Easter Sunday | The Rev. Luk De Volder | April 20, 2025

Welcome to Trinity this morning. We are here to celebrate the resurrection, the victory of life over death, the triumph of love over hate. And O do we need to hear this today. But with all the yard signs stating “Hate has not home here”, it does feel like the conversation today is more about hate than about love.

This year 2025, we might not be sure whether Jesus would be ready to come out of his grave. He might have taken a peek this morning and decided:  “Màh - this year, I am not seeing it. I am following the groundhog back inside, where it is warmer and more peaceful.”

Because let us name the elephant in the room. Many of us are scared, or disillusioned, or don’t see the future of our country. Our homeland has been feeling less like home. And we don’t see a way forward. (And this sentiment is not only alive in America. Europe has similar struggles.) Unless, unless we find a way to rise, rise above the fray, rise above the stormy waves of division and discontent that surge against what used to be the safe shore of our union. We need to rise up and restore our vision. We need to rise and dare to dream again.

Sure, some of us say, when it comes to dreaming, there is always the Hallmark channel. Or, in Sweden right now, millions of people watch the three week slow-TV spring moose migration. Nothing like waiting for hours to see those moose move a bit. When tensions rise, sedative entertainment is “always helpful”. Or we could use some humor. It is a great coping and cathartic mechanism. But it can be risky. In Eastern Germany during the Cold War, people were put in jail for running political jokes, which in turn gave rise to a meta joke: “There are people who tell jokes. There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there are people who collect people who tell jokes.” (David A. Graham, Laughing in the Face of ‘Overwhelming Malice’, Atlantic Magazine, read online on: April 19, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/04/dark-humor-trump-presidency/682517/)

Once we reach such point, it doesn’t feel like the right time to be singing Halleluia, as we will do today. Would that help? It may not feel like it.

But, the famous Halleluia we will sing today is as you know an excerpt from the Messiah, that masterpiece of George Friedrich Handel. Don’t you know, on a warm summer day in 1741, Handel took a fresh quill and started composing his Messiah scores. (Charles King, Every Valley. The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah, 2024)

With all his might, he needed to create something that gave him hope. Because his success in England had been waning. His health was ailing and the country was in turmoil: torn by civil war, deep divisions between protestants and catholics, succession battles between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, all the while facing wars with France and trouble in America. And so Handel earlier that summer Handel had decided to flee to Ireland. Handel did so with a script, entitled “Messiah”, written by one not so well-known Charles Jennens, whose fate was even worse and whose depression about the country made him ache for a devise that would help him envision the world with hope. For years, he had been writing for Handel and he now had just slipped his Messiah script in Handel’s mailbox before Handel’s departure for Ireland. He had combed and probed through the scriptures and he selected very deliberately a sequence of scripture verses that even to the non-believer would create an account of rising hope and new vision. You know the sequence. First the promise: Comfort ye, comfort. Every valley shall be exalted. Wonderful Councilor. Then sin: alas, all we, like sheep, have gone astray. But also the erasing of evil through Christ: lift up your gates, for the King of glory is coming. And finally a new beginning: Yes, I know that my redeemer liveth. The Trumpet shall sound! O Death were is thy sting? If God is for us, who shall be against us?

Both Jennens and Handel needed renewal, a loving God, to see the way to rise above the turmoil. And how effective became that rising power of the Messiah once it was combined with Handel’s music. Abigail Adams already reported in 1785 after attending the Messiah at Westminster Abby that, as soon the Halleluia initiated, people would raise to their feet as if for a national anthem. “I could scarcely believe myself an inhabitant of Earth”, she wrote. Mrs. Adams could already see how a different world could be possible.

When Jesus rose from the dead, he brought new vision, and so much of it. Today we mostly see Jesus as risen from the dead. And it may give the impression of a trick, like a jack-out-of-the-box. But if you ever have the time and blessing to follow the whole sequence of Holy Week, you might discover that Jesus didn’t just offer this comforting vision of profound peace and homecoming. He also did the work for it, to make this rising power happen. A few days prior, He had asked his disciples to love one another and then he kneels down, washes their feet, is present as their servant. Love one another as I love you, with all that I am, body and blood. Loving servanthood.

At the resurrection, no different: He doesn’t return to take revenge about their betrayal. Nor did he order them to sit around the table in front of TV cameras, to ask each one of them to say how great he is. After all, he returned from the dead. No, they all are back at the same Last Supper table where he said: I love you with all that I am, body and blood. And when he utters this profound cosmic statement of peace that makes you sink into this life-defining acceptance and endorsement for who you are, embracing you in whatever tantrum you find yourself. Jesus helps them to see that beyond or underneath the pain and the sin, is the power of love. 

And, then, he says: now it’s your turn. To make this happen, I count on you. To build this new humanity, the ball is also in your court. I will help you help others see this power of love, and together we all need to bow down and put our shoulders under the yoke of love, and embrace this world that is in a tantrum. Infuse it with loving-kindness as I did. Bring this rising power of this loving servanthood, as I do. This vision is so powerful, it will bring resurrection. 

But aren’t there many who create the tantrum, support all this frantic stuff, this exclusion, this aggression, and do not some of them claim to be Christians? Archbishop Rowan Williams says about this: “The trouble with bad religion - what makes it toxic - is that it is a way of teaching you to ignore what is real. And one of the tests of actual faith, is whether it stops you ignoring things. Faith is most fully itself and most life-giving, when it opens your eyes and when it uncovers for you a world larger than you ever thought.” (Rowan Williams, Discovering Christianity. A Guide for the Curious, 2025, p. 3)

True religion is not afraid of questions. This is how Jesus started, by asking: What are you looking for? And then he invites them to see: Come and See. At at the resurrection he once more says: see it is me. He is opening us to a world, a world of grace, larger than you ever thought. To a humanity that is more relational, more tender, more caring than we think we can afford. 

So when we sing Handel’s Halleluia in a couple of minutes, in these hard times, it is a way to sing to God: be thou my vision. I do not ignore what is real. I am signing up, on the dotted line to join this loving servanthood. Not only because you embrace us with your love and peace, but you put us - who are searching and probing the scripture about how to make this world anew - you put us on the right track to get there, the track of loving servanthood. Many things don’t feel safe or secure right now. But there is no shame in going back to square one. Jesus did the same. He started over right there at the grave. You can’t go lower. With God’s love that keeps loving even when marked by death, Christ’s love brought this sacred reset.  So let Christ be our vision, let the Halleluia be our way to subscribe to Christ’s resurrection. Let us rise above the fray, let us raise to our feet with Abigail Adams, and sing that Halleluia that brings us the vision of God’s love and that declares our readiness to start this loving servanthood.