I find that it doesn’t take much to be overwhelmed with either horror or the great acts of kindness that are being offered every single day, every single minute. When I think of New York City clapping, shouting, and banging pots at 7 o’clock every day for health care workers who are daily walking toward death and the hope of life, it’s enough sometimes to cause me to tremble. It somehow makes me feel more alive. It’s so overwhelmingly good.
Springtime is a beautiful time of year. In front of the church daffodils are in full bloom. A member of our church came to mow the lawn, and put some of the daffodils in a vase for service. A small gesture like that is all it seems to take to fill me with a rush of good feeling nowadays. The veil somehow does feel a little thinner now: the veil between life and death, the veil between individuals, the veil between human and plants, animals, nourishment.
The seasons change and winter becomes Spring. The earth lets go of winter to welcome new life. As humans, we are not quite that easy. We are more complicated. Some of us always live in winter no matter what season it is. Some of us are like Camus, we feel inside us an infinite summer. We see what is happening around us, but it doesn’t touch us.
Easter is one of my favorite holidays because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s confusing, at times overwhelming, and really hard to believe in. Even the secular version of Easter with Easter egg hunts, bunnies that lay eggs, I find just as odd as the biblical story. I never celebrated Easter growing up. I say that with just about every holiday, but this has proven to be a great gift. I don’t have a preconception of what these holidays mean, and I get the opportunity with you to explore their meaning every year.
So I want to share my thoughts on Easter with you this year, and hopefully provoke you to share your own during the talk back later. First, Good Friday for me is just as important as Easter. I think most of us by the time we reach adulthood realize that life doesn’t go the way we expect or planned, in fact it can really go off the rails. As we get older, we lose friends. We witness injustice. We see criminals raised to the highest offices and given rewards, and we see good, honest people being treated inhumanely. Most of us as we grow up realize that sometimes the story doesn’t save us, the story that we are invincible and that everything will turn out okay. Sometimes it doesn’t. In fact a lot of the time it doesn’t, at least not in the short term. The reason we have Good Friday after Spring has arrived is the same reason we have Christmas Eve after the Winter Solstice: because we are complicated. We can feel the exact opposite of what is happening outside our doorstep.
I love the spiritual, “Were you there?” It’s about Good Friday. It’s haunting. It was the first hymn I heard that really helped me make some sense of Easter – both the worst time of our life and the best time of our life can lead to trembling, and one can be easily confused with the other. It is a profound surprise that shakes the ground we stand on, the ground that once felt more certain, but now trembles. The Easter story at its simplest is about a community who are dealing with the loss of their good friend and teacher, and they don’t know what to do. This wasn’t how the story was supposed to go. He was too good to go out like that. I mention this because I know now of at least a couple of you who have relatives or loved ones who are near death due to COVID-19. My heart goes out to you, and so do the hearts of everyone in this community. We are here for you even as we know we can’t fully understand what is happening, though we see it happening on the news every day. It feels different when it happens to you personally. It is not just a statistic or a piece of misfortune. It’s something that doesn’t just impact your life. It becomes part of your life. It transforms you in ways you can’t control or expect. For me, this is the heart of the Easter story. It’s a story of loss that transforms you into someone you weren’t before the loss.
And again, this doesn’t make any sense. It’s not meant to. To make full sense of our losses is to diminish them in a way. A loss is always beyond us even as it’s part of us. It is a mystery.
Do I think that Jesus literally rose from the dead? No, I do not. Do I think something happened that transformed a small group of friends into discovering something precious and dear about life? That I have no doubt about. We wouldn’t have Easter unless that was true, as many of them were imprisoned and crucified themselves, to testify to what they discovered. What did they discover?
To say what that is, I think would diminish the discovery. That is not a cop out. I really mean it. But I will venture a guess based on Mark which was the first recorded gospel. I think whatever it is they first discovered first made them very afraid and uncertain. It was not a cloud parting moment when the choir sings hallelujah, and a group of people who worshipped in certainty. They were deeply uncertain. They were uncertain to the point of fear and trembling. This was the birth of Easter.
The worst day of your life being connected to the best day of your life only makes sense if you throw in one ingredient: love. It’s love that shows us we really miss someone. It’s love that causes us to feel sorrow, to be uncertain about how we can go on without them. It’s love that shows us that we are still connected somehow even to those who are gone, sometimes even more connected.
