Rev. Michael Phillips’ Sermon – Easter Sunday (April 11, 2004)

The day has dawned. The sun has climbed into the morning sky. And we are well on our way into the time of resurrection. This is the great day of celebration. This is the crowning moment in the church year. All other days either lead up to and prepare us for this day, or they give us time to reflect and integrate into our lives the events of this day. Everything else in the Christian faith eventually leads to what we celebrate and proclaim on this great day – a new life of grace. New life is the reason this church and all other churches exist. It is what lies at the heart of our community of faith.

We have spent the last week recalling the story. The good and just man, Jesus, unfairly accused before the Roman authority in Palestine, is sentenced to death by execution on a cross. And it happened. Jesus died. His blood poured out. His breath escaped. His skin grew cold and clammy; his color white and pasty. (Sorry to be so graphic, but Mel Gibson has inspired me.) The man was dead – not just sleeping – not just biding his time for a couple of restful days in a stone tomb. The man was dead, buried, gone. He would never return to the life he had known as Jesus of Nazareth.

Most stories end at this point, but for Jesus, his story was in some ways, just beginning. God raises him to a new life.

It is this new life that we as his followers proclaim to the world. It is the only hope we have in a world overflowing with greed, fear, suspicion, self-interest, and distrust. God’s truth, strength, respect, and reconciliation shines through all attempts to eliminate them, even by killing those whose lives reflect them. The new life of the resurrection is never a private matter. The new life is always directed outward to the immediate community, in fact, to the whole world.

Now, I must warn you that not everything that occurs in this world points us toward the new life of grace. Some things may appear to be new life, but in fact, are not. Some things masquerade as resurrection, but in reality are merely extensions of the life that already exist. For example, attempts at self-improvement. Self-improvement is a wonderful thing. Take a course at the community college. Learn a foreign language. Join a yoga or t’ai chi group. Change to a healthy diet, and on and on. Every day in every way, a little better, a little stronger… there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just not living the resurrected life of Christ. Sure, we all need to work on ourselves. We need to hone our skills, develop new ones, and take the necessary steps to maintain our bodies and our minds. Many churches even provide self- improvement programming: such as learning more about the bible, or peer groups for parents. Self-improvement is not “bad,” it’s just that we don’t want to confuse it with the new life of the resurrection.

A good illustration for self-improvement is the return of spring flowers and trees. Last year, a cluster of tulips sent up maybe four or five flower stems, and this year, because the bulb has grown underneath the soil, the same cluster will send up seven or eight flower stems. That’s not new life, its self-improvement. We knew the flowers were coming when conditions were right. They came back in the same color as last year, in the same spot.

Or we could look to the four copper beeches on the north lawn. As spring approaches, the ends of the branches extend outward another eight to twelve inches, and the tightly bound leaf buds that survived winter’s freeze, not begin to unfold. That’s self-improvement. It’s the same tree, with the same branches, in the same spot, only a little bit bigger than last year, with room for a few dozen more leaves. This is not the new life of grace, its just springtime, and we know it will happen again next spring.

Just because things are “different” doesn’t mean we are living the new life of resurrection. The new life of grace is altogether different, unexpected, surprising, it changes everything and there is no going back. When the Israelites stepped foot on the dry land of Sinai after passing through the Red Sea, things weren’t just “different” they were new. And as the waters closed back over Pharaoh’s army, they realized there was no going back. That’s what the resurrected life of Christ is like. When we participate in Christ’s resurrection, we hardly feel like the same person. We not only feel the joy of the new life, we also feel like we have suffered the same death – as final and as inert. Keep working on improving yourselves, but it’s not what we proclaim to the world. It is not the hope we have to offer. It is not our salvation. New life brings a new order, a new way of doing things, business as unusual, business as extraordinary.

Another word of warning: not everything we think of as salvation is salvation. I’m speaking primarily of that element which most, if not all of us believe would radically transform our lives and save us from a multitude of stresses and pressures: I’m referring of course to “mo’ money.” I like to call it the great god Mo’ – mo’ money, mo’ cars, more houses, more gadgets, more toys, more, more, more. The great god Mo’ tells us that if we only have Mo, everything will be alright – no mo’ troubles.

