Easter Sunday Service, with Rev. Frank Clarkson preaching, “Easter People,” with Intern Minister Sophia Lyons and Worship Associate Joanna Fortna.

Even in a normal year, I find the transition from Good Friday to Easter to be rather abrupt. It happens so fast! So I appreciate the invitation of Holy Week to enter the story, to travel with Jesus as he and his friends take their itinerant ministry from Galilee to the big city of Jerusalem, where the Roman army is in charge; where things don’t go well, and by the end of the week Jesus is arrested and put to death. 

But this year, with this virus ravaging our world, it’s like Holy Week on steroids! Death and suffering isn’t symbolic, isn’t a metaphor—people are dying, and frontline workers are at risk because they don’t have the right protective gear. The virus seems to be disproportionally hurting those who are already at the margins. We’ve all lost things, and had our lives curtailed. One loss is the future we’d been imagining and looking forward to. Because none of us know, right now, what the future will bring, what our lives will look like, in the coming months. We just don’t know. 

And into all thus, here comes Easter. Are you ready? I’ve been asking that of myself, and was heartened when I saw a local pastor ask online: “Can we just agree to set a new date for Resurrection Sunday? I’m asking for myself,” he wrote. I know how he feels! It feels like the necessity these days is to be right here, in the struggle and pain of it, because there’s no way to get out of it, no way to pretend this isn’t happening. 

Two thousand years ago, a little band of fishermen and other common folk followed a man named Jesus because they could tell he was filled with the Spirit. Their lives were hard, the future was never certain, but in his presence they felt alive; they got glimpses of freedom and possibility. In his presence there was food enough to share, and people who were sick got better. Life was good. But then Jesus went to Jerusalem and thumbed his nose at the rulers, and they killed him. His followers went into hiding, afraid for their own lives. Afterwards, it was the women, or course, who got up their courage and went to the tomb to anoint his body. 

Nobody knows exactly what happened. But in the days and years that followed, people still sensed Jesus in their midst. Walking along a dusty road, or fishing in the Sea of Galilee, they felt his presence. They started telling the story of the empty tomb, of the stone that had been rolled away. 

The image that because the symbol of Western Christianity is Jesus hanging on the cross. But wouldn’t a better symbol be the empty tomb? The point of the Easter story is that even death could not contain his spirit. That when everything seems lost, and broken, and uncertain, and you think it’s over, it’s then that God, or Love, or Goodness, whatever you call it, shows up, breaks in to our lives, reminds us that in the end, Love wins. That Love is stronger even than death.

In those last lines from the gospel of Mark, we heard the women wondering, as they walked to the tomb, “Who will roll away the stone?” They knew it was big and heavy. And when they got there they found it had already been rolled away! The work was already done. They didn’t have to do anything but bear witness to the miracle right in front of them. Which was no small thing. And why, the story, says, they ran away, trembling and afraid.

Here we are, on Easter morning, being asked to bear witness to the empty tomb, to the fact that the stone has already been rolled away. As the great Easter hymn says, “Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!”

The brilliant contemporary theologian and preacher Rob Bell did a series of podcasts called “Jesus H. Christ,” in which he explores the life and ministry of Jesus. In the last episode Bell sums up Jesus’ message in one sentence; he says Jesus’ core message is “You are already at the party.” That what Jesus meant when he said, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He meant that God—the Spirit of love and goodness and wholeness—is already right here, with us. We are already at the party. We just don’t see it. And people back then, most of them anyway, they didn’t see it either. 

And that’s why I need Easter, especially this year. And I expect it’s why you need Easter too. To be reminded to wake up, and look up, and see that, in spite of everything, there is still plenty of good in our world. That love does abide. That there is a party, laid out for us, right now, if we will open our eyes and see it. 

And if you’re not ready quite yet for full-on Easter, don’t worry. Easter is a season, fifty days of opening up to Love, to possibility, to the ways the Mystery is moving in our midst. We’ve got time. 

And right now, in these days, isn’t this a good time to be looking for signs of life, for little resurrections, right here, in the midst and the mess of this present situation? The invitation is to be right here, in the struggle, to be leaning toward the light and reaching for hope. This is what it means to be people of faith: to be Easter people in a Good Friday world. 

We are here to awake to the wonder of this moment, and do what we can to create heaven right here, on earth. Reaching out in love, sharing what we have, working for healing and wholeness, for everyone. 

These days, when we need all the hope we can get, let’s start with little resurrections. Reaching out to a friend, or putting your hands in the dirt; making masks to keep people safe, or listening for the peepers singing their resurrection hymn. Whatever it is, these days please do what you can to put yourself in the way of grace.

These days, let’s lean into Easter. Let’s work on opening our hearts a little wider, so we can hold the challenge and the joy of this life. So we can do the work we have been given to do, and help heal and bless our world. 

For months, I’ve been looking forward to this day, because our choir was going to sing an Easter song, written by my friend Jason Shelton, with the words we just heard from Gretchen Haley. We have to wait now, but there will come a day when we will be back in church together and we can join in with the choir and sing that song about rolling away the stone. And it will be even better, because we will have been living this message, in these days, it will have been our prayer:

Roll away the stone
of your hesitant heart
Let the light shine
on all the sleeping shadows

Awaken to this day
that offers itself to you
and to all
as a gift

Awaken to this beauty
that persists,
this chance
that we might begin again,
that even here we are finding our way
to healing, and hope
that even now we are changed by the in
and out
of breath
the rhythm we forge
across screens and comments sections
the re-creation of community
the remembering of how to grieve
together, woven through loving -
that we might still surprise
this earth with a new song
sung together
calling us all in,
and before long,
sending us back out
to life.

And in this, my companions, let us know it all as blessing—the joy and the sorrow, the light and the shadow. Because we are Easter people. Now and forever,

Amen.