When I think of Jesus, the man whose name is so clearly associated with Easter Day, I do not think of his sad and cruel death or highly fabled birth. I imagine Jesus' life, his daily hours… I think of his ethical passion. I think of his deliberately peaceful living. I think of his call to all who heard him, his invitation to so transform society that the hardships of poverty, illness and cultural cruelty would no longer rule the roost and distort the powerful and central reality of love.

Yet despite [this focus on his humanity], I am always intrigued by the story of transformation that Easter represents. In the gospel of Mark, the 'young man at the tomb' tells the women who come there to grieve that they should not seek for 'something alive among things that are dead.' He tells the women to return to the Galilee.

And what's back in the Galilee? Their families, their boats, their knotted fishing nets, their everyday lives, their children, the heavy taxes of the government, and the ordinary political folderol of the era. That's what waits for them in Galilee. Not a resurrected corpse, but something completely alive: themselves -- living their lives. [Themselves transformed by their experience, by the words of their teacher, by their own pain, by their hard path to awakening.] ___________________________________________________________________________________

Big Joy
Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, March 31, 2002

We've come around again to the time when the earth begins to green, to a welcome springtime with days turning warmer and the early flowers blooming like crazy and the air a little softer each day. We can almost hear the earth begin to breathe again, and its breath smells sweet. The winter was so mild and easy this year that it was troubling, and we can feel a little sheepish for being so glad at the springtime, since we didn't suffer much through the winter. But we are glad, and we're ready, and we're eager for the green lacy signs of new leaves to spread themselves out on the trees.

But there's a winter of the spirit too, a winter of the soul and psyche born mostly of the harsh ways our human family can visit on one another. That winter has delivered bitter, intemperate weather this year, and we have all suffered from the chill. That winter isn't over; in fact it doesn't seem to have a thaw in sight.

So what do we do with the celebrations of springtime that seem to arrive despite it all? We are called this morning to the festival of Easter, the assurance of resurrection and renewed life, the promise that life is triumphant and ever rising again. But that call comes to us at a time of war, with violence dealt to us and violence our response, a time of confusion and anxiety. In these same days we are called to the celebration of Passover, the grateful remembrance of ancestors liberated, of high courage and faith. But as that call sounds out, the people of Israel and Palestine are more fiercely imprisoned than ever by walls thick and shadowed and bloodied. And though it's half a world away from our calm morning here, war in that small land, more than in any other place on the earth, feels like a vortex that pulls all of us into its pain and its grief and rage.

It is not an easy time to tell the stories of resurrection. It is not an easy time to tell the stories of hope and liberation. It seems almost unimaginable to tell the stories of peace. So what shall we tell each other this morning? What should we tell of Easter and resurrected life, of Passover and liberation, that can hold meaning for us here today?

It seems to me that both Easter and Passover are built on stories of remembrance that make more sense for us to tell in the hard times -- times like these -- than in the easy times. In the easy times, when peace seems to reign and no clouds trouble the horizon, promises of liberation and promises of resurrection are irrelevant. We don't need them much, when all is right with the world. In the easy times we can just walk our confident way into the springtime. The rains do come, sooner or later, and the earth tilts on its lovely flight through space; the leaves come on out at their appointed time and we gather tulips and daffodils gratefully, and shed the layers from our bodies and psyches. In the easy times, the story belongs to the earth.

But in the hard times the stories belong to us. In the hard times we draw the stories out of ourselves, out of our suffering and brokenness as we begin the long casting about for hope. When the winter that grips us is not the planet's winter but the far harsher human winter we make for each other, then the story of the spring isn't quite enough. That's when we really need the stories of life rising out of death and of bondage finally broken. That's when we really need the stories that turn us toward hope, our souls' equivalent of the tentative sprouts coming up through the snow or ice.

When I was a believing Christian, Easter was of course the high holy day of the year. Jesus was God made human, God come to dwell among us for a little time, and the story of Easter was of that God rising triumphant after what looked like death. The story of the grieving women who arrived at the tomb to find the stone rolled away gave me goose bumps every time.

