Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Easter sermon


The commercialization of Easter with cute bunny rabbits and plastic Easter eggs can make it appear trivial. But the Resurrection is anything but trivial. That Easter day long ago changed history and changes our lives today.

Easter Day 2010
Transcribed from a sermon given by
The Rev. Valerie A. Hart
At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Alleluia.  Christ has risen.

Response:        The Lord has risen indeed.  Alleluia.

You can do better than that. 

Alleluia.  Christ has risen.

Response:        The Lord has risen indeed.  Alleluia.

Much better. 

There’s a story from during the time of the Soviet Empire when the communists were ruling and were trying to eliminate all religion. They had people who were trained to go around through the countryside to all the towns and teach them about atheism.  One of these teachers of atheism, these philosophers, they called them, came to a town.  All the people were gathered because they didn’t have any choice about coming.

In this large auditorium he expounded eloquently on how atheism was the only real truth.  At the end of a couple of hours of exquisite reasoning, he looked down on this group of people and he was sure that he saw shattered faith and hopelessness, that they had been convinced.

There was a moment of silence, and he asked, “Are there any questions?”  There was some more silence.  Then way in the back of the auditorium, a man with a loud and clear voice said, “Christ has risen.”  And the whole auditorium responded, “The Lord has risen indeed.”

Christianity always has responded well to affliction.  When the culture has tried to make Christianity illegal, it has become stronger.  When it has gotten pushed down, it has grown up.  When there have been martyrs, new people have become Christians.  Christianity can resist that kind of thing.

But our culture doesn’t actively resist Christianity.  In fact, it calls itself a Christian culture.  But it has done something more insidious.  It has taken Easter and it has trivialized it.  Easter has become domesticated with cute little chickens and baby rabbits.  And Easter has become commercialized.  We all know this.

It’s become all about springtime.  Easter break is now spring break where you go party.  When you go into the stores, you see all the Easter decorations and all the nice pale spring colors. It’s all very pretty, and it’s all very nice, but not real important.  It’s become trivialized as another time to send cute little cards on Facebook.  Or perhaps you go and visit your family.

But, of course, we know Easter isn’t trivial.  That’s why we’re here.  It makes all the difference in the world.  The commercialization, the making of Easter commercial, to me is very ironic because Jesus, the one who died and has risen again, went into the temple and kicked out the moneychangers because He didn’t want the worship of God to become commercial.

We’ve done a pretty good job with Easter.  You know what I mean. I found this one, which is the one that gets me.  (Holds up a stuffed animal) It looks like a little bunny rabbit, cute, soft, fuzzy little bunny rabbit, but actually, it’s a bear in a bunny costume [Laughter].  What that has to do with the life, death and resurrection of Christ, I have no idea [Laughter]. 

Rabbits became associated with Easter because Easter was also the time of Pagan fertility celebrations, and rabbits are known to be prolific.  Nothing to do with Easter.  And then we’ve got plastic eggs.  Now, real eggs, real colored eggs came to be associated with Easter for a real reason.  The story goes, that Mary Magdalene, after The Resurrection, traveled all over the known world, which was the Roman world at that time, telling people about The Resurrection and her experience of the risen Christ.

And it said that she made it all the way into Caesar’s Palace and was meeting with the emperor.  As she was talking, the emperor said, “That can’t be.  There couldn’t possibly be a man risen from the dead.  That would be like that egg over there on the table turning red.”  She reached over and she picked up the egg, and she raised it up, and it turned bright red.

So if you ever see an icon of Mary Magdalene, you’ll see her holding a red egg.  And that’s why we started dying Easter eggs.  In the Eastern Orthodox Church, the tradition of Easter eggs is taken to a high art, and they still remember Mary Magdalene, and why it was done.

Here in the United States we get plastic ones (Holds up a plastic Easter egg) [Laughter].  You just go to the store and you buy them.  What do these have to do with Easter?  They’re hard.  And you know what?  When you open them up – if you had a real egg, if you really cooked an egg and dyed it and then you opened it up, you’d have something nurturing to eat.  There’s no better protein than eggs.  But when you open up one of these plastic ones, there’s candy inside?  (Walks into congregation with a basket of plastic eggs.) Who wants some candy?  Do you want to pass that [Laughter]?  Yeah.  There.  You want some candy?  Is he allowed to have a little candy? 

Response:  Yeah.

Yeah.  I’ll give you a few.  Who else wants some candy?  Anybody here?  You like candy, Bill?  Oh, Brian.  You’ll take some candy [Laughter].  All right.  Who else is brave?  Who wants to get your sugar high early [Laughter]?  All right.  We got one more here.  One more.  Bill, would you like it?  There we go [Laughter].  Great to get an Easter egg and you get a piece of chocolate candy.  Wow!  And you eat it, and it tastes good, and it’s gone [Laughter].

