postID: 7075; title: The Sunday Of The Resurrection: Easter Day
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
The Sunday Of The Resurrection: Easter Day
Almighty God, who through thine only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord's resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by thy life-giving Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Array
(
[date] => 2018-04-01 15:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1457
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2018-04-01 15:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2018-04-01postID: 7075 (The Sunday Of The Resurrection: Easter Day)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7075; date_type: variable; year: 2018
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7075
displayDates for postID: 7075/year: 2018
Array
(
[0] => 2018-04-01
)
postPriority: 1primaryPost found for date: 2018-04-01 with ID: 7075 (The Sunday Of The Resurrection: Easter Day)
The Sunday Of The Resurrection: Easter Day
Array
(
[date] => 2018-04-01 15:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1457
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2018-04-01 15:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2018-04-01postID: 7075 (The Sunday Of The Resurrection: Easter Day)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7075; date_type: variable; year: 2018
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7075
displayDates for postID: 7075/year: 2018
Array
(
[0] => 2018-04-01
)
postPriority: 1primaryPost found for date: 2018-04-01 with ID: 7075 (The Sunday Of The Resurrection: Easter Day)
A Sermon by
Fr. Ritter
✛
To Be Continued
When was the last time you tried to get somewhere, only to be caught in one of those construction zones in which the sidewalk is closed and the noise is unbearable? There are those signs posted all over the place: hard-hat area, construction zone, or sidewalk closed. I really don’t like the barriers that make everyone walk single file. Today, God has entered human history and created a new reality. God has nailed up his sign over creation: To Be Continued. The world has been put on notice; there is a new construction zone in which God is now working. It’s a bit of an odd sign, if you stop to think about it. To Be Continued, what kind of sign is that actually? Signs tell us to do something, like Stop, Go, Private Do Not Enter, or No Trespassing. They give us some instruction, some direction, something to do—but what about God’s sign that says, To Be Continued?…What is God telling us?
To be continued: perhaps it really is God’s little joke on us. God raised up a dead, executed criminal? Who would believe such an incredible story? To begin with, no one comes back from the dead. We can stand here are talk about Jesus and the empty tomb until we are blue in the face, but when my Aunt Susan dies, she is dead and that is the end of that. We are not going to see her again. Period—end of story. Anything else is just wishful thinking, plain folly, madness. Just for a second though, entertain such wishful thinking, what if it were true? If the dead don’t stay dead, then what can we count on? The claim of resurrection breaks all the rules. I am not saying that these rules are even close to perfect, but they at least order this life. We thought we knew what was going to happen but then God raises Jesus. We decided to end the story, stick a period on the sentence and be done with it, but God buts in and says, “Hey not so fast—I have to add a few things.”
To be continued, the Gospel of John that we heard today cannot end the story of Jesus. The events of Jesus’ life; the tomb, his shameful death, crucifixion, torture, humiliation; these will not have the final word over Jesus. God says, He is not finished: to be continued. Just as the tomb could not hold Jesus, neither can any of the Gospels contain Jesus. Jesus will not be bound by their endings; he will not be pinned down. All the disciples can do is proclaim with Mary Magdalene, “I have seen the Lord; He is risen!” Jesus will not be constrained by the rules of this world. It is one thing to go around saying I am the resurrection and I am life and things like that, but then Jesus went and actually did it. How could anyone have taken him seriously? Look at the disciples, the ones who thought that they knew him best. They spent a good three years following this Jesus around, you would think that at least one of them would have an idea of what was going to happen to him, but they did not even have a clue. They fled and abandoned Jesus at his death. But then Jesus appears to them with this strange resurrected corporeal body and says, “to be continued—my life, your life, creation, to be continued.” And in the blink of an eye everything that you think you know is suddenly turned on its head.
And I doubt that much has really changed over the last 2000 years. We still struggle to make sense of resurrection. It simply doesn’t make sense—how could someone who has died, be alive again? It goes against all that we know. It sounds too good to be true, in this world it sounds just like one more broken promise. Perhaps because of this we have become numb to the idea of resurrection. We know, deep down, that we are dying, and the promise of life is frightening. We can protest and continue to deny it. We can go around pretending that all is good and well. When asked, “How are you?” we can say that we are fine and good, but we know that we are not o.k. or fine. We know that in fact life is fragile. We know that there is something terribly wrong with the world and with us. We are tangled up, mired in sin and in need of a savior. And so for us, this story is frightening. You don’t have to look far to see how much we are obsessed, even addicted to the idea of immortality. Take our obsession with youth; we spend millions in the attempt to appear younger than we are. Look at our language: we don’t even die, instead we pass on, but we don’t die, surely we don’t smell, rot or decompose.
So, what if this story that we know as our life, does not end? What if it were true? The God who spoke into the void of nothingness and created all this here, speaks into the abyss of death, “You, yes, you are mine! Even you, even in death you are still mine, nothing will change that—not death, or sin, or disbelief—your life does not end; it belongs to me! Whether you remember it or not, when the water of Baptism touched you, I claimed you, then and forever. God’s yes in Jesus is louder than all of our noes. It is louder than our no to God’s mercy, our no to God’s grace, our refusal to have anything to do with God. God’s Yes rings out into the nothingness of death, I am the Lord, your God, the Almighty and Everlasting, the Lord of the living and The Lord of the dead. Death will not have the last word. Even as I said Yes and raised Jesus, so now I say Yes to you and claim you! My love for you is not bound by anything in heaven, on earth or even in hell. The dominion of death from which we believe no one returns will not have the last word. God’s Yes will overcome our questions, our doubts, our disbelief! God’s Yes, it is the last word, and when all is said and done, when we are in the ground, it is the only word that matters. The dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live (John 5:25). Once you had an end in death, but now God has spoken through his Son: to be continued.
