Sermon preached by The Rev. Dr. Harold T. Lewis

SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA EASTER DAY, 2007

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?" (Luke 24:5)


In his sermon on Good Friday, Nate Rugh reminded us that you can't really appreciate the Resurrection if you don't experience the Crucifixion, and that although that Crucifixion bespeaks a real death, it is a death that signals the hope of Easter. Well, I experienced a solemn but hopeful Good Friday, thanks to the musical offerings of Calvary's choir. The first ray of hope was in the words of Jesus to the penitent thief, in the form of that sublime tenor aria from DuBois' Seven Last Words of Christ, "Verily thou shalt be with me today in Paradise." Another ray of hope came in the choir's moving rendition of Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri. In one of the final choruses, we hear the comforting words "Make your face to shine upon your servant, and in your loving-kindness spare me."

On the first Good Friday, however, no one seemed to be especially hopeful. News that Jesus had died on the Cross and been buried in a tomb caused the apostles, that motley crew to whom Jesus had somehow entrusted the leadership of the church, to make a tomb of their own. They sequestered themselves in the Upper Room, and bolted the doors, "for fear of the Jews." We can imagine that drowning their sorrows with the leftover wine from the Last Supper, they commiserated among themselves about the recent turn of events, while they tried to contemplate their next steps. Peter, perhaps, wondered if Zebedee would re-hire him for his fishing business.

Now the women who had been Jesus' faithful groupies were no less despondent, but being task-oriented, practical women (is there any other kind?) they decided to take some action. (You remember the old joke that if the Wise Men were the Wise Women, they would have gotten directions, made a casserole, and brought some sensible gifts for the Baby.) And now, Jesus being dead, their hopes dashed, they took action in spite of their disappointment, depression and disillusionment. They dutifully prepared some spices and ointments, and set out at the crack of dawn. The very least they could do, they thought, was to show their final respects by anointing Jesus' Body. (They would have done it sooner, but were bidden to observe the Sabbath as a day of rest.)

Pouches of spices in their hands, they approach the tomb. To their astonishment, the stone had been rolled away. They look inside. There is no body. They are bewildered. Then two angels appear and ask them "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" He is not here, he is risen." But the women are clueless. Sensing their astonishment, the messengers try to jog the women's memories. They remind them of what Jesus had said, what he had promised. And then it all comes back to them --- how Jesus had told them that it was necessary for him to be handed over to death and the third day rise again. When it all clicks, the women who had been self-appointed morticians see their new role as the first missionaries. They run to tell the know-it-all apostles what they had seen and heard, but, St. Luke tells us, "their words seem to them as idle tales, and they believed them not." (But that, perhaps, is another sermon!)

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?" The angels were telling the faithful women that ---- duh ---- they shouldn't be looking around a cemetery for someone who is alive. I wonder if the angels are speaking to us even today --- two millennia this side of the Resurrection. You see, I think that some people --- even some theologians and greater and lesser prelates in the Church find it convenient to hold up the idea of a dead Christ. If Jesus died in ancient Palestine, enshrouded in the cultural mores of his day, having preached only to a handful of people in a corner of the Roman Empire, then he has nothing to say to us today about matters of gender, race, human sexuality, global warming, or any other issues with which the people of God grapple in the twenty-first century. (See above under "idle tales"!)

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?" The more I read, the more I am tempted to believe that we live in a culture that somehow prefers death to life. That would at least be one explanation for why we now find ourselves in the fifth year of a war of dubious origins and questionable purpose which has managed to send more than three thousand young men and women to an early grave. And what about the British sailors and marines held hostage in Iran? I am incredulous that some military personnel on both sides of the Atlantic have found their behavior questionable. The logical extension of their remarks is that they should have fought back when originally captured and only given their respective names, ranks and serial numbers while imprisoned. Are we to believe that people actually think that it's better to go down in a blaze of glory for Queen and country than to return home safe and sound? Does the picture of one of the seamen, arriving home, picking up and embracing his child mean nothing to us?

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?" Let me let you in on a professional secret. One of the joyful occupational hazards of being a priest is that when I'm on an airplane, or at a party or even in the line at Whole Foods, once people discover who I "really" am, the topic of conversation often changes from the weather to the meaning of life. People who possess all the trappings of success, but who at the same time are trapped in fear, tell me of their negative experiences with "organized religion" (when I am tempted to retort with a favorite line from our former curate, Colin Williams, "Would you prefer unorganized religion?") Or they tell me of their not-so-secret longing to get reconnected with a loving, caring community. Anonymous people tell me of dead-end (and sometimes illicit) relationships, or of their estrangements from members of their families. They confide in me that they would like to turn over a new leaf, or perhaps branch out in a new career, but like the women at the tomb when first faced with the unknown and the unknowable, they are afraid. Such people are looking for the crown to replace their cross. They are trying to make the transition from Good Friday to Easter.

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?" Perhaps I have told you one of my favorite stories --- a true one --- about the difficulty we have in moving from Good Friday to Easter. For about a year or so while I was in college, I had a non-paying Sunday gig as chapel organist in Her Majesty's Prison in Montreal, a maximum security establishment. I was there at the behest of the chaplain, who in a previous life had been my parish priest. One day, Father Mac called me to say that he would be bringing to dinner at my college one of the former inmates, but, in a crash course in ethics, he explained to me that I shouldn't reveal how I had known him, since after all, Tom had paid his debt to society. "No problem," I said. On the appointed evening, as we were having sherry before dinner, one of my colleagues asked Tom how he met Father Mac. Tom had obviously also been schooled about not letting on about his former status, so without batting an eyelash, he said, "I met him on the outside!" Although a free man, his frame of reference was still the inside of a cell.

My friends, on this glorious Easter morning when you have braced freezing temperatures to come to church (there's a new line!) I ask that you leave your respective cells (or shells). I ask that you make every effort to be an Easter Christian and not a Good Friday Christian. I ask that you stop hanging around the graveyard and that you claim what Jesus has promised us in his Resurrection, and that is life, life in abundance. This is an indiscriminate invitation to those whose families have attended this church for six generations, and those who learned about us in The Post-Gazette yesterday. Those who are married, partnered, single or divorced. Those wet behind the ears as well as those "of riper years." Those steeped in the faith or who believe they are struggling with it. And in the ecumenical spirit, this annual invitation is extended to catechetical Catholics, pragmatic Presbyterians, and methodical Methodists as well as to our home-grown epicurean Episcopalians! For what we all have in common is that we are on a journey. A journey in which Easter is not the destination, but the starting point. Each year we "come to glad Jerusalem" for a fresh start, leaving the Cross behind, and with it all the crosses that impede our progress. And each Easter, we enter the empty tomb, but we do not stay there, because we have learned to look for Jesus among the living, and not the dead.

Let us pray: Jesus lives! Our hearts know well nought from us his love shall sever; Life, nor death, nor powers of hell tear us from his keeping ever. Alleluia! [The Hymnal 1982, 194] AMEN.