But those Easter Sunday celebrations I attended were made vivid and real not so much by the white vestments and Easter lilies and resurrection music of the morning. Their power came through the three days of darkness and silence and death that precede Easter. Maundy Thursday, with its powerful extinguishing of the candles; Good Friday with its remembrance of suffering; and the silent waiting of Saturday were all necessary before we could arrive at Sunday's triumph. The Easter story means very little if it is cut loose from the suffering and despair of the crucified Jesus, divorced from that profoundly human plea, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"

I am no longer a believing Christian, in the sense that I no longer believe that Jesus was God. But while my faith has shifted and changed its shape, I still have faith. I still believe that Jesus lived and taught and died, and that all these centuries later our lives can be brighter because of how he lived and died, and above all because of what he taught. I believe in resurrection because like all of you, I have seen it before. Not just in the ways of the planet, the dead seed with its promise that all is not as it appears. Not only in the ways individual people manage to create a new life for themselves even after the most terrible suffering and loss.

I believe also in the long and difficult collective resurrection that is somehow lodged in the human experiment. I believe in our uneven, desperately slow movement toward one another in the effort to live together with something approaching kindness. That's the resurrection that demands of us that we not give up, that we not turn ourselves over to despair or to the cynicism that grows from despair. It is a stubborn faith in our ordinary lives, a willingness to turn back to those lives after even the most devastating news, to turn back to these ordinary lives of ours with the heart to believe in them, the heart to lift ourselves and one another to the challenge.

In our reading, Mark Belletini reminds us of the ordinary lives that awaited the companions of Jesus after his death. After those heady, extraordinary months lifted out of all routine, those times with Jesus when they must have been giddy with hope and promise, everything turned to ashes. Everything was lost, and all of those earlier days of bright vision must have looked like the worst kind of foolishness. Now there were days and nights of mortal fear, and there was heartbreaking anguish as their friend, their teacher, was tortured to death.

And somewhere in that suffering, they went back home. They shuffled their weary way back down the road until the familiar houses came in sight. They forced themselves to get back in the fishing boats, to mend the nets, plough up the neglected fields, sit down to meals with their families and eat, even when the bread tasted like dust. And somewhere in there, against the odds, the dry little seed of possibility began to unfurl its filament of a root, its hint of a leaf, and some sort of resurrection began.

I like to think it happened for them the way we know it happens for us. Maybe two of them were together one day mending the nets, grim and beaten down and mute. Maybe one of them finally says something to bring up to the light all that's been lost; maybe it's something simple: 'Remember?, It was this same time of year we first saw him walk into town' Or maybe she says, 'You know, sometimes I could swear I hear him saying my name. Just 'Mary', the way he used to.'

Or maybe he says, 'the one story I just can't forget was the one where the son came back home and the father let him back in, despite everything.' It takes two of them to have this conversation, or three or four. They help each other remember. They tell the stories again, and as they tell and listen, they hear new things in the stories. They start to think hard about those months they walked with their teacher. They start to notice that they aren't the same people -- not quite the same people -- they were before he said, 'Follow me!'. They are not quite the same; and the change within them slowly ripens, slowly awakens and strengthens them, until they find themselves planting new seeds for change all around them.

That's where resurrection happens, in the ordinary lives we live together. We take the truths we learn, the deep, quiet truths we grow into and the soul-searing ones we receive as revelation. And we put those truths to work in the pattern of our ordinary days, visited by the ordinary blessings of bread and companionship and laughter and song, visited by the ordinary suffering of illness and death, cruelty and indifference. Resurrection comes when we see that the ordinary pattern of these days is not immutable. Resurrection comes when we see that the truths we learn, the insight we gain, can change the pattern.

It isn't easy, being a believer. It isn't a particularly rational thing, this clinging to hope. But liberation has happened before, to ancestors long enslaved by Pharaoh and to solitary brothers and sisters bound by some Pharaoh within. Resurrection has happened before, life rising to shine again from extraordinary brokenness. We have found the way forward before, despite our half-heartedness and our failures of courage and our mixed motives. We are not gods; but we do know something, a very little something, about climbing up out of the tombs we build.

In his poem, "Easter Exultet" from "Sermons of the Big Joy", James Broughton writes:
Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

May we hold to the possibility that everything, somewhere down this muddled road of ours, transforms. AMEN.