Easter, Year B, April 1, 2018; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of laughter, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Happy April Fools’ Day everyone! I’m so glad you’re here. You look very beautiful (and that is no joke). Welcome to those of you who are here for the first time; welcome to those of you who have been here more times than you can count, and welcome to everyone in between!  Thank you for coming to Emmanuel Church to begin the festival of the Great Fifty Days of Easter.  You honor us with your presence this morning. We are glad that you’re here whether you love this holiday, or you don’t so much, but you are here because it matters to someone you love, or you are here for a sadder reason.  Maybe some of you don’t even quite know the reason you’re here – and I’m grateful that you’re here too!

I love that children’s story of The Three Trees and I read it (and weep) every Easter – kids or no kids.  One of my favorite Emmanuel Church Easter memories is from seven or eight years ago when a young girl, urged by her mother to come forward for the story, plodded up the aisle scowling, shoulders hunched, saying, “I’ve already heard this story before!”  Maybe some of you feel like that too!  My Easter hope for all of you is that, whether you have come for celebration or solace, whether you are excited or grumpy, whether you have skipped or stumbled into this sacred place, you will leave here today knowing that you are truly and deeply loved – that even if (and maybe especially if) you don’t “fit in,” still, you belong here today. This is a place where we actively practice belonging to one another.

I’m guessing that some of you were hoping that I wouldn’t mention April Fools’ Day – but how can I not? It funny for Easter to fall on April Fools’ Day! It hasn’t happened in my lifetime. [1] What could be more foolish than celebrating resurrection? Let’s not be afraid to laugh at ourselves because it’s a little bit crazy. You know, the Bible is full of humor – puns and other word plays, bawdy jokes, incongruities, surprising turns, wild exaggerations, all sorts of hilarity. So much of the Bible’s comedy is lost in translations, not just language translations, but translations of geography, culture, centuries of time.  Jesus was a funny guy and the Church loses sight of that at our peril. Humor has always been a most powerful form of resistance to tyranny and oppression.

It’s a funny Gospel story that Jesus sent an army full of polluted spirits out of a suffering man and into a herd of swine, which then jumped off a cliff.  It’s a funny story Jesus told about the realm of God being like a weed that grows uncontrollably where a sensible farmer would not want it. It’s a funny story that every worker gets the same amount of pay whether they’ve worked all day or arrived at the worksite right before quitting time. It’s a funny story that Mary Magdalene mistakes the Risen Lord for the groundskeeper. Having left his burial linens in the tomb, did the Risen Jesus find some work clothes hanging on a line that were just the right size?

Many years ago, far away, at a different Immanuel Church, I was a Sunday School teacher at a meeting with my peers to plan Eastertide lessons.  To begin the meeting, the rector asked each of us to tell the group what we thought resurrection meant. One by one, we went around the circle saying the kinds of things that I imagine you all would say if I passed the microphone around the sanctuary. (I would love to do that, by the way, but we just don’t have time.) After the meeting was over, one of my friends rushed up to me and said, “nobody in there believes in resurrection!” and my response was, “What? What I heard was that nobody in there believes in the resuscitation of a corpse that has been dead for a day and a half (that is Friday afternoon to before sunrise on Sunday). Everyone in there believes in resurrection!”

In the nearly 30 years since, I have come to believe that believing or not believing in resurrection is missing the point entirely. Resurrection is a funny truth that I believe got Mary Magdalene laughing through her tears. Resurrection is a funny truth that got Mary Magdalene, and Peter and the Beloved Disciples and Jesus’ other followers to move through their fear and grief to continue the work that Jesus had shown them how to do. Resurrection is not something to be interrogated using scientific methods. Resurrection is not something to be subjected to questions of historical investigation. The Roman empire tried to annihilate Jesus from Nazareth by using the most brutal form of torture and execution and he wouldn’t stay dead.  That’s funny.  Of course it’s much, much more than funny, but let’s not miss the deeply subversive humor because we’re busy arguing about what is and what is not realistic or credible or plausible. We are all here this morning.  That’s funny too.

Attempts to communicate the deep truth of resurrection fall in the category of art, not of science; of beauty, not of facts; of Love, not of intellectual analysis. The music, the poetry, the stories, the paintings and sculptures about resurrection carry messages that are deeper and more true than their sounds or colors or shapes can ever adequately portray. Sometimes the art of resurrection is clumsy, sometimes sublime; sometimes the words about resurrection don’t speak to us at all, and sometimes they are just right; sometimes the music leaves us cold; and sometimes it warms our hearts. Quite often the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say, and not every beholder agrees.  In any given moment, one person can be transported and one left behind; over time, as we grow our perceptions change and what we find meaningful shifts – at least I hope it does.

The Greek word that gets translated resurrection is anastasis – literally, uprising. Our own English word resurrection comes from the same Latin root as resurgence. [2] Both in Greek and in Latin, the sense is much more communal than individual.  We don’t use words like uprising or resurgence when we are talking about one person. The visual art of the Eastern Church is much clearer about this than in the Western Church. In Christian Orthodoxy, for example, paintings show that all humanity: past, present, and future, are a part of and benefit from the uprising of Jesus. In a recent essay about this called “Rising Up with Christ,” John Dominic Crossan and his wife Sarah Sexton Crossan highlight the Eastern Orthodox artistic depictions of resurrection and rightly point out that the notion of uprising or resurrection of martyrs in both testaments of the Bible is always “corporate, communal, and universal…involv[ing] the whole human race.” [3] If one of the meanings of anastasis is “a recovery from a debilitating condition,” then in the resurrection, the debilitating condition from which we are to recover is oppression and violence, not by using more violence, but with the non-violent resistance that Jesus modeled.

If we’re practicing resurrection, we need to be in community.  And if we are in community, we will find things to laugh about, even in the midst of our sorrows and struggles.  I say practicing resurrection because participating in this uprising is so much more about behaving in a way that is beloving and belonging than it ever was about believing. Laughter will be a sign. Laughter is one of the answers to the Biblical question of whether there is life before death.  Death is so certain, but life is not.  Life is quite uncertain, and the uncertainty is so much easier to bear with loving companions with whom we belong. Perhaps the uprising, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is an antidote to the unimaginative binary of life and death – a way to a different, larger dimension of being, along our way.

Let us rejoin the uprising. In the words of the late, great Gwendolyn Brooks, let us:

Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
“Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.”
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along. [4]

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