A homily for Easter Sunday, The Resurrection of the Lord, April 17, 2022
Acts 10:34a, 37-43, Col 3:1-4, Jn 20:1-9
It’s appropriate that Easter is the crowning jewel of springtime.
Both Easter and palpable spring come after a long period of waiting. We had 40 days of Lent; we had (was it only?) three months of winter.
Both trigger some housecleaning. One brought about spiritual housecleaning; the other involved scrub brushes and elbow grease.
Both give us extreme joy. Both give us a sense of relief.
Both renew our faith in resurrection.
In spring, nature gives us tangible, fragrant symbols of resurrection when our perennial Easter plants push their stems from under the ground and reach toward the ever-brighter, ever-warmer sunshine until they finally burst forth their flowers.
Just as they did last year.
Just as we believe they will do again next year and years into the future.
To be clear, the flowers this year are not the same flowers we saw and smelled last year, and future flowers won’t be the same as these. In every generation of living things, death follows life. And then new life springs from old.
Resurrection is a constant.
As is God.
God, who is love. God, who loves. God, whose laws of creation include rebirth.
Throughout our Lenten preparations for this feast, which is the center of our faith, and throughout the Scriptures that accompany our worship through Lent and our celebrations this weekend, we learned of God’s love through Jesus.
We learned not only of the depth and breadth of that love, but just how amazing his resurrection seemed to Jesus’s disciples. How puzzling. How unbelievable.
And yet they came to believe.
Meanwhile, all we have to do is hit a button on a game controller to resurrect our digital avatar. And it’s become all too easy for us to conflate the virtual world with the real.
That’s why the appearance year after year of hyacinths and daffodils reminds us there was only one actual resurrection of a human, and that Jesus’s rising from the dead through the power of God was part of God’s overall plan of salvation and renewed covenant with humanity.
God still invites us to believe. God asks us to make Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer our alpha and omega.
To bring springlike newness into our lives.
Jesus rose, and we rise with him. Every day, when we embrace his Way. As long as we live, as long as we remain in his light.
Yes, let’s rise.
Christos anesti! Alethos anesti!
