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We’re here this morning to celebrate the core affirmation of our Christian faith: Jesus our Lord is alive. It’s a notion that shapes our faith, our hearts, our lives, and even our world.

In one sense, there’s nothing to do but celebrate. We hear the message, “Christ is Risen!” and our response is “Christ is risen, indeed!” What can we add to that affirmation? Not much more than gratitude is expected. So, thanks be to God. And the best way, I suppose, of giving voice to our gratitude is to sing out our praise. Easter is, at its heart, a joyful celebration, expressed best in song.

So the Hebrew bible lesson comes from Israel’s songbook in many ways our favorite book in scripture. “Give thanks to the Lord,” says the Psalm for today. Psalms are favorites, I think, precisely because they are songs, and though we’ve lost their original melodies, somehow the very words carry the tune of faith. Do you hear?
“O give thanks to the Lord, [who] is good;
[whose] steadfast love endures forever! … The Lord is my strength and my might;
[The Lord] has become my salvation.
… I shall not die, but I shall live,
and recount the deeds of the Lord.
… The stone that the builders rejected
has become the chief cornerstone.
This is the Lord’s doing;
it is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day that the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:1, 14, 17, 22-24; New Revised Standard Version.) It’s not a surprise, is it, that we turn to one of our best psalms to lift our praise? Especially today, Easter Sunday, we also look to Beethoven and Handel whose genius alone gives us music grand enough for today’s message of joyous “hallelujah!”

Still, many of us want to reflect for just a moment on the meaning of the praise. Easter is at work in our world, and in us. Yes. But what difference does it make to affirm, even to sing, “Christ the Lord is Risen today?” I’ve been brooding over that question since shortly after our plane landed in Managua, Nicaragua, this past February. I was in a bit of a haze after not getting much sleep on the overnight flight and trying to adjust to the sun and heat of Central America following the chill at JFK airport. And being in Nicaragua, the second poorest country in our hemisphere, highlights the economic contrasts in our world. On the way to our work with our friends in Leon, we pass first, a squatter’s village where hundreds of families live in shanties made of black plastic sheeting supported by scavenged saplings, then just down the road, a large sign invites us and other high rollers to a gambling casino named Pharaoh’s Palace. And while my groggy brain juggles the sight of the poor on the one hand and the frivolously wealthy on the other hand, I notice a taxi driving in the other lane, unremarkable except for the unforgettable silver letters across the top of its windshield announcing “Christos Vive.” And though my Spanish is not that good, I understand the message that connects these disparate worlds of rich and poor: “Christ Lives.” In this broken, deadly world of ours, what does it mean to say, “Christ Lives”? When we so casually consume so much, and so many around us survive on so little, what do we mean when we say, “Christ is Risen; Risen indeed!”? What is the driver of that taxi in Managua saying, as he carries passengers between the worlds of desperate squalor and empty greed? What is God saying to us in raising Jesus to new life in a world that worships death?

“Christos Vive,” is the core affirmation of our faith. Like “Christ is Risen,” and like the older affirmation from the Psalm, “O give thanks to the Lord, [who] is good, [whose] steadfast love endures forever,” the affirmation, “Christos Vive!” calls us to remember that in every circumstance our world is founded on God’s goodness and not our own. But there’s more than mere gratitude in our Easter praise. There’s also the recognition that Jesus’ resurrection transforms our world, even as the Exodus transformed the world of our Hebrew ancestors in faith. Easter Jesus from the power of death. And Easter liberates us, Christ’s followers from the power of death, as well.

And here’s the bigger truth. Easter isn’t merely about our own transformation. Easter is about the transformation – the redemption, or the renewal – of the whole world. I’m not suggesting that Easter’s core truth is merely about a springtime rebirth, either, as glorious as that is for every human heart. Easter is about something deeper, fuller, richer, and more fundamental. The message of Easter affirms that our world itself is renewed when the cross is defeated and Jesus is restored to life. Easter is the first act in a new drama in the world. Beginning on that first Easter, his old creation is new. Or, to use Jesus’ language, “The kingdom of God” is begun. We’ll sing it or hear it sung in just a few minutes, in words from The Messiah, where Handel quotes our Bible’s last book: “The Kingdom of this world has become – the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”

Revelation’s language is grand, but you can change the image, make it mundane: The world is drawn to death as moths or a mosquito fly toward high-voltage bug zappers, but at Easter God invites us toward a new light. (This image comes from the poem, “Plastic Beatitude, by Laure-Anne Bosselear. See Garrison Keillor, The Writer’s Almanac for March 23, 2010.) Something totally new is at work. It’s this new thing at work when we say, “Christ is risen,” when we sing “Hallelujah,” or when a Christian in Managua goes about his business in a new way, letting his taxi take his message of hope for a better world, “Christos Vive!”

Songs of faith do a better job than words today, so I’ll stop talking so we can sing some more. But first let me confess that Anglican scholar and Bishop N. T. Wright helped me make some sense of the message in Managua in three helpful sentences. He summarizes clearly what I’ve been trying to suggest here: “The point of following Jesus isn’t simply so that we can be sure of going to a better place when we die. Our future beyond death is enormously important, but the nature of the Christian hope is such that it plays back into the present life. We’re called, here and now, to be instruments of God’s new creation, the world-put-to-rights which have already been launched in Jesus and of which Jesus’ followers are supposed to be not simply beneficiaries but also agents.” (N. T. Wright, Simply Christian, page xi. See also: The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart, page 21.)

Our job is to live the truth of this new world, the reality that Wright calls “the world-put-to-rights” and Jesus called “the kingdom of God.” We live this truth by giving thanks to God, who lifts Jesus at Easter, even as he led him every day of his earthly life. And we live our thanks to God every time we dare to lift our praise in prayer, in song, or simply whisper, “Hallelujah!”

Christ is risen.

Christ is risen, indeed.



Amen.


Mamaroneck United Methodist, April 4, 2010.
 

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