Alleluia, Chris is Risen! Welcome to Easter. Whoever you are, wherever you find yourself on the journey of faith, you are welcome here at St. Michael’s. If you are here because your mom or your brother brought you, welcome. It’s good to build up capital with family. If you are here because it is Easter, and you are supposed to go to church, you are welcome here too. You honor us with your presence.
This morning, I want to ask, what would it mean to have a Resurrected faith? I find it fascinating that Easter is one of the most packed days in church, because Easter is such a complicated story. Easter asks us to go to the very edge of our capacity for faith. Believing in the resurrection asks us to grow our imagination for the world that could be. Easter invites us to find the will to believe that love can overcome hate, that justice can overcome games of power and persecution, that life can overcome death. Easter asks us to enter another way of believing, another way of hoping, another way of living in this world. Easter is such a high bar, I find it a wonder that the church is so full on this particular day.
While it Was Still Dark
Early, on the first day of the week, John tells us, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene goes in her grief to anoint Jesus. Last week, Mandy reminded us to notice the women in this story. Notice it is the women who are not afraid to face their grief. Notice, it is the women who stay with Jesus through the pain and suffering. Notice, it is a woman, Mary Magdalene who is the first to know, the first to announce Jesus is Risen.
In the stories that follow, the reaction from the men won’t be great. Thomas doubts. Peter, probably still feeling guilty for denying Jesus those three times rushes out to meet Jesus, walks on water, but then his anxiety gets the better of him and he begins to sink. In Easter we hear stories of Jesus’ followers who are confused, fretful, and not quite sure what this Resurrection stuff really means.
The Latest Survey of Non-believers
This past week NPR covered a survey of those who have left the church. My whole ordained life, I have been hearing stories about how the church is dying. But this was the first time I heard about researchers who asked “why?” Why are so many people disaffiliating? The answer, the most common answer was simple: people don’t believe what the church teaches anymore.
But what really struck me was that when the researchers pushed deeper, it wasn’t stories like Easter morning that turned folks off. If I am honest, there are days when the Resurrection sounds like one of the six impossible things the Red Queen of Wonderland tells Alice she practices believing in before breakfast. Resurrection is tough. This story is so mysterious. We don’t get to see what happened in the tomb. We don’t know why Mary, at first, doesn’t recognize Jesus. We don’t really understand why he tells her he is also leaving, ascending to God on high. The Resurrection asks a lot of us, when it comes to faith. But belief in the Resurrection mostly wasn’t the issue for people leaving church.
People said they were leaving the church because they couldn’t stomach the homophobia and transphobia. People couldn’t hang in there with the misogyny and institutionalized racism endemic in the church. They couldn’t put up with one more sermon about abortion. If that has been your experience of church, let me say, I am sorry. And let me say again, how honored we are you would worship with us this Easter, that you would dare to set foot in a church at all.
Resurrection and Resuscitation
The Rev. Dr. Otis Moss, pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ likes to talk about the difference between resuscitation and resurrection. Easter is not a story of resuscitation, he says. If it were a story of resuscitation, Easter would simply be about Jesus coming back to life. Things would be going back to how they were before. If you are resuscitated, you simply go back to being who you were. But the resurrection isn’t about going back, the Resurrection is about moving forward. Jesus has become something new. The Risen Christ is the firstborn of the New Creation. Easter is the story of a break-in, the break-in of God’s promised reign of love into a world that often still feels like Good Friday.
Whatever happened in that tomb, Jesus didn’t come back the same. Something cosmic took place. Believing in resurrection isn’t believing that one man came back to life, but rather that death itself has been conquered. All the hatred and envy, all the violence of the world that was visited on Jesus, all that evil didn’t have the last word. Hate and violence will never have the last word.
The Resurrection isn’t simple. It isn’t clean. Resurrection asks us, where we expect hopelessness, to look for hope. The resurrection asks us, in this cynical world, to trust in Good News. The Resurrection asks us to believe amidst all the awful reports we hear of suffering in our world, that loss, tragedy, and pain isn’t the end of the story. The Resurrection asks us to lay aside our fear and to trust.
A Resurrected Church?
This Easter, I find myself wondering what a Resurrected Church might look like. If it isn’t about some return. If we’re not measuring ourselves by some metric from before the pandemic, or based on mythic worship attendance numbers from the 1960s, if we’re not trying to just resuscitate some idea of church, what could church look like? If we stopped looking backward?
A rabbi from Los Angeles asked a similar question about 20 years ago. Rabbi Sharon Brous and a few other young Jewish friends realized that rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Orthodox scholar who marched with Dr King, Heschel was right when he said, “religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. What young people need is not religious tranquilizers, religion as diversion, religion as entertainment, but spiritual audacity, intellectual guts, the power of defiance!” Rabbi Brous and her friends sent a mass email inviting a group of younger Jews to join an experiment. Come on a Friday night, let’s talk about how our traditions can help us live lives of meaning and purpose. Let’s talk about how our faith can help us figure out who we are called to be in this time of moral crisis. They figured twenty people might come. One hundred thirty-five showed up. Twenty years later, the IKAR community is getting ready to move into its own building.
As I read Sharon Brous’ story, I thought of this congregation. I think St Michael’s, when we are at our best, is trying to reimagine Church for our day.
This Easter Sunday, here at St Michael’s, I want to hold open the possibility that the Resurrection might mean more for us than whether we can, in any given moment, believe in a questionable historic event. What if the resurrection was more than a wild story told by grieving women? What if the resurrection had meaning beyond Easter morning, for you?
Can we imagine a resurrected faith? Not the old time religion of the past, not a Christianity which requires some people to remain silent, not a Christianity which teaches hatred toward LGBTQ+ people, not a religion which justifies division. Can we imagine a resurrected faith, a faith that takes Jesus seriously when he says we will find him among the hungry, the imprisoned, those who lack shelter, immigrants, and asylum seekers? Can we imagine a faith that invites us to celebrate the visibility of our Trans siblings? Can we imagine a resurrected faith that allows us to find in stillness and prayer the grounding we need to face the next day? Could a resurrected faith that invites us into community with others? Could we imagine a faith that urges us to trust strangers, and that causes us to stay in relationship even when we’d like to run for the hills? Can we imagine a faith which doesn’t just tolerate questions, but encourages us to wrestle with the hard questions? Is there any chance that the reports of Christianity’s demise are premature?
The Promise of Easter
The promise of Easter is that, if we are willing to dare, if we are willing to go to the edges of our rational minds and dare to believe, Christ will meet us. Indeed Jesus is already out ahead of us. The promise of Easter is that, if we look for Jesus, we will find him out beyond the tombs. We will find God, living and active, loving all sorts of people our world has told us not to love. We will find God out crying for justice. We will also find God in the quiet moments, when we turn inward. If we dare to believe in resurrection, we will find all things are already being made new, even us.
The poet Wendell Berry famously encouraged us to practice resurrection. Friends, I wonder if what our world needs right now, more than anything, are some people who are willing to practice hope, to practice life-giving love, to practice showing up for one another. Our world needs people who believe, as Demond Tutu put it that goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, who believe that life has conquered death. Maybe the way we begin to heal the pain of our world is to practice resurrection. Alleluia Christ is risen. Amen.
Mike Angell 