Good morning! I was hoping you’d be here. You look beautiful. Thank you for coming to Emmanuel Church to kick-off the festival of the Great Fifty Days of Easter. I think that the Church gives us 12 days of Christmas, 40 days of Lent and 50 days of Easter, because Easter is the hardest to grasp. I’m glad that you’re here whether you love this holiday, or you don’t so much. Maybe you are here because it matters to someone you love, or you are here for a sadder reason. I love to say, whether you have come for celebration or solace, whether you are energized or exhausted, excited or grumpy, whether you have skipped or stumbled into this sanctuary, my hope for all of you is that, you will leave here today knowing more deeply that you are loved – that even if (and maybe especially if) you don’t feel like you “fit in,” still, you belong here today. Emmanuel Church is a place where we actively practice belonging to one another no matter what. It’s not always easy, but it is always worth it. This is a place where we focus our efforts not on whether we (or anyone else) will get into heaven, but on whether any heaven will get into us.[1]

What is heaven? In the Episcopal Church, our teaching (our catechism in our Book of Common Prayer) says that “by heaven, we mean eternal life in our enjoyment of God.”[2] What (or Who) is God? Our catechism doesn’t say, but the Bible says that God is Love and those who abide in Love abide in God and God abides in them.”[3] And what does eternal life mean? Back to our catechism: “A new existence, in which we are united with all the people of God, in the joy of fully knowing and loving God and each other.” Eternal doesn’t mean “future,” and it doesn’t mean “after death.” Eternal means timeless or free from time. Eternal is like a stream that has no beginning and no end. Whenever we are at one with Love and with Love’s people, we experience a new existence – heaven gets into us for our enjoyment of Love!

How do we let heaven into us? I think there are many ways, but for me, the way is to follow Jesus to the “corner of kinship and mutuality”[4] with others at the edge of “down and out” and “up and out” (which is how I respond when people ask me, “where in the Back Bay is Emmanuel Church?” It’s at the edge of down and out and up and out.) How do we let heaven into us? We cooperate in freely sharing (giving and receiving) resources – each according to their ability, each receiving according to their need, allowing love to drive out whatever fears bind us, moving us more and more from isolation and despair into larger and wider community.

What the women at the tomb in the Gospel stories model for us is what looks like to step into that stream from a point of total devastation and loss. They were fully prepared to care for a dead Jesus and not at all prepared to encounter a living Christ. Whatever Jesus had taught them, hadn’t sunk in enough to get past their witnessing his gruesome death. They were grief struck and despairing. When they found the tomb empty, they were at a total loss, consumed with anxiety, the Greek says. They had no idea of what to make of the emptiness they encountered. The men in dazzling clothes ask them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

Those of us who have been coming to Easter services for as long as we can remember have been told countless times that Jesus is risen. So why do we look for the living among the dead? Why do so many of us feel anxious when we encounter nothing, emptiness, when we look for Jesus, expecting to find him where we left him or where others put him, expecting to grasp something more solid – more tangible? Do we also assume that this is an idle tale, and just go through the motions of good and proper rituals? Is any of us looking for proof of the Risen Lord and coming up empty? Has anyone stopped looking for the resurrection altogether, and is just hoping to be moved by the music, beautiful flowers and puppets, hoping for a short sermon?

Look around you. We are the tangible proof (at least part of it). We are the proof whenever our lives embody the claim that love is stronger than death, stronger than shame, stronger than despair. To be the proof means that we remember that there are still plenty of crosses today – that is, there are instruments of violence and shame and death all around us. It means that we remember that the forces of consumerism, racism, classism, sexism in all forms, militarism and violence of any kind are all dead ends because they all rely on hatred and fear for fuel. And it means that we remember to join the Holy One in naming, challenging, healing, which are all part of loving. That’s hard work of course — looking at things that are difficult and unpleasant to see, both in the world and inside of ourselves that need to be named, challenged, healed and loved.

Naming means identifying and speaking about those instruments of violence and shame. Challenging those instruments always means conflict. For Jesus-followers, it must always mean non-violent conflict, but conflict nonetheless. This is hard for Episcopalian Jesus-followers because so many of us are conflict-averse. “Please God,” we pray on Good Friday, “work out salvation in tranquility – you know, quietly and without a struggle. We Anglicans prefer not to be disturbed.” But I’m here to tell you that challenging instruments of violence and shame is disturbing. Maybe our prayer is that some day it will not be so disturbing, but meanwhile, we must expect conflict if we are going to follow Jesus. As Richard Rohr says, “before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.”

We are called to participate with the Holy One, in healing. Healing sounds good, indeed it IS good, but it can also be painful. In our various ministries of healing, God (Who is Love) is the healer. Our work is to show up and be open to the possibilities of healing grace. And that is work – to admit our own need for healing, and to admit our abilities, to admit our resources, to serve as vessels of God’s healing grace for others. We are called to look for the living not among the dead, but among the messy, chaotic, confused and disturbed who are living. When we do that, we are loving.

Let’s go back to Luke’s story – to what happens when the women are at a total loss to make sense of the emptiness they see and feel. Two men appear in flashy garments, with a question that helps the women remember what they had forgotten when they were overwhelmed with the emptiness. What they remembered, I believe, was something like the promise of the Holy One from Isaiah 65:17 – our first reading today. “For I am creating new heavens and new earth; the former things shall please not be mentioned and shall please not come up in the heart.” (Two times the Holy One says please in that sentence and it’s not translated from Hebrew into English!) What the women remembered when those two men stood by them in their dazzling Easter outfits, was the promise that God is always doing something new, unexpected, and amazing! Always.

Luke’s Easter proclamation is that God has not desired or required violence. And God has not disowned and abandoned Jesus or any of us, even in the midst of the worst, most violent, most shameful situations imaginable. The Risen Lord, the Christ, the Redeeming Desire of God, lives and is on the move. We are to be messengers – to tell others by our words and actions – that God’s Redeeming, Recreating energy is up ahead! We are to spread the word by demonstrating that love is stronger than fear and love is stronger than death.

The mental gymnastics we do about what we believe or don’t believe at Easter time might be spectacular, but for me they’re not what Easter is about at all. Easter is about God being undaunted and undeterred by our low expectations, our faulty memories, our blurry vision, our shame, our aversion to conflict, our pain, our grief, our fear or our shattered lives. I think of the Holy One sometimes as a skilled physical or psychotherapist, not wanting to inflict pain, but desiring healing and knowing that healing is often hard and painful work. Love’s therapy is for our individual well-being and it is for the well-being of the group, of the community – and the well-being of the whole world. The good news is that we’re not asked or expected to do it alone – in fact, the only way we can do it, is with and for others, even when we are in pain ourselves. Easter calls us again and again to move beyond our pre-occupation with our own well-being. The Gospel news, according to Luke is that the Risen Lord is out and about and coming home to us, bringing his hungry, naked, sick, previously incarcerated friends with him. The Gospel news is about proclamation, of course, but the only way to begin to believe it is to enact it with open hearts and open arms.

Let some heaven get into you today – enough to provoke this question from an unsuspecting family member or friend: What’s gotten into you? “Heaven!” you can say. Happy Easter everyone!