What does Easter mean?

            One of our visitors last Sunday at the sunrise service was little Anna, a student in the four year old class at our Hand in Hand Day School.  I was certainly glad to see them, but rather perplexed since I know that she and her family belong to another congregation in the area.  As we made our way to the prayer garden, her mother informed me that when they woke up that morning and announced that they were going to Easter Sunday services at their that morning, Anna sat upright and said with some indignation, “But Mommy and Daddy, but I want to go to my church.”  So there they were a week ago this morning sitting on the back row.  And it didn’t stop their either.  Little Anna felt so at home at her church that at the beginning of the service she informed me and everyone else that she wanted to sing “Jesus loves me.”  So, at the end of the service, we added another hymn and with her at my side helping out we sang in rousing chorus.  “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”  Sometimes it takes a child to remind us how special, how significant one day can be, a day when we are moved to see and hear things differently, a day when we are led to break with the script and sing a new song, to venture forth in a completely different direction, right here and now!  

     

Now when we think about the meaning of Easter, the significance of Christ risen from the dead, we’re apt to think in terms of what’s going to happen to us after we die.  Christ has overcome death, so death will not have the final word over us.  We too shall rise.  “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet...it will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”   But for early church, Easter isn’t only about life after death, but, just about here and now!  In the book of Acts we hear of strange post-Easter behavior to say the very least.  “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.”  They’re the kind of words that cause our ears to perk up.  Who ever heard of such scandalous talk in the church, especially so close to Easter?

 

It’s one of those troubling scripture passages we’d just as soon do without.  No private ownership, selling off land and houses and giving the proceeds to the needy—it sounds downright subversive, something akin to socialism or even communism.  I mean, I don’t doubt that we’re all for charity, but is taking things too far.  And besides, history has shown time and time again that when all is said and done, such utopian idealism just doesn’t work.  The former Soviet Union is a case in point.  So, where does the church get off talking such nonsense?  We work hard for what we’ve got and we’re willing to share some of what we have, but if everyone started selling off, where would we be?

 

I confess to not knowing a whole lot about Karl Marx, but I do know that he claimed that practically every human action and concern could be traced to economic sources, to how we view things and money.  We can rest assured that Luke, who wrote the book of Acts wasn’t a Marxist, but he was a good enough judge of human behavior to recognize that where our treasure is there our hearts will be also.  And as those of us who read through the book of Acts a couple of years ago discovered, a lot of the book and the one that bears Luke’s name has to do with money matters.  There’s Mary’s Magnificat, parables about the debtors, the good Samaritan, the rich man and Lazarus and stories about the rich young man who couldn’t part with his money and another rich guy who was called a fool because of his silly dependence on well filled barns.

 

Have we ever heard it said, or maybe even wondered ourselves, why we always seem to talk about money in the church?  Wouldn’t it be nice to get beyond all this mundane stuff and talk about the real spiritual stuff that really important?  It’s a week after Easter for goodness sakes!  The truth is, there’s probably nothing more potentially divisive and nasty in the church that when we get to arguing about money.  He may have missed the boat in a lot of other ways, but in one sense old Karl Marx may have gotten it right.  We are defined by economics.  Money really does make the world go around.  And it matters not that we call ourselves Christian.  We’re just as much a part of that as anyone else.    

 

When Jenny and I were in Costa Rica last year, we and our traveling companions stayed in an indigenous village just outside the capital of San Jose.  The last full day that we spent with the Huetar people there, the children took us on a hike into the hills up from the village.  We walked up a muddy road past an old pig farm and other ramshackle buildings that people called home. 

 

After walking about forty five minutes we can to the crest of a hill and beheld a majestic view.  It was there that our young guides informed us that off to our right was a coffee plantation.  Sure enough, there on the clear cut slope you could see the bushes planted in neat rows almost right up to the road and the little green beans they contained.  We learned that this particular plantation was owned not by Juan Valdez, but by a company that supplied to one of the big international coffee companies, the kind of companies whose product sits on the shelf at HEB or Randalls or Albertsons.  Our ELCA missionaries informed us that in fall, this particular company would hire them on to pick coffee beans.  Out of curiosity, we asked them how much they made.  What they told us amounted to not much more than a couple of US dollars a day.  I confess that not a single cup of coffee has gone by since then that I haven’t thought about that.  The ugly truth is that part of the reason coffee is so cheap is because children like the ones in Quitirissi Costa Rica are paid so little and to a considerable degree our prosperity is borne on their backs and the backs of poor people like them around the world.  And it’s the way things have been since time in memorial.  I don’t suppose it’s any accident that the first banks were temples and the first coins were stamped with the images of gods.   

 

The great twentieth century theologian Ernst Becker noted that as belief in God and other sources of immortality grew less pervasive, money began to fill the void, our road to significance and immortality even in death.  As the old saying goes, “you can’t take it with you.”  Of course the sentiment doesn’t do away with our need to have stuff and money it just shows where it comes from, a desire to live forever by passing on what we have to someone else or in some way leaving an indelible mark for generations to come—like the giant head of Jesse Lincoln Driskill that adorns the hotel bearing his name downtown.  And I imagine there’s a little bit of Colonel Driskill in each and every one of us.

 

So what’s the point?  How does all this translate for those of us who would follow the crucified, risen Jesus?  Well, the operative question for the early church wasn’t “what do we have to give up to follow Jesus?”  The question really has to do with who Jesus is.  “Who do you say that I am?”  He asks.  As we catch sight of the risen Christ, we begin to discover who we are, who God has made us to be, that living in light of his death and resurrection means orienting our whole life to his, not just some “spiritual” part of it.  It alls boils down to this.  What does Easter mean?  Is it just about what happens to us in the heavenly hereafter or does it mean something for how we live today, in the here and now?  For the early church it most certainly did and so it does for you and me.  And the good news is that the same miracle working God that helped the lame to walk, the deaf to hear and the blind to see, the same God who raised Jesus from the dead and broke the bonds of sin and death once and for all is at work among us, opening hearts and hands that until now only knew how to hold on for dear life because that’s the only reality that we knew. 

 

But the light of Easter breaks in upon our world to reveal a new reality and we as the church are called to bear witness to that new reality, to be an alternative community, a signal, a sign that Jesus Christ enables a kind of life lived together unlike anything the world has ever known.  Does that mean that now we as the church, as individual Christians have finally arrived and everyone else needs to get it together like we have?  No, not at all, not by a long shot.  Until the day we die or until Christ comes again we’re works in progress.  And as sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west we’re going to fail.  We’re not going to get it right in a lot of ways, including and especially when it comes to money and possessions.  But living together as disciples of the crucified and risen Lord, we can share our burdens, we can be honest and learn to speak the truth in love not because we’ve got it all together, but of the precious gifts we receive each and every new day, the gift of forgiveness and new life, gifts that we share with one another as God builds the kingdom right here among us.

 

Christ the Lord is risen!  He is risen today!  And because of what God has done, there’s new script, for a new day.  Let us go forth in the name of the one who has made us God’s own.  Amen.