Living Story, Living Faith (Audio)

Sermon for Easter Sunday

Saint Peter's | Arlington, VA

Romans 6:3-11

Mark 16:1-8

Living Story, Living Faith—Rev'd David

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Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The tomb is empty! Death has lost its sting! Love wins!

That about sums things up. A few here may have heard some of these words last night though, so let me level the playing field with a spoiler alert: it’s about new life.

Christ’s resurrection is the foundation of our faith. It is the source and summit of our incarnational spirituality. And it is the reality that animates our lives.

It matters that we proclaim this story with great boldness, and it is no small thing to do so. Conveying the grandeur that is Easter, Archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Romero said it like this:

“Easter is a shout of victory! No one can extinguish that life that Christ resurrected. Not even death and hatred against Him and against His Church will be able to overcome it. He is the victor!”

What a truly seismic thing. It’s a story full of mystery—and it would be appropriate to linger awhile. Sometimes joy-muscles can have a way of atrophying and it may a little extra time to warm ourselves up.

So, this morning, we add a little extra glitz, glamour, and hot cross buns just to be sure we fully sink into the fullness of the day. Because if we are to truly usher in a full fifty-days of Eastertide, we need to let the wonder and awe of this day saturate the whole of ourselves.

All of the extra pizzazz intends to captures our attention—and I truly hope it does. Because living as we do, it is all-too-easy to forget that the story we gather around matters greatly—for ourselves, and for our world.

So, throughout Holy Week, we tell stories. Lots and lots of stories. The many readings appointed for the days leading up to this morning tell a sweeping history of salvation—a story of God’s creative and continuous action.

It’s like a highlight reel of God’s Greatest Hits. Because retelling the tales-of-old helps us understand how we arrived here, from where we’ve come, and it leads us into the future.

At many points throughout our scripture though, it would seem the story has stalled out altogether—and perhaps even reached its final end. First, the Hebrew people are bound in slavery—but God makes a way. Then, of course, the people are led to a seemingly senseless death at the Red Sea—and, again, God makes a way. And when the people are captured, displaced, and led off into exile—yet again, God makes a way out of no way.

From the Exodus to the Cross—and countless times in between—each time it would seem the story ends in desolation, destruction, and death—sure enough—the same God-Who-Creates-From-Nothing in Genesis again brings forth something new.

Truthfully, this is just the way it’s always been. The same story of new life is revealed again and again from multiple vantage points.

Now, our siblings in the United Church of Christ sum this up in their denomination’s logo, which is a ‘semicolon’ and the tagline, “God is still speaking.” And, as a common fit-for-a-t-shirt cliche goes, which I shamelessly share: “Don’t put a period where God puts a comma.”

God never ceases to create. Throughout scripture and in our lives, God’s activity remains relentless. What a wonderful thing.

So often though, when the writers of scripture encounter this creative force, it is likened to thunder and earthquakes—evoking a kind of terror. Now, all of these descriptions are, of course, incomplete and fall short—but how else would you attempt to describe the things God does? I mean, really: liberation from slavery, deliverance from despair, freedom from hopelessness, life from death?

This is a powerful story of deep, steadfast love—and if sometimes it causes us to tremble, well, it would be quite appropriate if from time to time we got just a bit weak in the knees.

So when the women in Mark’s gospel lesson go to the tomb and with great alarm take in the unimaginable thing that has occurred, it is no wonder they are seized with “fear and silence.” To them, it sure seemed like the story ended on Good Friday.

Somehow, though, where there was no way, God made a way. And whether or not they choose to speak of what they’ve witnessed matters—but it doesn’t come without implications.

In the book, Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, practical theologians, Hebert Henderson and Edward Foley say the following about the important of storytelling:

“We conceive of ourselves as a web of stories—a historical novel or a miniseries in the making. We think in stories in order to weave together into a coherent whole the unending succession of people, dates, and facts that fill our lives. [...] Stories hold us together and keep us apart. We tell stories in order to live.”

Telling a story is an inherently constructive act. It imagine new worlds. But not only that, it brings new realities into being. And it for this very reason: storytelling is unavoidably disruptive. As the authors add:

“Stories are mighty, however, not only because we shape our lives through them but also because they have the power to unsettle the lives we have comfortably shaped by them.”

So, at the empty tomb the women face a dilemma. While they had set-out to embalm Jesus’ body, and had likely prepared themselves for the tremendous grief that would accompany it, now the situation is all the more complicated.

Because proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus—a political dissident executed by the state—is an act of defiance. There’s no way around it. Doing so entertains the possibility that there is something larger and more powerful than the instruments of death and those who wield them. And, even more critically, it subverts Caesar’s false claims of Lordship.

Telling the story is both constructive and disruptive—and surely it comes with personal consequences. A common phrase suggests that Christians are “Easter people living in a Good Friday world.” We might imagine these women as the very first to live into the tensions of this reality.

This is much the same dilemma Oscar Romero faced himself. His exuberant proclamation—that “Easter is a shout of victory!”—comes from his final Sunday homily, on the last Sunday in Lent, 1980—delivered with full knowledge of the consequences. The very next day, as he elevated the host while presiding at the Eucharist, he was martyred.

Indeed, much evidence of Good Friday remains all around us. We know this all too well.

In the wake of ever-increasingly-frequent mass shootings or the medical diagnoses and any variety of desolations that happen in our personal lives: we are indeed Easter people living in Good Friday worlds. Even still... God is still speaking.

As Mark’s Gospel continues: the women tell the story. Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of Jesus, Salome, and Joanne (as included in other accounts) are the first evangelists to go and share the good news.

And in doing so, they enter into this story as co-conspirators. To be clear: traumatic memories of the crucifixion, merely three-days old, surely remained present. But not now those sorrows are held alongside the wonderfully disorienting and paradoxically inexplicable joy of resurrection. Neither sighing nor suffering has the final word, but love.

We remember and retell this continually unfolding story for much the same reasons. To be shaped by it. Not merely for purposes of intellectual curiosities. And neither as a fiction performed for entertainment.

It is a living story of a living God that by living faith transforms our living reality.

The purpose in the events of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection is summarized with these words written to the Corinthians: “that we too might walk in newness of life.”

Our own participation is what it’s all about.

So, we rehearse this story, week in and week out: that being reminded of our place in God’s work of salvation, we might truly become Christ’s body in the world.

Friends, in the glory of this morning, especially when we may utter our alleluias with an ache, know that the story we proclaim is that God is making a new world!

With every Easter-tide alleluia, we proclaim that risen with Christ is a new way of living illumined by love. And in the knowledge of “a love supreme,” as John Coltrane would put it, we can hold firmly to Easter hope! Even when there is seemingly no way. Even now, today. Thanks be to God!

Let us rise then and walk in the joy and beauty and wonder and goodness of new life!

May the alleluias of our lives burst forth like the newness of cherry-blossom blooms!

Alleluia! Christ is risen!