Easter Sunday Sermon

During the season of Lent, week after week, in the broken tiles behind the altar, children from St. John’s were slowly filling the cracks with gold. It was inspired by the Japanese craft of kintsugi – where broken pottery is mended with gold and precious metals, so the cracks themselves become the whole point: the repairs are now the precious place, the beautiful place. As in life.

We can’t maintain an innocent life. It’s just not possible. From the beginning, we’re damaged by the brokenness around us. And as we stumble our way through life, doing our best, we nonetheless contribute to the brokenness around us. It’s just the way it is.

And the beauty of our faith is that it isn’t just a bunch of rules about the right way to live and how to please God or appease God. At the heart of our faith is a story – a story of God’s love that joins us in this life, this cracked and broken life. God’s love takes the form of a life, like ours, and lives a life, like ours, and dies a death, like ours, and then rises from the dead, as our lives shall also be raised.

God didn’t take the cracks away – our sufferings and sorrows still remain, and, one day – sooner than we think possible – we each will die. But now – because of whom we have discovered God to be, through Christ – all our suffering places are revealed as the abode of God’s love. And that love becomes the whole point. God’s love is the healing. It is the beauty. It is the reality that overcomes all other realities. Even death.

And we are now a part of God’s healing love. The joy of Easter is not merely the promise of a life to come – though that’s awfully encouraging; and God knows the day will come when that’s rather important to us – but the joy now is that we live now in the hope of this reality: love has conquered. Love does conquer: every sorrow, every heartache, and every death.

And, with this hope, we have already become participants in Christ’s resurrection. We, too, have become the gold that can fill every crack. After all, God is in us and we are in God. Christ is risen, and we are risen. Christ’s love has conquered death, and we are no longer dead. We are the gold that keeps filling every crack in this world.

Last year, St. John’s initiated its “We Choose Love” campaign. It was a deliberate response to the fracturing of society we’re experiencing right now in our country – political divisions, misinformation, Artificial Intelligence, climate change … everywhere we turn it seems new fissures are rupturing in what once felt so stable.

So… we choose love. This is God’s healing response to the world. There’s information in the back (show pamphlet) about this campaign. But, for this morning, a couple points are worth making:

• First, it starts with us as individuals, and our commitment to foster a loving spirit within our hearts towards everyone – those who are most intimate and those who are furthest away. After all, Jesus taught us: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” That is the power of the gospel. And that is our salvation, too – when we are set free from the fury of our enmity to relax, with Jesus, into the peace of compassion. So, at 8 am, every Wednesday on zoom, I lead a Loving Kindness Meditation to help strengthen our spirits’ desire for everyone’s It starts here (pointing to heart). That’s where being like Jesus begins.
• And then, second, we asked each parishioner to pick one thing – just one thing – that will be their thing to bring light to their corner of the world. It might be something you’re already doing; it might be something new. It might be enormous; it might be subtle. But it is some, specific thing to which you can commit that makes this world a better, more hopeful place. There are 371 active members and visitors on our parish roles. That can translate to 371 deliberate, repeatable acts of love that can change Gig Harbor.

That’s why we handed out these gold cards this morning. It is an invitation for each of us to pick and name our one thing that we’re choosing to be as God’s redeeming love that fills the cracks of our broken world. Take it home, think about it, and then write on it what you’re doing, and then – in the weeks to come – bring it back to church.

Starting next Sunday, that wall at the back corner will be filled with a map of the Puget Sound. And it will be full of cracks – symbols of the fissures in our society. And you can put your gold card in the crack. Bit by bit, we will see St. John’s commitment to love, filling in those cracks.

Often, it’s a virtue to be anonymous in doing good works. And there may be some cases where that will still be necessary. But, by and large, we’re encouraging you to sign these cards – especially if you’re willing to have someone else join you in your “one thing.” Sometimes it’s helpful to have a buddy.

This “thing” you choose – it can be anything. Ideally, it’s something outside of St. John’s. It is a way of bringing the hope and the love we know here, into the world.

• It might be something you’re already doing. Perhaps you’re a teacher and your career is very much, for you, a vocation – the way God calls you to love and serve. But in now naming it as your “one thing” for We Choose Love, you’re recommitting yourself, in your work, in a fresh way, to creating light and hope in your love for your students.
• You may choose to host potlucks for your neighborhood once a month in the summer.
• You may choose to run for a state or national office.
• You may choose to smile and be deliberately kind to every cashier who sells you something.
• You may choose to sit outside the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center and pray once a week for all those detainees we cannot see, and who are easily forgotten.

Your “one thing” can be any-thing you choose. But in choosing it, you are saying, “I will do this. I cannot change the world. But I can choose love, in this one, specific way.”

And when we see those fissures in the map, filling up with these gold cards, we can know: “This world may be a mess. But I belong to St. John’s. And look how St. John’s is loving.”

We are Easter people.

We are resurrection people.

We are a people, learning what it means to live into the hope that God’s love is in every broken place. That’s what the cross tells us: God came to our suffering place in love, with us. Wherever you are suffering, that, too, is the cross of Christ where God is suffering with you. God did not remove you from the suffering. But nor did God remove god-self. You are not alone.

In the language of this fractured world, you might even say that Christ’s tomb itself was a fissure in the earth, in which love went, in which God in Christ went, all the way to hell, and filled it with love. Hell and death will not have the final word. There is only one word in the end, and that is love.

That’s what strikes me so much about that image on the cover of your bulletin. It isn’t your standard Easter picture: sunrise, three crosses, empty tomb, maybe a butterfly. But it is entitled, “Resurrection,” which is what we’re here for today.

I’d never seen this painting before; I’d never heard of the artist. But I saw it in a museum last fall and was quite taken by it. It was huge – one of those paintings that takes up a whole gallery wall. And what captured me was Jesus’ face, and his eyes. It’s nothing like the rather pious images of Jesus we’re used to seeing, where he looks so serene and holy and – well, honestly – totally unappealing and unrelatable.

That’s not at all the Jesus we have here. No. We’ve got someone who’s just done a big work. And he knows it. He’s looking outward, but his thoughts are still inward. The substance of what he’s just been through is all still there, within him. It’s the kind of look you’d see on someone who’s just dropped their firstborn off at college, or who’s just signed off on putting their father on hospice or just sold the family home: this major work, this life-changing work, this necessary work.

It’s all conjecture, of course – conjecture on my part of what the artist meant and conjecture on the artist’s part of Jesus’ expression as he emerged from the tomb. But it’s helpful for me – looking at this face of Jesus and imagining: “What did you just experience – through your suffering and passion, on the cross, in the grave? What did you experience while being dead? What story of your big work are you carrying with you into your resurrection?”

Jesus conquered death – not just for himself – but for us.

In the old language of the church, his days in the tomb were called the Harrowing of Hell. It is the belief – the hope – that his days were not merely lifeless days, but days of activity, that “he descended to hell” as we used to say more boldly in the Apostles’ Creed, to set the captives free. I hold the theology lightly, as something beyond our ken. But I like it.

I don’t claim to know what hell is or is not. But what I do claim, most assuredly, is that God is love; that God took form in Christ showing us humans the face of that love; that Christ’s love was always compassion for the hurting one, the outcast one, the sick one or demon-possessed one; that he only threatened hell to the religious leaders whose rules were more important than love and prevented people from knowing God’s love; that Christ died on the cross, in union with us, in the completeness of our human life; and that Christ rose from the dead and became for us the first fruits of our resurrection. And so, in Christ, shall all be made alive. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

So now, for us, we may already begin this risen life that has already begun, which means there is but one option for us Easter people: We choose love.