The Living and the Dead
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THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
Easter Day + April 20, 2025
The women were terrified, and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you. (Luke 24:5-6)
Where were you exactly one year ago today? Where were you on April 20, 2024? Do you remember? I can tell you where I was: London. Stacie and I had flown over a few days earlier because I was to preach at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square on Sunday, April 21st. But on Saturday – one year ago today – England was pausing to celebrate the nation’s patron saint, St. George. Our host, the Rev. Roderick Leece, being the Rector of St. George’s Church, had all sorts of official, civic duties to fulfill. He would lead a ceremony at the Statue of the Fallen Soldier, then lay a wreath at Westminster Abbey. Roddy invited us to tag along, and he encouraged me to wear my clerical collar so I would look the part by his side. It was all very proper and dignified. When the moment calls for solemnity, the British know how to stand still and be quiet better than anyone.
Throughout the day Stacie and I noted the differences between the great cities of London and New York. In London, seats on the Underground cars are upholstered. No so in New York. On the London sidewalks, when people see a priest approaching them, they don’t cross to the other side of the street, as they do here. At one point I even commented how nice it was to walk through the city and not be assailed by the stench of weed every step of the way. I spoke too soon.
Later in the day we were strolling through Hyde Park, London’s equivalent to Central Park. Off in the distance we could see that a huge crowd had gathered on a large, grassy area. What looked like clouds of incense hovered above the multitude. Clearly, we were stumbling into some sort of mystical moment, but what could it have been? A breeze blew in our direction and removed all mystery. The clouds of incense weren’t incense at all. Cover the children’s ears, now: it was marijuana. The skunky aroma gave it away. Suddenly, the crowd began shouting, hooting, and hollering. I looked at my watch, and sure enough, it was 4:20 pm on 4/20. In fact, if you look at your watch right now, it is 4:20 pm on 4/20 in London at this very moment. Do you know the Happy Hour saying? “It’s 5:00 somewhere.” Well, apparently, it’s 4:20 pm somewhere too. So that’s where I was, one year ago today: in the midst of a rowdy festival I didn’t expect. It was the high, holy moment of International Weed Day. Standing there in my clerical collar, somehow I don’t think it would have gone over well had I posed the angels’ question to the crowds: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
Don’t get me wrong. I rather like that Easter Day and International Weed Day coincide this year. It won’t happen again until 2087. You see, the revelers on the lawn of Hyde Park and other places like it are not completely off the mark. They seek redemption and release, as do we. They seek love, joy, peace, and transcendence, as do we. What we would say to them, however, is that Easter is the day of greater promise and possibility if you are looking to take hold of the life that really is life. Easter is the highest feast of the Christian year. For us, no other day compares. Why? Because the Christian faith begins not with the birth of Jesus, not with the teachings of Jesus, not with the death of Jesus. The Christian faith begins with the resurrection of Jesus. Without this mighty miracle of God, the disciples of Jesus would have remained scattered, his teachings forgotten, his movement ended, his birth never recorded. Death would have erased from history any memory of Jesus. But because of what God did on this day everything is changed. To cut to the quick, here we are, still talking about Jesus.
This year we are hearing the Gospel of Luke’s version of the first Easter morning. Luke describes how at least four women brought spices to the tomb of Jesus. Their aim was to complete the Jewish burial rites that they could not finish on Friday evening because of the Sabbath. Little did they know that they were stumbling into an experience that they could not have imagined. When they arrived at the tomb they found that the large, circular stone that was supposed to be sealing it already had been rolled aside. They went into the tomb – which would have been a small cave dug into a hillside – and could not find the body of Jesus. The tomb was empty. Luke reports that two men in dazzling clothes – possibly angels – stood beside them and asked, “Why do you look for the living among the dead.” The angels went on to explain that Jesus was not there, but risen.
The four Gospels all report the Easter morning experience, but with slightly different details. All agree, however, that the immediate reaction of the women was not Easter triumph and Easter joy. It was fear, confusion, and grief. When they went to tell the others, the disciples rejected what they had to say, considering it an idle tale. It wasn’t much better for Peter. At least he went to the tomb to check out what the women had to say. Yes, he was amazed when he saw the empty tomb. How amazed? “Then he went home,” is how Luke records Peter’s somewhat underwhelming response. Even the later appearances of the risen Jesus were met with more confusion and disbelief. The immediate friends and disciples of Jesus didn’t recognize him. Then they did. Then he would vanish. Now you see him, now you don’t. The earliest witnesses chose a specific word to describe what had happened to Jesus: resurrection. They did not proclaim the immortality of Jesus’ soul, or the resuscitation of his corpse. Rather, it was the resurrection of his body. The choice of the word resurrection reveals their confusion.
