ANCIENT TRUTH – TIMELESS MESSAGE

Easter Day

4 April, AD 2010

TEXT:  St. John 20:1 – 10.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.

Alleluia!  The Lord is Risen!

The Lord is Risen, indeed!  Alleluia!

With those words the Church has greeted the dawn of Easter Day throughout most of its twenty-one centuries.  They proclaim an ancient truth and with them, its timeless message.  For the event which we celebrate and commemorate this day was like none other in the course of human history and will be like none other until God, Himself, returns; bringing history and time, as we know it now, to a close.  But until that time comes, we live, here and now, in the fullness of the Easter reality and are called to be transformed by it; never to return to our former ways or our former state of being.

From the writings of St. Bede we find that it was only after the fourth century AD that the Church began to call this day – Easter; in honor of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of Spring, Eostre.  I suppose that is why chocolate bunnies, marshmallow chicks, and jelly bean eggs came to be associated with this holy-day, because of its close association with Spring-time; when the earth awakens, once again, out of its frozen death.  But the ancient Church didn’t know anything about the word Easter.  Today, and what became the fifty-day long celebration of Our Lord’s Resurrection from the Dead and His mighty acts performed after His Resurrection before His Ascension into Heaven, was first called Pascha, from the Hebrew word pesakh or “Passover”, which unquestionably connects what happened in the tomb on Easter morning with the event in Jewish history when the Hebrews were lead out of captivity from Egypt by God through His servant Moses and those events which occurred the night before that Exodus when the angel of Death “passed over” those Jewish homes on which the blood of the lamb had been sprinkled.  Now, were the Resurrection of Jesus just a re-enactment of that great Passover event, we might not be sitting here this morning.  But we know that the Resurrection of Jesus from the Dead was more than that – that no man had ever been dead and come back to life, never to die again.  That happened once, for all mankind, never again to be repeated and with it came Redemption for all humanity – you and me – so that our relationship with the God who created us would be restored to its original condition from before the time of our first disobedience and we could live with God in the manner in which He created us to be and never experience spiritual death or oblivion.  This is the fundamental tenet of the Christian belief; the ancient truth and its timeless message and it is asserted to and proclaimed by all the writings of the New Testament and the Creeds.

But how is it that an ancient Truth has a timeless message?  How is the two thousand year old Easter event relevant to those of us in post post-modernism?  Haven’t we grown beyond that intellectually?  I mean do we really still believe it?  Out in the world, in society, it would seem, perhaps, not so much.  In this world of instant this and instant that, a society known for instant gratification, some Churches, on the one hand, have seemed to cave into instant religion.  I am talking about an article I saw in yesterday’s News and Observer which had the title of “Story of Easter – To Go”.  Now a title like that was obviously designed to grab the attention of anyone perusing the paper, so I stopped and read it.  The subtitle read, “Churches cater to lifestyles of busy families”.  As you can imagine, my annoyance was growing.  I had to read more.  It seems that a local Baptist church has been putting on a drive-thru panorama of Jesus’ last days; resplendent with props, concrete animals, numerous costumes, and many actors; similar to a live Nativity at Christmas, but on a much grander and larger scale.  That, in and of itself, is a good thing because it exposes people who might otherwise not know about Jesus, His Passion, Crucifixion, and His Resurrection to that ancient truth and timeless message and through their efforts some might be “saved”.  But what really annoyed me in that article was this, “For churches, the drive-through is an effective way to deliver their message to people who may not have the time to sit and stay for a full sermon.”  A full sermon!?!?  How long could a full sermon possibly be?  We’re not talking a Senate filibuster, here.  Now I know that some “preachers” of certain varieties go on and on and on, but they are also sensitive to the fact that even their tummies start rumbling and they want to get to Sunday Dinner as well.  So in the great scheme of things, I ask again, how long could a sermon possibly take when one’s soul hangs in the balance?  The article went on to say, “Religions in America have learned to adapt their practices to the larger culture in which they live, said David King, who teaches American religious history at Emory University in Atlanta.” . . . “They have adapted to the rest of the marketplace because they’ve had to.”  This is in stark contrast to and in total defiance of and a cop-out, really, from what H. Richard Niebuhr taught in his book, Christ and Culture in which he said that the message of Jesus Christ and His Resurrection should transform society, and not the other way around – where society dictates to or otherwise transforms Jesus Christ and the message of His Resurrection into drive up Confessionals or Ashes on Ash Wednesday to go or even in these religious communities called Mega-Churches which practice “feel-good, warm fuzzy” religion to the exclusion of any mention of the Suffering, Passion, or Death of Jesus – what He endured to give us new and unending Life or the impact that sin still has on the world today.  By not considering these aspects, they miss a crucial part of the message of Easter in particular and of Christianity in general.  Because, as we have said time and time again, you cannot truly understand or even begin to comprehend the magnitude of Jesus’ Resurrection and Easter’s message of new Creation and unending Life, unless you take the time and walk with Jesus during the last week of His Life on earth.  That is why our corporate worship is so important, and that at any Church for which I am responsible, we will celebrate Holy Week and the Sacred Triduum, because it does a dis-service to the faithful to go simply from the joys of the Triumphant Entry on Palm Sunday to the Sunday of the Resurrection without at least hearing about, understanding, and experiencing what Jesus went through to give us new, abundant, and unending Life in Him.  Granted, this takes a little longer than the time to go through a drive-through, but the effects and the benefit to your soul last an eternity.  

If we had to sum up the ancient truth and timeless message of Easter, it would be this:  God, whose Holy Spirit moved across the face of the waters at the beginning of Creation and then breathed His own Life into the nostrils of Mankind, created in His own image and likeness, who then rebelled against God through disobedience, sent His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ to earth in the form of a human-being to reconcile Mankind back to our Creator God through the Resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ, from the Dead on the first Day of the week, at which time we were made new creatures, new beings, restored to the image and likeness of God who created us, never again to be separated from God in this life or the next, if we believe in Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Saviour and invest the time to get to know Jesus most intimately.  Once we, ourselves, are transformed by God’s Redeeming Love, then we are called as an Easter people to take that Love out into a world which has been ravaged by sin, death, and Hell and reclaim it, little by little, soul by soul for Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven.  Don’t let people try to convince you that you don’t have the time to do this or to come to Church and don’t let your social situation or schedule dictate the final disposition of your immortal soul.  Because you can do all of this, and I have seen some of you doing this, by the way you live your life on a daily basis – just going around quietly, living your life for Jesus’ sake and making a louder witness for Jesus than any sermon from any pulpit could.  By claiming the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Day – this day, and then taking that reality out into the world in which you live, you come to personify the ancient truth and the timeless message of God’s Love for this world and the Life of the world to come.  May your Easter season be full of the never-ending Joy that only the knowledge of Jesus Christ and His Resurrection can bring.  So, in the Name of Holy Mother Church, we proclaim, Alleluia!  The Lord is Risen!  The Lord is Risen, indeed!  Alleluia!

And now, unto God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost be ascribed all might majesty, power, and dominion as is most justly due this day both now and forevermore; world without end.  Amen.    

SOLI DEO GLORIA – JEUསྙ