Sermons from the Pulpit

    That last hymn we just sang has been telling the truth about Easter for 13 centuries. God loosed from Pharaoh's bitter yoke Jacob's sons and daughters and led them with unmoistened foot through the Red Sea waters, and in the very next verse, Christ has burst from prison, and from three days' sleep in death as the sun has risen. Exodus and Easter go together. The Exodus is the precedent of Easter, and Easter is the Second Coming of the Exodus. No Christian should ever think of either one without thinking of the other. They are two sides of one coin.

     So if you want to have some idea how it was for these women, these two Marys, who went to the tomb at dawn, you might look at the other side of the coin, at these long-ago Hebrews making their escape from Pharaoh's land, and ask how it was for them. There they were, running for their lives, arriving at the Red Sea shore, and they look back and see the Egyptians gaining on them, and they are terrified, and they wish they had never followed Moses or listened to him in the first place: "Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians!"

     So Moses tells them, Don't be afraid! And I think to myself: Fat chance. And he says, Stand firm and see what the Lord is going to do for you! Just be quiet and you will never see these Egyptians again! And then he says, Here, look, I wave my hand over the water and it divides and you just walk through on the sea bottom with a wall of water on your left and a wall of water on your right, c'mon, do it! Like what's the matter - don't you feel comfortable walking between two walls of water? About as comfortable as a cat in a car going through a car wash.

     And here are these two women, and they're going in the spooky morning twilight to visit the tomb of a man who was crucified day before yesterday, and all of a sudden there's an earthquake, and this figure appears looking like a bolt of lightning and rolls away the tombstone and sits on it and tells them, Don't be afraid. Do you see a pattern emerging here?

     Researchers are always doing surveys about religion to see if they can figure it out, and I understand there was a Newsweek poll recently where they asked people, Do you believe God raised Jesus Christ from the dead? I guess this was somebody's scientific way of celebrating Easter. And 87% of Christians said they did. And 63% of non-Christians said they did.

     In the springtime a lot of preachers like to talk about Easter people. They say we are Easter people. Resurrection people. Well, if Newsweek is your authority, 87% of Christians and 63% of non-Christians are Easter people, but what's wrong with this picture? Something about it really bothers me, and I think I've figured out what, namely this: If you can even imagine sitting down and making a check mark in either the yes box or the no box, then it pretty much doesn't matter which box you pick, Easter doesn't have much to offer you.

     Checking the yes box on a questionnaire doesn't make you Easter people. It makes you So-what people. Yes, Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. Yes, weird things happen every day. But so what? The Resurrection becomes a topic for Ripley's Believe It or Not. It calls to mind one of the oldest and driest of all the dry old Down-East jokes: Somebody says to a Maine farmer, "Do you believe in infant baptism?" And he says, "Sure do. Seen it done many times."

     I say the critical thing isn't whether your answer to the Resurrection is yes or no, but whether it causes you to tremble. Tremble as if you were walking between two walls of water with a whole bunch of Egyptians galloping after you. Tremble like a woman who meets lightning face to face in an earthquake at a tomb. Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord.

Now I realize that trembling is not widely considered to be evidence of a positive mental and emotional condition, but then neither is meeting up with the risen Jesus. Somebody reminded me this week of the frustrated question a patient once put to a psychiatrist: "How come if I talk to God I'm praying, but if God talks to me I'm schizophrenic?"

     I subscribe to an email discussion group for preachers that's supposed to help us all proclaim the Word, and sometimes it really works, but this past week what happened is, all these pastors, UCC, Baptist, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Disciples of Christ, the whole motley crew, all supposedly trying to get a handle on their Easter sermon, and they got into this huge debate about whether it's OK to preach the literal physical objective resurrection, or whether you should talk about it metaphorically and subjectively and experientially and symbolically and like that instead. I couldn't believe what a huge waste of time it was.

     I never know what to say about the plausibility, the reasonableness, the credibility of the so-called Easter myth, but I do have something to say about people who take part in discussions on that topic. These people are comfortable. They are safe. And they have a ways to go if they want to be Easter people.

     What should a new widow do on Easter morning? She has just buried her husband; should she come to church? Might feel a little out of place. But if she's not Easter people, who is? Easter starts with two women going to a tomb.

     Same goes for the person who just got bad news from a doctor, or outlived a child, or lost control, or broke a promise, or gave up. Easter people are people who can't afford to play intellectual games with theology or debate the right approach to proclaiming the empty tomb: the mourners, the disturbed, the displaced, the hemmed in, the frightened and the disabled, not to mention the refugees. You've seen the pictures from Kosovo and Macedonia and Albania and all those other places we have so much trouble sorting out. Yes, I know the refugees we're seeing are mostly not Christians, and the people who are chasing them mostly are Christians of some sort, but Easter is most real to whoever is on the losing end at the moment.

     The Resurrection changes the meaning of bad news and good news forever. The world gets turned upside down, and the key to laying hold of Easter is not that you have to transform yourself into a loser or invite a string of bad luck upon yourself. What we do have to do is quit kidding ourselves and get honest and admit that we can't afford to be So-what people any better than the widows and the refugees can. Nobody can afford it. We may make a pretty good show of being winners in the game of life, but the great irony is that by doing so we make ourselves very poor, and it's Easter morning that exposes such poverty as that.

     The Eastern Orthodox churches have a tradition of joking and behaving like clowns on Easter, because, they say, the Resurrection is the God's favorite joke. They don't mean it's fraudulent. They mean that like every joke, it is a matter of reversal and surprise. Reversal and surprise, and the sudden discovery that things are not as they seem. We may laugh. We may tremble. We may do both at the same time. That's called "fear and great joy," and it's part of the Easter story too. We may also say,  So what?  But if we do, the joke's on us. Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord.