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.