This sermon was preached at Unfinished Community on Easter Sunday. Rather than the usual discussion questions, it ended in a group singing exercise for those who were present. Since you're reading it, I would like to encourage you to go find some other way to practice the discipline of joy instead! So, as a pastor typically does on Easter, you can see I prepared a lot. Food, drink, games, fellowship. I prepared a lot.
Except there was one thing I didn’t really prepare. A sermon.
This might come as a surprise, especially for those of you who turned up expecting the kind of Easter experience that is traditional in most churches, where the music is rocking, and the pastor really brings their A-game, sermon wise.
And this might also come as a surprise for those of you who know me personally, because you know how much I love sitting with the scripture, taking it apart, reading through the source languages and analyzing it, fully and completely, to find the deep and nuanced message that God has for us and our community in this time and place.
But, every time I sat down to write this week, every time I tried to peel back the online-like layers of the scripture this week, I just kept coming up empty.
The truth is that today’s specific verses, like every part of the Bible, have their own deeply nuanced meaning woven through the text, and there are a lot of deeper things we could talk about. The fact that it was the women of the group who discover the empty tomb, and who are immediately disbelieved by every disciple except Peter, for example - pretty sure there’s a lesson there about how we treat women even today. We could also dig into the fact that Jesus’ resurrection happened first in the predawn silence - the greatest miracle of the entire Bible done deliberately before precisely ZERO witnesses.
Pretty sure there’s a message there too.
We could dig into what it means to look for the living among the dead, or the fact that Jesus warned them back in Galilee that this was coming and they still couldn’t believe it when the truth was staring them in the face.
Or, and this is my personal favorite, we could dig into how the the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the ultimate act of defiance against oppression, corruption, and the forces of Empire. We could talk about how the corrupt religious leaders spent Jesus’ entire ministry discrediting him, pushing harder and harder against Christ right up until they hit the maximum escalation - executing him in the most public, humiliating, and embarrassing way possible at the time…and it still didn’t work because God’s justice rolls down like a river: utterly and completely unstoppable. We cold talk about how no matter how hard one might want to try you absolutely cannot force the Spirit of our living God to behave how you want, to act in a way that pleases or empowers you, and even if you wield the power of death itself against it, all your reward will be is a temple curtain torn in two, a living Savior, and an empty tomb.
That’ll preach, right?
The truth is that any of these ideas, or dozens more would work as a sermon, but none of them would really, truly be what God needs right here, and right now.
Because today we aren’t here to listen, to study, and to learn.
Today we’re here to celebrate. To rejoice!
So there will be other days for lessons, other days for theological nuance, other days to deconstruct the prejudices, self-serving arguments, and questionable practices we’ve built into our faith lives over the millennia since Christ first rose from the grave. There will be other days to question, other days to wonder, and other days challenge ourselves and out contribution to the brutality of world gone completely and unrepentantly off the rails.
But today, in this moment, we need to relearn how to rejoice.
Because when I say “rejoice” I”m not suggesting some sugarcoated, individual moment where you set aside the worries and fears of life and say “yay” for a moment, just to return to the dark and gloomy atmosphere of regular life.
I also don’t mean to suggest that we should be feeling an overabundance of joy welling up inside us either: for a great many of us, this time in our lives (to say nothing of the lives of the world) is troubling to such a degree that spontaneous eruptions of joy within just aren’t something that happens for us right now.
That’s why I’m not using the word “joy” right now, not saying that this is a time to feel joy. Instead, I’m using the verb rejoice - an active verb which suggests a decision.
A choice.
Our passage from Isaiah is basically an outpouring of hope and promise, giving us just a bunch of things to rejoice for: everything from an end to weeping and distress, to the creation of an entirely new heaven and new earth. The whole of the passage is offering up the hope that not only will God bring about a world in which things are different from what we struggle with now, but that this world will be so unrecognizably different that we may as well just call it new.
But that hope is directed not at any one person, and not cast in terms that an individual might hear that hope and turn it inward, praying for an outpouring of spontaneous joy from a heart long-suffering the indignities of this world.
No.
It’s directed at the community.
And it’s directed at the community in such a way that it highlights the action of hope and rejoicing, rather than the spontaneity of it. There’s talk of building and planting, laboring and bearing children, and a peace so complete that wolf and lamb eat happily together.
But at the beginning of all that, is a choice. Verse 18, “But be glad and rejoice forever”
The message here is simple - God’s given us a victory in Christ, one so impossibly huge that death itself has had to bend the knee to God.
And what’s asked of us in this moment is to make the sometimes difficult, deliberate choice to lay down our burdens for a moment, come together as a community, and rejoice at the magnitude of the gift we’ve been given. To rejoice at the fact that death itself is no longer the end, because the Lord we know so dearly has walked through that terrifying black hole like it was just a simple door, and then popped his head back through to tell us that he’s setting up a place for us next door.
So for today, we’re gonna set aside the deep-dives, let the ancient texts rest for a moment. Save nuance and meticulous lesson-giving wait until tomorrow morning when I record the weekly podcast. For now, what we’re going to do, is come together and make the deliberate choice
just sing out in joy.
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