Easter Sunday Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, April 9th, 2023
Christian Holy week is a time where things which were cast down are being raised up and things which had grown old are being made new, while all things are being brought to their purpose. The more I love this church, the more the date January 6, 1976 looms large in my mind, the date when our church caught fire. Before that it was by all accounts the perfect church. How perfect you say? The kind with Tiffany windows? Well, yes! The kind where say Franklin D. Roosevelt would choose for the wedding of his firstborn son. Well, yes! That wedding took place here June 4, 1930. The New York Times wrote of a gathering of more than 500 of the world’s leaders right here that day (evidently they could fit a lot of people into those perfect pews): “The church lawns were overrun with people on the Aspinwall Avenue and St. Paul sides. Verandas and steps of neighboring houses were used as points of vantage from which to watch the arrival of guests and later that of the bridal attendants and the bride herself.”
When that perfect church burned, there was such deep grief that the feeling was not even to try to rebuild it. It could never be the same again. The problem with that was that despite the raging fire that burned everything, the stone foundation remained solid and strong. (think about that). The last 47 years here (and we have members who have been here for all of that), has been a remarkable story of new life springing from the ashes of that dreadful fire.
There are so many impressive and surprising things about what it has taken to rebuild this church physically and spiritually. But the one that I am thinking about this morning is the most surprising one at least to me. It is that however much we admire that perfect church of the past it is not the church that anybody that is a part of this church today wants. What church do they want, do you want? This one. The one rebuilt after the fire. Not the perfect one always calling us to a glorious past, but this one that not only brings the wisdom and lessons of the past to us (such as its original stone arches drawing our eyes ever upward), but also calls us by its very openness, spaciousness, and flexibility to reach out to our present and to think of the future as a place of possibility. Of course, no one would ever wish for the pain and suffering of January 6, 1976 upon us or our predecessors, but how astonishing it is that we are gathered here this Easter morning experiencing a joy loving where we are today! I marvel both at the magnitude of our loss and at the triumph the we being here this Easter 2023 represents.
This two steps forward and one step back quality of to human history is a familiar one. Building alternates with destruction, where unimaginable calamities are only superseded by an even more astonishing series of events where things which were cast down are raised up, and things which had grown old are made new. This Easter, and every Easter, we Christians pause and celebrate how new life came out of the experience of Jesus’ death, how Jesus’ blood was shed for us yet death was not the last word and life emerged from death by the power of the resurrection, and it remains with us as a persistent hope. This Easter truth is more ancient and more resilient than any of our buildings or achievements. It’s a truth this church knows from its own experience.
Sometimes we talk about having plan A or plan B for our individual lives. I’m not sure I have ever met a person living plan A, that is, the plan that was first imagined with doll houses and sports balls. No, life’s unpredictability intervenes and never corresponds to what we expected. And who we are today has more to do with what we have done with these intrusions of loss than with any unbroken record of success. If you are not living “plan A” don’t beat yourself up over it! Welcome to the human race. Often the most remarkable human stories are those about what a person did next after the unimaginable happened, after the fire, or the fall, or the failure, or the diagnosis. Even on an otherwise happy Easter morning, who among us can’t tap into our own personal struggle with the two steps forward, one step back, push and pull of life?
If that is your life, if you love a church that once caught fire and was never quite the same again, the Easter story of Jesus is a story for you. The Easter message is not one of everything always being fine “if only” we have the right attitude, “if only” we do the right things, “if only” we know all the right things. No, every year we rehearse how things go wrong, despite our best intentions, Jesus dies, and along with the crowds in Jerusalem, we are not sure how it happened and how things could have gone so wrong, so fast. No matter what we do, every year Jesus ends up on the hard wood of the cross and in a tomb. The Christian message is not about how we could have gotten it right, how we could have saved Jesus if only we knew what we know now, or only did the right thing.
No, the Christian message is about redemption after the fact, about how new life emerges out of the old (like Easter lilies emerging from soil composed of dead plants). It is not about the hard road of “if only” I had done this or that, but the gospel of what new life there is to be had for all of us “from now on.” It is less interested in diagnosing exactly what put Jesus on the cross than in making the experience of resurrection life available to each and every one of us “from now on.”
