“Easter – No Idle Tale”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
Easter, April 8, 2007

Luke 24:1-12

            Of course, the disciples didn’t believe them. For one thing, they were women. Two thousand years ago women weren’t considered reliable witnesses in a court of law. Jesus is risen from the dead? Phooey. An “idle tale” – had to be. Women’s gossip, no doubt.  Don’t skip too quickly over this detail – that among Jesus’ followers, it was the voiceless and powerless women who are given the privileged status of being first to see life in the kingdom of death. This Easter tale, like the rest of the gospels, subverts the social and political arrangements that the mainstream often confuses with reality.  Imagine the story being told today – only instead of Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James getting to the tomb first   it was cross-dresser, a transsexual, and Fred (our local back-lane binner), blurting out their tale of resurrection. Who’s going to believe them?

But this wasn’t the only reason their story was so hard to believe. The disciples each witnessed, only two days before, the brutal execution of their leader. The nails that pierced his wrists and feet were like nails in the coffin of hope.  It’s why crucifixion was the Roman Empire’s favoured method of execution when it came to quelling potential uprisings. To witness one was to understand the message in no uncertain terms: here hope for a different world dies; here all talk of resurrection, of life emerging out of death is nothing more than an idle tale.

Zoom forward 2000 years – global warming, species extinction, the gap between the rich and the poor widening at an unconscionable rate – crucifixion still goes on, and where is the Easter story in these realities? Who’s going to believe that life, not death will have the final word, that Christ is risen? Many would conclude with the disciples that it’s nothing but an idle tale – wishful thinking of those who can’t bear to face reality squarely. For the realist Good Friday is the credible story.

          The bad news story is the easier one to come to terms with. For the last 500 years, during the Modern period, we worked so hard at ridding the universe of Spirit, that we’ve convinced ourselves that this journey of life is an idle tale, told by an idiot. Lacking the tools to measure spirit, science measured only that which dissipates and dies, and came up with the second law of thermodynamics that states that it’s all winding down. Sorry to rain on the parade, this law states, but our sun’s going to burn out in a few billion years, all flesh withers and dies, and it’s all just one long descent into an empty void. Make meaning if you must, but know that your meanings are nothing more than arbitrary attempts to calm our fear that it’s an idle tale this story of life – that we are traveling through an incomprehensibly large and ever-expanding universe toward oblivion.  Deal with it, says biologist Richard Dawkins, in his best-selling book, The God Delusion.

Yet consider this: Imagine that you were around in some form, 14 billion years ago, when the universe began in an immense explosion of heat and light. You’re just floating there as a witness. There are not even atoms yet – just particles of matter and anti-matter, and it looks for all the world that anti-matter is going to win this battle. But somehow .01 percent of matter survives this primal contest. Remember, we’re not yet at molecules. No hydrogen, no helium. There you are witnessing this titanic struggle. Now, imagine being told that in 14 billion years,  millions of monarch butterflies would be migrating toward a bioregion called Mexico – monarch butterflies, creatures with beautifully patterned wings, with a built-in intelligence to make an annual pilgrimage to Mexico! Would you believe this tale?

You are asked to believe that life is going to bust out all over the place, from this humble battle, this primal execution of matter. It will all wind itself up in the direction of abundant life.  Out of this primal light show there would emerge whales sounding, cardinals singing, otters frolicking, lions mating, monkeys grooming, and frogs croaking. Orchids and daffodils and cherry blossoms and bees buzzing in fields of clover will emerge.  One day, a two-legged creature is going to emerge, who will stand up on two legs, gaze out at the stars, and be capable of comprehending the whole story of life. It will be as though the universe had created a creature capable of observing itself. This creature would be able to understand the whole 14 billion year adventure as a story of Spirit, winding the whole thing up in the direction of increased beauty, complexity, and consciousness. And when these human ones figured that out, they would drop to their knees because everything in them would want to say “thank you, thank you, thank you.” They would come to call that thank you “religion”, and yes there would be problems with religion, yes, but eventually the two-legged ones would understand that religion was just organized gratitude for the miracle and grace of it all.

In the year 2007, you are told, some of these upright ones would gather together in a grey stone building, in Vancouver, Canada, on an Easter morning, and let the hallelujahs fly, because they can’t get over the miracle of it all. There you are hearing that what you had just witnessed in this Flaring Forth would be a story of life that incorporated death and tragedy and destruction, of course. But at the end of the day, anybody with eyes to see would be able to tell that this was a story of eternal, unending life, not death. What’s more you hear that these same people would behave as though the very spirit of their crucified leader was still alive and well in them.

I’m not saying it’s easy to hear the women’s story of a God for whom death is but a prelude to new life.  Goodness knows we’ve come to terms with death, and truth be told being called back to life by the Easter story is a little disturbing. Just when we’d come to terms with seeing the earth and all her creature as so much stuff to buy and sell – a death story that the affluent could work with and benefit from at least for the time being – the women’s tale of new life interrupts our plundering.  Just when we’ve come to terms with the reality that the world is divided into those who can “play” the market and those who will forever be played by the market, the risen Christ interrupts our cynicism asking us if we’re aligned with the kingdom of death or the kingdom of life.

Out of this tomb of meaninglessness and cynical accommodation to the kingdom of death comes a disturbing word of life.  And no, it’s not going to be easy to hear. We’ve lived Good Friday, we’ve been educated away from awe and wonder at the mystery of life, we’ve grown comfortable with the conveniences of an unsustainable economy – this word of life is, to use Al Gore’s term – inconvenient. Word of Christ risen from the dead comes to us from the direction of the deep feminine principle and challenges us, not just to believe in a 2000 year old Easter story that happened way back then. No, this feminine witness is part and parcel of the Spirit of God built into the fabric of the universe, and our own being, inviting us, you and me, to participate in resurrection life. We’re next up for resurrection.

The witness of the feminine principle interrupts our accommodation to death, and breaks the news that we don’t get off the hook by simply believing the story and then going back to dwell in the kingdom of death. This feminine witness is inviting us to feel the life that rolls back tombstones and heals broken bones and breathes life into death and is the source of all beauty, truth, and goodness – to feel the generative Source of all life lifting us up out of death.

An idle tale? You decide for yourself. But I’m saying it’s a call back to life, to the abundant life of the risen Christ. And it means that if you accept the call to come out of the tomb of death you won’t fit so well in the world. So, you’ll be tempted to fall back under the spell of death, and tempted to instinctively dismiss this disturbing word of life, because to experience resurrection is to join a resistance movement. It is to be mobilized by the spirit of the risen Christ to speak out on behalf of life and love and the “gay, great happening illimitably earth”(e.e.cummings).   It is to speak a word of love and life to the purveyors of death, powers within us and within our social systems – to speak a word that more is expected than the pursuit of private comfort and affluence; that life demands that we give ourselves to this great Spirit-adventure in which God is always and everywhere doing a new thing; fashioning from twisted arms and mangled hands wings of light, from wounded hearts a resurrection of compassion, and from forsaken cries hallelujahs of hope. This is no idle tale. It’s the only story worth living.