 I invite us to reflect this morning on the passage we heard a few moments ago from Paul's first letter to the fledgling church in Corinth. "As by a man came death, so by a man has come the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so all will be made alive in Christ" (1 Corinthians 15:19-26). This is Paul's summary of the Easter message. Christ's resurrection is real; it has a direct bearing on our lives; and it does so because we are all connected to each other.
We all know the power of connection. We are shaped by relationships and dependent on them. Some of these relationships are inherited, some come at us out of the blue, some are forged and honed over a long period of time. Many of you are here this morning because of parents, grandparents, children, friends who invited you to come to church with them. But connection is not confined to family and friends. Our closest relations can open us up to much broader circles of relation. And they should, because we are ultimately connected to everyone.
This is the point of Paul's reference to Adam. For Paul, Adam is about having a common ancestor. Adam is therefore a reminder that we are all one body, inescapably related to one another and available to one another, for good or ill. That means hurtful and mean-spirited deeds can have far-reaching effects, because our connectedness acts as a conductor, spreading hatred like an infection from one human being to another.
But this works for good deeds as well. A single act of mercy or a gesture of respect can reach to the ends of the earth. That's what Paul is saying about Jesus rising from the dead. Because Jesus is God-with-us, because he has become one of us, because he is our relative, his victory over death can become our victory over death, his life can become our life.
That's one piece of what Paul is saying here. Jesus' resurrection has set off a process of restoration and transformation that no human being can avoid. We can resist wave after wave of opportunity for new life, but we cannot bring that process to a halt.
Which brings us a step closer to the main point of this day.
Paul is not just talking about how our connection with one another conveys Jesus' risen life to us the way air conveys heat. Jesus' risen life is about connection. Jesus was tireless in his insistence that we belong to God and we belong to one another. So from the very first Easter Day, Christians have interpreted Jesus' resurrection as a vindication of what he taught and lived.
Whether we believe the witness of Mary Magdalene and the other women about the empty tomb, we cannot escape the personal challenge the Easter message brings our way. Do we embrace our connection to one another or not? Jesus demands that we do so. Can we handle his resurrection on those terms? Do we welcome his challenging presence among us?
Easter presents us with a choice. We can reject our connection to everybody, opting instead for a closed circle of allies and excluding everyone else. Throughout the Bible, this is the primal sin, because it closes us off from the human race as a whole, and it closes us off from God. Just the other evening one of my colleagues at Diocesan House was in one of our downtown skywalks and heard a man on his cellphone say: "Look, there are two kinds of people: those who are commodities and those who have skills."
That about sums it up: people are either useful to us or expendable. If we think this way, says Paul, we are headed for death -- the death of bitterness and isolation. For the more we acquiesce in the notion that it is okay to write people off as unworthy of our attention or respect, the more we lose our capacity for real conversation and communion with people who differ from us or with whom we disagree. In this week's edition of the Christian Century, poet and essayist Wendell Berry laments the polarization that prevents us from talking across our divisions around abortion and gay marriage. I would add guns and budgets.
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't defend the truth as we see it. Our local struggle on behalf of the Anna Louise Inn is a case in point. The Diocese of Southern Ohio has gone on record twice urging that the Inn be permitted to operate peacefully in its present location just around the corner, and this cathedral has urged its other neighbor, Western Southern, to stop trying to force their removal. But even when we as the church are fulfilling our proper role as an advocate for the poor, we must remember that Christ has a heart for the rich as well. Our job is to tear down walls, not reinforce them. How can we reframe the conversation so grace is on offer to both sides?
Which brings us back to the choice that faces us today. We can choose disconnection in the name of righteousness, or we can embrace connection, even with our enemies. If we choose connection, the energy that we receive and transmit will be Christ's energy, the energy of life not death. We will become conductors of grace, what Paul calls "ministers of reconciliation."
Easter leaves us in no doubt about what is the winning choice. All our hymns this morning, all our prayers today, all our Easter readings hammer home the message that Jesus took death head on and conquered it. Love trumps hate. The scales are tipped in favor of connection, as the risen Christ moves to destroy what Paul calls "rulers, authorities and powers," by which he means any institution or system, political, economic or religious, that promotes disconnection. As followers of Christ we are deputized and empowered to participate in his peaceful but Indefatigable campaign to bring disconnection down.
For the most part, this is work that has to do with this world. We are called to be agents of change in the name of the risen Christ, and the change has to do with how we serve the common good. But there is a danger here. We can all too easily forget that the Easter message matters for this world only because it utterly transcends it. As Paul says in today's reading, "If we believe in Christ only for this world, we are most to be pitied." Radical commitment to connection depends on faith that reality really is about connection, and that connection includes fellowship on the other side of physical death.
Jesus himself staked everything on connection. This is what he meant by the kingdom of God -- a universally connected community in which everyone was welcome, before and after death, as long as they welcomed everybody else. The Christian story is that Jesus was not wrong: God vindicated Jesus' commitment to universal community by raising him from the dead. Now it is our turn to believe. How shall we do that?
In today's Gospel reading, the women run to tell the apostles that the tomb is empty, and they have received a revelation from angels proclaiming that he is risen. The apostles (all male, we might note) first dismiss this as an idle tale -- mere superstition and suggestibility. In the end, Jesus appears to the apostles directly, but we, in turn, are dependent on their witness. We would like more evidence, but the New Testament is remarkably insistent that believing the witness of others about Jesus is crucial to our own lives as his followers. For instance, in our reading from Acts, Peter says the resurrection was revealed only to chosen witnesses. Why is that?
I have struggled with this every Easter, but I think I finally get it. We are not permitted to understand resurrection apart from connection. Our dependence on the witness of the women, and eventually, the apostles, is a reminder that we can never bypass other human beings to get to God. Salvation is about community, so our way to happiness, our way to life, cannot be solitary or cliquish. Even if we are alone or feel alone, Jesus walks with us.
So let's lay hold of the good news that comes to us by way of the witness of others. Let's outdo Peter and the other apostles in hearing what Mary Magdalene and the other women have to say to us. As Paul puts it, Christ is risen, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To hear this in its fullness is to open our hearts to a measure of hope we had not imagined was sensible or possible. Our loved ones who have died are not lost to us. The whole universe is redeemed. Tragedy is swallowed up in highest comedy. Christ is risen, and we are on our way, together. "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive."
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