Once upon a time during Holy Week, I was hunched over my computer after a service. I was concentrating on very important church work, like scheduling meetings and reading emails. All of a sudden, a bunch of young kids rushed by the office, all talking at once. “Rev. Anne, Rev. Anne,” they cried, “the ‘Alleluia Box’ blew up in the church and all of the Alleluia’s are gone!”
“What?” I exclaimed, with a bit of impatience, looking at my watch. I knew that I was in control of that Alleluia box game; I was the one who locked up the word “alleluia” on Ash Wednesday. I was the one who would free it on Easter. It’s a fun game, but I knew that the box wouldn’t really blow up. Kids’ imaginations! But the children were all in an uproar, so excited, all talking at once.
“It’s true, we saw it, we saw it!” they cried, when I didn’t react. “It’s just like you told us,” offered one boy, in the patient way you have to talk to clueless grownups. “You said that on Easter the box would open and that all the alleluias would come out. Well, they must have come out early and flown away, because they’re all gone!”
“OK,” I said, trying to humor the kids. “You’d better go find your parents. They’re probably looking for you. I’ll check on it later. You see, it’s still Holy Week,” I explained. “Jesus isn’t alive again yet. So the alleluias must still be in the box. It’s OK.” The children trooped away dutifully, with only a faint trace of disappointment on their still glowing faces. They knew what they had seen—and they remembered the Easter story from Godly Play. Still, only when I finished my “important” work did I head into the church to see what was going on.
My tale is similar to Luke’s account of the resurrection in today’s Gospel. A group of women arrive in the fragile light of dawn to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. They’re terrified to find an empty tomb, rather than a lifeless body. They’re told by angelic witnesses that Christ is risen, and all of a sudden, they remember what Jesus had taught them. They remember the promises that he made to them. They run back to the rest of the disciples, full of wonder and excitement. Yet their testimony is dismissed as a gullible flight of fancy. After all, in the first century, women had about as much credibility as young children do today.
Just like Jesus’ disciples, we have heard his promises, too. We read what the earthly Jesus said and did in Scripture; we hear his story in Godly Play; we recite it every week in the Creed. We know how the Easter story goes: Christ is risen. God is victorious. Death is vanquished. Sin is forgiven. From that first Easter on, we live in a new creation. We are a new creation. We Christians say that we believe this story. Or at least we try to believe it. But then we mostly go on about our lives as if none of it were true. We spend our days working and running from moment to moment, hardly stopping to catch a breath. We spend our nights worrying about failure, about war, about sickness and death. We live as if gathering enough security or buying enough things will make everything all right.
Even at Easter, we get caught up in brunch menus and reservations, in decorating and cleaning up the church, in getting the kids or grandkids looking cute for the photo ops. “Christ is risen!” we proclaim, yet it often feels like a game that we are playing, a game like locking up and freeing the alleluias. Those of us here today, at least, are pretty good at showing up at the tomb, like the women. Yet, even though we know what Jesus has told us, we come expecting not life, but death. We don’t really expect an explosion of life on Easter, do we? We don’t expect to see Christ. We don’t expect the world to change overnight. I mean, how can we?! Just look at the news headlines!
I read a quote this week that shook me out of my own death-seeking slump. It’s by Cole Arthur Riley, author of the new bestseller, This Here Flesh. She posted on Instagram that “Turning on the light doesn’t make the monsters disappear from under our beds, but it reminds us who has power over the switch.” Turning on the light reminds us who has power over the switch.
Don and I have a running battle over who has power over the light switch in our kitchen in the morning. I’m for sudden shock and awe, blasting the room with morning. Don prefers a gradual glow, adding light a bit at a time. In any case, whether the lights come on suddenly or slowly, we all know that uncomfortable, blinky feeling. When you get up everything is still kind of dark and fuzzy, right? You’re still half asleep, and you don’t have your glasses on yet. And then, whoosh, the light comes on! Suddenly, you squint and blink, and you can’t quite see everything right. You’re blinded by that light. Then, as we start our day, our eyes eventually get used to the light. We don’t notice it anymore. We just pay attention to the world that the light shows us. We make our coffee and start reading the paper. We’ve forgotten about the light. But without it, everything would still be dim shadows.
For theologian Rowan Williams, the resurrection is like a new light going on in the morning. The Risen Christ is a way of seeing the world around us. For the disciples at the empty tomb, it was as if someone had just flipped on a bright light. Jesus was that light. They saw him everywhere. It was a disorienting experience, a frightening one. They were painfully aware of his strange new form and presence. But soon, people stopped noticing the newness. They stopped squinting. The light stopped being something that drew our attention. Instead, Christ became something that we see by. At Easter, the Risen Christ becomes “the channel by which God goes on speaking to the world, the way in which God is with us, committed to us whatever we do.”[1] Easter reminds us that God, not evil and death, has power over the switch.
I’m hoping now that the children can help us death-seeking grown-ups remember Jesus’ promise that God controls the switch of new life. Children, come on up here, and let’s blow up this “Alleluia Box!” [The children come forward and hold open a big silk scarf like a parachute. I open the Alleluia Box and pour all of the locked-up Alleluia papers in the middle. Everyone shouts, “Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed!” And we send the papers flying up into the air.]
May we all remember that Easter didn’t happen one time over two thousand years ago. It didn’t happen just last year, or just today. Easter is every Sunday. It is new life in the Body of Christ. Easter is here among us, the light by which we see. The light in which we live. Alleluia!
[1] Rowan Williams, “Ascension Day,” in A Ray of Darkness (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1995), 68-71.
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