Our Easter Faith
Easter 2002 sermon by the Rev. Dr. John Westerhoff
St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Atlanta
For all who long for peace and justice the news this year has been mostly bad. And yet we came to church today to proclaim what we believe is good news: "Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed; Alleluia."
Every Sunday since last Easter we have prayed for peace and every day we have had to face a world threatened by terrorism and tormented by fear, helplessness and the horror of violence.
During this holy week I have been haunted by the conviction that I would be unfaithful if I did not address this issue. But I was also haunted by the awareness that what I believe is our best Christian response may be unacceptable to many, for while what I believe is within the Christian tradition it has never been the dominant voice.
Nevertheless, the professor-theologian in me, needs to begin today by asking the question, what might our Easter faith have to say to our current situation? And then proceed to seek an answer by returning to those days when our Easter faith was born.
Now in Jesus' day those who chose to follow him longed, as we do today, for a time when war would be no more. Yet the world in which they lived was not much different from ours today. The fear of terror, the injustice of occupation, and the constant threat of violence occupied their days and nights. Their expectation and hope, however, was that one day God would send them a Messiah, a Messiah who would lead them in an armed struggle, a Messianic war, that would deliver them from the forces of evil and establish for them the kingdom of God.
Is it any wonder that Jesus' repudiation of violence and his willingness to suffer death on a cross was not only unimaginable, but resulted in confusion, disillusionment, and despair. It took the disciples of Jesus their irrational experience of the resurrection just to plant in their minds the thought that God's defeat of evil and the establishment of God's reign of justice and peace might only be achieved through the cross -- that is, through non-violent, suffering love.
However, in time they learned that this pacifist action of God in Christ's death on a cross was only a beginning, and time would need to pass before God's reign of justice and peace was to be fully established. Some became convinced that God would not complete what God had begun without their response and cooperation -- that is, by their adopting the peaceful ways of God in a world where evil continued to persist.
But most concluded that the most faithful way for them to contribute to their hoped-for future was through the use of political, economic, social or military might. And so while never ruling out the ways of non-violent resistance and suffering love, the church adopted a theological ethic of what it named "just wars," that is, wars in which the use of violence would be acceptable and indeed necessary to defeat the forces of evil, terrorism, and violence. And in spite of 2000 years of evidence to the contrary, this remains the dominant position of most Christians.
This may explain why over time both Passion Sunday and Good Friday became marginal days in the church's calendar. Instead, most Christians chose to move from Palm Sunday, in which they celebrated the church's triumphalist march to a victory over evil in this world, to Easter Sunday, in which they celebrated God's promise and assurance of peace and justice in another world after death.
That, perhaps, will help you understand why it has always been tempting for clergy on Easter to focus on the opening words of the Burial Office: "I am the Resurrection and I am the Life, says the Lord. Whoever has faith in me shall have life, even though he die," as, indeed, even I have done in years gone buy. Nevertheless, while I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, to focus on that message, no matter how popular, would be unfaithful to the Easter proclamation of the early church and avoid dealing with the meaning of Easter for our own day.
The original message of Easter is this: Life here on earth can be different. God is at work striving to accomplish our longings for a world without war, a world in which all people experience peace and justice. God has entered into human life and history to disarm the violent powers of evil through non-violent resistance and suffering love, but only if we, the church, will accept God's way of making peace and not our own.
Let us not forget that Easter, the day of the Resurrection, is not the "in spite of" Good Friday, but the "because of" Good Friday. Easter is that day on which we celebrate the strangest of all miracles, namely, how God defeated the forces of violence and evil through non-violent resistance and love, a conviction most Christians have difficulty believing.
Nevertheless, as naive and strange as it may appear, I invite you to please question our assumed faith in political, economic, and military might as the means to peace. I invite you to please question our assumed hope that we can defend our way of life from terrorists through increased armament and warfare. And I invite you to please question our assumed understanding of love as giving to others what they deserve, by punishing them for what they have done to us.
If we are willing to do so, there is the possibility that today's proclamation of Good News may indeed by good news for our troubling times, for only then will our Easter faith offer us an alternative to fear. So please reflect upon the possibility that our Easter faith invites us to place our trust in God's ability, with our cooperation, to bring new life, abundant life, eternal life not after our death, but for now while we are alive. And try to remember that while it may not make sense, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi are witnesses to the truth that non-violence can transform our lives and history.
And so especially on this Easter we are called upon to consider faith in a God who conquers evil through suffering love. To consider hope in God's continuing work in the world on behalf of reconciliation and peace through non-violent resistance. And to consider love which like God's is always forgiving, and willing to give up that which we do not need so that all the peoples of the world, even our enemies, can have all that they need. For this, for better or worst, is what I believe it means to be an Easter people. Or as Brian Wren writes in his contemporary hymn:
Christ is alive! Let Christians sing. His glorious cross stands empty to the sky.
Let streets and homes with praises ring. His suffering love in death shall never die.
Christ is alive! No longer bound to distant years in Palestine,
he comes to claim the here and now and conquer through love every place and time.
Not throned above, remotely high, untouched, unmoved by human pains,
but daily in the midst of life, our Savior with the Father reigns.
In every insult, rift, and war, where color, scorn, or wealth divide,
he suffers still, yet loves the more, and lives though ever crucified.
Christ is alive! His Spirit burns through this and every future age
till all creation lives and learns his joy, his justice, love and praise.
Amen.
