Awake, My Soul, and Sing
By Rev. Dan Smith
April 08, 2007
Easter Day
Lessons: Isaiah 65: 17-25, Luke 24: 1-12
Have you ever been to the summit of Mt Sinai in the middle of a warm summer’s night and then just as the sun is risings over the Egyptian desert? I have, and I’m sure you’ll hear about it someday, but for today, I won’t even try to capture it.
When people tell us about extraordinary places at extraordinary times, we may be curious, fascinated even, to hear their energetic accounts. Sometimes, the experiences are so amazing, that even when someone does a good job with the details, their stories can leave us wanting. We want to nod in understanding of another person’s experience but we often end up shaking our heads instead, unable to grasp just what they are trying to convey. Our attention starts to wander. The truth is often the old cliche: you just had to be there.
Friends, we’ve come here today to celebrate. We’ve come to hear a fabulous choir and to sing our souls out. We’ve come to hear and to remember an amazing story of a place where none of us have ever been. We bring our curiosity and our fascination to the task. But if we’re honest with ourselves, somewhere deep in our guts, we get that ‘yeah but’ feeling. “Yeah, but… I’ve never been there.” Our heads want to nod up and down! "Love is stronger than death!" "Allelulia!" And then someone reads the account of the empty tomb, and our heads start moving side to side. Before you know it, we’re all a bunch of bobble-heads! Welcome to the wonderful paradox that is Easter Sunday! Easter is the quintessential “you had to be there” experience.
I caught a short parody awhile back in the comic newsweekly “the Onion”. The headline was “Civil War Historians Posit 'You Had To Be There' Theory”. The article, from
You laugh, but guess what? I’m taking that theory and applying it directly to the Resurrection! You think I’m joking? The whole gist of thing is hard to get unless you were there and saw it happen! There I said it. Now, let’s move on and learn what we can from those who were there.
Those who were there at the empty tomb proclaimed to us that he was not! And so we know that something happened on that first day, at early dawn. Not only was there a mysterious empty tomb, but soon after, there were stories of encounters with the Risen Christ. I’m convinced that all the while, those first disciples were as disbelieving as we are. The gospels say as much. They were amazed, terrified, and confused. But, they have a distinct advantage over us. They were there and, “idle tale” or not, they lived to tell the story! Has it ever occurred to you that our faith in the resurrection may have as much to do with whether we believe those first witnesses as it does in whether we believe in God or Jesus?
Before you ponder that one, I have another question for you. We’re clear that none of us were there on that first day of the resurrection, but I’m curious, what about that other big Biblical first day, as in the first day of all creation, when God made light and pronounced it good? Talk about a “you had to be there experience!” Most of us have figured out how to hold Genesis in one hand and the big bang theory in the other, but neither answers all of our questions about how the universe and all creation began. But my guess is most of us believe that God began something new on the proverbial first day of creation, whether by bringing something from nothing, or at least by bringing the world as we know it, big bang and all, into it current state of being.
Returning now to the day of the resurrection, we clearly don’t know the hows of this one either. We haven’t been there ourselves. But, here’s the question: Do we believe that something new began on that day? It’s the question that the church has throughout the centuries answered with a resounding “Yes”! From the very first witnesses and the apostles, faithful followers of Jesus have proclaimed the resurrection -- not as resuscitation, not as proof in the immortality of the soul, not as metaphor -- but as nothing less than the beginning of a new creation! Those who were there were as baffled as we are about how it happened. But they affirmed that something happened that first Easter, something that changed everything!
I learned recently that early church fathers, building on this idea, would sometimes call Easter the Eighth Day of Creation. I like to take it one step further and say that Easter is the very Octave of Creation! When we sing about creation, we sing about God’s power. As the hymn goes, we “sing the mighty power to make the mountains rise, to spread the flowing seas abroad and to build the lofty skies! On Easter, we sound this very same note of God’s mighty power, the power to change everything, and to make new life rise. We sing out the “ground tones” of God’s power of creation. We sing out the octaves of God’s power revealed through the resurrection and the new creation it ushered in.
In the words from Isaiah that we just heard, God has created “a new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating.” Easter is the day to celebrate the dawn of this new creation wherein God has set things right and wherein our job is to put the “former things” behind us. If last week was the week to choose which Palm Sunday procession we were in, the procession of God’s kingdom or the procession of human empire, today is day to choose which creation we are in, former or new! While I still can’t explain how God raised Christ, I can offer a good stab at why the story of the resurrection is still with us today. The resurrection of Jesus happened to awaken our faith, to revive our confidence in God’s power to change the world, and to reveal a new kind of order, a new procession of love, for the global community.
