Easter Sunday, 12 April 2020

Lectionary Readings for Easter Sunday

Jeremiah 31: 1-6

At that time, says the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people. Thus says the Lord: The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel! Again you shall take your tambourines, and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers. Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant, and shall enjoy the fruit. For there shall be a day when sentinels will call in the hill country of Ephraim: “Come, let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God.”

Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever! Let Israel say, “His steadfast love endures forever.” The Lord is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation. There are glad songs of victory in the tents of the righteous: “The right hand of the Lord does valiantly; the right hand of the Lord is exalted; the right hand of the Lord does valiantly.” I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord. The Lord has punished me severely, but he did not give me over to death. Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous shall enter through it. I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation. The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Acts 10: 34-43

Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Colossians 3: 1-4

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. Matthew 28: 1-10 After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

Sermon for Easter Sunday

If you were an American, poor and without plans in 1848, you looked West. West was the direction you wanted to go. In that year gold was discovered in California. Within a year 4,000 gold miners were in the former Mexican territory, and within another year about 80,000 forty-niners, as those fortune seekers of 1849 were called, had made their way overland, despite terrible hardship and cholera, or by sea, around Cape Horn, taking four to five months. By 1853 their numbers had grown to 250,000. Few of those individual prospectors struck it rich: living conditions were primitive, the work was hard, long, and uncertain, and violence plagued the camps. The native American population in California was decimated. Although it was estimated that some $2 billion in gold was extracted from the rivers there, the get rich quick plans of most evaporated with the reality of the life they encountered.

But the West still beckoned: Go West, young man! was the phrase that continued to ring in the ears of so many of those in the nineteenth century, who, like my own ancestors, had no stake in what Boston or New York offered: they were the impoverished, the less-educated, the third or fourth sons, the ones who could only see a way out by travelling in a new direction, and leaving behind everything they had known, to do it. For fame and fortune, they looked West.

But from the earliest times, Christians have looked East.

Not because of the direction of the dawning light, as pagans worshipped the sun. The ancient Hebrew story was of the garden planted in Eden, in the East: paradise lost. Christ, the Christ to whom all Christians turned their faces in the radiance of hope, was to come from the East. When he comes again in glory, to reclaim the living and the dead. From at least the fourth century, churches were oriented to the East, to embody in their very shape and setting this sense of wondrous expectation, of eucharistic celebration: they faced East.

The early Christians had a lot in common with those impoverished, less educated, superfluous sons in the America of the Westward frontier. The early Christians also had little stake in the established order of things. Most of the those who left everything to follow Jesus had very little to leave behind. They were on the margin of Empire, the Roman Empire, an empire built on military power and control, efficient administration and a carefully homogenized allegiance. Within and outside this Empire the old pagan cults were already fading. The Christ who came in the blaze of Resurrection gave to these insignificant ones a single commandment the Roman gods had never required: to love one another.

We keep this Easter feast today, as for 2,000 years we have kept it, in celebration of Christ Resurrected. Because what Resurrection meant for the first Christians, and what it means for all those who continue in this faith, is that Love has triumphed over death, Love triumphs over death, Love will triumph over death, to the end of time.

This is our Resurrection belief; this is our Resurrection hope.

We still look East.

We celebrate today the Christ who came to earth to love us to the end. God raised him up on the third day, and by that great act freed us also from the bonds of death. This is a mystery, but it is also a fact. We are now free.

We are free, in this human life we share, to choose to respond to the love of God in Christ by the acts of love we show to others, in imitation of Him.

In our time in the wilderness, this Lent, we have been blessed by the grace of countless acts of love that we have demonstrated for one another. Two small girls, sisters, slipped notes to every house on my street to say that they wanted to play a song at 5 o’clock each afternoon, “to spread happiness!” Five other girls and boys, ages 6 to 13, thought of a book exchange last Wednesday, so that each family on the blocks around me could place some books on their doorsteps, and then, between 8 and 10 a.m., keeping a careful distance, go around and choose some books of others that they liked. The books that remained went to a place where books were needed. I now greet neighbors and talk with neighbors I had never seen before, neighbors who thought they didn’t have time for this, before! The caring of this congregation for one another by faithful phone calls, communicating the needs we discover, has been transforming. We will never be the same, because of this new pattern of relating, and that is one grace-filled consequence of this troubling time.

I have not suffered through this time of plague, but there are members of our congregation who have. And there are many members of our world who have. 100,000 people in our world have died of this epidemic; probably more than this. We can help them by our own sacrificial giving, of time and of money. And we can pray for them, continually.

The symbols of our faith are powerful: the water of baptism; the bread and wine of the eucharist. The early Christians were encouraged to pray standing on Sunday, the day of Christ’s Resurrection, with arms outstretched, making a cross with their bodies, looking East.

Standing upright, heads held high, like a people set free, on the road to the Kingdom, offering their souls upward toward God. With their eyes looking to the East. The East, direction of paradise lost and regained.

As we turn our faces to the East, this symbolic direction of our Resurrection Hope, let us celebrate with all our hearts the reality of the Love of Christ that has already vanquished death. We have been freed to live without fear, in faith and hope and love.

Although it is most often sung in the season of Advent, the hymn, People Look East, proclaims with gladness the light of the Love we express, the light of the Love we wait and look for, in its ultimate consummation:

Angels, announce with shouts of mirth

Christ who brings new life to earth.

Set every peak and valley humming

With the word, the Lord is coming.

People, look East and sing today:

Love, the Lord, is on the way.