In the late 1800’s an American tourist paid a visit to the renowned Polish rabbi, Hofetz Chaim. The tourist was astonished to see that the rabbi’s home, just a room, was barely furnished. It had many, many books but for furniture he had just table and a simple cot. The tourist asked, “Rabbi, where is your furniture?”

The rabbi replied, “Where’s yours?” The puzzled American responded, “Mine? I’m only a visitor here. I am only passing through.” To which the rabbi replied, “So am I.”

Today, on Easter Sunday, here and all across the world, bells peal, trumpets blast and organs thunder. With hymns, anthems and alleluias the Christian church in every shape and size, in every color, tongue and nation declares with one astonished and jubilant voice that we are, indeed, only visitors here. We are just passing through.

On Easter Sunday the Christian church makes the audacious claim that death shall have no dominion over us. Our lives are measured, not by our mortality, but by our immortality. Each of us – anonymous or known, poor or rich, miserable or happy, unloved or lovely – each of us wears the colors of eternity. ¹

It is this claim that prompted St. Augustine to write, “We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our cry.” Indeed, we are an Easter people.
And, yet, we live in a Good Friday world, a world of much suffering and violence. From the Asian tsunami to genocide in Sudan; from a murderous rampage in Minnesota to a bloody war in Iraq, from Osama bin Laden, to the torture of prisoners of war; from the pandemic of HIV/AIDS, to the half million residents of Massachusetts lacking healthcare: we live in a Good Friday world.

Yet, the Christian church persists in telling the story of Easter. Yes, we live in a Good Friday world. We, who are gathered here, know it as well as anyone. Yet Easter is our story and we are sticking by it.

We are sticking by the story of those frightened women, the two Marys, who are so wretched and afraid after the horror of Good Friday. Yet they summon the courage to visit the tomb. Suddenly there is an earthquake and then an angel who rolls the stone from the tomb’s entrance. No wonder the soldiers are frozen with fear. However you explain what happened that day, there is much to fear. But for the Marys their fear is mixed with joy as hope begins to break into their hearts. They run from the empty tomb, with two conflicting emotions, fear and joy, swirling around together inside them.
It is then that they meet Christ! Imagine their emotions: shock, disbelief, surprise, recognition, hope, joy, fear. Even as they grasp his feet in wonder and joy, the risen Christ urges them not to be afraid. Notwithstanding his words, it is “with both fear and great joy” that they run to tell the disciples the news that they themselves can scarcely believe.

Christians tell and re-tell this story – we stand on it and we stand by it – not because we can explain it, or prove it, or test its veracity. We tell and re-tell this story because we know this:  whatever happened that day transformed the lives of those who experienced it. They were transformed as individuals and, in their turn, they changed the world.

It was from this experience of transformation that the early followers of Jesus organized themselves to feed the hungry. They founded hospices for the ill. They built and supported homes for society’s most vulnerable: orphans and widows. Although a minority community without power or prestige, they challenged the habitual violence of the Roman Empire, especially the cruel practices of infanticide and gladiatorial contest.

If you require evidence: there it is … evidence of lives transformed, who then, in their turn, literally changed the world.

A few years ago, writer Yann Martel opened his novel, Life of Pi, with this remarkable promise: “I have a story that will make you believe in God.”²

When Martel began writing his novel he was an agnostic. But over the course of the project, over the course of four years of travel, research, reading and writing, bit by bit, he fell for his subject. Bit by bit, he began to believe in God.³

In his novel, he tells the story of a boy who is the lone human survivor of a cargo ship that sinks in the Pacific Ocean. The ship had been carrying the boy and his family as well as their family business, a zoo. The boy finds himself sharing a lifeboat with a 450-pound tiger. The novel tells the story of this boy and tiger as they drift in a lifeboat for 227 days. Both spend the better part of these days in terror: in fear of each other, of drowning, of dying of thirst, of perishing of hunger.

Theirs is a dangerous and terrifying ordeal. Yet, the boy brings to this experience a unique life of faith: he simultaneously embraces and practices Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His religious devotion gives his ordeal a kind of framework, an overlay, as he adapts religious practices to his daily struggle for survival.

But the story is not consumed with fear. It is also a remarkable story of moments of deep and surprising joy: the shimmering blues of the ocean’s swells; the captivating eye of a whale whose enormous mass looms over the small lifeboat; the triumph of securing food; the balance of respect and apprehension achieved between the tiger and the boy.

The story explores faith by putting faith to the test in the heart of catastrophe.  It is a story that brought its author to believe in God.
Well, the Christian church too, boasts that we have a story that will make you believe in God.  That’s just it: it’s a story. Not an analysis. Not an argument. Not an essay. Not the sort of evidence required by courts of law or laboratory research. A story … the story of an empty tomb, of new life, and of lives transformed. This story, our story, springs up defiantly out of the very heart of catastrophe.⁴

Friends, we live in a Good Friday world … a world of suffering and violence. Our newspapers are rife with stories of catastrophe and terror. Parents tell of how frightening it is to raise children in this world. The poor of our cities live in daily dread of losing their homes. Even the well-healed – those buffered from the ravages of poverty – even the well-healed live in fear: fear of illness, of loss, of death.

Yet, like the Mary’s we ourselves are transformed by our decision to live and act as an Easter people in a Good Friday world. We are transformed by the news that on this day over 2000 years ago, God clothed us, each of us, in the colors of eternity.

We are transformed by the news that we are just visiting here, just passing through; death is not the end … not even close. It is, in fact, just the beginning.

For we are an Easter people and Alleluia is our cry!
 

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1   Kenseth, Arnold. Sabbaths, Sacraments, and Seasons. Amherst, MA: Windhover Press, 1982 (p.44)
2  Martel, Yann. Life of Pi: A Novel. New York: Harcourt, Inc. 2001
3  Brown, L. DeNeen, “Easy as ‘Pi’: Booker Winner Meets With Sudden Fame”. Washington Post, October 28, 2002.
4 “Pi and a Tiger” article on Homileticsonline.com, March 11, 2003
 
 

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