Note: This sermon was preached online for Trinity Church and St. John’s Lutheran Church (both in Three Rivers) on April 12, 2020 and in response to readings that can be found here.
Last year, Episcopal Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s Easter message was called “Hallelujah, Anyhow!” He said:
The Rt. Reverend Barbara Harris was the first woman ordained and consecrated a bishop in The Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion. In her memoir, entitled Hallelujah, Anyhow! [she] quotes an old Gospel hymn that says it this way:
Hallelujah anyhow
Never let your troubles get you down
When your troubles come your way
Hold your hands up high and say
Hallelujah anyhow!
I won’t spoil the rest of it for you. If you’re looking for an awesome Easter sermon, Bp. Curry’s 2019 Easter message still holds up in 2020.[1] In fact, I’d say this Easter, it is more timely than ever.
If there’s ever a day when the church gathers together, it’s Easter. Christmas, too—but at least then you can imagine it getting canceled due to bad weather. But for Easter to be canceled, that’s truly unprecedented.
Where are the Easter egg hunts? The organ? The choir? The bright smiling faces? The “Sunday best” outfits? The incense? More to the point as far as I’m concerned: where is the darn egg bake? This Easter is going to be different from every other Easter we and Christians going back centuries have ever experienced:
Save one.
“1After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.” You and I have just heard the rest of the story of that first Easter that was unlike any other.
The people at the time were living in fear, in sadness, literally in locked rooms (as we’ll hear in next week’s Gospel). There were no giant Easter celebrations. In fact, their big celebration as observants Jews, the Passover, had just ended—and let’s be honest: Worst. Passover. Ever.: you want to call this Easter unusual, how about your teacher, friend and Messiah, getting crucified on your biggest holiday of the year? And all Mary Magdalene and the other Mary can do is go on a socially-distanced approved walk of two at a time to go to Jesus’s tomb.
And out of the tomb, a miracle happens. An earthquake. An angel from heaven. Stone rolled back. Guards fall, like dead men. And as they look on, the angels says 4 short words: Do not be afraid.
Do not be afraid. This is not a throwaway line. Who wouldn’t be afraid from what they’ve just witnessed with an earthquake and an angel and guards tipping over like fainting goats? But more than that: they are afraid because their friend has been crucified, afraid because they don’t know who will be hunted down next, afraid because they don’t feel safe anymore, afraid because they don’t know what the future will hold for them and for their loved ones.
Do not be afraid. If ever an Easter message were still every bit as timely this year as it was before, it’s that one. Do not be afraid. Not, “don’t worry so much about it.” Not, “be reckless.” No, Do not be afraid: for Jesus who has been crucified has been raised.”
The message of Easter is at once profoundly realistic and profoundly hopeful. The message the angel delivers does not deny death or run from death: even on the morn of the resurrection, the angel names Jesus “the one who has been crucified.” But the message of Easter is that Jesus has overcome death.
For that reason, we need not be afraid. Not that troubles won’t come; they will, and they have. But we Christians have an alternative vantagepoint to view reality. That short lesson from Colossians: honestly, it’s hard to imagine how it could be so wordy and confusing in 4 short verses, but that’s Colossians for you. But the basic message is this: we are no longer limited by the things we see around us. Where we see death and fear in the world, because Christ is raised, we can also look above it all to see resurrection and hope. Colossians says our lives are “hidden with God;” in other words, this perspective isn’t obvious; like the women at the tomb, it still takes faith to get from an empty tomb to the idea that Jesus has been resurrected. Some people say “when life gives you lemons, crush them into lemonade.” The message of Easter gives us something better: “when life and the world give us the tomb, Christ has rolled away the stone.”
I think the best way to understand it is that hymn:
Hallelujah anyhowNever let your troubles get you downWhen your troubles come your wayHold your hands up high and sayHallelujah anyhow!
It is the song of Easter. Hallelujah anyhow! It was the song that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sang on Easter morning. Hallelujah anyhow! It was the song the Israelites sang when Jeremiah prophesied to a people scattered in exile and told them: you will return to your home, and you will be reunited with one another at last. Hallelujah anyhow!
Friends, as strange as Easter 2020 is, we don’t need all the bells and whistles, we don’t need Easter eggs and hunts, to paraphrase another poet, we don’t need “packages, boxes, or bags” for Easter to come, we don’t need to pack the pews.
We simply need Christ who was crucified
risen from the dead. And whether we are
all together as I hope we soon will be, or whether we are gathered with a
couple loved ones in front of the screen, or whether we walk 2 at a time to the
empty tomb, Christ is what we have.
Christ who was crucified but now is risen. Christ who did not run from death but by
death overcame the power of death.
Christ who continues to come to a world in fear, that our voices may
rise in the great and perennial song of Easter: “Hallelujah anyhow!” Amen.
[1] You can view the full message here: https://episcopalchurch.org/posts/publicaffairs/presiding-bishop-curry-easter-2019-message
