Easter Sermon by Bishop Audrey Scanlan

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

It’s been a busy Holy Week in our house. Well, there have been services to attend and sermons to write and music to practice. But this year there’s been an extra layer of involvement, the katakesis of a sort of two small grandchildren in California, ages four and six, who have suddenly developed an interest in the Easter story and are trying to figure it all out. I guess I started it. You see, I mailed them a small picture book called The Story of Easter. I liked this book because it’s told the Holy Week story without a bunny rabbit in sight.

It also told the Jesus story from the triumphal entry on Palm Sunday right up to the carrying of Jesus’s cross to Golga. The book stopped short of showing the crucifixion or Jesus dying, but it did show the tomb and it told about the joyful resurrection. The first lessons came when our daughter facetimed us on Monday night because there were questions. Where’s the blood? Everett, our six-year-old, demanded. I guess he knew more than I had imagined. He had attended a Methodist preschool for two years after all. And his little sister, currently a student at the same preschool, she nodded in
agreement.

This book was not telling the whole story. So much for grandma sparing her tender grandchildren the gory details. But later in the week, there were more questions by text. I guess that’s how we do it in the 21st century. Why did they put that crown of prickers on Jesus head? Why didn’t his friends help him? Did the people who killed Jesus go to jail?

And where where was Jesus’s house? I did my best to come up with answers that made sense. I didn’t sugarcoat it. I had learned my lesson and I gave them the information that they wanted and needed to move to a place of understanding. I think they got it. Apparently, Everett was satisfied enough to take the book to his first grade class to teach his peers a few things, our little evangelist. It’s quite a story, especially if it’s somewhat new to you. And for these two children who are in the business of making meaning and gobbling up facts in their complicated wonderful world. It was something to take in to learn to digest.

It is for them and maybe for some of us the way that we come or have come to faith. We discover knowledge and drive truth and faith binds us to it especially in the hard moments when life is challenging. Anglican theologian and author CS Lewis famously wrote, “Faith is the art of holding on to the things your reason has accepted in spite of your changing moods. or I would add despite what the world throws at you. So, back to the Jesus story and the Easter moment of resurrection, we know that the tomb was empty and that according to Matthew, an angel addressed the women and told them that Jesus had risen and that they’d see him later in Galilee.

And we know Matthew tells us that the woman women ran into Jesus as they fled in fear and great joy. They ran smack into him and they worshiped him. We can take these stories and cross reference them with the other gospel stories and arrive at what we hold to be true. And at some point that truth matures into faith. It’s like that old question, is the Bible true? And the answer, the Bible’s true because it reveals truth. In this Easter moment, the truth is that God’s love is too powerful for death to have the last word. God’s dream is for our flourishing. And by Jesus resurrection, we have seen the power of God. And that powerful love brings new life.

And that could be ours by faith. Andrew McGawan, who is the dean at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, he would take it a step further. He writes, “The point of the resurrection isn’t experience or evidence or even faith. As we moderns are constantly tempted to think, it’s action and response. This is where St. Paul was right. Mission, not just belief, is the consequence of Easter faith. Oh, okay. It’s not enough to know it, to hold it as true, and believe it. We’re also compelled by faith to act. to act in response. It seems we’ve learned about that in our baptisms when we promised in our baptismal vows to live and love as Jesus did.

The response of the women at the empty tomb was to run and share the news with the disciples who then headed to Galilee to meet the resurrected Lord. Galilee, the place of Jesus’s ministry of teaching, of healing, of preaching. It made sense that following on the resurrection that Jesus would center his time with the disciples back where his compassion and love was rooted. by meeting his followers again on his home turf to inspire them to their own continued ministry in his name.

And so I wonder on this Easter day in which we glory in daffodils and tulips, a day of singing and feasting and chocolate. What are we going to do with this Easter truth, this Easter faith, this Easter joy? What are we compelled to do as a result of Jesus’s rising?

I pray that in this Easter season, it lasts 50 days, you know, that we will have time to ponder and to act. God knows, I think, that the flourishing that God dreams for us is ours to come by in acts of compassion and gratitude and healing.

May God’s love send us forth rejoicing to serve.

Amen.

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