Easter Day Sermon

Sermon Preached on Easter Day at Holy Trinity and St Adamnan's, Kilmaveonaig

OK, here we are Easter morning, we’ve heard the Gospel Story,

Jesus has risen, what does this mean for us, for humanity, what on earth is this all about. We’ve come to the point in the story of Jesus, the man where everything goes ‘weird’, we’ve been through Holy week we’ve lived through the agony, the pain the suffering, but this is the point beyond which we cannot go, we could share in imagination Jesus’ suffering, we could watch and pray, but resurrection, now that’s different we can’t share that, what it comes down to now is a question of faith of mystery of wonder. So what on earth is it all about, what was God doing that first Easter morning.

Perhaps the only way to understand the resurrection is as Rowan Williams says to understand that:

“There is no short cut to Easter. It would be a bitter paradox if the effect of Easter hymns and Easter preaching were to bury the reality of the crucified”

So this morning let us try to look at  the reality of the crucified, I have tried to put into words  the whole Good Friday & Easter experience though the eyes of one of the disciples, a few years later  describing  their feelings, speaking their understanding of what happened and its significance for us all. The disciple speaks:

“They killed him and in a way killed things in me too. You see, when He died on that cross, all of my hopes, dreams, and understanding of life, God and faith died there with Him. It wasn’t just my hopes and dreams, but the hopes and dreams of all of us! We thought we knew what it was all about, we knew all the stories about the Messiah, how he would come to save us, the Jewish people, we just knew that he was going to make  life  a whole lot better. Now  we had heard Jesus tell us that He would die but perhaps we weren’t listening clearly because it just didn’t make any sense and so, to help you understand  to help you make sense of the stories you’ve heard, I’m going to begin at the  beginning to give you a clear picture.
It all started for me about a couple of years before they killed Him, I heard about this strange prophet Jesus, roaming the countryside. He talked about God’s rule in a way that just struck people as odd. We knew He couldn’t really be serious about it, but He kept on about how God wanted more direct contact with people, especially the scum of society, so it seemed. Jesus went around all over the place, doing things, healing those with various ailments, deformities, and serious problems. Well the healings were one thing, but the message was another. If it weren’t for the miracles, many of us might have just brushed Him off as some eccentric lunatic. But once you began listening, it just seemed like it was the rest of the world that was crazy and He was the only sane one around!
He talked about love and how God loved everyone, even the people we couldn’t stand. He taught about worshipping God in wholeness and sincerity of heart, rather than just following the rules. He preached about a God of grace and mercy, when the God that we knew was capable of harsh justice. His preaching often went directly against the standard interpretations of the Law. It set many people’s teeth on edge. It made them uncomfortable and exposed the shallow foundation on which they built their lives.
So in the end, it seems to me, they had to killed him, to protect their understanding of reality, of God, of truth, and the comfort of the status quo. They killed our hopes, our yearning for intimacy with God, our burning desire for life to have greater meaning.. They threw us into a pit, a pit of despair, dread, fear, and gross uncertainty. We ran away and some of us hid as He was arrested, tried, beaten and nailed to the cross.
I can still see us, our hope melting into despair as Jesus trudged along on the way to Golgotha. Oh yes we wanted to protest, but we were frightened. We wanted to rise up and fight to protect him, even as Peter had tried to do in Gethsemane. We didn’t want to let them kill Jesus, for all of our hopes and dreams depended upon Jesus being alive! If Jesus were to die, our hopes would be destroyed and our lives would revert to meaningless actions with no future, hope, or direction. But in some strange way that was the point and I now believe that was why it happened.
As strange and harsh as it seemed to us at the time, Jesus wanted our dreams and hopes to melt away. He wanted our understanding of faith and God and life to be destroyed once and for all, because He had something more to offer.
You see as long as Jesus was alive, we could still cling to our ideas of an earthly Messiah who would wage war on Rome, declare Jewish independence, grant us wealth, prominence, and political power. He didn’t want us to live with those hopes and dreams. He didn’t want anyone to reduce Him to a worker of miracles. He wanted us to grasp the true reality of God, the reality of hope, peace, and love.
You see, if I am honest we were still living under a delusion that we could add Jesus’ teaching to the way we knew things to be. (Does that ring any bells with you) We were taking in His words, but we were twisting them into our own view of what life was all about. So those dreams had to be nailed to the cross. It was really the only way for us to confront with finality the inadequacy of what we wanted out of Jesus. He refused to be just an addition to be tacked on to an existing structure. We needed to accept Him for what He declared Himself to be, not for what we wanted out of Him.
Earlier I said that they killed Him. That’s not really true. Strange as it may seem, it was what He wanted to happen all along. He wanted them to pin our hopes and understandings and dreams to that cross so that we might finally accept His message in its own right. He wanted our perspective shattered so that we might finally see that God truly is love and grace and mercy. You see, Jesus was more than a miracle worker. Jesus was more than a great teacher and prophet. He was more than a light in the darkness of stale religious expression
Jesus was/is very God in human flesh, come into our midst that we might catch a glimpse of the reality and breadth of God’s love for us and for all creation. Our hopes and dreams stayed on the cross and went no further.
But our concepts of God as exclusive, vengeful, wrathful, and angry could not make it beyond the cross. Our lack of understanding of what Jesus was really teaching us were shown to be completely false when God allowed Himself to be nailed to the cross. And the enormity of that action and the realization of what it meant for humanity and the whole world changed my life forever.
He didn’t stay there of course and you know the story, he didn’t stay on the cross, he didn’t stay in the tomb and that’s part of the message that we are celebrating and thinking about today today!  Because if he didn’t stay there, neither can we.
When Jesus rose from the grave, he shattered for all time our understanding of life, reality, and God. He forced us to take a new look at the meaning of His words and His life. He forced us to see that God really is interested in everyone. God really does love us, even the outcasts among us. God is not angry with humanity and seeking ways to wreak justice in retaliation. God seeks us out in love to call us to Himself. It was in love that he was born among us, it was in love that he was nailed to the cross, it was in love that he rose again, and it must be in love that we tell his story to the world
And that my friends is your commission, this Easter morning to tell the world by your lives and examples that God is love, that he loves each one of us and was ready to risk everything to show that love, once and for all in his son’s life, death and glorious resurrection”