Easter: Celebration

Here is my message for Easter Sunday. The text was Mark 16:1-8:

On the day that Pope John Paul II died, he was greeted at the Pearly Gates by St. Peter, and is told that he has complete access to heaven and can go anywhere anytime that he likes, but first that God would like to meet him.  John Paul said he would love to do that, but wanted to know if heaven had a library.  Peter said, “Well of course,” and John Paul said “well there is something that I have been puzzling over for a long time and could never find a satisfactory answer in the Vatican’s archives, and so I wonder, before I go a meet God, could I go to the library first?” “Of course,” St. Peter replies, and so they head off to the library and the pope sits down to study. The and the days turn into weeks, and the weeks turn into months, and the months turn into years, as he continues to study, never coming out, never interacting with anyone else, and then one day, people hear a cry of anguish coming from one of the study tables.  When people rush over they find the Pope there, with a large book in front of him pointing to one line and crying out “there’s an r! There’s an r!  Look, there’s an r.  It says is celebrate not celibate!”

And so today we come to celebrate. As today is the foundational event of the church, and we are an Easter people. And it’s not just today, but traditionally every Sunday is seen as a little Sunday, a day of celebration on the first day of the week to celebrate God’s victory over death. To celebrate the freedom we find and have received in Christ. And once we understand what God has done for us through Christ. Once we understand what God’s love looks like and feels like and acts like and once we understand that there is nothing all in of creation that can separate us from that love and that God’s grace is freely given to us, then we shouldn’t have any response but celebration. And yet somehow we don’t. The church is not exactly known for having a celebratory nature or atmosphere, and we should probably ask why?

As Richard Foster says, “Jesus was so full of life that he was accused of being a wine-bibber and a glutton. Few Christians could ever possibly be accused of such a thing today.” Indeed, when it comes to the fundamentals of the faith, we have forgotten the fun and focused more on the mental. But that is not who we are called to do or to be. Indeed when the angels make the announcement about Jesus’ birth, we are told “Behold, I bring you good news of great joy that shall be for all people.” Are we living in great joy? When Jesus preaches his first sermon, he quotes from the prophet Isaiah and says that the Spirit is upon him and he is bringing good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the captives, liberty to the oppressed and to proclaim the year of jubilee when all debts are forgiven. That sounds like some pretty good news doesn’t it? So where is our joy? Where is our celebration?

Have you ever been told a joke and then they never got to the punchline, perhaps because they forgot it? In one of the seminal movies of my generation, Breakfast Club, Judd Nelson’s character is telling a joke and just as he gets to the punchline he falls through the ceiling, and so we never hear how it ends. And the truth is, he made it all up, there was no ending to the joke. And when we hear the passage from Mark today, we might imagine the same thing. Where’s the end? Or perhaps we just think someone is playing a joke on us. If you look in your Bibles, you will find two different endings after the passages we just heard, with a heading of either the shorter or longer ending. But our earliest and best manuscripts don’t actually have those endings. Instead they end with the women fleeing from the tomb in fear and not telling anyone. Those endings were added later because editors thought that there needed to be more, just as there is in the other gospels. I mean after all, the women did eventually tell someone, and we know that because we are sitting here this morning.

 And so their terror and amazement changed. As did their ability and willingness or desire to tell others, to be witnesses and proclaimers of the good news, which is at the heart of what Mark is about. And so the terror and amazement changed to joy and celebration, and that’s often what we need for our celebrations is something to help us to remember and celebrate the good times. Now that’s not always the case, and definitely not for all people. In our preschool, the kids are always ready to celebrate, and most especially to laugh and dance, something we could learn something about. They don’t need a reason, they just need a place. But, for us we often need a reason, and coming out of the depths of despair is the perfect counter balance to celebration, and that’s certainly what Easter represents. I know it’s possible to celebrate Easter and eat all the marshmallow peeps you can without thinking about the tomb, but it’s not as meaningful, because to understand resurrection we have to deal with death. You cannot have resurrection without the tomb, and so the celebration of resurrection is the recognition that the thing we thought was the end, death, was not the end at all.

