Easter Day

April 12, 2009

Isaiah 25:6-9

Acts 10:34-43

John 20: 1-18

If beauty delights you,

the dust shall shine as the sun.

If you enjoy that speed, strength

and freedom of the body

that nothing can withstand,

then you shall be like the angels of God.

If you delight in any pleasure

that is not impure but pure,

you shall drink from the torrent

of the pleasures of God. St. Anselm

Most people do not automatically identify the idea of religion with the idea seeking for beauty in one’s life. Religion and beauty are two words that are not often heard together. Nowadays people associate Religion more often with rigid Morality or cut and dried Belief – what we are supposed to do and what we are supposed to believe. Fundamentalists of every religion use morality and belief as weapons against what they consider to be an encroaching Godless secularism. Those who think that religion or faith concern themselves only with actions and beliefs terrorize others if they do not espouse their social, political or personal causes. The notion that a religious life can be motivated by a pursuit of the beautiful would be a very strange idea indeed to those who think that the aims of religion can be accomplished solely through political channels. For such people, Easter Day is all about getting the facts of the resurrection story straight and then simply forcing yourself to believe them.

For other Christians – especially those who lived in the early Christian and Medieval worlds – Easter Day has a much wider significance. God has not just given us bodies and minds. He has given us hearts that long for Him. For those who have eyes to see it, Easter Day kindles our longing to be transformed by the power of divine beauty. Faith is not just about right actions and right beliefs. It finds its beginning and end in longing and desire. As Saint Paul said, “If I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have and deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” (I Cor. 13:2-3) The words of an ancient Christian song sung on Easter Eve call all Christians to wake up to the force of this love and the power of this longing. Something new has happened in our world. The priest or the deacon sings: “Sound the trumpet of salvation!” The trumpet was used as a wake-up call and rallying cry. The rallying cry of Easter morning is simply this: what was old has been made new again. Our pain and our brokenness have been healed and we are restored to our original beauty through the resurrection of Christ from the dead. God loves us; he desires us. Our longing and our desire find their fulfillment in loving God in return. Evil, sin and death do not have the last word. The last word belongs to Christ himself. “Greetings!” he says to Mary in the garden, on what was the first day of the first week of the new creation. “Have no fear.”

We all long for a more beautiful world. We long for our souls to become beautiful and to resemble more closely the beauty of the God whom we seek. So many things conspire against our being able to find such beauty in our lives. We are oppressed by poverty, illness or depression. We are oppressed by the greed or the stupidity of others. We grieve over missed opportunities, wasted years or talents unrealized. We mourn those whom we love and whom we see no longer. Yet in the middle of all of these things, we still yearn for the beauty that we mistakenly believe that we have lost beyond recall. Easter morning restores our beauty to us. That beauty returns to us precisely through our experience of love, with all its frustrations, disappointments or tragedies. By his suffering, death and resurrection, Christ showed us that no human experience is alien to him. Our suffering, our tragedies; even our death can be made beautiful through that love.

This congregation, understood as the risen body of Christ, becomes a sign of God’s intention to re-shape the whole of human society. Love, both divine and human, works for good in the suffering of human existence. Through that love we are transfigured into images and likenesses of God. Easter day turns us into God’s children, and we all bear a family likeness to the One in whose name we are baptized. Have no fear. Christ is risen. Long for God; just as God longs for you. And may your Easter be a joyful and beautiful one.

The Revd. Nigel Massey