Sermon Preached at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, March 31, 2024, at 10:00 a.m.
Christ Is Risen!We Are Risen!
“Thank God, because he’s good, because his love never quits. Tell the world, Israel, {no, tell the world, you in Fort Lee!] God’s love never quits.” (Instruction from verse 1 in Psalm 118, Message Translation)
“…that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection.” (Collect, Easter Sunday)
We have just sung my favorite Easter hymn, and I’m so glad we placed it at the opening of this glorious service this morning. “Jesus Christ is risen today!” It says it all, doesn’t it, in one concise phrase? And do you recall the acclamation that is common at this time of the year? I announce, “Alleluia! Christ is risen.” And you reply, “The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!” Isn’t that powerful? But my theme this morning goes even further to the core of the thing. We can also proclaim, can’t we: I can say, “Alleluia! we are risen!” and you can reply, “We are risen indeed! Alleluia!”
Now if we are a bit uncomfortable making such a claim, I want to break us in a bit. I am going to say, “Alleluia! we are risen.” And then we will please reply, “We are risen indeed! Alleluia!” Are you ready? Here goes. “Alleluia! We are risen indeed!” [And the reply comes: “We are risen indeed! Alleluia!”] I might have even preferred for us to say, “I am risen indeed,” instead of “We are risen indeed.” For both are true. We and I are/am risen indeed.
I hope you might be a little startled, even uneasy making such a claim. But if this Easter event does not invade and inform our own personal lives, then I wonder if it doesn’t remain some distant, even half-forgotten and more often ignored event, an event that we bring out once a year and salute like we do the flag on the Fourth of July.
And I wonder how many sermons throughout the world this season talk about the event of Jesus’s resurrection as an event of the long-ago past—when?—in the year 33 anno domini, A.D. They now call A.D. dates CE, meaning “common era.” I’m scrambling to keep up with what is called what these days. However we date it, Jesus’s resurrection is said to have occurred many, many years ago. That date certainly ushered in the Christian era, followed by four beautiful accounts of Jesus’s life and some spectacular letters, particularly from a man named Saul, renamed Paul after his conversion. All of this we can study and learn on our own or in Bible study classes.
But how does what happened back then intersect with our lives? What, in other words, does the Resurrection mean to you? Is it something you carry in your heart? Does it guide and motivate your day? I’m afraid, if we are honest and if I am honest, that this central event of the Christian story may be tucked away on a dusty shelf of our lives and referred to only occasionally, at this time of the year or on the occasion of the death of a loved one.
I want to make two points that might aid in to bring this idea more front and center for us. First, the Resurrection, whatever it means, is not primarily about something that might or will occur after our death. After all, the hymn says, “Jesus Christ is risen today!” Present tense. This is not just commemoration. It is speaking of what is true right here, right now, in our faces. And the second point is that this Resurrection does not just include Jesus, but us as well. The Resurrection is about us, here and now. The Eucharist meal celebrates our life in Christ, as a perpetual, eternal thing bearing down in and through every single moment of our lives, the happy one and the sad ones.
In the slap dab middle of our Communion Prayer we proclaim, “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.” Well, I hope we occasionally ask what this is all about. It is about something happening now. I translate it: “Christ died and shows us that he continues to die. He dies with us as we die. He dies with the children of Gaza as they die. He dies with all those who are forlorn and heavy laden.” Christ himself is with us. And then we say, “Christ is risen.” We do not say, “Christ was risen.” The proclamation is in the present tense. We see in our faith hallelujahs written across history, in our current events, in every single life lived now, whether nominally Christian or not. Christ did not just come for the Jews and Christians. His message is either universal or it is sentimental twaddle. And the third rung of this proclamation: “Christ will come again.” Do you read this as an apocalyptic prediction that Jesus will come back, riding on something or other at the end of time? Good for you if you believe that. I think a lot of our fellow Christians are a long way from thinking like this. “Christ will come again” means to me that Christ is not just in my present but in my future. I can face tomorrow knowing that God is with me. This is what my faith and hope are about. A love that will not let me go.
Now this intersection of the Resurrection in our lives, which simultaneously includes not just the Christ but every single one of us, is something I dare to believe isn’t so foreign to us. In fact, in our heart of hearts we know it, not in the sense of book knowledge but in the sense in which a good friend “knows” his friend.
I’ll close and suggest that each of us reflect on one or two occasions in our lives when the door opens onto what Resurrection is about. Like the rolling away of the rock from the tomb. I had a small but beautiful incident the other day when I was in Richmond for the funeral of the brother of a friend. The family and I were eating dinner, and I just casually asked the daughter of the deceased a question. “Do you think that your father is somehow still with us, that he hasn’t gone anywhere?” And to my amazement, she and her husband both nodded their heads. Ask your friends who have lost loved ones what I asked or ask yourself. These little insights open a new way of viewing our lives. That Resurrection is real, that it is present, and that we know it! Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen, indeed. Alleluia.
Amen.