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 gentle 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, theologically speaking, 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 to congregations about a first century myth late in time.
With the possible exception of Unitarians, people do not come to church on Easter to hear a myth demythologized, 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 festa 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 2015 might be a good time to unpack that very term, "eternal life," since it will be a recurring motif throughout the Easter lections, prayers and hymnody, and also because most people would like to know how to purchase their way into it.
Such preaching, 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 Ζωήαιών: "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 more than a half-century 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 politically conflicted with much left to accomplish in terms of human rights, social and economic justice. 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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As to the "events" that in this season are marked in ritual celebration, it must be said that just as there is no dependable archaeological evidence of the Exodus, much less any likewise dependable attestation outside of scripture for its story, so the blow-by-blow account of the crucifixion of Jesus and the very mixed bag of texts concerning his alleged resurrection are at best wildly exaggerated accounts. The consequential difference between actuality and reality seems to be unknown to many who attempt to interpret the texts.
Crucifixion was, as has been noted in this series, an ancient method of mass intimidation with the convenient bonus of offing enemies of the state. If there was one such as Jesus is variously depicted as being and if such a person was, in fact, perceived by Rome as one whose public humiliation and death could be advantageous to its governance, it is as likely as not that he was so executed. How church theologians got from that to "he died on the cross to save us from our sins" in other than a convoluted and metaphorical way is a subject of perennial wonder.
The same can be said of the resurrection stories. When left to the labors of textual scholars, such texts are revealed as raw, well-intentioned mythology composed at the earliest some four decades after the events are said to have occurred in efforts to spin what are certainly contradictory assertions into a number of contradictory stories.
As long as it is made clear that such stories are not accounts of events but the product of defiant hope against hope for a favorable validation of the central premise of the gospel, the Easter proclamation will be an honest one. And what is the gospel's central and, really, only premise? It is to love one's neighbor as one's self and to respect the dignity of every human being. To lay down one's life willingly for such a cause, as - for example - did Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 47 years ago this coming Easter Eve, is to save humanity from some of its worst sins. To be remembered for having done so, and out of memory to haunt those who would deny respect to every human being can be said to be resurrection.
Mark these words of the late George Arthur Buttrick, famed 20th-century scholar and preacher: "What makes people Christlike? Love laying down its life - parents for their children, patriots for their country, laborers doing it for us at what seems the price of their nobler growth, poets scorning surface gains and living deep, philanthropists pouring forth their gifts, doctors, prophets, teachers. On all these there is the mark of the Cross - love laying down its life.*
* from the eighth and last of Dr. Buttrick's Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School in 1930.
