Easter Sunday
April 8, 2007


What is the sound of Easter?

There was an Easter card that I received back in my days in the seminary that made an impact on me. It said simply: “He came singing love, he died singing love. He rose in silence. If the song is to continue, then we must do the singing.” Though there is a lot about that poem to attract the heart, I think it is dead wrong in regard to the sound of Easter. The sound of Easter is not silence.

Rather, isn’t it closer to something like this? The people of Israel, after they passed through the Red Sea, journeyed through the desert for forty years. And do you know why? The darn men wouldn’t ask for directions!!

I heard another story this morning from Mike Britt, so I know it must be true. A young kindergarten student came home from school one day and said: Mom, did you know that Jesus has a last name – his full name is Jesus Christ Holy! The mother was confused. “How did you figure that out? “Well, today in class, my teacher told me that Jesus was part of the HOLY family…” AHH, that’s the sound of Easter.

What is a joke? It is something that turns the tables on the expected, something that hinges on the unpredictable or unreasonable. And is there an event, is there an occasion, is there an incident more unpredictable or unreasonable than what we celebrate tonight? The resurrection of Jesus has been called “God’s practical joke” on those who blindly trust in the sufficiency of human reason. Easter is the day when God laughs out loud, at all the things that snuff out joy, at all the things that pretend to be powerful, like cruelty, cynicism, despair. Easter is the day when God laughs out loud even at death. Jesus sweeps all that away with His wonderful, boisterous, resurrection laughter.

The question is, if we are Easter people and “Alleluia” is our song, why are we so darn depressing?! A little boy once went to Easter Sunday services. He kept tugging at his mother’s elbow, till finally she acknowledged him. “Why,” the little boy asked, “why are they all singing to their shoelaces?”

Easter is all about what one of my friends has described as the choice to live a “DEFIANT, INTENTIONAL JOY”. A defiant, intentional joy. Christ rises in every widow’s smile, in every joke told through tears, every suffering that is embraced in saving love for others. Christ rises in the lives of those who endure the imprisonment of a loved one for a just cause, in the hearts of those who battle poverty’s effects in the classroom, in the lives of those who run the homeless shelters and food lines – because they have seen through the illusion of the world’s suffering, and know that it is not ultimate, it is not final. That’s defiant, intentional joy. The choice to seek out all the living ones from their places of death…

Easter does not pretend that death is not real, that suffering is not real, that all the things that bring sorrow and pain into our lives and world do not exist. The women go to the tomb in that Easter dark because those things are all too real. What they learn from the angels, though, is that death and sorrow and pain are not the final answer. They have been trumped – and the response of the believer is to look for the living one, not among the dead, but in all the places to which they go and to which they are sent.

How will you live DEFIANT, INTENTIONAL JOY this season? Will people see resurrection in your face, know it in your smile, understand it in your suffering? In a few minutes, you and I will have the opportunity to make our statement of defiance, our own statement of belief in the resurrection – at the renewal of our Easter promises. Let it be the first act in a long chain of defiant, intentional joys…

One last thought. I had planned to end this homily in a big way. I was going to end this homily by laying an egg on the altar, but I’m just too chicken….

(at seat: Now that’s the sound of Easter…)