You’re not really filled up.  In fact, you just want more chocolate.  Sugar and chocolate just make you want more.  And it puts a little weight on too, if that’s an issue for you.  It doesn’t really nurture you.  It doesn’t really give you anything.  It looks like it would.  It has the appearance of something of value, but it’s fleeting.  It’s momentary.  And it doesn’t really nourish you.

But Easter is different.  Easter is not trivial.  Easter is the moment at which history changed.  Nothing has been the same for humanity since that day.  We even have our calendar as before and after that moment.  Everything changed.  And even if you haven’t accepted Christianity, philosophy and the understanding of the nature of humanity changed. 

Everyone has had to deal with and accept the Resurrection of Christ or deny the Resurrection of Christ since that day.  It’s not trivial, and it’s not domesticated.  It’s not a little chicken.  It’s a roaring lion.  It’s not a cute little bunny.  It’s something that transforms our lives.  It’s not safe.  It’s not predictable. 

The women go to the grave, and the first response is fear.  Not domesticated.  And, of course, it’s not commercial because what Easter has to offer is grace.  And grace is free.  You can’t make money off of grace because it’s given by God generously and abundantly. 

We have a tendency in our society to trivialize things.  I was a psychologist before I became a priest, and one of the things I noticed as a psychologist is that we weren’t very good at dealing with guilt.  Now, we were good at dealing with what’s called neurotic guilt, that’s where you feel guilty about something but you really didn’t do anything wrong. 

As a psychologist, we were good at helping people deal with the guilt that something was done to them, and helping them realize that they weren’t responsible for the fact that their mother or father abused them or whatever it is they were feeling guilty about.  We could deal with that kind of guilt.

And we could help people realize that if they felt guilty because they didn’t wash their hands that that wasn’t important.  We could deal with that kind of guilt.  But we had no answer to when someone had deeply wronged another person, when they knew they had hurt someone and they felt guilty about it.  Oh, sometimes in the liberal progressive psychology one could say, “Well, you murdered because you grew up in a poor home and you didn’t have the right upbringing” or whatever.  You blame it on the parents.

But the truth is that’s not dealing with guilt.  That’s making excuses.  And when you’re really feeling guilty and responsible for hurting someone, what you need is someone who will take it seriously, to not trivialize it, to not explain it away, but to acknowledge the pain that we have inside when we know we’ve hurt someone. 

And that’s what we have with Easter.  God never trivialized our guilt.  God never said, “Oh, it’s okay.  I understand.  You had a hard upbringing.  I understand that you’ve hurt other people.”  No.  God never trivializes the way we hurt one another.  But God will forgive it when we acknowledge it.  The God of Jesus Christ is the good father whose son goes off and squanders his money, does all kinds of nasty things.  When he comes home, the father runs to him.  The father wasn’t saying it was okay to do that, the father was expressing his love. 

The answer, what we get at Easter is that God loves us like a good parent.  Acknowledging that we make mistakes, acknowledging that we hurt each other sometimes terribly and cruelly, and yet, even on the cross, Jesus asked for forgiveness for the ones who killed Him. 

The Resurrection says that even when we hurt each other, even when we’re lost, even when we run from God, even when we pretend there’s nothing beyond ourselves, there’s still hope.  Even when we’re dead and lost and hurting inside, there’s still hope because God never gives up on us.  There is always the hope and the promise of the Resurrection.

The resurrected Christ - whatever that means to you - something happened.  Something happened that day when the tomb was empty and the frightened disciples became courageous.  Something happened, and what they tell us happened is that Christ has risen and we’re forgiven and we are loved.  And that makes all the difference.  It brings us hope, it brings us joy, and it brings us new life. 

Alleluia.  Christ has risen.


Response:        The Lord has risen indeed.  Alleluia. 

Monday, March 21, 2016

Easter Vigil 2010


Easter Vigil
Transcribed from a sermon given
Easter Eve of 2010
At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Arroyo Grande, CA
The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

