“Spring and the Resurrection”

EASTER SUNDAY

March 27, 2005

Scripture Reading:   Matthew 28:1-10

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church

It’s spring and it’s Maine.  I know, these two facts don’t really go together.  Spring in Maine is an oxymoron most of the time.  Spring in Maine are two words that just don’t seem to go together.  You know like “jumbo shrimp” or “burning cold” or “lowfat cheese” or “bittersweet.”  To say the least, after a Maine winter we are so beaten down by snow and cold and the sheer length of the season that we have given up on even thinking any other season will ever happen.  Winters in Maine are just so hard.  This year was no exception.

I found a temperature conversion chart made for Maine.  It goes like this:

*40 above zero:  Italian cars won’t start…People in Maine drive with the windows down.

*32 above zero:  Distilled water freezes…Mousehead lake’s water gets thicker.

*20 above zero:  Floridians wear coats, gloves and wooly hats…People in Maine throw on a sweatshirt.

*0 degrees:  People in Miami cease to exist…Mainers lick the flagpole.

*-40 below:  Hollywood disintegrates…The girl scouts in Maine begin selling cookies door to door.

*-60 below:  Polar bears begin to evacuate Antarctica…Maine’s Boy Scouts postpone “winter Survival” classes until it gets cold enough.

*-500 degrees:  Hell freezes over…The New England Patriots win the Super Bowl!

Sounds like a Maine winter to me.

Here we are on Easter Sunday and we still have mounds of snow on the ground.  Yet, I’m not complaining.  I am thankful we didn’t get yet another blizzard and have had to cancel Easter Sunday entirely!  We have a lot of skiers in our church, including my own family.  To help the skiers ease into the idea that it is really Spring we are going to start calling “coffee hour” – “après church”  A lot of us are still going up to the slopes there is so much snow left.  But, it is melting, however slowly.  Remember “The Blessing of the Pets?”  Well, I am thinking of having “The Blessing of the Snowballs.”  We will get one from Sugar Loaf and one from Sunday River.  We will put them in Tupperware containers and keep them in the refrigerator freezer down stairs.  We will tape Ecclesiastes to them, For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:  a time to be born and a time to die; a time to ski and a time to put away the skis…

Yes, spring in Maine can seem like an oxymoron but it is true none the less.  Spring is really here.  The weatherman on channel six, Kevin Manix, said so.  We had the solstice over a week ago.  It’s official.  There are some shreds of evidence if you know what to look for.  Sledding is a little patchy.  Our cars are getting splattered by mud.  The sun is higher.  When my son, Ian, and I wait at the bus stop in the morning we say to each other, “Yes, I think I hear more birds today!” 

Most of all I feel spring in my bones.  Does that happen to you?  I breath in deeply and know from someplace deep inside that a power is afoot.  Something stirs inside of me.  It is wonderful.  I had forgotten about it all winter long.  It is the spirit of life that is stirring all living things.  It stirs in me too.  During the weeks and weeks of deep snow I walked above the ground and slid on ice.  I forgot what my yard looked like.  I began to think life was only about air and weather, cold air and bad weather.    But, now we are in March.  Little rivers of water trickle down our driveways.  Light sings with the birds.  And I slowly return to earth.  I am called by spring and recognize my home of earth returning. 

Because of this the coming of spring is a classic metaphore for the resurrection of Christ.  Christ has risen.  He has risen indeed!   Jesus didn’t just come back to life.  More importantly, Jesus is the source of life.  The miracle of the resurrection isn’t just that Jesus was resuscitated after death.  The resurrected Jesus was a powerful source of new life for everybody. 

Likewise, spring is more than just the same old stuff from last year warmed over.  Rather, it is new life emerging out of the dead life, powerfully young.  It is not just a caterpillar resuscitated in a cocoon and emerging again as a caterpillar.  It is a caterpillar completely transformed in the cocoon and emerging a butterfly. 

If at the end of the service you still wonder about the resurrection.  What does it mean for you.  I suggest you just come up front here and take a deep breath and smell these lilies.  Flowers, sweet flowers again.  That spring feeling will start to get under your skin.  Or, take a walk.  Because it is spring smell the air, hear the birds, notice, can it be true, daffodils and crocuses.  Let that spring feeling seep deep down into your bones.  Touch into the life giving power of spring and you will begin understand what the resurrection is all about for Christianity. In death Jesus is life.   In darkness Jesus is light.  In slavery Jesus is freedom.   In hatred Jesus is love.

I don’t want to say the resurrection and spring are the same thing.  I am saying that the power of life that we feel each spring reminds us of the even greater life Christians experience through Christ’s resurrection.

Let me throw around a few big theological ideas for a minute.  The resurrection is not just an historical event.  It is not just something that can be reported on the news and then time for a commercial.  Rather it is an eschatological event.  That means that it is the beginning of the end.  It is not a bad end.  It a very very good end.   It is the beginning of the end which is life abundant and forever more.  Surely, the resurrection takes place inside of time.  Yet, it also takes place outside of time, and above time and beyond time.  Christ is a new creation and in Christ we are new creations.  Paul says,   From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.  So if anyone is in Christ, there a new creation:  everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new  (2 Cor. 5:16ff)

The resurrection is about the beginning of the end.  That is how the disciples could make such outrageous claims.  These are claims that to an outsider that didn’t know the resurrected Christ sound completely preposterous.  They say things like, Did you knot know that the saints will judge the world?  …Do you not know we are to judge angels..(1 Cor 6:3)  Go into to all the world and proclaim the good news to all creation  (Mk.  16:15)  It would be like pilgrims stepping off the Mayflower and immediately declaring a national foreign policy.  Or, it is like someone who came to Maine in winter, and never heard of spring being told that the arrival of a little dusty color bird with the muddy red chest called a robin,  means that all the snow is going to melt, the mud is going to dry up, the brown grass is  going to be green, the dead apple tree is going to flower with thousands of sweet smelling blossoms.  The air is going to be so warm that we don’t even have to wear our sweatshirts out.  Such claims would seem utterly ridiculous to those who had not experienced it.  More ridiculous would be the change in spirit the advent of spring brings to people in Maine.   We start walking around as if death was nowhere in the background.  We move from joy to joy, as the bird flits wing to wing, and we unaccountably find things to smile about as if smelling blossoms, impossible blossoms, sweet impossible blossoms. 

Let me approach the powerful life of the resurrection another way.  Compared to other major world religions Christianity is frankly weird.  Jesus was the founder of Christianity in a completely different way than Moses was a founder of Judaism, or Mohamed was a founder of Islam, or the Buddha was a founder of Buddhism.  With Moses we have a leader of people who was with them for over 40 years.  Moses is attributed giving this massive body of law, starting from the 10 commandments, which forms the constitution of the people and regulates the life of the people of Israel from then to the present day.  It has been handed down through the traditions of the elders and the scribes.  In the case of Mohamed we have a prophet who experiences Ala through the divine voice reciting to him on a stump in his back yard over a period of about 40 years.  Again, it was an ongoing revelation which created the basis of a theocratic state which could then be govered by a series of successor to Mohammed.  Or in the case of the Buddha, we have a man who experiences that state of enlightenment and then communicates that experience to others who when they learn the same things the Buddah learns can themselves have the same experience.

Clearly Jesus does not fit into these kinds of categories.  His active ministry lasted only one to three years.  He had twelve followers that he chose but they abandoned him at the end.  The gospels uniformly describe them as not worthy followers, that they were fairly stupid, they didn’t understand what Jesus was up to and they were faithless.  In the end Jesus died alone.  He was executed as a criminal.  This is such a frank acknowledgement of the gospel that later critics of Christianity made a great deal of this. 

Unlike all the other religions with Christianity there is a disconnect.  There is a big gap between the last moment of Jesus’ life and the first moment of belief.    What bridged that disconnect.  What jump started a car whose battery had gone dead in the cold?  What would jump start a band of disciples who were scattered, discouraged and disillusioned?   What would make them completely change so that they suddenly proclaimed victory, preached to the world, and each and every one of them sacrifice their life for the cause of Christ?   It had to be the resurrection.  Christianity is born not as a direct result of Jesus’ personal actions or words, but as a result of what god has done through his death and resurrection.  Therefore, the real beginning of Christianity is Easter, not the birth of Christ, not Christmas. 

The resurrection gave the disciples life power.  It enabled them to move through suffering.  It gave them faith that they could live their lives in the light of transcendent reality.  It gave them love to overcome racism and selfishness and become peacemakers. 

Because of the resurrection Christians are profoundly optimistic.  C. S. Lewis makes this point.  He saw the resurrection effecting life like that of a country occupied by the Nazis getting the electrifying news that a far off battle has been won and has turned the tide of the war.  The occupying power is in disarray.  Its backbone has been broken.  In the course of time the Nazis will be driven out entirely.  Prisoners upon hearing on the radio of the victory  psychological outlook changed radically.  They begin to laugh and cry as if they are free already.  That is what happened to the disciples.  We know we are Christian, really Christian when that happens to us too.  No matter what is getting you down in life, your job, your marriage, your health, whatever it is know that the war is already won.   The resurrection happens when Spring takes back winter of our defeated souls. 

The mystic Hildegard of Bingen says Christ as “greening love that hastens to the aid of all.”  He brings a lush greenness to a shriveled and wilted people.  He is greening power in motion making all things grow and expand and celebrate.  Because of him we are like the apple tree that will blossom.  He is the rain coming from the dew that causes the grasses to laugh with joy of life.  

Winter is over.  Spring has come to Maine.   We can feel it in our bones.  Let’s celebrate!  At 35 degrees above 0 while the people in Texas have closed schools, people in Maine fire up their back yard barbeques again.  Soon it will be 50 degrees above zero and while Californians shiver uncontrollably,  I know a place at Two lights State between two rocks where we can start sun bathing.  Spring has come and soon, very soon, it will be 60 degrees above zero and we can plant our gardens.