Sermon, March 31, 2002
Easter Sunday, Year A
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas

"It’s Easter Sunday," says the seminary professor. "Here’s your chance. Explain Christianity in 200 words or less. ...No pressure."

Gulp. Okay. I’ll try.

For us, Jesus is the human face of God, our window into the divine. We see in him a human being who embraces everything that humanity faces. Family and friendship. The struggle toward vocation. Reaching out to the margins, to the suffering, to do what little he could do to help. Being misunderstood. Becoming indignant at injustice and the abuse of power. Eventually, betrayed by a dear friend, he soaks up all of the hatred and evil that a broken world can dish out. Suffers vicious unrelenting physical pain. Hangs hopelessly in a slow death. Sees his friends run away in fear. Experiences total spiritual abandonment from God. And finally at the limits of human life, feels what it feels like to die. In all of this, amazingly, he is constant in his love and compassion for all, even those who abuse him. He dies loving and forgiving from the cross. We say, that’s what God looks like. That’s how God is. And Easter Sunday proclaims that nothing in the universe is stronger than that love. God triumphs in the end.

Okay. Twenty words to spare. But what does that story mean for you and me? It’s two-thousand years old.

I believe that story still lives. The same energy, the same spirit that motivated and guided Jesus is available to us today. God still embraces everything humanity faces, everything in your life and mine. As we live with our family and friends, as we work at our jobs and try to do what little we can do to help a suffering world, there is this quiet, living power that is infusing us with a spirit of acceptance and courage, and willingness for love and compassion. The same God that Jesus points us toward is reaching within our lives to give to us the same Spirit that Jesus had. That’s our amazing claim. God is with us. God is in us. God is in everything. Even injustice, abuse, betrayal, hatred, evil, suffering, pain and death. Still, there is nothing in the universe stronger than love. God still triumphs in the end. And all of that is accessible to us.

You’ve seen God’s power of resurrection in your life. We all have. Sometimes we name it; sometimes we don’t. Wherever there is a Spirit of acceptance and courage, a willingness for love and compassion, there is the Spirit of the risen Christ. Surgeon Richard Selzer wrote about seeing this Spirit in a hospital room:

The young woman speaks. "Will my mouth always be like this?" she asks.

"Yes," I say, "it will. It is because the nerve was cut."

She nods, and is silent. But the young man smiles.

"I like it," he says. "It is kind of cute."

All at once I know who he is. I understand, and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.

That’s what God looks like. That’s the Spirit of Jesus, the human face of God, bringing the power of resurrection into our brokenness and suffering. Wherever there is acceptance and courage, love and compassion – there is the risen Christ. And it doesn’t have to be labeled Christian. That Spirit is active and available to all – of any religion or no religion.

Because, you see, God’s work of resurrection is not just for particular people or individuals, it is for the whole world. And what God is doing is not just personal stuff, it is also very corporate. After all, Jesus took on not just the personal sinfulness of individuals, but also the structural power and abuse of political and religious and economic systems. God is bringing the power of resurrection into our corporate brokenness and suffering.

In 1985 South Africa appeared hopelessly trapped in the grip of apartheid. The President Pik Botha was entrenched in power, and his single-minded promotion of apartheid made him appear almost cartoonish, except for the horror of it all. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was invited to our Episcopal Church’s General Convention that year. It took pressure from the White House to extract a visa. As a black man, he could not travel many parts of his own country; he could not go anywhere there without identification. And though he was an Archbishop in the Anglican Communion, he could not vote in his native land.

This diminutive bundle of energy spoke before our Convention. Desmond Tutu had an enormous smile, an infectious giggle, and a happy spirit. He thanked us for our prayers for his oppressed people, and he told stories to make that oppression real to us. But then he said something I’ll never forget. Opening his arms wide as though he were embracing the whole world, he said to us (in his beautiful accent). "Pray for my brother Pik Botha. Yes, he is my brother and my friend. Pray for him, for he does not know. He is already defeated! His cause is hopeless! He fights against the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. He hasn’t got a chance."

In 1985, there was no earthly evidence that Pik Botha and the powers of apartheid would ever yield. To the world, it appeared hopeless. But to Desmond Tutu, who believed in the power of the resurrection, he knew that evil had already been defeated. He knew that God always triumphs in the end. He knew that acceptance and courage, love and compassion are the most powerful energies in the universe. And in his country’s darkest days, he lived in the light of the resurrection, the victory of God for us all.

Less than a decade later, after twenty-eight years in prison, Nelson Mandela was elected president of a new South Africa where power is shared racially. Tutu created a healing process to allow the country to deal with its past in a context of truth-telling and forgiveness rather than revenge and punishment. The prayers were answered. The vision of resurrection was true.

I want to remember Desmond Tutu’s words and faith on this Easter Sunday when the place we call the Holy Land looks so hopeless and when our world feels violent and threatened by a new kind of terror. I also want to remember that story of the man from Nazareth, and the Spirit of acceptance and courage, compassion and love that he released. I want to open my eyes to see that Spirit in sunsets and birds, in songs and broken bread, and especially in crooked kisses in hospital rooms and everywhere else that the divinity within us shines forth in ordinary people.

At his Inaugural Speech in 1994, South African President Nelson Mandela invited us to see with resurrection eyes and to feel with resurrection hearts. He said:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous.

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking.

We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone, and as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

The Spirit of Christ’s resurrection lives in you. It is your energy of acceptance and courage, compassion and love. You are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within you. Do not be afraid.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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