Easter Sunday – Deep Easter
Beneath the sparkle and the dye, beneath all that catches our eye, there flows a Deep Easter, a truth that new life is always present. How can we find hope in times of uncertainty, as we recognize how fragile and resilient life is? Thank goodness we have a full fifty days to celebrate Easter, because we need all the time we can get to become saturated with the promise of God’s life-giving presence.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
Easter sermons are notoriously hard to write. I had three. And after Brandon gave his at nine, so many things in Brandon’s sermon struck chords within me that I threw it out. So I’m winging this one. If it goes wrong, it’s not my fault.
They’re very hard to write because if I could be so bold, I think the church has gone about this oftentimes in entirely the wrong way. Easter Sunday is one of those few days when so many of us come for different reasons.
Some of you are here because of your family. Some of you come to church with either a grandparent or a parent on Christmas and on Easter, and the last thing that you want or need is some long doctrinal lesson, however fun that would be to give. That’s the last thing that you’re looking for.
Others of you have been hurt. Others of you have been hurt and may not have been to church in a long time because of something that happened to you. So the last thing that you need is some priest standing up in front of you telling you something that you should or should not do. Although perhaps you should or should not do that thing.
Others of you may not know why you’re here at all. You may have gotten lost. You may look around and thought this was an entirely different church and now you’re trapped in the pew and you cannot leave.
Others of us are in this state of joyful exhaustion. This is our tenth service in seven days. So some of us have been here. We have slept here. We have not bathed. We have not brushed our teeth.
So all of us find ourselves here really for different reasons, right? We find ourselves here in different places. For some of us, for some I know over this week it’s been really hard because this was your first time to go through Holy Week and get to Easter Sunday without your loved one by your side. I know that’s true. It’s true for many of you. And that’s hard. That’s both a thick place and a thin place at the same time. And we navigate that.
But Easter is different. And so the last thing that you really need is someone standing up in front of you with this kind of Pollyannish view of everything is fine. Because as Brandon said so well in his sermon at 9, that disorder that the resurrection brings into the world upsets life. And your life has been upset in your own way. So we hold all of that. All of that is here. We hold all of it. And we do our best to make sense of it.
So the way I think the church has gone about this the wrong way is that we often come at Easter and Christmas sermons and we lead in terms of doctrine. When we really need to lead in terms of human life and experience. To be honest about where we are, what we’re holding, what we’re facing, what we’re wrestling with, all of those things. The doubts, the fears, the hopes, the dreams, all of that, all of that is here.
So that’s why they’re so hard. Not because we don’t know the story. We know the story. We know that story so well. It’s hard because we don’t know how to connect the deep truth of the story with where we find ourselves. And we lack the words sometimes to do that. And so we rely and go back to old shorthand and catch phrases that might have served us well in years past, but don’t hold up.
So we’re always forced to ask ourselves, how do I make sense of this here and now? How do I make sense of this in this moment? Not to go back just to the way that things have been, but to ask ourselves and say, this is where we are. How do we make sense of this? How do we make sense of this thing called resurrection? How do we participate in the resurrected life? How do we look for life?
So more and more over this season, I’ve come in my own life to call that Deep Easter. We need Deep Easter. We don’t need Shallow Easter or Superficial Easter or Saccharine Sweet Easter. We don’t need Entertainment Easter. We don’t need laser lights and sparkle shows. We don’t need that Easter. We do need eggs and we do need chocolate. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not throwing it all out. But we need Deep Easter.
And here’s why. If we were to do a straw poll and we were to go around and I were to ask each and every one of you, “is your life great?” you would start by saying, “yes, it’s fine. Thank you for asking.” because we’re in the South and that’s how we answer things. But given enough time, we would all open up and we would say if we were brave,
“I’m struggling with this.”
“I don’t know how to make sense of that.”
“I’m wrestling with this.”
”There’s this spot of pain I don’t know what to do with.”
“I’ve struggled for a long time to make sense of this and I can’t.”
And in that spot, in that honest vulnerable space, that’s where Deep Easter takes hold. That’s where Deep Easter takes hold.
Here’s where it rang true to me this last week. It was about Tuesday, I think, and I was making pastoral phone calls out on the back porch, and it was beautiful, but it was windy. It was that day, it was really, really windy.
