A SPIRAL. You will note on the back of your bulletin that this day in the Church Year has

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1 A SPIRAL Acts 10:34-43; 1 Cor. 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8 You will note on the back of your bulletin that this day in the Church Year has two names. Resurrection of Our Lord is one. Easter Day is the other. What do you call this day? The distinction is important and it bears thinking about, and the way I m going to think about it is in terms of the two great patterns of faith that are expressed in the religions of the world. Let s look first at the oldest of these two patterns, the one that is picked up under the name Easter from the old English eastre from the prehistoric West Germanic name of a pagan spring festival. The English name Easter is sometimes said to derive from an Anglo-Saxon goddess of dawn, Eostre, whose rites were celebrated at the Vernal Equinox, the beginning of spring, which is the approximate season of the celebration of Christ s resurrection in the church. The celebration called Easter is older than the Christian faith. It is rooted in the cycles of nature, these being the most ancient basis we know for human religion. Long before the Hebrews were thinking about the God of gods, Yahweh, Creator and Sustainer of all things, partner in the Covenant with Israel, people organized their religious lives around the cycles of nature and celebrated the fertility that is required for life to continue. The time we observe as Christmas was a time for feasting after the harvest as well as an anticipation of the next growing season as the days began to get longer after the winter solstice. The time we celebrate as Easter was in the pagan world a celebration of a new growing season and rituals to insure the fertility of

2 the land and of livestock. These cycles and all that made for them were believed to be controlled by gods and higher powers which must be appeased and thanked in order for these cycles to continue. The world in which Hebrew religion arose was full of religions and cults that worshiped the order and beauty of nature in this way. Hebrew religion distinguished itself from the religions around it by insisting that worship be given exclusively to the God who is the Creator of all things, the eternal One who is the Source of nature and the material world. Our Christian faith, of course, derives from Judaism which developed from Hebrew religion, and among the things we inherited from this religion was the belief that God controls history according to a divine plan. So just as Hebrew religion understands God as leading Israel from bondage in Egypt through the wilderness to the Promised Land, so it understands all of history to be directed by God to some higher purpose and conclusion. According to the New Testament, the fulfillment of this history is to be found in Jesus, though it does not seem that this fulfillment has yet been realized in this world, which seems to operate pretty much the same as it did before Jesus. Indeed, this was the big problem for the first disciples of Jesus who expected Jesus to return soon after his death to make all things new. If we think about today as the Resurrection of Our Lord, we will be thinking of history as an ongoing process, proceeding from the start in the creation to its finish in the resurrected life with God, however that life may be interpreted. You have a sense of this in the words from Acts that we have read today, and which end, [Jesus] is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him and everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name. If

3 Easter Day represents religion in cycles that occur over and over again, the Resurrection of Our Lord represents religion as a line that begins at the beginning and ends at the end. Easter as I have been describing it is, I suspect, much easier for many of us to think about than is the Resurrection of Our Lord. At Easter, Jesus life comes forth from death as the new growth of spring emerges from the dormancy of winter. According to this view, Jesus represents the cycles of dying and rising that we see in nature and which is most remarkably and joyously evident at this time of year. That s the Easter Jesus whom we celebrate in the cycle of the Church Year. The Resurrected Jesus is not as easy to think about, not just because it is difficult to imagine anyone actually rising from the dead, but because it s not at all apparent what the Resurrection of Jesus means. I don t think we will understand much about the Resurrection if we think of it as a historical fact, an event that occurred one day long ago. It is a prejudice of the modern world that we have come to think that the only real events are those that the science of history records. Such history, of course, has nothing to say about the resurrection of Jesus. At most it will say that the early Christians, the followers of Jesus, believed that Jesus rose from the dead and from this belief the Christian faith arose. It is a point well taken in the sense that the Resurrection of Jesus did not take place in the public square, in the Temple before thousands of worshipers. Rather it took place in the privacy of homes and cemeteries, not before religious authorities but to disciples hiding from those religious authorities, not as a historical event that could have been filmed but as a private revelation. What cannot be denied is that something happened to the disciples. They experienced the most essential aspect of Jesus as remaining with them after his death.

4 (Walter Wink, What Happened to Jesus? ) This Jesus with whom they had lived became for them indistinguishable from the living God and became the force that directed their lives. The disciples saw that the spirit that had worked within Jesus continued to work in and through them, with the result that they extended his critique of the domination of people by the powers of death. Thus they continued his life by advancing his mission. Whatever happened to Jesus after he was crucified, whatever became of his body after it was taken down from the cross and placed in the tomb, his followers came to regard his life as revealing the inner meaning of the universe and of God and the destiny of all human life. And so we are gathered here this morning. If the word Easter suggests the cycle of rising from death which we see coming to pass all around us in this spring season, a cycle observed by people from time immemorial and which we also observe in the cycle of the Church Year; and if the Resurrection of Our Lord suggests a point on the line of history of God s love for the whole creation and the beginning of the Christian church, what is the shape of a faith that celebrates the Resurrection of Our Lord and Easter Day? May I suggest that it is neither a circle nor a line but a spiral, cycles that do not return to exactly the same place but rather stretch out farther and farther from a point of origin over time. Think of the steel wire binding a spiral notebook. If we have come to this service exactly as we were last year, we are only celebrating Easter. If we come here thinking that Jesus did all that needed to be done some 2000 years ago and all we have to do is ride on his coattails, we are only celebrating the Resurrection of Our Lord. Neither by itself is enough.

5 This ritual we are observing, pretty much the same as it was last year, is meant to move us forward and transform the days ahead and to transform the world as it did in the case of the first followers of Jesus, who came to see in him the possibility of a new life for themselves and for the world, a life free of fear, a life no longer dominated by the forces of death. All of the things we do as a church, our ministries, are attempts to express the transforming love of God in the practical terms of life in the world until at last God s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. But we come back again and again to this place to remember the source of our inspiration and to search out its meaning for the days ahead and for our world and for worlds to come. Most of us will be back here next year. Indeed, most of us will be back here next Sunday. But even by next Sunday, but a week away, we should be changed, more like Christ Jesus than today, more alive, less fearful, more the image of the love which has made us and would make all things new. Happy Easter! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed!) The spiral continues. Amen. Easter Day/The Resurrection of Our Lord, April 12, 2009 Emanuel Lutheran Church