Easter Day
April 4, 2010

It is customary on Easter Sunday for the preacher to get up into the pulpit and do his or her very best to explain what the Christian doctrine of the resurrection is all about. Well, I am not going to do that this morning. In fact, I want to go out on a limb today and suggest that Easter is not primarily about our particular religion, even though, let's face it, we are all sitting in a Christian house of prayer this morning. It is not primarily about this or that doctrine, this or that dogma, this or that way of believing.

No, when we get down to brass tacks, Easter, my friends, is about your life, it is about my life, it is about the journey we are on. Most assuredly, this journey is one that takes us from dust to dust, because there is no one here today who isn't mortal. None of us can cheat death by clinging to the illusion of permanence, or clinging to the illusion that we can somehow control our fate. For in truth, all things flow, and nothing abides.

Easter is about recognition. It is about recognizing our the journey we are on. It is about living life to the fullest, free of fear, free of despair, free of putting off for tomorrow what we must do today. Easter is about setting out on the path that leads to eternity.

This, I believe, is what Jesus was trying to tell us on his earthly sojourn. This is what he was trying to show us in the sacrifice of his life. "I have come to give life and to give it more abundantly," Jesus said. Life, life in abundance, for Jesus, was found on the path that leads to God. And his death and resurrection mean nothing, they mean nothing at all, unless we too, rise to meet the new road he calls us to.

As you are well aware, recently I have been on a pilgrimage of my own. And in India, you are never alone as a pilgrim. Pilgrims are everywhere, carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs, barefoot and jubilant, walking day and night, often for 50 or 100 or 150 miles. And they do all this for the simple joy of venerating a beloved shrine, or saint, or god.

I learned something very important in their company, you know. With those wandering pilgrims, I gleaned something of the reality that Italian poet and novelist Ceasare Pavese spoke about when he said that, "traveling is a brutality (because it) forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it."

Easter, my friends, is about these essential things. For surely, this is what is destined for our journey through this life. The essential things. In Christ, death no longer has dominion over us. We are heirs of eternity, the "first fruits of those who have died." Round that next corner, just beyond the bend, is a new heaven and a new earth, that draws us nigh. We have no time to lose, not a moment to squander.

For Easter is about your life and mine. It is about this ever so ephemeral, this ever so fleeting journey we are on. So here's the question for us on this blessed morning, put in simple eloquence of Mary Oliver: "if you have not been enchanted by this adventure, your life -- what would do for you? And to her question, I will add another: if we're not yet on the journey that leads to God, then what on earth are we waiting for?