We Are an Easter People and Alleluia Is Our Song

Easter Sunday  C   April 21, 2019

Isaiah 65:17-25  Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:19-26  Luke 24:1-12

Lectionary Link

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.  Amen.

When a newly engaged woman wants to show proof of her engagement, what does she show?  Does she flash the palm side of her hand to show the underside of her new diamond ring?  Of course not.  The ring is called a diamond ring.  It is not called a gold or silver band mounted with a shiny stone.

The famous metamorphosis cycle that we learned in elementary school is not called the egg cycle or the larva cycle or the caterpillar cycle or the chrysalis cycle.  No, it's called the butterfly life cycle.

All things are not treated with equal value in the cycle of life.  Some things stand out and define the process or the item.  It's the diamond ring.  It's the butterfly life cycle.

And today we say about Christianity:  It's the Easter Cycle of life.  Friends, today is diamond ring day.  Today is butterfly day.  Today is resurrection day.  And it is from the resurrection that we define our meaning in life.

Are we being naive and pollyannish optimists as those who choose to anchor our lives of faith on the resurrection?

I think not.  The butterfly does not deny the chrysalis, or the caterpillar or the egg stages.  The butterfly is all inclusive of what came before; the butterfly also includes what will yet be in a possible future, because the butterfly does what cannot be done at other stages; the butterfly can lay many eggs.

We are Easter people not because we are not realistic about everything else in this life, including pain, sickness, innocent suffering, evil, drudgery, loss and death.  We are Easter people because we can be poignantly realistic about everything else in life and still experience hope as the chief value of our life.

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.

If we are Easter people of hope, then futurism is our claim.  We profess that we will always have a future.  We confess that we will always have an afterlife.  There will be you and me after there is you and me now.  And this will always be so.  We can't be so precise about how you and me will be in our continuous afterlives but we will be.

Why do we profess this belief in our afterlives?  Because Jesus Christ had a definitive afterlife and promised us the same.  There were moments in the life of the followers of Jesus when they did not think that Jesus had a future.  When they saw him captured, tried and put to death.  Surely, if Jesus was gone forever, as good as he was, then there's no hope for us to continue to be after our deaths.  But when Jesus lay in the grave, he continued to be profoundly in the hearts of his friends.  He was there as an infallible memory, a profound memory which created deep, deep grief.  Their infallible memory of Jesus in their hearts allowed for the re-appearing of Christ in their lives in such an indelible way that the resurrection reality of the church was born and has never died.

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.

The witness of the people of the New Testament is that the Risen Christ was made known to them in profound re-appearances.  And since they discovered that Christ lives on forever, they knew that the rest of us could also ride on his coattails to foreverness.

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.

As hopeful as we are about Easter, let us not think that it is based upon a childish naivete.  Easter is not magic; Easter is based upon a faith that is continuously being educated by hope, love and justice as the chief values which are worthy for us to live for in this life.

We can be people of skepticism and doubt today, with good reason.  We can have realistic fears.  As scientists we have to choose to call the life cycle the butterfly cycle and not the chrysalis cycle.  It would be reasonably valid to call the life cycle the egg cycle, or the larva cycle or the caterpillar cycle or the chrysalis cycle.  The events of freedom give each phase its due time and it might seem perfectly reasonable to define life from each state of immaturity or even from the appearance of death.   

But there is something intrinsically sublime about the bursting of the butterfly from the chrysalis state and from the experience of the sublime we declare that the butterfly event establishes the identity of the entire cycle.

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.

Yes we could be birth people, Christmas people only, or we could define ourselves by the experiences which afflict humanity because of the freedom for some very bad things to happen to us, including the event of death itself.  Just as a scientist wants to call the cycle of life a butterfly life cycle, so we Christians choose to call ourselves Easter people.  We choose in faith to anchor our identity upon the sublime possibility of our afterlives; a re-birth after our lives have ended.  Why do we do this?  We believe in love.  We believe that love would not use hope as a way to torture us with dreams of wanting to be more than we could ever empirically be.  You and I, from childhood could regard ourselves as people tortured by dreams of wanting things and experiences that will never be ours.  And would a God of love be such a one to use Hope to taunt to want things that can never be ours?

When Jesus died, his life was not finished.  He had more life to live but in a different way with his friends of his past and his new friends to be, including us.  And isn't it amazing, the Risen Christ got to live on to know us too.

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.

By faith we choose to identify ourselves with the Easter event.  It has a totally different kind of solemnity than do the phases of immaturity with even the event of death as the last state of human immaturity.  Why do we even arrive at death as immature?  Because there is so much left that we wanted to say and do with all of the people and in all the places in our world.  And what will our mature afterlives be?  Well, use your imagination.  I imagine it would be something like the movie, Ground Hog Day.  You know you wake up each day and repeat the new day having integrated all of the lessons from having lived it before so that finally you learn how to achieve a loving relationship with the one whom you have finally impressed by coming to know her in a winsome way.

The maturity of our afterlives is the maturity of hope's dreams finally having enough time to do it all because one is finally learning to be in love with God and with everyone.

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.

Do you believe this?  Can you believe this?  Can you believe it enough to go forth to live and share the hope of the Risen Christ?

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.  Amen.