Gospel Reading (Take 1): Luke 24:1-12
For Sunday, March 31, 2013—Easter Sunday
It is Easter, and you are loved. The soft insistence of Love has overwhelmed all other possibilities, to become the end, the final answer, the destination, the location for our wonderings and wanderings—
It is Easter and Love is possible. Love is present. It is Easter and you are loved, in an inconceivable, irrevocable, uncanny, prodigious way by God who created us all for this purpose. God created us so that God could love us.
It is Easter and we are infected with the possibility of love, the possibility to love, we are capable, we have the capacity, a pervasive desire to love. It might not be at the fore front of our psyche—it may not appear to be a driving force in our lives—but I am tell you—it is there. You are made to love and you are good at it.
It is Easter and you are free to love—
Of all the things I could say on Easter, that is the one I like to say.
Clear and Remarkable
On this Sunday, Easter Sunday, I am always a little intimidated to get up and say any thing, especially such a clear and remarkable thing.
How do I talk about the actuality of this event that we are re-membering, the coming back from a murder perpetrated by God’s creations, which serve not as evidence for our condemnation, but as the advent of our reconciliation.
The rest of the Sundays in the year I can point to this theo-historically pivotal proclamation with hints and misunderstanding and uneasy anticipation. I have to work at unearthing this great good news. Usually it needs to be got at, delved into, plied or pried, so that the basic revelation of the Christian faith might be glimpsed.
More Comfortable with Misunderstanding
But the challenge I face this Sunday each year—with a sense of deep obligation, a feeling of helplessness and dread—is how do I proclaim the resurrection of God from the dead, with the gravity, majesty and inconceivable, mercy in a manner that is equal to the event?
I am more comfortable with hints and misunderstanding than I am with bald, triumphant, shouts from the mountaintop of “He’s Risen!” No matter how loud I yell or how much joy and exuberance I try to bring to it, it always feels false in its aim or it size. But maybe I try to bring too much.
Maybe it is a different sort of proclamation, more subversive, this undoing of death, this enfolding of all things in living and loving way—runs counter—to the getting over, getting paid, getting bigger, more getting more powerful, getting more stuff-ness, that is the story of our world.
The Hardest Question
Is the proclamation that “He has risen!” something not to be shouted, but whispered, like a secret that everyone can be in on—is it lived out, not broadcasted, is it received, not promoted? Is it profound peace, and not the pronouncement of perfections?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