On the cross, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, quoting from the 22nd psalm. But that cry of despair in the psalm eventually turns to praise because God did not abandon them in their suffering, and delivered them and so ends with the statement that “God has done it.” That is the Easter message and it’s tied up in the notion of hope that Easter gives us, that even in the darkest moments of our lives we are not alone and that suffering, pain, persecution, sorrow and even death itself will not have the final word. That God has the final word. Love has the final word. Hope has the final word. Peace has the final word. Resurrection has the final word. And that is why we celebrate, or at least that is why we are called to celebrate.

In the season of Lent, which is the 40 days before Easter, a time of repentance and preparation in the church, we were looking at some of the spiritual disciplines, which are practices that help us to deepen our spiritual lives and faith, deepen our relationship with God and with others, and that, like training that athletes do, mold, correct and perfect us. In his seminal work Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster, which acted as a guide of sorts for that series, Foster has celebration as his final discipline, and he says that he includes it last because it is the most important discipline that we do. Now celebration and discipline are two words that don’t really seem like they go together, after all that appears to be why some people aren’t having a lot of fun, or celebrating much, because they are being disciplined.  But celebration is a discipline because it is something we have to decision about; we have to choose to be joyful and to choose to celebrate. It may, like laughter, come easily to children, but as we get older we have a tendency to forget how to be joyful and celebrate, although children can bring this out of us, as study showed that 2-year-olds tended to laugh about 18 times an hour when interacting with their mothers, but the mothers laughed an average of 33 times in that same hour. I think there is a reason why Jesus says that we need to become like children in order to inherit the kingdom, because children know the joy of laughter and celebration.

And so Foster says that we have to choose to celebrate, we have to choose to be joyful, just a we have to choose to pray or worship or fast or participate in any of the other disciplines. But, he says, celebration is the last and most important of the disciplines because it is the one that has to infuse all of the others. “Celebration is central to all the spiritual disciplines. Without a joyful spirit of festivity the disciplines become dull, death-breathing tools in the hands of modern Pharisees.” The other disciplines, in connecting us deeper with God can also lead us to celebration, of making a joyful noise to the Lord as Psalm 98 and 100 both say, or to know that the joy of the Lord is our strength, as Nehemiah says. What the practice of celebration also does is to allow God to transform the dark areas of our lives, the suffering and sorrow, not to bypass it, but to redeem, but for that to happen we have to be open to that reality. We have to be open to the possibility of resurrection, we have to be open to the possibility of miracles, we have to be open to the possibility of transformation, and the practice of celebration helps us to do all of those things.

Foster says, “Celebration is a discipline – [because] it is the result of a consciously chosen way of thinking and living.” And in living in celebration, living in the joy of God, we also open ourselves up to other realities. Learning to laugh at ourselves keeps us humble, and can give us new perspective, which is also at the heart of the spiritual disciplines. And when we choose to live lives of celebration, we also open ourselves up even more to the mysteries of God, which has to include laughter. And if you don’t think that God has a sense of humor, just look at the platypus. But, the 13th century Christian theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart said that “The father laughs at the son and the son laughs at the father, and the laughter brings forth pleasure, and pleasure brings forth joy,” and he described that joy to be like a horse kicking up its heels in the air, “and the joy brings forth love.” Laughter brings forth pleasure, pleasure brings fourth joy and joy brings forth love, and of course joy also brings forth laughter, and laughter begets more laughter, just as joy begets more joy, and celebration leads to more celebration.

Voltaire once said that the problem with the church was that God was a comedian who was playing to an audience who was afraid to laugh. One of the occupational hazards of the people of faith is to take ourselves too seriously, or always needing to be profound, of being stuffy bores. But Jesus said he came not just to give us life, but life abundant. Not life boring, not life dreary or wearisome, but life abundant, because we can cast all of our worries and suffering and despair over to God not only to carry but to redeem, and that relieves us of our anxieties and allows us to celebrate because God will always have the final word.

The angel says to the women at the tomb, the angel says to us, “Do not be alarmed” do not be afraid. “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is not here; he has been raised.” So, let us celebrate this day, and every day, let us laugh in joy because God has pulled the greatest prank ever and the tomb is empty, God has won, for nothing is impossible with God. So, let us go forth to laugh and proclaim the good news that Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Amen.