Diocese of Down & Dromore

Easter Sermon by The Rt Revd Harold Miller, Bishop of Down and Dromore, in St Anne's Cathedral, Sunday 4th April 2010 at 11am.

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree,

But God raised him on the third day. (Acts 10: 39-40).

The Easter message absolutely depends on an old and rarely preached Christian doctrine, which has not been popular of late: The Fallenness of Humanity. It is expressed well in Article 9 of the Thirty Nine Articles, in these words:

    '...man is very far gone from original righteousness (that is,

     in my words, the righteousness of the Garden of Eden), and is,

    of his own nature, inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth

    always contrary to the spirit.'

That teaching about human fallenness, with its recognition that every aspect of our being is flawed and every person on this planet is flawed, no matter how good we may make our lives appear, has not been popular either inside or outside of the church for the last few decades. We have preferred to believe that we can somehow spruce up our lives and the lives of others, and hopefully give an appearance, at least in the church, that we have it all ‘together’. The newspaper headlines of these days are a reality check for all of us.

The story of Holy Week and Good Friday blows such self-satisfied moralism and religiosity apart in the most stark terms. Here we see the truth of what human beings can stoop to: Judas sells his soul for a bit of extra money; Peter does not have the courage of his convictions to speak out when it might be costly for him; the crowds, so enthusiastically supportive on Palm Sunday, have been swayed in the opposite direction by events and are crying out with vehemence: ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’, excited by the smell of blood.

Here we also see the weaknesses and inadequacies of institutions. The political and religious institutions of Jesus’ day are incapable of welcoming the presence of God among them when it challenges them to change; they are incapable of rising above dominance and self-preservation; and they themselves become, tragically, the vehicle by which the physical destruction of the Son of God is brought about.

I don’t think the story is very different today. We do not find ourselves in some exalted and more civilized category as human beings in the 21st Century. We are still every bit as fallen. And any thought that the essential nature of humanity has changed is certainly blown out of the water by our experience. We too are so often prepared to sell our souls  for financial gain; We too keep our mouths shut when the time has come where we need to speak out; and we too are prepared to change our principles when the majority shout loudly against them.

It is into the midst of this situation that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ comes on the first Easter Day, with those words of Peter (the same Peter) in Acts 10:

‘But God raised him on the third day…’

This is the moment when we are given a glimpse of what God can do which we, in a million years of our own efforts and self-righteousness could never achieve:

God has the power to reverse the effects of everything which human beings and the powers of evil can throw against his Son. That is the meaning of Easter Day. On that Resurrection morning:

He reverses, and is victorious over, all the contrivances of human sin

He reverses, and is victorious over, all the self-serving power of institutions, and

He reverses, and is victorious over, the apparent finality of death itself.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, these are not just the words of a sermon: these truths are what we need to know here in our own society and in our own lives in the Year of our Lord 2010, lest we sink into a mire of hopelessness. Without the Resurrection, we will, as St Paul puts it, be ‘of all men the most miserable’.

We need to remember the resurrection power of Jesus when we are inclined to believe and act out the idea that this world’s goods are going to bring us meaning and satisfaction in our lives. He had nowhere to lay his head; he ended up on a cruel cross naked and penniless, apparently with nothing, and on Easter Day, the message of the Gospel tells us that God delivered everything into his hands as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, exalting him to the highest place of rule and authority in heaven.

We need to remember the resurrection power of Jesus when we think that we, in our human weakness, have nothing to say into our apparently very powerful world. This one man who proclaimed his Father’s word, even when he was reduced to silence, proved to have the message of all messages, and indeed to be the Word itself in his very person. We need to believe that in a thoroughgoing way: we have the words of forgiveness and life for our society, not in and of ourselves, but in the risen Christ of Easter Day.

We need to know from the resurrection power of Jesus that it is not the crowds or a majority vote which brought about our salvation, but one man, the perfect man, who looked as though he was defeated but walked in God’s way right to the end. He was vindicated on this Easter Day, against all human odds. One person lived out the life of God fully, carried our sins, and led the way to resurrected life, open now to every person who trusts in him.

We need to know that all our institutions are subject to the judgement of God when they become a block to his will and purposes, rather than a sign of his presence. This is true of financial institutions, political institutions, and not least, religious institutions, all of which share in the human condition of fallenness. Don’t ever put your final trust in any institution, no matter how old or impressive it may be, not least the structures of the church. It is true that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church of God, his ransomed community bought with the price of the blood of Christ, but he has never promised to prop up any particular institutional form of the Church, not least the Church of Ireland. Our dependence is in Jesus Christ, not in a denomination, no matter how greatly loved that institution may be.

But the basic message of the Resurrection is this: The disciples could not change the situation on the first Easter weekend. It appeared to be beyond changing. We cannot change any of these things in and of ourselves. The whole of the story of Easter Day was brought about, and could only be brought about, by the intervening power of God. No-one could have imagined it, no-one could have made it happen, no-one had the power to call the resurrection into being. I sense that many of us are almost overwhelmed by the events we are experiencing in the news. Just when we think things could not get any worse they do. We feel let down, depressed, unsure that we can depend on any human being or institution; as though all our hopes and aspirations are being dashed to the ground. Well, I don’t have to tell you, that is exactly what it was like on the first Good Friday:

     They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; But,

The core of our celebration this morning is:

     God raised him on the third day.

These times of devastation, powerlessness, destruction, and hopelessness are the very moments which bring us literally to our knees, in the realization that it is only God on whom we can depend, only God who hears our cry, and only God who can bring about something new by his risen power and life, in and through Jesus Christ. And the message of this Easter Day is not just that he can do so, but that he will do so, often surprisingly, often in the way we least expected, because the Risen Lord Jesus is the one who reigns over and in the end directs even this fallen, but redeemed world. He transforms our relationship with God, and makes our future secure.

The Easter Anthems put it like this:

    Christ has been raised from the dead,

    the first-rate of those who sleep;

    For as by man came death,

    by man has come also the resurrection of the dead.

    For as in Adam all die,

    even so in Christ shall all be made alive

Open your lives with all their frailty, sins and fallenness to the power and presence of the risen Christ, and become united with him in his vision and purposes for transformed lives, and a transformed world. That is our only hope, our resurrection hope, glimpsed even in this fallen world, and most certainly fulfilled in the next.

May you have a happy and hopeful Easter in the Risen Christ. Amen.