But

Easter Day (Year C, RCL)
April 8, 2007

The Reverend Paul R. Abernathy, Rector

On Friday, Jesus was crucified. It’s Sunday now. He’s dead and buried. So, what sense does it make, what good will it do now for Jesus’ friends – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women – to anoint his body for burial? “But,” Luke tells us, “on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they (go) to the tomb.” They expect to find his body, but the tomb is empty. Two angels mystically appear, stand beside them, terrify them, verily, scare the heaven out of them, but also share good news: “Jesus is risen!”^[1]

In the face of their futility, the absurdity of preparing an already buried body for burial, the women out of loyalty go anyway. In the face of their certainty about what they will find, a dead body, they find an improbability – no body. In the face of their anxiety and fear, they receive an angelic word of comfort and cheer.

To the question – What do we think of Easter? – the answers, our answers, no doubt, are numerous and varied. For some of us, Easter proclaims that Jesus, who died because our sins – our selfish self-interest, our human predisposition to defy or even deny God – was raised bodily from the dead, thereby fulfilling our hope of freedom from sin and life after death. For some of us, Easter proclaims that Jesus and his ministry of love and justice continue to live resurrected – alive and embodied – in the hearts and minds of his followers, the Church. For some of us, Easter with its declaration, “Jesus is risen!”, proclaims a fiction – for Jesus never lived or even if he lived, his resurrection never happened, for he died and remained dead – told by his disciples to verify their claims of the primacy of their gospel. For some of us, Easter proclaims something else, for the only thing of which we’re sure is that the revelation of what Easter means is ongoing. For some of us, Easter proclaims nothing else, for we aren’t sure what to make of it.

Whatever we think of Easter, it is, for me, a story about what can happen when in the face of all that can hold us helpless and hopeless – the external circumstances beyond our power to alleviate, let alone eliminate (the Iraq war, global poverty, systemic injustice) and the internal conditions beyond our ability to amend (the unbridgeable chasm between the good we want to do and the less than good we often do) – if we, like the women, are faithful, doing what we can despite the apparent, logical futility of it all, if we, like the women, are alert to new possibilities despite our certainties about the way things are, if we, like the women, dare confess our anxieties and fears despite our need to pretend that all is well, then we might hear good news summed up in that one word: But.

This story about God raising Jesus from the dead, I believe, tells us that our choices matter. We may not, perhaps cannot change our circumstances, but how we respond is within our power to choose.

The women told the disciples that Jesus had risen. “But it all seemed to be an idle tale, and they did not believe.” A real danger is that we don’t believe that our attitudes and actions in this life, our responses and reactions to life matter.

Most of my life, I’ve been a pessimist. I learned the lesson at my mother’s knee: Always expect the worst, if it happens, you’ll be prepared. Through my own experience, I have learned that the worst usually doesn’t happen and, having prepared for it, I’m usually too psychically exhausted to enjoy the blessing of the best when that happens or even the less than the worst, which usually happens.

Two weeks ago, my Aunt Evelyn died. While in St. Louis, I had a chance to peruse my family archives. I came across words written by my maternal grandfather, James Henry Roberts. Words of a grandfather I never knew, for he died nearly twenty years before I was born. Words, because I never knew him in the flesh, like the words of Jesus, come to me through the mists of history on pages of written text. Words that, like Easter, give me a new vision.

My grandfather – a teacher, a school principal, and, later, an attorney, in Oklahoma and, then St. Louis – never made a good living, in great part, because he was a proud and educated African American man in an American culture that neither received nor welcomed him. He wrote:

The story of my life is one fraught with difficulties, disappointments, and discouragements. It would not be very pleasant to relate were it not that I have always had more or less faith in the advantages of disadvantages. Meager circumstances have as much power as weight for him who is struggling up life’s hill.

My grandfather, I believe, knew the power of the word but, verily, the power of Easter, the power of continued faithfulness in the face of life’s absurdity. Reading his words, I got a glimpse of it, too.

[1] The gospel text appointed for the day is Luke 24.1-12.