It’s been quite a journey.  We have talked about this Lent as a journey to Jerusalem, as a journey to the Holy City, as a journey to the center, to the center of the labyrinth.  Now some of you may have had an intense and profound Lent having given things up and fasted.  Some of you may have been so busy during the last couple of months you hardly even noticed that Lent was happening. Some of you may have been doing this for a long time or some of you may have just started out.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s all part of the journey.  It’s all part of the journey of salvation history, which is what we heard this evening over in the Perish Hall. 
That is the idea of the Easter Vigil.  The Vigil was originally designed for the people who were about to be baptized. On the eve of Easter, they would literally stay up all night reading scripture to tell the story.  It was a teaching moment.  It was a remembering moment.  It was a time to be with the literature, to be with the history, to be with the journey of the people of God.  Then at sunrise those who had prepared for months would be baptized and have their first Communion on Easter. 
We don’t do it all night.  It’s hard enough to get just a few people here in the evening, let alone do it all night.  But we do remember and read the salvation history, the story of God’s walk with God’s people.  We hear about the Israelites who were in bondage in Egypt, and how God came and called them to leave their bondage, to leave slavery and walk free, and how they came to an obstacle.  They got to the Red Sea, and they couldn’t go any further. They were about to give up. Then God said, “No.  Don’t turn around.  I’ll make a way when it seems like there is no way.”
One of the things that we heard on Thursday night as we reflected on and lived out part of what a Passover meal would be like is that for the Jewish people, when they remember this story at Passover, they don’t remember it as something that happened thousands of years ago.  They remember it as something that has happened to them.  They say, “We got out of bondage in Egypt.  We crossed the Red Sea.”
It’s not even really in the past tense.  It’s something that we’re living today.  We all know what it’s like to be in bondage.  Maybe bondage to a job or a bondage of fear of not having a job.  Maybe bondage to drugs or alcohol or bondage to food or bondage to a relationship or bondage to fear.  We all have ways in which we are not free, in which our lives do not live out of the freedom of choice of the moment, but live out of habit and fear. We all know what it’s like to be in bondage.  And so just as thousands of years ago the people of Israel were invited to leave the bondage of Egypt, we are always invited to leave whatever it is that binds us and to walk free.
 And we may have freed ourselves from something and then run into an obstacle.  We’re always running into obstacles.  We’re always running into times when we want to turn back. We remember what it was like for the Israelites.  They got hungry, and they remembered there were onions, there were leeks and there were other good things in Egypt.  We should go back they told Moses.  Sometimes when we are seeking our freedom, we feel like we need to go back; we remember the good old days.
Or sometimes we run into an obstacle where we feel like there is no way that we can move forward in our lives, that we’re stuck, we can’t move forward.  But God opens the way.  God just parts that Red Sea, that obstacle that looked impossible, just opened it right up, and the people walked through.  No matter what the obstacles we face in our lives right now, God is with us opening them up.
And we read Isaiah who was speaking to people who were in exile.  He said, “Come you who are hungry and thirsty.  Eat and drink in abundance.  If you hunger, eat and drink.”  He talks of the abundance of God, that God just wants to shower good things on us.  Back then God wanted to do it, right now God wants to do it, tomorrow God will want to do it. To those who hunger for God, who hunger for peace, who hunger for joy, God will be there.  If we thirst for love, if we thirst for God’s presence, God wants to provide for us.  Salvation is offered to everyone.  Mercy is offered to everyone.
Then we read how God is giving a new heart.  Not just back then, not just to them, but to us and to everyone on earth because for God time is not like it is for us. We live in linear time, but God lives in some other kind of time.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s not linear.  I know that.  And God is not limited to one place.  God isn’t just offering salvation to us or to the people of Israel or to the people in Africa or to people who believe in a certain way.  God is offering God’s love to everybody all the time everywhere.  Always was, always will be. 
And then we heard about the dry bones. Who can forget when Fred reads about the dry bones? Of course the writer was not talking about literal dry bones.  He was talking about the people, the people of his country who had become dead inside.  They had become spiritually dead, and the prophet was feeling hopeless.  “I talk to these people and they’re dead.  It’s like talking to a pile of bones.” Then God says to the prophet, “Is there life in those bones?”  The prophet says to God, “You know.  I don’t.  I don’t have any hope for these people, but, God, you’re in charge.”  Then God says to the prophet, “Prophecy and make these bones come alive.”  And he speaks to the bones and says, “Come alive.”  And they start getting back together again.  But they aren’t fully alive until God breathes the spirit into their nostrils. 
Tonight, yesterday and tomorrow God is speaking to the dry bones, to people who are spiritually dry, so that whatever in us that’s not fully alive can live.  The bones can come back together and new life is breathed into them.  And that is called resurrection, which, of course, is what we’re celebrating tonight.  That Christ died and was buried. Then people went to the grave not knowing what to expect.  They discovered it wasn’t a dead body, it was an empty grave, and then they even met Jesus. And they were fearful and joyful. 
In all of the stories about the resurrection, the response is fear and joy because there’s something about it that when we realize, when we come to know that Christ died and is risen for us, that we will not die, that there is that much love in the universe, that God cares for us that much, there’s something scary about that because there’s nowhere to hide.  We can’t hide in our fear.  We can’t hide in our doubt.  We’re called to step out of Egypt.  We’re called to cross the Red Sea.
How can you look at a resurrected Christ and not accept a new heart and a new mind?  And so it’s kind of scary, but it’s wonderful and joyful.  When we accept it, we are new people.  Each day, every day, but tonight especially, we are invited to open our hearts and minds and let God’s love that shone through Christ come into us, transform us, and make us whole. 

Amen.