Sermon, The Great Vigil of Easter
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church
30 March 2002
Matthew 28:1-10
.
A DAY IN THE LIFE
OF THE RESURRECTION

Sister and Brothers:: The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Anymore when I wake up in the morning, I worry that maybe the apocalypse happened last night, and I’m the only one left on earth. So almost the first thing I do is turn on NPR’s "Morning Edition" to find out if there really is a morning out there. Of course, every day, sure enough, it’s the beginning of a new day: time has not stopped. So I have to get up, dress and go to work.
. . . . You understand this: as much grief as there is in the world, sometimes it’s difficult not to be pessimistic. Then I walk into a men’s room and see a diaper changing station; and I say, well, maybe the resurrection happened after all.
You laugh: but think about it. Even fifteen years ago you would never have seen such a thing. Diapers were a woman’s affair, not a man’s. And changing diapers was an affair for the privacy of the home, not life in public. But something happened to shock someone’s imagination into a new possibility. Whenever the imagination is shocked into new possibility, we experience another advance of the resurrection.
. . . . We have not believed the resurrection until we have started to live a resurrection life. To live a resurrection life is to live into new ways of thinking, being, behaving. Consider sidewalks: such a thing as a ramp to make a passage accessible to those who walk with difficulty or need a wheel chair was almost unheard of fifty years ago. Jesus came to make the lame walk and the blind see: but where that has not yet happened in its fullness, an "imagination’s new beginning" seeks to give the lame and the blind greater resources for the fullest possible life. We are terrified when we consider the hold that the forces of death have such a hold on an imagination that it can think the unthinkable and do it. Can we recognize that the power of God to raise a man from death to life as also a power of unthinkable force? The difference between the power of death and the power of life is this: the power of death is always only more of the same. It may surprise in its efficiency and its capacity for mass destruction and its ingenuity and its precocity, but it’s same-old same-old: the spirit of vengeance in the 21st century is no different than it was when Cain murdered his brother Abel in cold blood.
. . . . But Resurrection is the shock of something utterly radically new: it means the break of the same-old pattern. It doesn’t come easy. Resurrection means that something must come to an end: resurrection means a full stop, a dying, a turning around. T. S. Eliot writes

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning:
The end is where we start from.

I often wonder what it means to live our lives out of the power of the resurrection. It is so foreign it is almost unthinkable. But every time we come to a full stop and make a new beginning we have a chance to live from out of the resurrection. Every time we change a destruction and abusive pattern of behavior we live out of the power of the resurrection. Every time we respond to a situation in a way that gives life instead repeating the same-old patter of death, we live out the resurrection. When we are graced to smile rather than speak in anger; when we can offer a gentle hand when a fist would be appropriate; when we can say "no" to the forces that urge a mad, manic rushing about and say "yes" to necessary rest and quiet, and awaken refreshed after a night of sleep entrusted to the loving care of God: then we are free to imagine a new beginning shaped by the power of Christ’s resurrection. There is new life out there: do what must be done to care for it. Break a pattern. Dads and uncles: change diapers.

Amen.

T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets: Little Gidding.” The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1971), p. 144.

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