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.
