Easter Sunday

"Our Easter Celebration"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

"On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it." (Psalm 118:24)

This proclamation from today’s psalm captures for us the essence of our Easter celebration. “On this day the Lord has acted.” Oh, the grace of simple understatement! On Easter we commemorate again the most pivotal point in all human history. The Lord did indeed act and raised from the dead Jesus, God’s only Son, who had lived and suffered and died for all of God’s children – not a pretend death, but actual death and burial, with no hope, it seemed to his despairing followers, beyond the grave.

But on this day the Lord acted by raising Jesus from the dead, not merely resuscitating him, as Jesus had done for his friend, Lazarus – a unique and unprecedented feat in itself. No, this was and is a perpetual raising of Jesus from the dead, never to die again, but to reign over all of creation forever. Nor were Jesus’ followers and we left to marvel in awe at God’s power and love but remain excluded and unaffected ourselves. God raised Jesus from the dead for all of God’s children, breaking the kingdom of sin and death and opening to all of us this once for all victory and the mystery of eternal life. While sin and death still win many temporary battles, the Lord has acted and won for us on this day the ultimate war against them. Therefore, as our psalm proclaims, “we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

We will celebrate! We will come to church to give thanks to God, with beautiful flowers, wearing our Easter best, singing joyful hymns and thrilling to inspiring music, listening to the proclamation of the Good News and relishing gathering with other fellow believers, some known to us and many not known, but all part of this ecstatic celebration.

We know all about celebrations in Chapel Hill! Fortuitously we had another one this past Monday night as the downtown was filled with jubilant fans, who found themselves caught up in the euphoria of victory. Cheering and chanting and constantly in motion, they gave voice to their unrestrained joy. Such an atmosphere of excess leads to some unwise choices, of course, and sadly five students are still literally cooling their heels in the burn unit of the hospital, waiting to recover enough to return to class. And even the next day at lunch time, although the town crews had done an incredibly efficient job of cleaning up, I found this charred twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk, fuel from one of the fires, a testimony to the lengths we will go to celebrate the triumph of something we believe in and feel part of! I am glad to show it to you at the door after the service if you want to see up close this relic of that exuberant celebration!

Without diminishing all the festivities that accompanied the accomplishment of that inspiring national championship, how much more should we celebrate the far more world-changing and life-changing achievement of the first Easter? By raising Jesus from the dead, God revealed the unfailing Divine love for all God’s children and shared with us the victory that can never be taken from us. “On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

But it is not only this one Easter day on which we celebrate. Although we have prepared for this feast with the penitential forty days of Lent, we appropriately celebrate it for the Great Fifty Days of the Easter Season. This is the First Sunday of Easter, and next week the Second Sunday of Easter and so on through the Seventh Sunday of Easter until we get to Pentecost Sunday, celebrating the unleashing of God’s Holy Spirit. One liturgical party after another!

And even after the Easter season, there is a real sense in which we continue to celebrate this deep mystery in our daily lives. One-time and even prolonged celebrations are good and necessary. But ultimately their value depends on how they manifest themselves in our actions and priorities. An inspiring and engaging wedding, for example, is simply a happy memory turned awkward if the couple is not able to move forward in living out their marriage covenant together, day after day.

With that in mind, let me ask you to turn in the (red) Prayer Books to page 137. I want to point out to you these four one-page daily devotions for different times throughout the day as a way of strengthening your relationship with the God who on this day has acted and in whom we rejoice. As you can see, there is a portion of a psalm, a brief scripture verse, and a collect offered for use in the morning, at noon, in the early evening, and at the close of day. I find the first and last the most helpful to my daily routine, but your schedule might be different.

Notice in the middle of page 137, the Reading from Peter’s First Letter, to be recited each morning: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Through his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Everyday is an Easter celebration! No matter how difficult our lives get, each morning we are to begin anew and to bring the perspective of our faith to our situations. Everyday we are to remember and give thanks for this awe-inspiring mystery of Easter, this gift of God, which frees us and gives us hope and calls us beyond our own narrow vision to see God’s grace at work in all of creation.

On this amazing feast of Easter then, I invite you to rejoice and give thanks, not only today but for the whole Great Fifty Days, and even beyond that into your routine daily lives. To assist you with that, the Chapel of the Cross is offering you a gift this morning! Forward Movement prints up these four daily devotions in a handy folded card, one on each surface, easily kept on your night stand or in your pocket book or glove compartment – wherever it would remind you to take three or four minutes for daily prayer. The ushers will be handing them out at all three exits after the service. (If we run out, we’ll have more next week.) If you think there is any chance you might use this gift, please take one! You and I – and God – will all be happier!

“On this day,” then – in this season, in the world, in our daily lives – “the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”