Let me tell you a little secret about Easter sermons. They almost always begin with a joke. Catholic Easter sermons. Protestant Easter Sermons. If there were such a thing as Jewish Easter sermons I can promise you they too would begin with a joke. Not that death is funny, even with resurrection as a rider. It's just that jokes make people comfortable. Since a quarter of you are making your yearly or bi-yearly pilgrimage to church, and therefore must feel at least a little strange sitting in a pew, a good joke can work wonders in the 'Relax this is not a scary place" department. Believe me, I am delighted that you are here. Thank you for coming. Come back if you wish. I should add, that regular Sundays are far more real than Easter Sunday. Not as festive perhaps, but on regular Sundays you are part of a community, not part of an occasion. Occasions are wonderful. Community is better.
But jokes are good too. In his splendid little book, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton said that "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly." By the same token, the devil surely fell on account of his gravity. So I should tell you a joke. You would relax. I would relax. If I were sitting in the pew and you were preaching, I would pray that you would invest at least two of your twenty-five minutes -- and more than one has already passed -- in a joke. In something to take home with me. Something I would remember. Something I might even repeat at a dinner party. People repeat jokes; they don't repeat sermons. If my Easter joke were good enough, just imagine. If enough of you remembered it and passed it on, I could bank on an even larger crowd at Easter next year. How very tempting. Just not quite tempting enough. Because if Easter is done right -- I'm not quite sure about this but I will say it anyway -- if Easter is done right it should drive as many people away from church as it will attract.
That was certainly true of the very first Easter. It drove away all but three of Jesus' followers, all but the three women who dared to stand by him following his death. Everyone else scattered. Even Peter.
These days Easter is not quite as dangerous as it was back then. But it is dangerous enough. For Easter is about death. Resurrection too of course, but in the first Easter story only Jesus is resurrected. You may slipstream if you wish. God bless you and Godspeed. But when it comes to the afterlife there are no guarantees. All we know for sure is that like Jesus we will die. And no one likes to be reminded of this.
I can understand if you would prefer to put death off. Unfortunately, for the next twenty minutes you can't. You came to the wrong church. We may live on after we die. It wouldn't surprise me. After being born, nothing that happens in life or afterlife should surprise us in the least. But I can't speak about experiences I haven't had, only about those I have. I haven't experienced death, but I have witnessed it. At least once a month I witness death. For me death is real, afterlife at best a possibility.
In a sense, it's not fair. I know that and I apologize. After all, you showered, dressed nicely, and came to this church expecting to garnish a beautiful day. Most of you are as clean as a hound's tooth and attractive as can be. The music has been beautiful. The light is shining through the windows. Nothing I am about to say will undo that. But for those of you who have managed prudently to sequester and hide death from your consciousness, unfortunately, and most likely unwittingly, for the next nineteen minutes you are stuck. Death may be safe on your back burner, but Easter is front burner time. So this year, no jokes, no politics, no attempts to flatter your own prejudices by sharing my own. Simply death. Death and life.
I put death first. Most of you know my simple definition of religion. Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. Regardless of our beliefs, we are the religious animal, because we know that we are going to die and therefore question what life means. In the meaning department, death is not a bad thing. Death invests life with meaning. Life and love, work and play, everything we do is enhanced by its temporal, ephemeral nature. If you could love forever, work forever, and play forever, neither love, work nor play would be nearly as charged with meaning as they are by the fact that each will end. When I tell you that I love you at the end of this sermon, one of the things I am doing is holding on. After more than twenty years as your minister, so many of you have left me. So many have died. One day I too will leave. I too will die. Before I do, I want to seize every opportunity for love that I can. Having squandered so many, I know how precious every opportunity for love can be.
Death doesn't scare me. Death is nothing, absolutely nothing. It may even be nothing forever. If it is nothing forever, fine. Nothing shouldn't scare us. Even nothing forever. What frightens me about death is not death itself. What frightens me is the psychic pain, the profound awareness of lost opportunities during my final reckoning the minute before I die. What frightens me about death is life: the life I squandered, wasted and betrayed.
They say that a drowning man sees his entire life pass before his eyes before he dies. What a terrifying thought. How long does it take? About a minute they say. So let's stop right here. Let's take a minute.
Actually a minute is quite a long time if you are paying attention to it. If you don't believe that, I'll prove it to you. Let's take a minute right now, one of the twenty five minutes in this sermon, the next minute of your life. This is a thought experiment. You can do it. One day you will do it for real, so why not practice a bit. You are drowning. You are about to die. No more options. No more projects. You can't do anything beyond those things that you have done up to this very moment. One minute. That's all you have left. Your entire life is passing before your eyes. Close them. What do you see?
A minute is a long time, isn't it? By the way, between now and this time next week, you have about ten thousand more of them. Not for your life to pass before your eyes, but for you to live.
