Loading...Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord's resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by your life-giving Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Alleluia, Christ is Risen!
The Lord is Risen Indeed, Alleluia!
I am preaching to you today from the picnic bench at my apartment complex where I have lived for 5 years. God made me believe He wants me to live here. As apartment complexes go, this one is crummy. When I first moved in there were mice, then the ceiling leaked for 18 months straight. I’ve lost track of how many times I have called for a welfare check on screams of peril. The neighbor’s dog pooped on my doorstep three times in a row — and I live on the second floor. In March, I found two nails in two separate car tires and last week my car was broken into. They didn’t steal anything, the police say they are only looking for guns.
I moved here because God told me to. I mean that I felt the finger of God pointing to this exact location and saying to me, ‘Here.’ ‘Here’ means that my kids could walk to school and feel independant. ‘Here’ means I had a certain sense of community and security during an unsettling transition. ‘Here’ means my 96-year- old neighbor is exactly the friend I need. ‘Here’ is at the intersection of two major highways which means I can be most anywhere I need to be in under twenty minutes. I know I am supposed to be here. I have been made to believe it over and over again, despite my opposition. I’ve tried to make all the crummy things about this place better. I filed complaints. I installed a security light, then a security camera. I even tried to move. ‘Here’ I am living in a blend of the crummiest place ever and the place God wants for me.
That blend of ‘Here-ness’ is Easter. Easter is the blend of the crummiest place ever and the place God wants us to be. The crummiest place ever is death. No one wants to go there, whether it’s death by physical suffering or death by gradual loss of freedom.
One word for death we just spent forty days contemplating is sin. Sin, our enslavement to anything that makes God seem smaller than the Creator and Governor of the Universe, is death.
We know from the Passover story in Exodus that God treats slaves with extra special attention. For us, God sends his only Son to fulfill their mutual mission to break the bondage of sin with the most powerful love of all — the love between a parent and a child. That unbreakable bond unites every other kind of love relationship to the cross. There, on the cross, slavery dies along with Jesus in a brutal display of human depravity blended with a surrender so beautiful we make 14 pictures of it and walk around in a parade to examine it when we walk the Stations of the Cross.
During this pandemic a friend said to me, “You want to make believe everything is sparkly but it's not.” Indeed, the health of the human race, like my crummy apartment complex, is not sparkly. Like my apartment, I cannot do anything to sparklize COVID-19. Yet, God has put me ‘Here’ in COVID-19. ‘Here’ we all are together in it. Thankfully, like Jeremiah with his defiant hope, I know how to make belief everything is sparkly. Jeremiah wrote:
The people who survived the sword
found grace in the wilderness.
Grace is here in the midst of sword and survival and wilderness. Here is grace. God has made me to believe there is grace in the wilderness. God’s love sparkles in any location.
My hunch is that anyone who is celebrating Easter today knows exactly how to make believe the way Jeremiah does. By the means and materials of grace, I create belief that God is faithful and has a plan and purpose for me and for you in God’s life and will direct me and you to that plan and purpose.
My 8 year old goddaughter Bryn colored a drawing of Jesus. She made
his hair purple and his clothes pink. His sheep are orange and green. He is surrounded by countless stars which she added herself and they are all red and blue, making Jesus look like an All-American Shepherd.
Bryn shows the way I want to picture the resurrected Jesus. In his Resurrection Life Jesus abides faithfully in all gruesomeness of human suffering while he is made sparkly by the hopes of those who claim the power of his Unconditional Love.
The way suffering and sparkle are united in Christ Jesus is the same way God’s Love unites us across the miles, across death and sin into new life, free to sparkle even in the crummiest COVID-19. I am preaching to you the good news of God in Christ from an unsparkly address because I have been made to believe that God is shining the light of Christ here and the darkness cannot overcome it. Christ’s indominiable light is the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection:
Reread Matthew’s story about the ‘here’ of the empty tomb. The women who come to the empty tomb on Easter morning arrive at a beautiful sunrise to feel an earthquake. After they see the resurrected Jesus they feel both fear and great joy. Even in the crummy Covid quarantine, Here is where Jesus wants to be. He has made me to believe.
