Living the Promise of Resurrection
In this Cooperstown community – and wider community – we know about sudden deaths, and how they can shake and rock our equilibrium. When we confront the stark realities of life, it would seem that death has the last word in our lives.
How do we keep before us and live the promise of resurrection?
I wonder: in Luke’s telling of the Easter story, what was the power that drove the women to the tomb and then home again? What was the force that moved Peter from paralyzed numbness to active wonder? Something in each of them moved them from the fear of death into a full-on embrace of life. I believe that’s where we all want to be, regardless of where we are on the journey of faith. I think we all want to move from the fear of death to a full-on embrace of life. For we know, deep down, that fear-based relationships are unhealthy, that fear-based politics is dangerous.
The Easter mystery is just that – a mystery. Resurrection, I believe, is not a doctrine to be explained, but a confession to be proclaimed -- just as on that first Easter.
If our Easter message is to have any heft, and not to be some saccharine gospel, we need to acknowledge that Easter does not prevent bad things from happening... And we must not gloss over bad things when they happen. Our real human situation – our life, our suffering, our mortality, our hope – matters so much to God that, as another preacher has pointed out, “Easter, our greatest godly celebration, takes place in a grave.” Grace and gravity.
The Easter miracle is the power of God’s love and life in the human condition, not in spite of it or against it or above it or beyond it. Our Easter joy must drive us down into the depths of human suffering, where resurrection matters most. I agree with the pastor and professor Mary Luti: if down in the depths we do not steadfastly offer Easter’s tenacious hope-against-hope; if the full-throated alleluias of our Easter liturgy are not also the thunderous “No’s” of God to the despairing deaths that stalk the world; if Easter indulges even the mildest indifference to the immense reservoir of human suffering, it is not Easter.
We don’t know what resurrection will mean for us in the end. We cannot know how it will feel, how it will work, or how it will look. But I know this: I would not have the strength or the courage to approach the pulpit and proclaim this Easter hope, if I did not at the end of the day know the power and presence and poignancy of God's amazing love; if I did not see evidence of the resurrection.
Did you see the pictures and read the story of the Pope’s washing the feet of refugees? That’s resurrection. Have you seen the way this community comes together at the time of tragedy? That’s resurrection. When, where, how have you been a witness to grace and life? to forgiveness? to hope?
That’s resurrection.
In the words of theologian Leonardo Boff: “Wherever an authentically human life is growing in the world, wherever justice is triumphing over the instincts of domination, wherever love is getting the better of selfish interests, and wherever hope is resisting the lure of cynicism or despair, there the [promise] of resurrection is being turned into reality.”
I pray that by God’s grace and power at work in our lives, this may be so.
~Pastor Elsie
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