Easter Day - Skip Windsor

Colossians 3:1-4

A Happy Thing

O God, open our hearts to your word – a word that passes swiftly and faithfully from the ear to the heart, from the heart to the life. Amen.

A grandmother told me not too long ago about the time she took her five-year old grandson for the first time to a carwash. As the car entered the enfolding darkness, sprayed with brightly colored soaps, soaked with high pressure hoses, and blasted with drying fans, the grandson looked up at his grandmother with a worried look and asked, “Grandma, is this a happy thing?”

“Is this a happy thing?” I think these words may capture something of what the first disciples were thinking when Mary burst into the upper room and told them that the tomb of Jesus was empty. At first, they may have thought it a bad thing until they received different messages and came to realize for themselves that this was indeed a happy thing.

Easter is a happy day because you and I celebrate a happy thing: Jesus lives! Today is the celebration of our hope in Jesus Christ. The faith of the Christian Church is dependent upon the resurrection. All hinges on the belief that “Christ is risen”. To be clear it was St. Paul who used the words, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” expressing the belief shared by all the earliest Christians.

Each Gospel tells a different resurrection story and each writer gives it his own particular slant. Angels, earthquakes, strange appearances, missing bodies all mark the events of the empty tomb. Our reading selection from John’s Gospel today renders a vivid account of fits and starts, running and stopping, love and loss, recognition and mistaken identity. It is a gripping narrative. It is grand story telling; but is it real?

Did Mary actually meet a gardener? Does it matter whether Peter and John actually saw Jesus’ linens folded neatly into two piles in the tomb? What matters, I think, is that Mary, Peter and John left behind their old lives, their frightened selves and became a transformed people. Somehow, in an odd and mysterious way, the resurrection of Jesus was not just about him. Rising from the dead was not done as some selfish act of God to liberate God’s son.

The resurrection of Jesus was about, and for, Mary, Peter, John and all the disciples. No longer was Jesus a “he:” some separate entity distanced from them. Now, Jesus became part of them. He and they were as one: still separate persons but intensely and mysteriously unified. “No longer,” as St. Paul writes, “do I live but the Christ within me.”

The late Peter Gomes of Harvard’s Memorial Church writes that you and I are called to be “Easter Christians.” We are to put off and set aside the old life and put on Christ. We are to put away anger, wrath, malice, and slander and to put on kindness, humility, and compassion. Gomes is realistic enough to note such biblical mandates come with a sobering reproach:

“The great trick in our intellectual world is to think of something we want to do and then imagine it to be so impossible as not to be able to do it which relieves us of the responsibility of trying to do it.” Gomes believes that these attributes of wholeness, integrity and authenticity are waiting to be summoned forth so that we can walk a new life as a resurrected people.

In our epistle lesson for today from Colossians, the apostle Paul writes, we are to take off the old and put on the new.

I am reminded of the story told by the Christian author, Max Lucado, called “Take it off? Take it all off.” It is the story Bob, who was born into the land of coats and was persuaded by various people to wear a variety of coats, depending upon which color of coat they were wearing themselves.

Bob got so good at changing coats so swiftly, depending upon whom he was with, that he became very popular. But, one day, Bob met a man who wore no coat, and who advised him to take off all his coats and “let the world see who you truly are.” So Bob was left to ponder the question, “Take them off? Take them all off?”

The advice of the man in the story is the same advice Paul offers in his Epistle to the Colossians. Using his words from another biblical translation called The Message,

Paul writes: “If you are serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with things right in front of you. Look up and be alert to what is going on around Christ – That’s where the action is. See things from his perspective. Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life – even though invisible to spectators – is with Christ in God. Christ is your real life” (Col. 3:1-4).

To take seriously the resurrection of Jesus is to see our lives differently. To paraphrase the poet Emily Dickinson we are to see it slant. To live into this new life in Christ, which may be invisible to others, is to seek a change of consciousness from being merely observers of an unfolding story but participants in the continuing narrative of salvation.

In the beginning God created the world to have a relationship with creation. This love was to become visibly manifested; and this love was shown most exquisitely through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. God took this risk to love; and the resurrection is God’s invitation to us to take the same kind of risk of love in our lives today.

Resurrection is not written in books alone. We are eyewitnesses to it everyday:

We see resurrection when one small black Anglican bishop and a long imprisoned man say no to apartheid and dismantle a country of oppression re-creating a new world of liberation and justice.

We see resurrection in the rescue of 33 entombed Chilean miners who were buried alive for 69 days

Resurrection is known when the organs of a brain dead man are given to three people who are able to live now because of him.

I see resurrection in the hopeless face of a Haitian girl who thought she would never walk again but brightens as she takes her first steps because of the compassion and ingenuity of a physical therapist

I see resurrection in a terminally ill woman who spends the remaining days of her life teaching a special needs boy how to live with strength and courage by her own brave example of compassion.

I see resurrection in a lost boy who was bewildered and beleaguered by drugs and alcohol that died to his old self and lives now a new life by selflessly serving his country.

Resurrection is about experience as much as it is about belief. Signs of resurrection surround us daily if we have the eyes to see. Easter is not a past event but is the event of our lives.

At Easter, you and I rediscover that behind the universe is a God who brings love, hope, and promise to everyone. Death is not the end because Christ is risen. In this sure knowledge, you and I live not just with a hope but live in the Body of Hope with the one we call Savior: Jesus Christ.

This is a happy thing – a very happy thing!