Alleluia, Christ is risen!
And you say ... The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!
Good morning on this truly glorious late-April Easter weekend. If you’re visiting, as a family or community member, a special welcome to you. This is our 175th anniversary year, which we’ll wrap up in a couple months. Our slogan for the year is “join our journey in faith and service.” We’re looking back on our past, but also reflecting on who we are in the present and what we hope to be moving forward. If you’re looking for a church home, we'd love for you to join us!
This being our 175th, I thought it might be nice to go back into our archives and find some Easter sermons from there. Unfortunately, though our archives are fairly robust, we don’t have many sermons there at all. There are two that were preached here on Easter Sunday, and published by outside presses. We do have those. Both were given just days after major events in our church and nation.
One was when a fire gutted our church, these walls around us, in 1882. It used to be here that the Senior Warden was responsible for feeding and stoking the coal furnace on Saturday night in preparation for Sunday worship. Any senior wardens, past and present, here? Well, in 1882 that senior warden would have been Oliver Hyatt, in whose memory these windows were later given. Apparently burning down your church didn’t disqualify you from being senior warden because he stayed on for a total of 68 years!
It was the unenviable job of the Rev. Frances Chase to stand up six days later--in the home of our founder, William H. Popham; without the church to meet in they had to meet in Popham’s drawing room--and preach an Easter sermon to the beleaguered congregation. Here’s a little part of Father Chase’s sermon that morning:
[W]hether such a rebuilding be found possible or not, we confidently look forward, in the very spirit of the season, to a new resurrection from the ashes of the old. By God’s blessing His house shall rise again from the dust … [Because] whatever else we might spare, we cannot spare the church. We must keep together; we must not scatter; at this time we must hold by one another, and look forward with hope and good courage to our re-establishment on the same loved spot.
And so it was to be. The new church, rebuilt within the stone shell of the old that did remain, reopened in 1883.
The other notable Easter sermon we still have was preached earlier, in 1865, by our second Rector, the Rev. William Olssen, and it was delivered just 3 days after the assassination of President Lincoln.These were his opening words:
The Easter morn dawns upon us amid gloomy and foreboding thoughts. The suddenness of the shock appalls, while it fills with horror the very lifeblood of the entire nation. During the past week our hearts and souls have been lingering around the days long past, when Jesus was present on earth, and we have been so given up to spiritual contemplation, as almost to have lost sight of the excitement of worldly matters. But in a moment, without previous warning, we are brought back to earth: the cry of assassination rings through the land and startles every heart, overwhelming it with a horror of that deed of cowardly, dastardly vengeance.
Those were extraordinary events, both the more striking by having taken place within days of Easter Sunday, [but] it makes me think of all the other Easter sermons preached here in trying times: the Easter sermon preached by Father Price three months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when parents’ thoughts were preoccupied with their young men--so many from this parish--being sent to war. The Easter sermon preached by the Rev. Dudley Stroup after the assassination of President Kennedy, and three years later, of Martin Luther King Jr. That horrible event was just ten days before Easter Day. Some here might even remember those last two.
There were surely Easter sermons preached amid local tragedies long forgotten: after the death of a parish patriarch or matriarch. The departure of a beloved priest. Not to mention all those Easter sermons from what may have been fairly ordinary years in our country or community, but were anything but in the individual lives of people sitting in these pews.
But here’s something important about Church. While most institutions in such times would (and did) postpone or cancel their galas, and anniversaries, and important ceremonies and celebrations for not being in sync with the demands or even the mood of the times, Church is never canceled. Easter Day--most definitely not.
It’s remarkable to think There’s not been one year in the history of this parish when the women of the Altar Guild didn’t deck the altar with lilies. When the rector didn’t preach an Easter sermon. When the people didn’t hear this story, and then loudly exclaim He is risen indeed. 175 years hence may they look back and say the same. There’s never a reason not to celebrate Easter.
Easter is more than a celebration of an event long past. It’s a decision we Christians make every year about how to live in the present. You thought you were just getting the kids dressed up this morning and coming to church. But we’re making, here, a communal promise that whatever happens in the world or in our own and each other’s lives, we will stand by one another. And we will stand on the side of hope. That’s what we do as Christians, and never more so than on Easter Day.
“[A] true Christian,” wrote Richard Rohr, priest and writer in one of his Easter reflections “[A true Christian] must be an optimist. In fact, if you are not an optimist, you haven’t got it yet.”
Now, Optimism takes practice, and diligence. It doesn’t come easy for some, probably most. I take comfort in another piece of wisdom from Father Rohr: “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
Every time we gather, whether it’s Easter day or a regular Sunday--and in the teaching of the church, all Sundays are a celebration of the resurrection--we’re living our way, bit by bit, one determined alleluia at a time, into thinking that our world is good. That people can change. That peace can be had. That differences can be mended. That grief can be overcome. That justice is possible. That love can be rekindled. That death is not the end.
If you want to really believe all that, there’s no better way than to start living it. Through good times and bad, week after week, one gathering, one alleluia at a time. It works.
Christ is risen today, and every Sunday, and in fact, every single day. To proclaim that is the most important thing we do. So let’s do it. I’ll start: Alleluia, Christ is risen.
And you say :) The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!
Amen.