While It Was Still Dark | A Sermon for Easter Sunday
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin for the people of St. George’s, Arlington, on Easter Day (Year B), April 4, 2021.
Acts 10:34-43; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; John 20:1-18
I preach in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, him who is, and who was, and who is to come (Rev. 1:4). Amen.
Alleulia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleulia!
This is a claim we make every Easter, and yet it is a truth that we, as Christians, live by always. At this time, for all time. Resurrection! To this we hold fast: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
It is a truth pronounced in the midst of joyful celebrations, but it is also a truth uttered at bedsides, in hospital rooms, and at gravesides.
Yes, all we go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make
our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. (BCP, 482-83).
Why? Because Christ is risen!
This remains true regardless of how we approach it. Whether we woke up this morning joyful, healthy or hopeful; sick, fearful or weary. Whether we woke up in the Easter frame of mind or unable to shake the dust of Lent from our feet, the resurrection truth has been, is, and will always remain the same:
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Thanks be to God.
This is our second Easter Sunday in a time of pandemic. Perhaps that’s not something I should remind us of –on this, a morning of rejoicing. And yet, I doubt many of you have forgotten. We are in liminal space –in a time between—living our lives in the shadow of death even while the hope and promise of soon grows stronger with each passing day.
Easter is cause for celebration, certainly. And yet, it is also a day that knows the powers of death, the sting of grief, the ache of a world that is not what we know it should be. The promise of Easter meets us right here and now: bearing the weight of our lived experiences, of our messy, all too often painful and confusing world, with the promise that the love of God Almighty will always win over the mechanisms of sin and death.
Consider that fateful morning which found the disciples huddled away in fear and grief. The future, incredibly uncertain. The path they walked in deepest hope seemingly ending in the finitude of death. And Mary, coming to the tomb while it was still dark so that she might anoint the body of Jesus, so that she might physically be with him once again, only to find the stone rolled away, the tomb empty.
They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him (John 20:13).
Mary’s morning begins while it was still dark, a painful and agonizing extension of Good Friday; she does not yet know of the miraculous transformation of suffering and death into something glorious: the grace of Easter morning.
Flannery O’Connor, that much beloved Southern writer once wrote:
In my stories a reader will find that the devil accomplishes a good deal of ground work that seems necessary before grace is effective. . . . There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment . . . And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace. [1]
The devil indeed accomplished much over the past week, and yet we call it Holy. We call the day of our Lord’s crucifixion Good.
Good Friday.
Why? Because it was when the world was as its darkest, at its most uncertain, at its most life-starved, that grace moves like a thief in the night. In the dark, something is stirring. In the dead spaces, something lives. There is a promise: the life-giving love of God will always move the stones away from the places of death.
And not just the death and decay of our physical bodies, but all manners of death: self-interest, greed, corruption, despair, fear, racism, marginalization, violence, our need for control, white supremacy, othering of all sorts –all this and then some will be dealt with once and for all.
In the words of O’Connor, “it is the resurrection which is the true law of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws.” [2] –not the other way around. That’s the lie. Resurrection, the truth.
That’s what we celebrate on Easter morning! That, my friends, is grace. The devil may do his work. Circumstances may look dire. Our hope may grow weary, and yet.
On that fateful first morning, the morning when Good Friday was no more, as Mary stands weeping, the Resurrection finds her quite apart from her ability to bring it about, to see it, to comprehend it. Before her stands Jesus, the Christ, risen. This is her moment. Grace stands waiting. And she claims it, with the help of Jesus who calls to her by name. Mary.
And then, while it was still dark, she turns and proclaims, I have seen the Lord! (John 20:18). May it be so for us all.
The Reverend Sam Wells deems the Resurrection “a breathtaking mystery . . . the epicenter of the Christian faith.” But it is, he says, “something to be discovered, believed, and lived. . . . It’s not something to agree with in your head. It’s not even something to believe in your heart. It’s something to know in your gut.” [3]
I have seen the Lord.
It’s honestly never the elegant words of theologians that ultimately sustain me in times of great trial, but the simple faith of trusted friends who know well the dark and yet still hold onto and witness to the light.
I have seen the Lord.
Resurrection. A claim that is absolutely unreasonable, but, nevertheless, true.
My friend and fellow preacher lady Sarah Condon [4] tells a story –an old Mississippi legend is what she calls it –about a preacher who took to the pulpit in his church on Easter Sunday. Looking out at the crowd –a much larger than usual crowd of course –he takes a moment to gather the attention of the room. With all eyes on him, he leans forward and speaks into the microphone:
It’s all true. Happy Easter.
And then he returns to his seat.
It’s all true.
Whether we are faithful or fearful, whether we wait, weeping, or flee in terror, whether we ask for more evidence or believe in a moment, Christ is Risen. The Easter story reminds us that once we see the Lord, God’s power, glory and love alive in a resurrected Christ, when we see that, there is no turning back. For neither death nor life, neither angels nor [the devil], nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:37-39).
The Easter Gospel faces down Good Friday, confronts it, conforms it, transforms it into the very way of life –death itself an unwilling instrument of grace. This is the truth to which we hold fast; this is the truth that we too, like Mary, are called to live and to proclaim, not only with our lips, but with our lives.
Alleulia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleulia!
Amen.
[1] Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 117.
[2] Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 100.
[3] Sam Wells, “Resurrection in Nine Words,” April 1, 2018, http://staging2.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/easter-day-5/.
[4] https://www.mbird.com/ct_sermon/its-all-true-sarah-condon/.
