A Sermon for Easter Sunday by The Reverend Craig Lemming, Associate Rector
In the name of the one, holy, loving, and liberating God. Amen.
When I was a youth, I was obsessed with animals. When my family tried in vain to get me to be interested in outdoor sports, I would bring my Complete Anthology of Southern African Birds and do bird watching while they played and enjoyed sports. I wanted to be a zoologist when I grew up. I would save all kinds of insects from the wrath of my family. We always had dogs, a German Shepherd, Doberman, Labrador, Rhodesian Ridgeback, and a Jack Russel. Much to my mother’s horror, I had mice, one of which got out of its cage, and crawled up my parents’ bedroom curtains! You’ve never heard a more blood-curdling scream! I had all sorts of fish and birds including cockateels, love birds, and budgerigars. I also had a tortoise.
My father helped me build a large rock enclosure for my tortoise with huge granite rocks. Despite my best efforts to keep the tortoise contained, he would always manage to escape from his granite enclosure. My tortoise was usually found feasting in our neighbors’ vegetable patch. Mr. Makoni would be furious but his daughters Thandiwe and Mercy would kindly return my tortoise to me over the fence. One morning, my tortoise escaped for good. My parents consoled me by telling the truth. That even though I loved my tortoise who gave me so much joy, his granite enclosure was a prison, and God created him to be absolutely free.
Today’s sermon is about God’s sacred, powerful, and tender force of life that refuses to be caged, enclosed, or sealed in a tomb. The God of Resurrection whose love liberates all of Creation from the prisons we create for ourselves and others. Today we celebrate God’s uncontrollable force of liberating new life. And we also acknowledge that the structures of domination, control, and mastery that empires impose on our lives involves a painful reckoning and grief. Those enclosures we produce to delude ourselves into a false sense of security, become prisons and idols. When a sacred and tender life breaks free from those prisons, we become disrupted, disoriented, and afraid of that loss. And that is precisely when God makes all things new in beloved community. Gathering together in the presence of God’s Word and Sacraments grounds us again in God’s loving, healing, and liberating presence. Through the seasons and cycles of our lives, when faced with our mortality, we turn away from the idols of empire, and turn back to the ancient, sacred narratives and rituals that remind us who we are and whose we are. Beloved images of the God of love who desires everything that is, seen and unseen, to be completely free to live and love abundantly. But why? What is the purpose of this freedom? In the immortal words of Toni Morrison, “If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” In this Good Friday world, when our hearts break for every creature that is born into an unfree world, what can we, as Easter People, do? Where do we start?
In the words of Albert Camus, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Now I know that, in the words of the First Lesson, “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food,” we have Easter brunches, lunches, and dinners to enjoy! So, we will journey briefly into today’s Gospel. I pray that our encounter with Christ will make each of us so absolutely free that our very existence will be an act of God’s loving rebellion, for all people, against the cages, enclosures, and tombs of empire.
Every Easter, we hear those sublime words: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.” The Roman Empire had tried to crucify and kill the love of God incarnate, and they failed. Empire tried to contain, control, and seal up that incarnate love of God in a tomb, and they failed. Empires still try to control, crucify, and kill the most vulnerable of God’s beloved creatures. Jesus Christ, the love of God made flesh, crucified and risen, triumphs over all empires eternally. God’s liberating love always bursts free from cages, enclosures, and tombs of empire. That liberating love is resurrected in each of us when we, like Mary Magdalene, have the courage to see God through our tears; to listen to that voice of Christ’s love through the noise of political chaos; and to share with others the Good News that God is alive and has already liberated creation from death.
The Holy Spirit gives Mary Magdalene and each of us the courage to will and to persevere in being completely freed by the love of God to free others. As followers of Jesus who practice his way of love, we join Christ in re-creating all that is, seen and unseen, anew. These sacred hymns, prayers, scriptures, and rituals equip and empower us to be rebelliously free to free others. This way of life, this way of love, this courage to be freed by God to free others is how, in the Prophet Isaiah’s words, God destroys shrouds of death that empires cast over all peoples; how love swallows up death forever; how love wipes away the tears from all faces.
So, how will you be like my tortoise today? How will you be so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of loving rebellion against idolatrous manmade enclosures? How will you be like Mary Magdalene today? How will you allow yourself to be freed by Christ’s living presence so that you can then free everyone you love from the prisons violent empires impose upon God’s creation?
Whether you’ve been at St. John’s your whole life, or haven’t been here in years, or maybe this is the first time you’ve ever been here, we come together again to remember and to celebrate God’s liberating and life-giving love for all people. We come together to reckon with, to grieve, and to let go of the cages, enclosures, and tombs in which empires try to trap, control, and seal us. We come together to love our way back into the fullness of life that Christ recreates and saturates with love. So, in the words of the poet Rumi,
Come, come, whoever you are: Wanderer, Worshiper, Lover of Leaving.
It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a community of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.
May Christ’s liberating, life-giving love come and free us and all of creation today and always. Amen.