During the crucifixion, in the gospel retelling, the earth shook and trembled. In Mark’s version, the women who went to find the body were shaking, trembling in surprise. The women are my favorite characters in this story. It is the women who have the willingness to look death in the face, and bring spices for the body, a sign of care. Again it makes me think of the health care workers, mostly women, who are called upon to care for and prepare our bodies. It’s truly a holy and humane act. They didn’t come to raise the dead. The women came to honor the dead, to pay respect.
That’s when things get strange. In the story, they see a young man they don’t recognize, and of course they’re alarmed. Why is he there, and where is their friend and teacher? He says something that takes their breath away: he’s walking around in your old neighborhood, he’s in Galilee. It’s like saying he’s on Federal Street, or if you’re in New York – he’s at the Trader Joe’s on 96th Street, or in Seattle at Pike’s Place. It makes no sense. They know he’s dead.
It is incredibly destabilizing to prepare yourself to face something you know will be difficult, and then you’re surprised when all of a sudden the setting is different than what you imagined. Have you ever had that experience before? You were preparing yourself to have a sensitive or difficult conversation, or face something that you know would make you emotional, and then you show up and it’s totally different than what you imagined. Maybe there is another person you didn’t expect, or the person you were expecting is not acting the way you thought they would, or maybe you discovered that thing you were so obsessed with for so long now is moot, and there are now other issues that need your attention.
Life not being what we expect it to be in the reality of both Good Friday and Easter. On Good Friday, the unexpected leads to great grief and disillusionment. On Easter, the unexpected leads to shock at first, but also the possibility of something good, though mysterious. Both of these experiences both come from the unexpected.
For me that’s what Easter has become: a way to celebrate the unexpected. It’s a way of honoring the unexpected losses and defeats of Good Friday, and the unexpected that denies me complacent bitterness and certainty on Easter morning. Sometimes the unexpected is the reason why I hope. Sometimes hope comes out of a place of acknowledging that there will always be something or someone unexpected who will come along and give you direction toward someplace you never imagined you would walk. Sometimes the unexpected is a source of joy and contentment. It’s the reason we look forward to Spring, and flowers that will bloom, but never exactly on our time schedule. Sometimes the unexpected makes me feel excited, wondering what and who is right around the corner. Sometimes the unexpected fills me with awe and humility, realizing how little I know, and how little I have control over. Sometimes the unexpected makes me laugh out loud. Sometimes the unexpected make me want to gather with people like you, like this, or over a meal with wine and dessert, and feel how rare it is that we have no idea what is really going on, but we are together, even and maybe more so when we’re apart. Sometimes the unexpected makes me feel like a kid on Christmas morning, wondering what kind of gifts this day will offer me, gifts that will be offered to my delight and surprise. Sometimes the unexpected makes me imagine new possibilities, possibilities like peace, justice, warm fellowship, and health for all the people in this world. Sometimes the unexpected makes my eyes widen with anticipation. But sometimes, if I’m honest, I’ll say the unexpected causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. But even the trembling is unexpected. I don’t spend my whole life trembling. Something unexpected comes again, and forces me to articulate something which I’m not sure how to articulate.
It seems that what comes to define our life is not what we gain or accomplish but what we lose, and how we live with that loss. The loss shapes our view, helps us feel what the world is, and what it is not. It opens us in ways that are unexpected. As we are all sheltered in place, we are all experiencing loss. Loss is not always a bad thing. We can lose distraction, we can lose stress and busyness, we can lose concern over things that don’t matter as much as what is front of us, the people we love who are right in front of us. We can lose pretension, we can lose greed, we can lose fear, we can lose the desire to perform business as usual when business as usual is harming us. Usually we lose all this by thoroughly exhausting them first: losing fear by being so thoroughly afraid we tremble. We are all temporarily undergoing loss of what was normal, some more intensely than others, and many of us are waiting to see if this loss brings us some new discovery.
We are being challenged through loss to ask ourselves some really basic questions. Were you there? All the years you lived in your house, with your loved ones, or by yourself: Were you ever really there, or was your heart and mind always elsewhere? As we have artificially limited our worlds, we are feeling an expanding of our perception of reality, of what is possible. We should take this moment to look toward our future with reinvigorated possibilities, possibilities for both our outer and inner world. And these possibilities all come from loss.
Like the women headed back to Galilee, a place they lived and thought they knew well, they are now being asked to return with fresh eyes, looking for a mystery, a possibility, a hope. Will we join them? Will we look around our homes and see what we’ve missed. Will we allow ourselves to finally, totally, be there? Will we allow ourselves a new life, rich in loss and rich in possibility?
So here are a couple questions for discussion afterward: 1. What is Easter like for you this year? 2. What is one thing good that has happened this week for you unexpectedly?
