The comedian Billy Crystal once observed, “Two thousand years ago Jesus is crucified, three days later he walks out of a cave and they celebrate with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps and beautifully decorated eggs. I guess these were things Jesus loved as a child.”
Happy Easter to you all! I truly hope that today will be filled with joy and hope and celebration because the very reason we celebrate transforms literally everything in our lives. If you were up early on an egg hunt, I hope you found everything. If you left some delicious chocolate on your counter, I trust you will truly savor it. God has filled our lives with gifts, and while Jesus’ conquering death is the greatest of them all, good chocolate and fun games are also good gifts from God’s hand.
It’s Easter Sunday — the most important Sunday of the whole year. As we plan worship, quite literally everything we do orbits around the importance of today. Easter is glorious. There are flowers everywhere. The music is awe-inspiring. People dress up for church.
We know today is special, and we do all we can to treat it that way. Why? I think we do this in hope. We know that life is a mixed bag, but we treat this day as special because we want to believe that there is more to life than its ups and downs. We want assurance that things are heading toward a good ending.
And they are, but that doesn’t mean we’ve arrived where everything is working out for good. Life isn’t that simple. We get the beauty and the pain. It all belongs.
It’s funny. I was already thinking about about how it all belongs — the good and the hard and everything in between — when I headed to a coffee shop to write. I kid you not, within moments of entering, I heard the baristas and patrons talking along those lines. As I waited to order, the baristas were chatting with each other. One said, “I finally found an apartment I really like, but it’s not in the best neighborhood.” As she was pulling an espresso shot the other said, “Well, you have to take the good with the bad. Isn’t that life?” In other words, it all belongs.
Just a few moments later, a customer was waiting for her drink. She said, “It’s going to be 67 degrees on Thursday.” It was clear she was excited that we’re getting some warmer weather. And, like Debbie Downer, the barista said, “Yeah, but it’s supposed to be really rainy.” Wah-wah. The customer looked at the ground and muttered, “I’m just trying to point out the good stuff.”
That is life, though, isn’t it? There’s good. There’s bad. There’s everything in between.
Yet, God is the one taking what is painful or broken and making it beautiful.
This year I’ve found it particularly comforting that God holds it all — even the hard stuff — and is redeeming it. God is unafraid to enter the darkest corners of humanity and heal even those. Easter doesn’t happen if Jesus didn’t willingly humble himself to the point of death, to the humiliation of crucifixion. Easter doesn’t happen if God wasn’t willing to endure cruelty and humiliation at the hands of those God spun into existence in the first place. Easter doesn’t happen if God wasn’t willing to write a new story, one of redemption and hope and salvation — a story that is so great that it is putting to death death itself.
While we know this is true, we also really struggle with how to handle life in all its complexity. That certainly was true of that first Easter morning. We’ve heard Matthew’s telling of these events today. In it, two women named Mary go to see the tomb early on Sunday morning. They encounter an earthquake. It’s actually the second time the earth shook in three days, according to Matthew. It also happened when Jesus’ took his last breath. This work that God is doing through Jesus is so huge that it quite literally is shaking the ground.
Following the earthquake, the soldiers playing dead, and the angelic visitor, the women dash from the tomb with “fear and great joy.” That is, in that moment they were holding everything all at once. Their fear. Their worry. Their questions. Their grief. But also their joy. Their hope. Their love. Their dreams of a better future. The whole ball of wax held in their hearts as they fled the tomb to find the disciples.
The story of Easter is more elusive than the story of Christmas. Each gospel tells it from a different angle, all affirming that Jesus was alive in body and spirit but with many other details not syncing.
When he wrote about Easter, Frederick Buechner observed, “It is not a major production at all, and the minor attractions we have created around it — the bunnies and baskets and bonnets, the dyed eggs — have so little to do with what it’s all about that they neither add much nor subtract much. It’s not really even much of a story when you come right down to it, and that is of course the power of it. It doesn’t have the ring of great drama. It has the ring of truth. If the gospel writers had wanted to tell it in a way to convince the world that Jesus indeed rose from the dead, they would presumably have done it with all the skill and fanfare they could muster. Here there is no skill, no fanfare. They seem to be telling it simply the way it was. The narrative is as fragmented, shadowy, incomplete as life itself. When it comes to just what happened, there can be no certainty. That something unimaginable happened, there can be no doubt.”
In other words, it all belongs. The expected and the inexplicable. The grief and the wondering. The fear and the great joy. In all of those things God is at work.
This is good news for us because in all things — both the hard and the good — God is at work. It’s one thing to say that, but it’s another thing to believe it even in the hardest of times.
Easter isn’t simply the bright, joyful, triumphant parts. It takes all the darkness, all of the worst the world can muster, and God’s power overcomes those things too.