How about you? Does the message of Easter confuse you? Here you are in the midst of a great celebration, and if you are honest, it’s all a bit confusing. Perhaps you’ve stumbled into this moment merely by accident of birth. You grew up in a marginally Christian home, but never really put together that all the nice things we say about Jesus depend on his overcoming the grave. Yes, it all rides on Easter, or it doesn’t ride at all. Without the resurrection, Christianity is an idle tale. Or, you look at the world as it is, and cannot reconcile the resilience of evil with the Easter proclamation. On Palm Sunday a Russian missile slammed into a Ukrainian city square, killing 35. In New York City last week, a helicopter fell out of the sky, killing six. At Florida State University just a few days ago, a shooter opened fire, killing two. The resilience of evil. The signs of a world gone awry. Jesus lives? The victory of life is won? It can be hard to see it.
Many of you know about the GO Project, a ministry founded over fifty years ago by Grace Church and Grace Church School. The GO Project provides tutoring and social services to public school students and their families who are falling through the cracks. A few months ago I had the opportunity to visit a Saturday GO Project class in session. The students were 3rd graders, learning how to tell if something is alive or not. The teacher would point to any common thing – a chair, a potted plant – and ask the students to assign it to one of three categories: living, not living, or not sure. The questions to ask, so the teacher explained, are: Does it move on its own? Does it eat? Does it need air? At length the teacher held up an eraser from the white board behind him, and asked the three questions. To each one the students replied with increasing certainty: NO. Finally, they all agreed that the eraser was not living. One 3rd grader even pronounced it dead.
Let’s play a game. Let’s have some good, clean 4/20 fun. Suppose this Easter, in the privacy of your own thoughts, you try to fit Jesus into one of the categories: Living, not living, or not sure. I mean, Jesus on April 20, 2025: living, not living, not sure? Without doubt, by the end of the day we call Good Friday, Jesus was not living. No longer would his body move on its own. No longer did it require food. No longer would it breathe the air. Jesus was dead. The Romans knew how to kill people. If the Easter message is true, then something dramatic, something substantial, something earth-quaking had to happen in history. So, can you reasonably declare that Jesus lives today? Or might you quietly settle for the safe answer: not sure?
Perhaps we need to go back to school, and brush up on some history. Remember how the 3rd grader told you that the eraser was dead. One fact that the eraser cannot remove from the white board of history is that within days after Jesus died, his followers had regrouped, and continued to gather in his name. What is more, the eraser has not been able to remove from the white board the central message of what this ongoing and growing community proclaimed. The fact of history is that they had one thing to say: Jesus lives. He is risen. I have seen the Lord. He breathed on Thomas. He ate broiled fish in our presence. He moved about from place to place in a mysterious way. He appeared to five-hundred people at one time. Had the tomb not been empty, and had the appearances not been a shared public experience, the earliest Christians could not have carried on for long saying what they did. Had they just made up a nice story about how Jesus would live on in their hearts, the eraser would have removed their sentiments from the board. But the eraser could not erase the history. Death could not erase Jesus.
The only sufficient explanation for the history that followed the death of Jesus is resurrection – a word that the earliest Christians chose deliberately. Jesus emerged from the tomb not for more of the same old mortality, not eventually to die again. No, God raised Jesus as a new creation, with a new kind of life, and a new kind of body. We heard the prophet Isaiah (65:17-25) foretell in today’s reading that God is going to deliver the life we are all seeking. God had been promising all along that the wolf would dwell with the lamb, that people would not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity. Let me say this carefully: Jesus didn’t come back from the dead. Rather, Jesus went through death, and came out the other side, and for a time appeared to humanity, so that by the grace of God we could glimpse life in the new creation. Whether you call it the new creation, or call it resurrection, it is the type of life we all yearn to live. It is the greatest, grandest truth in the universe, even though sometimes it is hard to see.
Some years ago my extended family and I ventured on a trip to Alaska. One day we took a river boat tour through Denali National Park. It was a perfectly sunny, summer day. We saw lots of things we would definitely categorize as living: bears, eagles, and mosquitoes that were practically the size of bears and eagles. The one thing we did not see, however, was Mt. Denali. We asked the boat driver, “Where’s Mt. Denali?” He pointed his arm and said, “It’s right over there. You can’t see it because of the haze.” I looked to where he pointed and could see nothing but blue, hazy sky. Imagine: we were essentially at the base of a 20,000-foot mountain, the largest mountain in North America, and we couldn’t see it.
Later that day we returned to the lodge where we were staying. The place has a lovely porch overlooking the mountain, and sure enough we could finally glimpse the snow-capped peak. We pulled out our cameras, and posed ourselves with the top of Mt. Denali in the background. Guess what? We took many lovely photos of family members in various configurations, but Mt. Denali does not appear in any of them. Today’s camera apps might be better at capturing the image, but we had no luck in those earlier days of digital photography. Mt. Denali is most certainly there at every moment, all 20,000 feet of it. Clouds and haze, smoke and mist can hide it from our sight, but cannot erase it from the board.
Easter is like Mt. Denali. Easter is the greatest, grandest truth in the universe, but it eludes capture. Tears and grief, war and violence, hate and cruelty obscure our vision. But Easter is always there. Now you see it, now you don’t.
Today is April 20th, and it is 4:20 pm somewhere. It is Easter somewhere. It is Easter here. It is Easter now, from this time forth, even forever. Death has been swallowed up in victory, and our song of triumph has begun. Alleluia.