A DIFFERENT SORT OF HOLIDAY
Matthew 28:1-10

A sermon given by the Rev. Richard H. Taylor
March 27, 2005 / Easter Sunday

When I was in High School those of us interested in religion would often bicker a little with each other over why our religion was better than your religion. It was kind of like those other youthful pass times like my baseball team is better than yours (Go Sox!), my favorite rock band is better than yours, and every thing else associated with me is better than you. It was childish.

I can remember telling my Italian Catholic friends that Protestant J. S. Bach was a far better musician that Italian Catholic Giuseppi Verdi. We still remained friends among all this nonsense. But in all this playful bickering I ran across one difference that astonished me. I had been brought up to believe that Easter was the most important holiday on the Christian calendar. But the Catholic friends I grew up with were convinced that Christmas was the most important Christian holiday. When I asked them why, the most thoughtful answers turned on the more significant role of Mary in the Christmas story as over against the Easter story. If Mary was to be central to your faith, then Christmas deserved more attention. Some also told me that Christmas was more important because Jesus could not have been raised from the dead if he had not been born.

But I argued that if Jesus was not raised, his birth didn't make very much difference. And, with a typically Protestant prejudice, I thought I had the Bible on my side. After all, all four Gospels make a big deal out of the resurrection, and it is central to most of the writing that follows. Christmas, on the other hand, doesn't even make it into two Gospels! Ah how we teenagers could get worked up over such things.

But as I grew older I found out that this was not a Catholic - Protestant thing. I found lots of people, Protestants, secularists, all kinds of people who agreed that Christmas was most important. Nonetheless, I have held stubbornly to my vote for Easter.

Recently I ran across an article by an American Greek Orthodox woman who takes my side.¹ Yet she has put a new spin on the issue that I had never thought of. Frederica Mathewes-Green argues that Americans come to love Christmas because it is designed for children. Easter is for adults. We are inducted into Christmas early on. Christmas was expected, looked forward to. And Christmas changed things, made life different, particularly in the toy box. And on Christmas you got to travel, go here and there, see long lost relatives, all with gifts.

But what does Easter have to offer? Well, chocolate Easter bunnies: good. But whoever came up with the idea that hard-boiled eggs are a fun food missed something. And face it - starched shirt collars and new tight stockings just don't make it. And Church on Easter seems like a long "blah-blah-blah." There aren't all the familiar carols that you learned in the shopping mall; you don't get to dress up like a shepherd or an angel; and Santa Claus doesn't visit.

Of course if you are raised American, Christmas is the big thing.

But Mathewes-Green says that even her friends have wondered about that. At a recent Christmas she got a note from a Jewish friend, Mitch. He said,

"Looking at the Christmas thing as a man raised in a Jewish home, the big celebration of Christianity should be Easter. No Easter, no Christianity. So all the focus on Christmas, at least to me, seems misdirected.

"Why Christians don't whoop it up more at Easter is a mystery to me. How inspirational! How joyful! That is the time to toast each other, lay on gifts, attend worship services, pack in rich food. Something really substantial and holy to remember." ²

Mathewes-Green finds herself agreeing with her friend Mitch. She reports that all the gifts to fill up the toy box meant a lot when she was a child. But eventually all the toys melded into each other, and when she became an adult she put away childish things.

As adults we think about things, notice things, that we didn't notice as children. Our brains actually function differently. They do things they couldn't earlier.

Often I have friends who marvel at the resiliency of children with cancer or other serious diseases. As soon as the pain abates they jump back into life with an enthusiasm, even if the doctor has not announced remission. Some children seem to be resilient even in abuse. My sense is that that is all they have known. They don't have a whole range of experiences to measure theirs as being worse than average.

I remember one young person I had in a youth group, who described to me years of abuse with a smiling face, and interposed the story with good hope for the future. He had no way to measure how bad his experiences had been. Only as he passed through adolescence and began to see the depth of what he had experienced did he begin to fall into depression.

Eventually somewhere in adulthood most of us have experienced the death of a loved one. As life goes on we come face to face with how unfair human existence can really be. As time goes on and our brains ask the unanswerable questions, as we send out challenging questions that echo through the deep emptiness of space, as we have seen the reality of the tragic, what is truly meaningful changes.

As adults we face things that children don't "have to think about."

Mathewes-Green writes, "Easter tells us of something children can't understand, because it addresses things they don't yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness."3

It is precisely to this reality that Easter speaks. Easter follows an execution. Its big event is set in a cemetery with open tombs. The day begins with an earthquake and lightning flashes. Macho guards shake and faint. Angels have to return to the old refrain "Do not be afraid." And then suddenly there is resurrection.

All the fears and realities of human existence are challenged by resurrection. All of our adult presumptions, close-minded assumptions, pessimistic scenarios, dead-certain negativities, are shattered by eternal verities beyond our grasp. Every time we are ready to close the blue book of life sure of failure, a messenger announces success. Every time we are ready to give in to the gathering of clouds and the early onset of night, experience is penetrated by the light of a new day. Every pink slip that announces unemployment, every medical examination that says you have cancer, every hacking cough or faded complexion that seem to announce death, and death, and death again, is now turned over, toppled like a money-changers' table with life, life, life!

And only wide-brained, deep thinking adults can get the full grasp of how that knocks over the narrow vistas of our depressed myopic vision. Easter is for adults. Easter is the message all most too wonderful to believe, too marvelous to comprehend.

It is a soul-stretching experience that every adult needs at least once a year. Maybe weekly.

This is a holiday for adult thinking, mature living. So all you adults here is your holiday.

But for any children present, and any of us still child like at heart, let me say this holiday can be for you. It can be for you because it makes your loved ones happy. And it softens up your parents so they don't think they know it all.

This Sunday can be great because it does include little chicks, and jelly beans, and - yes - chocolate bunnies. But it offers more as well. It says, when you get older there will still be more joy. There's life out there ahead of you. It will be profound! It will stretch your brain! It will be marvelous! And life will finally win out over death. And you will be truly happy.

Amen.

1 - Mathewes-Green, Frederica, "Merry Easter?" Bread and Wine, (Plough Publishing House, Farmington, PA, 2003), pp.266-270.

2 - Ibid., pp.267-268. 3 - Ibid., p.269.