Trusting Easter's Enough - Whenever!

I love Easter. After more than two thousand years of fearing science; imitating emperors; impersonating philosophers; mirroring cruel dictators; adopting the tactics of snake-oil salesmen; and diluting the sheer gall of the Gospel, Easter brings us back to the clear message that through this Christ our lives belong to God.

It’s a message that’s simple to say, but not quite so easy to understand. Finding room to enter the message today, against the backdrop of Don Imus’ “comedy,” the death of a Kokomo guardsman in Iraq, or worse, the silent, private sufferings of your own heart may leave you in one of two places. Either you tolerate Easter even though you think this is all a bunch of hooey, but it’s harmless hooey, or, you’ve given yourself over to the truth of this incredible drama that’s beyond your wildest dreams.

What’s the message? That God sent Jesus to say and do everything he did, and to validate that God raised Jesus from the dead - and by that act God has triumphed over sin, death, and the devil.

If you take this at all seriously, you’ve had to, or will have to, try and wrap your brain around it. You’ll go after as many facts as you can. You’ll look for evidence and proof and test it all out against alternative theories. That’s part of what it means to have a mind in the first place. Then, you’ll move on to a way of trusting this so that metaphors and songs and poems do a better job of saying who you are inside the story of this God. That’s part of what it means to have a heart touched and grasped by this kind of God.

You can certainly enter the message today - either for the first time, or as a reaffirmation that this message defines who you are in ways that no other story can do. Meaning that, before your anything else - parent, spouse, employee, offspring, widow, divorcee, entrepreneur - and deeper than your anything else - you belong to this God, through this Christ, in the Holy Spirit.

The consequences, or effect, of this basic message - that:
• our sin, that is our over and over again tendency to miss the mark about who we are, is over come
• death is not the final word about who we are and who we are to become
• the devil, or any other power that competes for our loyalty, has been defeated.

The results of living in this message are radical and comprehensive:
• looking forward to the future replaces anxiety
• shame gives way to serenity
• distrust is displaced by joy
• self-discipline replaces addiction
• meaning overcomes maddening efforts to make an identity for ourselves
• relationship outstrips a desire for revenge
• persistence overpowers boredom.
• death gives way to life; darkness to light; fear to conviction; despair to confidence.

These effects are something like the fulfillment of your wildest dreams, your deepest hopes, your secret wishes. Only living this message, inside this story your hopes, dreams, longings, and desires spring from the heart of God - for you - not from your own, not completely trustworthy heart.

And there’s the rub, isn’t it? The Easter message goes against our grain, stands everything we know on its head. Despite appearances to the contrary, death is not the final word. Death is a door-way to a life that still, keeps on, continuing in God.

But instead of trusting in that, receiving an incredible freedom in the here and now, freedom from making our own meaning; we focus on the what of it, and the how of it, not the why of it.

Not one of the Gospels tells us what happened on that Sunday morning. They do - each one - all tell us that the Jesus who was crossed up, then shut up - somehow kept up coming after them - for them. That’s the heart of the message that Easter brings. Yes, in Jesus’ resurrection sin, sickness and the devil have been undone. AND, this God does that for you, for me. Despite everything we know, because of everything we know.

One of the grandest prayers in the Jewish Seder meal is the Dayenu prayer. After the eldest in attendance answers the question from the youngest, “Why is this night different from any other;” those gathered pray this way:
Dayenu - enough:
• O God had you made us in your image and likeness
• had you clothed us when we offended you in the garden
• spared Noah in the great flood
• given Abraham a son
• spared Isaac
• freed us from bondage in Egypt
• given us the 10 commandments and Torah
• forgiven King David his wrong-doing, etc.

But the facts of that prayer deny the truth of our being - a truth God knows and longs to undo. For us, it’s never enough.

And so, in the fullness of time God took flesh, became Emmanuel, God-with-Us. The heart of the Easter message is God for us. God, hard at work, trying to be enough for us. The crucified Jesus, still calling Mary’s name, still explaining scripture to the two on the road to Emmaus, still showing up in a locked room, still putting Thomas’ fingers into his wounds, still cooking breakfast for friends on the beach, still coming for us gathered in his name, still presenting himself to us in the Holy Spirit, in this word, at this meal.

Try as we do, it’s still never enough. Paul says, this side of the grave it will never be enough. We see through a glass, dimly. We have but a foretaste of the feast to come. He also says this: When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. That means “when,” as in whenever.

Despite what appears to us to be the continuing power of sin, death and the devil, glimpses of that Easter resurrection’s WHEN are breaking out all over. Whenever:
• the sun peaks over the horizon one more day
• a way out of now-way suddenly appears
• strangers put their strangeness aside in favor of relationship
• we let go of vengeance
• someone chooses to forget why they’re angry
• we employ our talents to make beauty, art, music, kindness
• we make room in our hearts for friendship and forgiveness
• our mouth’s declarations about injustice guide our hands and feet toward building justice.

Is this message believable? Not the way we usually use that word. Even Paul said as much. This is a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. Then he went on to stake his own life on both the reality and the truth of the message.

So have countless others. The women who were last at the cross and first at the tomb believed. So did the centurion at the cross and the wealthy Joseph of Arimethea. So have famous folks like: Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Barbara Jordan, James Weldon Johnson, and Senator Paul Simon.

So have the not so famous. Like Ollie Filer, Bill Ecker, Dorothy Siersbeck, Chuck Schroeder, Irene Strom – David Neil Simmons of Kokomo, and our own lists could go on and on.

With that great cloud of witnesses, I stand on the shoulders of those first apostolic believers who trusted the why of it, without giving a hoot for either the what or the how of it - and am privileged to shout, once again, “Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!