We are the ones who get caught in “if only this” or “that” as in some spider web of death, but God scrutinizes our past motivations less than we may think. Easter is always about today. This is a lesson that every one of Jesus’ followers had to learn on the first Easter Day, and each of us learns, and relearns again and again.
Jesus championed a heroic love for all and insisted that it was that kind of God-given love that was the fulfillment of every law and the best way to understand how God is present in the world. When he was suddenly arrested, tortured, and executed, what was at stake for him was the ongoing place of that love in the world. This is why he loved his torturers even as they beat him and prayed for the forgiveness of his executioners even as he was dying on the cross. The night of his arrest, he explained to his closest friends that the lamb that was to be sacrificed for the sins of all that Passover was not one that had white fur and walked on four legs. No, it was him, and he would absorb everything awful the world could unleash on him. His body and blood would be given and shed instead of theirs so that through that sacrifice of love they could begin anew and live “from now on” lives of forgiveness and love.
It is not that Jesus’ suffering is so much worse than yours or anybody else’s. The real significance of his pain is that God is not overcome or flooded by the experience of suffering in Jesus. God’s infinite capacity is in no way diminished, and is able, therefore, to know every one of our losses, pains, defeats, anxieties, as they can only be understood and experienced within each of our private stories. God knows you, God know what every loss means to you and only you, acknowledges that loss and loves you anyway. This truth is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, where he knows and loves us in our pain to lead us through that to a real experience of forgiveness and life.
We may, or may not, have our pain in common. Our stories may or may not overlap. But what we do have in common is an experience of a love that cannot be pulled apart by pain, not an ordinary love, but a love that is an experience of God the way that we need the most. In the face of the most inexplicable suffering, God’s love can hold and contain us, even when our flesh fails us. What is most remarkable is how that love, once experienced, has the power to seep back in time, and redeem past pain. It makes previous wounds not into something that diminishes you, but, in fact, that pain can become the sort of pain that makes you more alive, like the pains of childbirth. That is what love does to pain. God’s love for us works like that. It saves us. It reaches deep into our lives, and our whole histories, and defeats the pain with love.
The core Christian truth of Christ’s Easter resurrection is that death’s victories are temporary and that Life ultimately is the greater power. But the key thing about this new life is that it is always experienced by us as forgiveness–forgiveness of ourselves, forgiveness of our loved ones, forgiveness of our enemies, and even forgiveness of God for not conforming to our expectations and fantasies, or for not ensuring that plan A actually came to pass. Forgiveness, new life, and freedom are so inseparable in the accumulated centuries of Christian wisdom, that as we long to be freed from the burden of pain, as we wish to see the stone rolled away from our own tomb, we can be confident that our first sensation of being newly alive will be an unexpected experience of radical forgiveness of all.
This morning, even as you worship in a church where you can still see the burn marks in the walls, let this Easter faith live in you. Be persuaded by Easter. Let it lift the weight not only of recent events, but all your grief, loss, and fear because you can be confident that those things about you are known by God, that God has given you the acknowledgement you seek, and has invited you to enter your future knowing that “from now on” you can have the confidence that God’s inexhaustible resources are yours in Christ. Let that experience change you. Let it mend what is broken in you. Let it loosen what is struck in you. Let it awaken in you your own capacity to love and to forgive. Let it connect you to others here at St. Paul’s so that you can freely join and accept the embrace of a community of the forgiven, a community living God’s “from now on.”
No matter what may burn, fall, or fail, let the power of Jesus’s love live in you. Let it prove you wrong when you have abandoned hope. Let Jesus surprise you with good news! May that good news strengthen us when everything just hurts too much. Let the unexpected new life of the resurrection, spill back into our whole conflicted history, heal our hearts, open unimagined possibilities for the present, and give us hope for the future. And may the God who spoke the word and there was light, and who raised Christ from the dead, also enliven our souls and bodies with the power of the resurrection. Happy Easter!
Amen.