Easter Demands a Response

I have posted this excellent sermon by the Rev. Cathie Caimano without her permission.

The Rev. Catherine A. Caimano
March 23, 2008
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Wichita, KS

I read a really interesting story the other day on Slate.com, an online magazine that covers current events. The writer, James Martin, a Jesuit priest, was writing about why it is that Christmas has been almost completely taken over by commercialism and consumerism, and that somehow, Easter has resisted this trend, and it remains largely a religious holiday. Why is that so, he wondered?

The main point he made is that Christmas is safe. It can easily be boiled down to a happy, wholesome image, regardless of what one’s beliefs actually are: a young, pretty pregnant woman, a ruggedly handsome slightly older man, their trusty donkey.

With no room in the inn, they give birth to a beautiful baby boy in a stable stocked with cuddly animals and a few interesting shepherds and other characters around. It is heartwarming and lovely, and fits right in with feasting and joy of every kind. And if you want to think that this little baby is the Son of God, well, then, no one is really going to be troubled by that.

The Easter story, on the other hand, is not nearly so easy to take – a man who preaches love and peace is betrayed, arrested, and then brutally tortured and killed. That doesn’t make for witty cards to send to our friends, or an occasion to decorate our home and throw parties. It’s no wonder that the secular world shies away, and it’s no wonder that it is hard for us to reduce this moment in our story to sentimentalism.

But the truly interesting thing I found in this article, especially in a thoroughly secular context, is that Martin points out that the real reason that Easter has not been co-opted by our culture is that it demands a response.

There’s no sitting on the sidelines. There is no making it pretty.

The events leading up to Easter, the Passion story, the days that we have just finished walking through – the nails and the cross and the bitterness and the gall and finally the empty tomb. There is no hearing this story without it having an effect.

If we are appalled by it, if we are vaguely fascinated by it, if our hearts are broken by it, we can’t reduce it to part of OUR every day lives, we can’t make it about US. Instead, we are drawn out of our lives and into this world, this story of Jesus’ last days, this drama of life and death.

Incidentally, it occurs to me that unlike almost everything else in the Christian story, and especially unlike what happens after the tomb, no one doubts this part. Isn’t it interesting, that you never hear anyone saying that Jesus WASN’T really hung on a cross,
that Jesus DIDN’T really die a terrible death? No one has trouble believing in hatred. No one disputes the violence.

But what happens next, what we are here this morning to celebrate, the resurrection, is really where the controversy is, is really where the choices are. Martin points out in his article that even though there have been many celebrated movies about Jesus’ last days, most notably Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ of a few years ago, they have treated the resurrection with barely a passing glance.

But here, this moment, the empty tomb, although it is ALL about God here, what God has done, here is also where we ARE involved. Here is where there is a call on OUR lives.

If it happened that Jesus rose from the dead – well, then there really is no turning back. You would HAVE to believe that love is the strongest force in the universe. You would HAVE to believe that God loves us so much that God defeats even death to show us this.

And this would NOT be an occasion to take the sentiment and turn it into just another feel-good holiday. This would be an occasion to change your LIFE. This would be an occasion to BELIEVE in life. This would be something that could change the WORLD.

And because of this, there is nothing easy about it.

In his article, Martin writes: ‘The resurrection, the joyful end of the Easter story, resists domestication as it resists banalization. Unlike Christmas, it also resists a noncommittal response. Even agnostics and atheists who don’t accept Christ’s divinity can accept the general outlines of the Christmas story with little danger to their worldview. But Easter demands a response. It’s hard for a non-Christian believer to say, “Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead.”

That’s not something you can believe without some serious ramifications … If you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God … what he says about the world and the way we live in that world then has a real claim on you. Easter is an event that demands a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ There is no ‘whatever.’

And so this morning, this joyful morning when we celebrate the empty tomb, the shock and the astonishment of the Mary’s encounter with the angel, and then the risen Christ, we are here at the moment of our faith that asks us again to commit ourselves to something that the rest of the world simply does not understand.

The tone of this article that I have been quoting was surprise. The reason it got to me so much was that its author seemed so amazed that in this day and age, when anything and everything is co-opted to sell something, is borrowed from one cultural form into another, is reduced to simplistic piety or easy emotionalism, that this is ONE event that manages to resist every way that we have to seal it in a tomb.

Our ancestors did it with nails and beams and one big rock. We do it with marketing and contextualization.

But Jesus is stronger even than that. The love of God will not be reduced to what is safe, to what is easy to understand, what we can manage to fit into OUR lives. The resurrection ensures that we will not be content with anything short of rearranging our whole lives altogether.

Easter demands a response.

If it is just another day on our calendar, just another day off, just another excuse for chocolate, then it is just another step closer to Valentine’s day or Halloween, holidays that once held religious meaning but now are more or less just time to have some fun.

But if we are willing to say ‘Yes’ to the resurrection, then love and fear, life and death, EVERYTHING is rearranged by God in a way that calls us to live in the secure belief in resurrection, in forgiveness, in a God who never lets us go.

Martin ends his article with the thought that even Christians don’t really know what to do with someone who has been raised from the dead, but I think he is wrong about that.

We know what to do: we are called to follow this Lord, this love, which is stronger even than suffering, stronger even than death, stronger than money and power and cleverness and every other way we think that WE have to reduce and remove ourselves from what we are afraid of, what we don’t understand.

“Do not be afraid,’ it says twice in our Gospel reading today. Do not turn away from life, from love, from forgiveness and resurrection. Do not turn away from a God who loves you this much.

Easter demands a response.

The whole joyful world waits for yours on this day.