In the time of Jesus, the one who claimed to have all the power, even the power of God, was Caesar. We know Jesus didn’t die just any death. Jesus was killed, on Pilate and Caesar’s watch, by a state-sponsored execution, within a system of brutal violence, domination and corruption. Do you think if Jesus died of a brain hemorrhage we’d all be here today? The cross had been a symbol of Caesar’s power, the power to destroy all who stood in his way. Criminals and outcasts were hung up by the hundreds on Roman roadsides. On that first day though, at early dawn though, the cross became a new symbol for all the world’s transgressors, which includes us all, a symbol of God’s power over the violent ways of the empire, a symbol of God’s undying love and mercy for all! In the former creation, these rulers and this system of domination and violence, summed up in Paul’s phrase, “the powers and principalities”, have the power to order death and war, the power to judge, to imprison and to torture. They have the power and money to control airwaves and the flow of information to the rest of our still sleeping world! They have the power to name and blame the scapegoats great and small, the power to project a country’s former sins onto entire populations of people. These, our tradition tells us, are the workings and the things of the former creation. We can see them all around us. And yet, and yet, can you believe that a new creation and a new kind of power ascended on that first Easter Day?
Friends, we spend so much of our lives, so much time, participating in “the world as it is”, or the world of these “former things.” For most of us most of the time, it’s the only world we know. In the world as it is, the so call “real world”, there is for most of us no new creation, no new creativity, no new beginnings, no surprises, nothing we haven’t seen before. Our roles are prescribed. We get nestled into our lifestyles. The militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia and whatever other isms go, for the most part, unchecked or unnoticed. The point of all this talk of the dawn of a new creation is to inspire us to set our hearts and minds apart from the world as it is, and to get us on track, with God’s help, to continue to make manifest the world as it should be. When we take a hard look into our own hearts, my guess is we can feel that new creation bubbling up from within us, even now, even for those whose lives are already deeply fulfilling, I like to think we’ve at least seen moments of this new creation in our world?
I ask you…were you there at the March on
Whenever the powers and principalities are overturned, and those powers have a grasp on our inner lives as well, whenever God’s beauty and justice can shine through the shadows and break the bonds of our former creation, of our former selves, I believe we can feel that churning in our guts, and in our world. That churning is God’s spirit brooding over the chaos, just as it did in Genesis. It’s the Spirit’s further ushering us into the new creation that began on Easter Day! In a world of such devastating violence, don’t we need this hope and assurance that the new creation has begun, that our efforts for peace and justice are not for nothing. I know I need it. I need to know that my life is not some cog in a repetitive cycle of history where my best and noble efforts will always be matched by the greater forces of the Caesars of our world. To think such things is to be caught in the chains of our former creation and to forget God’s triumph over the cross. While we might study some of ways of the
Am I saying God’s justice was never served in history before Jesus? No, but as a Christian, I believe the resurrection was a crucial turning point wherein moments of truth and justice are part a new creation that is only beginning to show signs of formation. You think 2000 years is a long time, too long to wait for more than occasional sign? It’s been 13.7 billion years since the First Day Creation. And, do you remember God’s answer to Job? It’s one of the most beautiful speeches in the bible.
“Were you there when I laid the foundation of the earth?...
“Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb?—
when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped?”
“Have you commanded the morning since your days began,
and caused the dawn to know its place…
Do you know the ordinances of the heavens?
Can you establish their rule on the earth? “
When we take the long view, when we turn our attention from the powers that be and focus on the times, large and small, when the ordinances of the heavens have established their rule on the earth, we can feel that churning of a new creation in our guts. Though I’m not sure she had the resurrection or the new creation in mind, I find this dynamic so beautifully celebrated in a Maya Angelou poem called “Still I Rise”. Here’s an excerpt:
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise
In the new creation, we are called not only to leave behind not only night of terror and fear, but in the words of the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, “we are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds and stewards of the new day that is dawning.” It is time, I would add, for each of us to rise up from our cynicism and despair of this current moment.
To believe that something happened on that first day, to believe that a new creation was born is to have confidence that “Our God is Able!” Able to make something out of nothing. Able to bring new life where there is certain death. King preached an entire Easter sermon on those four words! Our God is Able! To believe in the resurrection and the new creation is to have a hope against hope that our future is already secure, that the powers and principalities have already lost! To believe in the resurrection is to live not merely “as if” there is a new creation. It is to live into a new creation.