Are you hurting and broken within? as the song says. Jesus is calling into that. Have you come to the end of yourself? Jesus is calling. Bring your sorrows and trade them for joy, from the ashes a new life is born. Jesus is calling.
That’s the story of Easter. What’s broken in your life? Are you suffering from addiction? Are you feeling hopeless at the state of the world? Are you angry that you just can’t seem to get ahead? God knows that brokenness and is tending to it. Earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal.
And, yes, Easter is about more than that. God in Christ is tackling the problem of eternity too. If you were here on Good Friday, you heard me speak about how Jesus took everything upon himself on the cross. It’s as though all of human history — past, present, and future — funneled into his crucified body. All the good. All the bad. All the joy. All the sadness. The intensity of this breaks me if I think about it for long. And for sure it would break me if not for the resurrection. God is capable of taking it all on for the sake of the world and bringing renewal to all of that.
One the great voices of faith over my lifetime was Walter Brueggemann. He died this past year, but before his death, he wrote this prayer:
We do not believe innocently,
or easily,
or on the cheap,
but sometimes we trust in your assurance
that you prevail as the God of life.
We stand alongside the women at the empty tomb;
we sit at the table with the astonished disciples,
we have new prospects as we confess,
That Christ is risen, risen indeed,
that death is conquered,
that [death] is defeated.
We tell the old story of our risen power;
what we cannot tell, we sing;
we sing to you in gladness;
we sing out loud in defiance;
we sing together in deep affirmation;
we sing without embarrassment
that you are the Lord of life,
that you override the cosmic negations we see so clearly,
that your capacity for newness surges among us in ways we
do not understand.
We may term it “Easter”:
or resurrection,
or new creation,
many names for the inexplicable openness you make possible in the world
as our worlds are shattered by our powerful, hidden purpose.
Right in the midst of our despair,
You make all things new
often enough that we trust you.
There’s a rule in improv theater called “Yes…and…” Basically, it means that the performers always accept whatever the other is thinking and then build upon it. To show you in action, I’ve come up with a scene that I’ll need Pastor Kristine’s help in sharing.
Troy: I accidentally adopted a raccoon.
Kristine: Yes… and it insists on being called “Mr. Business.”
Troy: Well, Mr. Business has started attending my Zoom meetings.
Kristine: I heard he keeps interrupting to ask about quarterly snack projections.
Troy: Somehow he got promoted before me. I thought I was up for that opening.
Kristine: Don’t you now have to submit your vacation requests to him?
Troy: Sure do. HR tried to intervene, but he charmed them with a tiny briefcase.
Kristine: They loved that briefcase so much that they put him in charge of HR too.
Troy: Honestly, morale is up.
Kristine: He’s now pushing for “more snacks, fewer Mondays” as the way forward.
Troy: You know what? I think I’m starting to believe in his leadership.
You get the picture.
Heading into this year, I decided I wanted to apply the “yes…and” rule to how I approach life and faith. I can be the kind of person who immediately thinks of all the reasons not to do something or try something. So, thinking with this open mindset is reshaping how I’m living and pastoring.
I think we need to “yes…and” what happens on Easter. That’s what the two Marys did in our passage. They took the strange scene — the earthquake and angel, the catatonic soldiers and the encounter with the risen Jesus — and they said, “Yes…and…” They didn’t say, “No way. This is impossible.” Yes, they left the tomb in “fear and great joy,” but they took all that they were feeling and thinking and they obeyed Jesus. They ran off to tell the others about this new thing God was doing in Jesus.
Did you notice that Jesus doesn’t call them “his disciples”? Rather, he tells the women, “Go and tell my brothers.” The resurrection has utterly upended their relationship. God and humanity have become kindred. They are friends. This is not unique to this story. In his extended goodbye to the disciples in John’s gospel, Jesus says, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends.”
Throughout his ministry but especially in his final days, Jesus puts his revolutionary love on display. We walked this path on Maundy Thursday, the night where Jesus washed his disciples’ feet and tells us to have a similar heart for serving others. And he gives us a new commandment. “Love one another,” he says. “As I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
This is the “yes…and” moment of Easter. We take what Jesus says and we build on it. We don’t protest, asking if only certain people are worthy of this kind of love. We don’t blink at the difficulty of loving others. We do it.
Colossians calls this “setting our minds on things above.”
The result of God’s work that led to Easter is the redemption of all things. It all belongs. The laughter and the sorrow. The joy and pain. There is not a square inch that God does not love, that Jesus isn’t redeeming.
Like the women at the tomb, our work is saying, “Yes…and…now get out into this mixed bag of a world and love another. Love deeply. Love radically. Love without barrier or boundary.”
That is the ongoing work of Easter in the world. That is our calling until our final breath or Christ calls us home. Let us be a people always willing to say, “Yes, Jesus!…And…”