Let me take a guess. That minute you just spent. You tried to concentrate. You knew it was important to have at least a few deep thoughts, but the pressure I placed on you to redeem that one minute of your life made it difficult. My fault, not yours. I sprung this on you. What I asked of you was unfair. I didn't give you time to prepare. Had you been ready for it, you might have been able to fill that minute more thoughtfully. But don't blame me. Blame death. As often as not, that is the way death works. We hit a trap door. It opens and we fall. We may fall for a minute or a month or a year, but once the trap door springs there is nothing we can do about it. Even more sadly we can do nothing to change all the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years that slipped by unconsciously before we fell.
But this is not a Good Friday sermon. It is an Easter sermon. Good Friday is death. Easter is death redeemed. I know only one way to redeem death. We redeem our own deaths by living in such a way that our lives prove worth dying for.
Take this afternoon. You can be fairly confident that you will live through this afternoon. I have a suggestion for you. It is an Easter suggestion. Resurrect yourself. Not after you die. Right now. Before you die. Resurrect yourself. If you go out to lunch, tip your waiter outrageously. Tell five different people that you love them. I'm sure that you love at least five people. If they aren't in the city call them. Tell them on the phone.
"Why are you calling?" they may ask.
"To tell you that I love you," you reply.
"That's sweet, but why now?"
"Because it's Easter. And because without you, without your love and kindness to me over the years, my life would have been markedly diminished."
It's true you know. We can't save ourselves in this life. But others can save us and they do save us time and again. They love us. They help us get through hard passages. They forgive us. They save us. Without them we are nothing.
The first thing I am going to do once my Easter duties here are fulfilled is to call my mother. I can assure you, my mother is just as complicated as your mother is or was. Mothers and fathers are always complicated. So are children. But they mean everything to us. They brought us into the world, or we brought them into the world. Death can take us away, but death cannot take this away. Even during our last minute. In the meantime, we are completely in charge. It is in our power to do all the things we wish we might have done right now, well before our life passes before our eyes.
You can wait until you die to be resurrected. I don't recommend this, but who knows, your faith may be repaid. In the meantime, I have a better idea. Resurrect yourself, now, before you die. Resurrect your old friendships, invest your love in the living, tell your mother you love her no matter how strange she is. She may tell you that she loves you too no matter how strange you are. All of us are strange. We are the products of a billion billion accidents. Far more than that. Our genetic lines go back through all time to the Ur-paramecium. The universe was pregnant with us when it was born.
So what do we do? Too often we ask, "What did I do to deserve this?" The answer is "Nothing." We did nothing to be alive, to be here this morning spending at least one minute of our life imagining our death. But we can do something about these things. We can accept ourselves. We can forgive others. We can surprise someone by calling her and telling her we love her. As a matter of fact, between now and the day we die, we can perform miracles.
Let me tell you this. I feel so strongly about it that it makes me ache. During the last minute of my life, I pray I won't be conscious of a thousand missed opportunities. Opportunities to care, serve, give, trust, hope and love.
As they are dying, no one ever wishes that they had spent more time in the office, or made more money, or read more books, or become a better squash player. However badly you bollixed the one minute I gave you, I can promise you that you were not thinking about the office, money, books or squash. The splendid thing about Easter, if we take advantage of it, is that we are inspired to frame our life by death to think about what really matters. Kindness matters. Forgiveness matters. Generosity. Enthusiasm. Ecstasy. Empathy. Above all love matters. Love given and received. By the way, it is as hard to receive love as it is to give it. Pretend that is a joke. Try to remember it
Let's be optimistic. We are going to live at least another week. We have almost 10,000 minutes to spend. Now that you know how long a minute is, imagine what a luxury awaits you. Ten thousand minutes, this very week. Lest this seems daunting, I promise you that I too will squander most of them. I can kill minutes, hours, even days at least as well as you can. That is why I preach to myself, especially on Easter. I preach to myself in the hope that not only you but also I will hear. In the hope that I too will awake before I go to sleep forever. In the hope that perhaps I may even enjoy at least part of my final minute when my life passes before my eyes.
Easter is not really about death. Easter is about life, not life after death, but life before death. Should you wish, this very afternoon you can practice resurrection. A single phone call can work magic, or a touch and an embrace. But go a little further. Be like Jesus. Call someone from whom you are estranged. Pull the pins from his doll. You don't even have to tell him you are sorry. You may not be sorry. That doesn't matter. Call him, wish him Happy Easter, and ask him how he is. Not that this will go all that smoothly. He may have attended the wrong church this morning. But you will experience at least a taste of resurrection. You will lay down a burden, and be better able to fly.
My twenty five minutes are up. The best of these was the one you had wholly to yourself. One of these days I will dare to give a sermon that offers each of you twenty five minutes to compose your own thoughts without interruption. It will be the hardest sermon I ever write. But one minute is not a bad start. One of this week's almost ten thousand minutes. Forgive yourself if you spend most of those that remain in ways you will forget during the minute before you die. But invest at least a few in the resurrection project. After all, this is Easter week. We might as well take advantage of it.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all. Copyright AllSouls 1999.