And I have a shelf because I’m a bit of a clutterer with flower pots. I know. I have a shelf and I put the pots that I don’t use on those shelves and a wren made a nest in one of those pots. And I walked out on the back porch to make a phone call and I noticed that the wind had blown that shelf over. And I go out and I look and I see that the pot that the nest was in is now about ten feet out in the yard. And I didn’t know if the wren had laid eggs yet. I didn’t know. I saw her go in there.
So I go over and I’m scooping down and all I see are two mouths that did this. [Stuart arches backward and opens his mouth wide upward to the sky.] They didn’t make a sound. They just felt a presence and that’s all that they did.
They could not have been more than three days old. Little hatchlings. So I said a prayer that, you know, because you’ve heard you can’t touch them, but you have to touch them. I couldn’t leave them because we have a one-eyed cat that lives in our neighborhood. It’s true. Its name’s Uno. It’s very, very original. Yeah.
So I couldn’t leave them because Uno would get them. So I did the only thing I could do. I scoop up these two little hatchlings. And I’m holding each of them in my hand, trying to rebuild their nest that they had fallen out of, hoping for the best, wishing them the best, and easing them in there,and they’re so weird looking. They had no feathers. They looked like lizards.
So I put the two of them in there and then I see the larger pot that had blown over and I go and in the bottom of the pot I see another mouth. [Stuart opens mouth wide to mimic a baby bird again.] And there was a third.
So I get the third and I’m holding all of them just looking at these little creatures. And I put them back in the nest, put the flower pot back on the shelf, take bricks and hold it up to do the best that I could do. And I wrote this. While I sat there and waited and prayed that the mother wren would come back, not knowing. Here’s what I wrote.
It’s called Anima Mundi, which means “soul of the world.”
Sitting on my patio within the shade of a blood red Japanese maple who whispers its name which I cannot pronounce. I watch it dance with a light and the shadow, the graceful bend. If I sit still long enough, can I hear the music it feels?
A strong wind blew a wren’s nest out of its safe nook and into the yard, tossing three frail hatchlings into the grass where I found them, all mouths. I held each of them in turn and gently placed them back in their pot, braced with brick to guard as best I can while I wait for the parents’ return.
How can life be so frail and strong at the same time? Held in these small bodies with the earliest tufts of feathers like crowns upon their heads. There is a language our hearts know, but our mouths cannot speak. Words and truths our lips cannot form of a desire and longing for life. Which has an edge as sharp as any knife cutting through the distractions we call ourselves.
And on this edge, hope finds footing.
That’s Deep Easter. Those moments that catch us off guard, that don’t make any sense at all, and that’s exactly what happened when Mary went to the tomb. That’s exactly what happened. Everything that they had been told was supposed to take place when a person died didn’t happen. And her entire life, their entire life was turned upside down and suddenly things that they thought were never possible were real.
And she struggled and they struggled and if you catch this wonderful part of John’s version of this, they struggled so much that John and Peter, John can never call himself John, he always has to brag in that passive aggressive way and call himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” So annoying. But John and Peter raced. Did you catch that? They had to have, because they didn’t know what to do, they didn’t know how to make sense of it. So they went back to old scripts that they had, which their old script was to compete.
And that’s what they did. They competed all the way to the tomb and then they got there and neither of them knew what in the world had happened. Their whole lives have been turned upside down. And in Luke’s version, there’s a line when they come and they go to the tomb and they’re not there, there’s a line that the angels say. It’s one of my favorite lines. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Which my entire life I’ve read that and I’ve felt that they were saying that they didn’t get it. I read it entirely different now.
When I hear that line and the angels say, “why do you look for the living among the dead?” what I hear is a charge and a call that every single one of us is supposed to pick up. That is what we are supposed to do. Every moment of our lives is to look for the living among the dead. That’s our call. That’s living into the Easter and asking ourselves in every situation we find ourselves, of pain and sorrow, confusion, uncertainty, and all of the anxiety, all of the fear to ask ourselves, “where do I look for the living among the dead?” How can I tune my eyes and my ears, my heart to see and pay attention to what God has in store for me? Because the spirit is promised to us in the midst of whatever we bring with us.
So as we step into this season, that’s where we find ourselves. Holding what we hold, being honest about what we hold, not thinking we have to sugarcoat it or gloss over it, and also daring to ask, daring to ask “How can I look for the living among the dead? How can I hold life in my hand that is so frail and strong at the same time and wonder what I can do to preserve it? And to nurture it.”
Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed.
Alleluia.