Easter Sermon 2020 | April 12th, 2020 | The Rev. Dr. Luk De Volder
Easter 2020
Sermon at Trinity on the Green
The Rev. Luk De Volder
April 12, 2020
Welcome to Trinity this morning, love and prayers to all affected by the COVID-19 virus, for the people suffering or who died. And showers of grace to the essential frontline workers. Let’s give them a show of hands and warm applause! Thank you for your love and care.
Happy Easter to all our kids: Thank God, the Easter bunny has been recognized as essential worker. But here we are at Easter. Our festival of joy feels more like a Requiem mass this year. By now we have read big books on when to panic exactly, how not to worry too much, and how to stack your 50,000 toilet paper rolls. Mid-March, I bucked the trend and instead of buying toilet paper, I came home with four six packs.
I have this wild imagination yet deep wish that every Trinity member will be spared from this pandemic. For the simple reason that, every year, at the beginning of Lent, we process throughout our church building, chanting that Great Litany, in which we call for God’s protection, including protection of all plagues and pestilence. Who would have thought how needed those prayers are. That procession, I pray, is now giving us all a step up, a higher degree of protection.
In any case, I miss you all today, and I so wish we could be here all together. We certainly will celebrate Easter later on. With the tympans and Handel’s Alleluia, even if it will be on Christmas day. Celebrating Easter, celebrating life and resurrection together we will!
O Happy Easter, if I may say so, or is it more like a Dies Ire, O Happy Day of Wrath? How can we celebrate resurrection - the power of life stronger than death - as we see so much death taking over lives? The beauty of the spring season is darkened by the hoof prints of the four horsemen of St. John’s vision. This cruel virus is an eerie, sinister, spine-chilling force, throwing us back to medieval experiences. The empty streets, the overloaded hospitals, or our masked appearances are, of course, causing anxiety. Like the disciples of Jesus, who just saw their teacher crucified, we rush to shelter and hunker down. Mocking this terror settling amongst us is an all too blunt judgement, because at times we indeed see no assured future. Maybe the Notre Dame Cathedral burning last year was prophetic as an icon of Christianity locked out their churches.
How then can we celebrate Easter and proclaim the power of the resurrection? Amid a time of plague, the thought of life stronger than death easily comes across as disjointed. Hasn’t the Easter message - that cornerstone of Christianity - just lost its credibility now that the powers of nature seem stronger than the powers of Grace?
As relevant as our doubt may be today, it is here that we may be trying to distill an answer of faith from a version of Christianity that we may have crafted for ourselves that is a feel-good Christianity. A Christian version that merged all too closely with the sense of success and prosperity, progress and wellness. If I believe in Jesus I will be prosperous, I will be strong. That is of course true, to a certain extend, but that is not the core of our faith. The bleak reality of the virus is throwing our faith back to the stark fact: Jesus did die. Mortality, the humble condition of our humanity, our bodies on a time clock, has never been taken out of the equation. Not even by the eternal, all-powerful, the resurrected and the life, the Christ. The Christ died!
Why death is such a necessary step for us, why nature or humans can be so cruel as to separate us definitively from our loved ones, didn’t even get an elaborate answer by Jesus himself. He died and was sealed in a tomb. The story of ended. Humanity took a halt that day as it does today. But his death underscored a crucial part of our predicament: we are not here to stay. The shelter and comfort of the resurrection does not lie in the fact that balming of Jesus body were a massage or a wellness spa that would keep all pain and finality for all of us at bay. No, we always have been destined for somewhere else.
But the next day, disputed for ever, changed everything. The resurrected continued the story of life. And the resurrected continues today to come to us with the same soul-opening dialogue. I am alive, I am the life. I am always with you. Christ came to wake us up to live life from our destination, that we are born to be eternal, that our true roots are in heaven, and to structure today with that expectation.
This is exactly how our forefathers and our foremothers of the 14th century, caught in the bubonic plague returned to Christ. If we can learn anything about the devastations they suffered, for so long and so intense, it is that they didn’t stay stuck in the news cycle of anxiety. Their faith in the resurrection, their roots in heaven, ignited their taste for the dream of our earthly life. I may die today or I may have decades left, nothing can hold me back from giving my best to the beauty of this fragile, yet God-given, life time. With the short time we have, let us make the best of it. Let us give it our all. And so the plague survivors launched, as the historian Barbara Tuchman highlights in her book on the calamitous 14th century, a wave of innovation and a new imagination, what we in the 19th century coined as the “renaissance”.
So on this Easter day, let us learn from our brothers and sisters in faith who have gone before us and while we are hunkered down let us like them also dream and imagine what our lives here - reminded our of eternal destination - may look like if we were to let it be a foretaste of heaven. Let us reconnect with the loving Christ, the prince of peace, the source of life and hope. Let us dream today how we would like our society to look like now that we have felt again how short life is, how much it means that we give our best to each other: we discover how crucial health care is. what gift our teachers are, what a present our dinner times are, what a beauty the birds are, what a call the by destitution weakened people, how primitive the free meals at the schools are. Let us reimagine our America.
Because there is now doubt, as many writers are racing to highlight, these microbes have and are making history today. And they will alter our lives. Surely, won’t just fight this plague, we will kick this virus with all the thirst of life we have in us. And when this viral storm lifts, we, the people, will imagine our future together. We, the people of God, turn to the resurrected Christ to envision life anew with the power of hope and the intense love that Christ seeks to change our lives. Happy Easter 2020!