The Easter People A Sermon preached at St. Luke's Church by The Rev. James B. Craven III  on Easter Sunday,  March 27, 2005 IN THE NAME OF GOD - FATHER, SON AND HOLY SPIRIT.  AMEN.     An early name for Christians was the Easter people.  Our observance of Easter, the greatest and oldest feast of the Christian Church, was what distinguished us from other folks.  Like Christmas, celebrated only since the fourth century, Easter superseded an old pagan festival which involved the exchange of colored eggs.  According to the Venerable Bede, the English historian of the 7th  - 8th centuries, the name Easter is taken from an Anglo-Saxon spring goddess, Eostre.  And the date, always in the period March 21 - April 25, is governed by the spring full moon, which in turn governs the tides, and they in turn take us back to the primeval creation in Genesis, when the seas covered the whole earth.        Our former rector said in a recent sermon that there were times when he had to take refuge in saying “I don’t know.”  Well there is much about Easter that I don’t know or understand.  In part we know too much.  We are all of us here 20th century Westerners, schooled in the scientific method.  We have split the atom, flown to the moon and back, exchanged hearts and corneas, yet death and taxes remain.  Primitive peoples of ages past perhaps had an easier time of it, understanding the miracle of Easter, for they were unencumbered by all our scientific and biological knowledge.  Children too have an advantage, as illustrated by the story of the slower child in Sunday School who held up the empty plastic egg to show the reality of Easter, a story doubtless used today in hundreds of sermons.  All of us have heard it a zillion times, and it is a fetching story, but we think we know better.  After all, we have seen death, many times over. As some of you, I have had the profound privilege of being with someone at the very moment of death, and of saying the great prayer and commendation: Depart O Christian soul, out of this world.  In the name of God the Father who created you, God the Son who redeemed you, and God the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you.  May your rest be this day in peace, and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God.     I have to think the answer to the Easter puzzle for us jaded scientific thinkers lies in hope, in the words of the ancient liturgy, in that sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, though our Lord Jesus Christ, when the sea shall give up her dead.  Our burial liturgy also makes clear that there is a divine separation of soul from body.  The soul, it teaches us, is taken by God unto himself, while the body is buried, in the earth or the sea.  All the resources of science and ingenuity cannot change this, or our sure and certain hope for life for all time with those we love.  And the gospel of hope just may be the most neglected of Christian virtues.  Hope is deeper than optimism.  To hope against hope is a virtue, a grace.     I think often of those close to me who I no longer see in life, of my father, dead now 28 years, whose voice down to accent and inflection, I can still hear, and whose twinkling eye I can still see.  Or my grandmother, dead now ten years, yet I hear her as though she were next to me.  I hear her voice vividly, as though it were on a professional quality tape, as she put me on the train to go to the Naval Academy, and said “Find your star, son, and follow it.”  And I even smell the dusting powder she always wore.  They are alive to me and always will be.  To this day when the ready answers elude me, and the confusion at times seems indecipherable, I can and do turn to them.  God willing my young granddaughter will be able to turn to me in that same way 60 years from now, when she is the age I am now.  We may well call this also the cloud of witnesses, or the communion of saints.  Or, the sure and certain hope that is Easter.  As Martin Luther put it, “This body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still.”  Paul teaches us, as he wrote to the Church at Corinth, that the resurrection of the body will be to a new and spiritual body, a body of a new order.  This may be reassuring to some of us of high mileage, no longer with all original parts.  And I daresay we cannot possibly understand it until we experience it.  We believe and hope in the resurrection of the body, the resurrection unto eternal life, but we are already experiencing the immortality of the soul, that part of each of us that will never be destroyed.  Ronald Regan said once that the closest thing to eternal life in this world is a government program.      So we are the Easter people, people of hope, of love, of life, of a new birth, of new opportunities to see Christ in each other and to be Christ to each other.  The disciples, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene surely thought they were alone and defeated on Good Friday, that the cause was lost with the life of him they loved.  There was certainly no cause for optimism, but there was hope, and their hope against hope was realized at that first Easter, not so much in the empty tomb, for that is only circumstantial evidence, but in the undeniable historic flesh and blood fact of the Christ who in the fullness of life walked out of that tomb.     Alleluia, Christ is risen.  The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia.                                 Amen. St. Luke’s 27 March 2005 Easter Day Return to Sermons Index

This page updated 26 March 2005