Easter Sermon

In the struggle between light and dark, I'm not sure light should win.

I don't mean good and evil here; I don't believe in that dichotomy much.  I mean that the Easter holiday often infects me with vertigo and a little sugar sickness: all those pastels, the flowers, the eggs, the good news.  It's so all so nauseatingly chipper.  So loud.  So light.  So much levity.  

That sounds worse than I maybe really feel.  Things I do love about Easter: big hats on old women, little girls in patent leather shoes, the blessed weather.  

Let me back up.

Let me talk about good news.

All about town the marquis reads "He is Risen!" and the blossoms bloom so bright they quiver from their very roots.  From the megaphone of the Internet, joyful headlines and status updates and photos of purple baskets stuffed to the gills with chocolate malt balls, plastic eggs, and fat bunnies abound.  

These things tell us we have something to celebrate, an exuberant thing, a happy thing.   

Perhaps.  But in the Easter story, I am more moved by death than life, by the story's no-nonsense acknowledgment of suffering more than its assurance of Christ's resurrection as our salvation.  I'm bothered actually by the dichotomy he/we in "He died for our sins," since the Easter story, to me, is nothing if not a mirror held up to the world, a kind of cosmic looking glass.   If they insist on cheer, I  wish the signs read "We are Risen!"   

I am drawn to the darkness.  The quiet consolations.  The crepuscular.  I love the Stations of the Cross, for example.  

The two most reassuring moments in the Easter story for me are somber moments:

1. The moment in the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus cries out from the deepest dark of his pain on the cross,"Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?", translated in English as "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"  Mark is the only gospel that includes this quote from Jesus, so who knows about its veracity, but I am less interested in factual truth than story-truth, in particular truth than universal truth.  In the contest of authorship, Mark wins.  His story has Jesus ask the ultimate question of all sufferers--why am I alone?--and in voicing our most human fear, Jesus assures us we are not alone.  He is with us in our suffering.   

This moment of all Biblical moments is a sublime example of empathy.  One definition of empathy is the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.  The best stories allow our subjective suffering to infuse others; or conversely, to see others as infused with our own grief.  My subjective suffering infused into the body of Jesus so that he feels what I feel.  Stories, then, become the great equalizer, as death is too.  

I do not need Jesus to save me from sin, so I much as I need a presence bigger than myself to sit with me in my darknesses.  The best stories do not entertain us or cheer us up so much as console us, and consolation does not come in pastels, at least not for me.

2.  If stories console us, then they behave as salves.  The other Easter moment I love--a moment documented by all four gospel stories--is the moment after Jesus' death when a man named Joseph of Arimathea bravely asks Pontius Pilate for the body of Jesus.  Joseph wraps the body in linen and carries it to the tomb.  Outside the tomb, women sit and pay witness.  

That we may all have someone dress our wounds, tend to our bodies when they're most frail.  May we all have someone watch, listen, witness, and mourn, a woman or two to say "I see what has happened to you. I hear you.  I see you."

The best stories sit with us in the pitch of night before the dawn.  They are soul-salves, wrapped around our broken spirits like Joseph's linen cloths around the dead body of Christ.  

Once in my youth I went to a Sarah McLachlan concert--laugh if you want.   I'm showing my age and my ridiculousness.  I was 18, suffused with sorrow and confusion, and I remember she said on stage, "I try to write happy songs, but it never works.  The sadder the song, the better I feel."

I just finished reading Joe Landsdale's excellent, deeply gothic mystery novel, "The Bottoms."  At the end, the main character Harry, looking back on his life, says, "Life's like that.  It isn't like one of Grandma's murder mysteries.  Everything doesn't get sewn up neatly."

I don't know why we want to sugarcoat everything, literally and figuratively.  I want the messiness before we sew everything up neatly, before the resurrection.  We need to celebrate darkness too, because then we'll feel less alone when we find ourselves incapable of joy, we'll feel less defective, less like failures.  We'll feel consoled.  If that's not good news, then I don't know what.

Happy Easter.

Amen.

In honor of darkness and empathy, here are a few very dark, very satisfying pieces of art I'm drawn to lately if anyone wants to feel better: