Easter 2009
 By Harry T. Cook
4/06/09
As a parish priest, I did not relish having to preach on Easter Day itself, though I did so off and on -- mostly on -- for 43 years while ringing every change available in the theological belfry from out-and-out skepticism to too-clever-by-half suggestions that it's all metaphor.
What is success in preaching? Hearing or sensing heartfelt "Amens" from among the holiday throng? Seeing brows knit in provocation? Having members of the congregation glare at you in barely veiled hatred on their way out the church door? Or having your hand pumped unmercifully by those who "enjoyed" your sermon when you know perfectly well that, having handed them, as it were, a live grenade, they somehow escaped intellectually unscathed -- as well as unengaged.
I have known every single piece of that "success" over time. Yet I think I have changed few minds and even fewer lives trying to talk about a First Century myth to 20th and 21st Century congregations.
With the possible exception of Unitarians, people do not come to church on Easter to hear a myth de-mythologized, nor yet to hear a tone poem filled with cloying metaphors about new life in daffodils and lagomorphs. What, then, do they come to hear?
My guess is the music, especially if it is good music well done by organ, choir and even brass. There's nothing like a rousing version of "Salve feste dies" to stir even the dull of heart and slow of mind to appreciation of something not quite tangible but nevertheless promising, some je ne sais quoi beyond the cheap-grace tawdriness of your typical television commercial that is the all-too-common punctuation of the one-dimensional life.
Even so, preacher: Try not to give (or if you are a long-suffering occupant of the pew, desire for) your Easter homiletic fare a disquisition upon the philosophical implications of the reanimation of dead tissue as they may apply to human wishful thinking about eternal life.
To the preacher and preached-to alike, I suggest that Easter Sunday 2009 might be a good time to unpack that very term, "eternal life," since it is a recurring theme throughout the Easter lections, prayers and hymnody, and also because most people would like to know how to purchase their way into it.
This, however, cannot ordinarily be done without recourse to artifice, or at least to baiting and switching. Announce a sermon on "eternal life," and you will set up an expectation that the goods can and maybe even will be delivered across the bridge between imagination on one side and actuality on the other.
Yet it can be done. It can be done by simply explaining what the New Testament phrase "eternal life" meant to those who first wrote it and heard or read it. For the record, the Greek is:Ζωή αιών: "life of the age" or even "life of the time." This latter could even be turned around to suggest "the time of (one's) life." In any event, "eternal life" means life that partakes in the finest and deepest human aspirations. It means a life that is full of the possibilities and profundities of its time and place, a life that is both self-fulfilled and is by intention the attempt to fulfill others' hopes and dreams.
My late friend and mentor, Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine (may he rest in peace), wrote the lyrics to a song that has been sung in the temple he founded 46 years ago for all of that time unto this day. I think it could be sung in Christian churches, and especially in the celebration of the Paschal feast. Why? Because it seems to reach out toward the kind of fulfillment and plentitude that the term "eternal life" suggests:
"Where is my hope? My hope is in me, my hope is in me and in you and in you." Not hope for any time other than this time. Not hope for some other place than this place, this age. Hope for the fullest and the best that human beings together in concert can achieve.
Let "resurrection-speak," if one insists on having it at Easter, be talk of a purposeful rising in the attempt to fulfill any and every possibility and expectation of which human love and wisdom are capable so that "eternal life" may be realized in the here and now.
And what of the practical application of such sentiments? The United States of America is getting deeper and deeper into economic trouble. Other nations whose citizens are likewise members of the human race have their own massive sorrows and disappointments. What shall a people bent on the celebration of "resurrection unto eternal life" do in light of all that? Not look beyond any of it for answers, but in it. The strange man from Nazareth said of the domain of heaven (viz., all that's desirable) that "it is in you" -- like Rabbi Wine's hope.
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