This message is proclaimed loud and long in our culture. Did you see how the Poughkeepsie Journal told the story of Mo’? Last Thursday, buried in the second section, they ran a photograph of a priest at Mt. Carmel Church washing the feet of the parish board. There was no story, just a photo and a couple of lines – so much for servant ministry, resulting from a new life of grace. A couple of weeks earlier, splashed across the front page, the top story, a headline event: “Local woman wins a million dollars in State lottery.” This is big news. She will receive $13,000 per week for the foreseeable future, from which taxes and fees will be withdrawn. The woman got mo’ money. One local woman’s troubles seem to be over. This is the stuff headlines are made of. Shout it from the rooftops. If the Journal had not reported the story, the very stones themselves would have lifted their voice in praise.

But, let’s not report that tens of thousands of local people have enormous trouble making ends meet, or paying their rent, or raising their children adequately. Let’s not report that the woman who won the lottery did so not out of her hard work, or her commitment to community service, or through the exercise of any skill she has honed. She won out of plain, simple, dumb luck. Let’s not report that millions of dollars will find their way into her bank account by impoverishing millions of fellow New Yorkers, fellow worshippers of the great god Mo’. Let’s also not report five, ten, or twenty years down the road to see if in fact, all of her troubles have disappeared.

Winning $13,000 a week for the rest of our lives might make us think that we are living a new life. But I believe with all my heart, that in doing so, we are actually living the same life, the exact same life, only now we just have more money in our pockets. Winning the state lottery does not bring us to the new life of grace.

The resurrected life is hope because the life we lead will always break down at some point. The life we lead cannot be trusted in the end. No amount of self-improvement, no amount of money, will protect us from our lives falling apart at some point and at some time. Every system we put together will falter. Every process and every institution will at some point or other fail. In that moment of failure, in that moment of breakdown, we find ourselves nailed to the cross with Christ, and we die. Death is our hope, our only hope. For, out of the tomb, God raises us to a new life, a new order, a new way of being human, a whole new outlook. We are reborn in the Spirit.

Just for fun some day when you have a few minutes, take a copy of the hymnal in your pew and look through it to find the number of hymn texts written within the first five years after WWI and WWII. If you make a list of them all, you will end up with a long list. The reason of course is that if things fall apart on such a grand scale to cause a World War, when it is finally over, everyone finds themselves saying, “What can we do to prevent that from every happening again!” How can we put in place a new order, a new way of doing things so that we never have to go through that kind of suffering again? So we write hymn texts, and we movies depicting the horrors of combat, and we establish institutions like the League of Nations and the United Nations. Major breakdowns on a global scale have a way of softening hearts that have grown hard and brittle. Like Pharaoh, whose heart was hardened against the Hebrews, found his heart softened when the first born in the land were killed by the angel of death, and a new order emerged from their graves.

A breakdown often leads to a breakthrough. A breakdown is therefore an opportunity, and a major breakdown is a major opportunity. “World peace” that elusive goal for which so many long, will not come about, in my opinion, by talking about it, writing songs about it, or persuading hardened hearts to embrace it. A new and peaceful world order will only come about through a major and devastating catastrophe or tragedy. The cross always precedes new life. If such a major tragedy occurs in our lifetime, I pray that our world leaders will have the courage and the wisdom to seize the opportunity made possible by the consequent softening of hearts. In the book of Ezekiel, the prophet tells us that God is a heart surgeon. (Some of you may not have known that.) God will remove our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh. God will take out cold, hard and unfeeling hearts, and in their place, insert compassionate, caring, and empathetic hearts. Nothing softens a human heart like tragedy, needless and painful tragedy – like execution on a cross, like a war that consumes an entire planet, like high school students shooting their classmates in cold blood, and other such events. Our newly compassionate hearts are open to new ways of living so that these kinds of tragedies and these kinds of pains will never be felt again.

The cross is tragedy, and world is filled with crosses. But the good news we proclaim, in the name of Christ, is that out of tragedy, God will lift us to a new life, and a new way. The even better news is that God did not cease resurrection two thousand years ago. Jesus was not God’s last resurrection, he was God’s first. Our lives can be made new. We can be reborn in God’s Spirit. The dawn of Easter Day shines for us. Holding only the courage to take up our crosses, and follow to the end, God greets us with a powerfully new way of living, and the world is made new. All that’s left to be said is Alleluia.

Return to Sermons Page