdalene, first witness to the resurrection, encountered Jesus. As she wept outside the empty tomb, she saw him, but she thought he was the gardener. Fair enough, for gardeners know better than most that things which seem dead will miraculously put forth life. So, I doubt Jesus was offended that she thought him so! But he called her by her name, and then she knew. Then she knew that the garden was not just a place of death; it was, once again, once for all, the place of life!
So, when I wonder how we will recognize resurrection without the lilies and the trumpets and the egg hunts … I look to the garden. I look to the ways in which we see, all around us, life breaking forth in its eternal profusion. It was almost an affront, when I was on my walk the other day. When we are all so preoccupied with loss and deprivation and death, there is the garden, bursting into life once more. Crocuses and daffodils, buds on the trees, even the first dandelions making their persistent way into my flowerbeds. Up it comes, to insist that life will find a way. Up it comes, to remind us that life and death are in a constant dance, but death will not win the final round. Not ever.
Life calls your name, urging you to recognize it as it recognizes you. Filling you with joy, and making you long to take hold of it. Knowing as you do how precious it is, how much it hurts to lose it, and how it changes everything to know that it cannot, will not, be destroyed by death. Life always gets the last word, the next word, the most beautiful word. Spoken to you as tenderly and powerfully as your beloved (as your God) speaks your name.
Life (the Eternal Source of Life that is God) calls your name, and tells you to Go. Go and tell the news that death has not won the game, will never win the game. Go and tell that Christ is risen. Go and tell all the good news Jesus ever told you, because how can you doubt it now? Go to your friends, and go to Galilee too: go to the stranger. More than that, go to your enemy, go to the person you think is least likely to believe good news. Go and tell them anyway. Proclaim GOOD NEWS to them, proclaim it in the words that you speak and (perhaps more importantly) the WAY that you speak them. Speak abundant, never-ending life. Speak radical liberation. Speak deep-down healing. Proclaim good news, even if it makes you feel foolish. Even if that feels like dying.
It’s not dying. Or if it is, it’s the kind of dying that happens in gardens. Life will emerge. If you are telling good news, then life will burst forth.
When the disciples went to the tomb, they expected to find death. Instead, they found life, and were immediately sent to deliver this message to a world that desperately needed it. We too, on a morning with an empty tomb and an empty church building, are called to be the church out here. Sent to tell good news: that life is stronger than death, that the irrepressible God is on the move, and that Christ is indeed risen from the grave. Alleluia, Amen!