Easter Sunday: Practice Resurrection!

Matthew 28:1-10 

           In my office, I have a US Forest Service sign and poster that reads, “Who passed this way?” showing an assortment of native and pioneer faces. Underneath, in a somewhat smaller font, it reads: “Please Don’t Erase The Traces of America’s Past.” I have that sign hidden back behind the desk in my study, because I’m half-expecting that the Forest Service will be knocking on my door and arresting me for having it tomorrow.

            How this sign came to me (legally, cough cough) is maybe interesting but not so important, but as I think about Easter, and especially the report of Easter from the women at the tomb, I am intrigued by the way we consider Easter both an historical event and a game-changer that turns our lives upside-down, even two-thousand years later. Today, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but we don’t celebrate it like we do Memorial Day or even Thanksgiving, whose significance is tied to memory. The resurrection is more than that Forest Service sign; it does more than beg us to remember the past. Easter does not live in a museum. It is not some fossilized reminder of a thing that happened once, which we must excavate each year. Easter colors everything.

I want to talk today about why.

            Like many of you, my eyes were drawn to Notre Dame last week as that famed cathedral caught fire. The majesty of that church and the history held within capture our imaginations in a multitude of ways, but the cathedral itself is only an incredibly impressive antiquity. People discover God there—no doubt!—but as I listened to the coverage, I heard the value of that building equated time and again with its age. I get it (I do!). Magnificent, old churches have character and a patina where the very air you breathe feels ancient, pregnant with the weight of the divine. And, yet, the worship of relics for relics’ sake is another way of treating Easter as just another historical event. God is more than a god of history; God is the God of right now.

            The resurrection of Jesus is the life-blood of the Christian faith; it is the thing that moves us, and we remember the resurrection not just by study and devotion but also by practicing resurrection daily. Practice resurrection! This is the concluding line of a poem by Wendell Berry (in his Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front) that might be the most important call to attention for Christians in this 21^st century, because it takes something that we assume to be passive—God will raise us; we are the object of the God’s action—and it transforms resurrection into something we participate in. Of course we can’t resurrect ourselves, but we can live out of the grace of God that this Easter morning instills in our souls.

Practice resurrection, because the life of Christ frees you to be not just a dead sinner, not just a repeater of clichés, and not just a thoughtless sheep. You are not defined by your consumption, or your bank account, or your batting average, because to practice resurrection is to die to all the score-keeeping—to see yourself as nothing but the dead creature you will one day be, returned to the soil from which human beings came, so that you can be reborn in the spring of God’s grace. And that spring bursts forth every spring on Easter, but also when we wake up in the morning and discover God’s mercies are new every day. To be an Easter-person is not to be a mere survivor; it is to be a person once dead but now alive. It is to be a child of the resurrection.

And children of the resurrection are contrarians. That’s right, we are every parent’s worst nightmare: We are children who zig when we are told to zag, who keep repeating “Why?” to a world that is sick and tired of giving us answers, and we are this way not out of petulance, but because being a follower of Jesus Christ means being a contrarian to a world whose basic tenets assume that all this is temporary. The currents of everyday life are built on the foundation of a world where everything comes to an end.

            In the normal, everyday life we experience where the dead stay dead, we have certain ideals we strive after—freedom, for one—and we take that freedom and we use it to stand in line for the same things that everybody else is waiting on. We buy the same houses, vacation to the same resorts, hike the same mountains, join the same clubs, start the same diets, and pray the same prayers, particularly that nothing bad will happen to us or those we love, so that they will be able to have the same experiences one day that everybody else is having.
            To be a child of Easter is to be a contrarian, because suddenly the dead don’t stay dead. And if the dead don’t stay dead, then we might use our freedom to do something radical. We might alter course and choose to sacrifice our desires for the sake of others. We might give up the easy gain for the harder road and the quieter reward. If the dead don’t stay dead, then we might find that death is not the thing to be feared, and we might take chances, accepting that not everything we do will work out, but what of it? God will catch us when we fall.

            So, practice resurrection! Remember that Christ is risen, so we shall too! Then, let that awareness of God’s history impact every fiber of your being. Let it change you, so you might zig where others zag, not out of selfish gain, but out of the good, hard work of following the God who created you to be who you are. Look inside yourself and discover that weird, strange, awkward child of God that is not like the rest of the humans, and be contrary, but do so for the sake of loving God and loving people. Practice resurrection.

            When the dead don’t stay dead, then the world opens up to you. You can be who God created you to be. You can chart your own course. Most of all, you can feel that weight of whatever you are carrying fade away, because Jesus died to remove that burden from you, and he rose from the dead so that you might live free from proving yourself to anybody. When the dead don’t stay dead, then the oppressors run in fear. When the dead don’t stay dead, then those who have rigged the game in their favor discover that the game was not what they thought it was. Most of all, when the dead don’t stay dead, you are not judged on your failings but by the righteousness of God that has you covered.

            Easter is the celebration of the resurrection. May that resurrection remind you, and inspire you, to live truly free, knowing that the dead won’t stay dead. So, be a contrarian, never fall in line, and live as if the world is ablaze with God’s grace. Practice resurrection! Because when the dead don’t stay dead, we come alive.