Homily preached at Evensong at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
April 16, 2020 / Easter Thursday
1 Corinthians 15:41-50
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Happy Easter everyone. We find ourselves now in the period which the authors of the church calendar call “Eastertide,” -tide being a suffix related etymologically to the word time. Eastertide is a season, a period of 50 days when Christians commemorate and celebrate the Cross, the tomb, and the resurrection of our Lord from the grave.
This is not without its irony, this particular year, when for the first time in the history of the Christian west, most churches were closed on Easter Day. And yet Easter has happened anyway, commemorated—as it always is—on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.
If anything, there is a lesson in the apparent disparity between the emptiness of our churches and our breathtaking proclamation that The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia! The lesson is that none of the promises of the Christian faith has ANYTHING whatsoever do to with what we as humans bring to the table. None of it depends on how great we are as humans, how much effort we put into anything, how many events we put on or programs we mount. And that’s good news.
As St Paul writes in our second lesson this evening, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”[1] The chief actor in the cosmic drama is God, and our salvation has been worked out through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Our lives as Christians are a response to the dazzling announcement of the angel at the tomb, “He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said.”[2] As HE said.
Even still, there is cause for rejoicing, and we will observe the full 50 days, and we will not forget that in the rest of the year every Sunday is called the Lord’s day, because it too is a kind of mini-Easter, when we who are baptized into Christ celebrate his death and resurrection.
It is true that we are living through a singular Eastertide. Markets are down. Unemployment is high. Hospitals in our part of the world are bursting at the seams, as doctors and nurses and all health professionals are working around the clock under extreme conditions. People are dying in huge numbers, and the most surreal part for your preacher is how many of us are spending most of our time at home, cut off from both the worst of the crisis and the comfortable norms of human society.
This week, I heard an Easter message from a clergyman who had not only been infected with the coronavirus; while I was busy not giving up anything for Lent, he was in the ICU. It is a small miracle that he should have survived, and so we can imagine that this Easter holds for him a particular poignancy, and a particular evangelistic hope. Here is a part of what he said in that message:
God has always seen me through, through all the difficult things in my life; every time he has brought me safely to the beginning of a new day. And while I was lying in hospital, I always felt that he was going to do that for me now. And of course that’s his promise to every baptized Christian: that he will see us through everything that we have to face, even in the end that he’ll see us through death itself.[3]
Even in the end, he will see us through death itself.
That is the Easter message: that God never gives up on us, never leaves us, and in dying on the cross, has accompanied us even to the grave. But that’s not where it ends. “As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.”[4] Christ brings us along with him through death into life, from a world that is dominated by sin and death and sorrow and destruction into the coming age of God.[5]
There could be no better news with which to face the challenges that await us.
AMEN.
[1] 1 Corinthians 15:50
[2] Matthew 28:6
[3] The Rev. Timothy A.R. Cole, introduction to Morning Prayer for Easter Day, Christ Church, Georgetown, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG-1UXIkdZQ
[4] 1 Corinthians 15:48-49
[5] Morna Hooker, Not Ashamed of the Gospel: New Testament Interpretations of the Death of Christ (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 36.