Easter: a time to laugh
Christ Church, Easter Day 2001
An
Illinois man left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida.
His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day.
When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail.
Unable
to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her e-mail address, he did
his best to type it in from memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his
note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife whose husband had
passed away only the day before.
When
the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let
out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint. At the sound, her
family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:
DEAREST
WIFE: JUST GOT CHECKED IN. EVERYTHING PREPARED FOR YOUR ARRIVAL TOMORROW.
P.S.
SURE IS HOT DOWN HERE
If there is one thing I would like
you to do this morning it is this: have a really good laugh. Laugh until you cry. Because this morning is a time to
laugh. In German speaking countries for
centuries preachers at the Easter services used to make their congregations
laugh. Do you know, in the sixteenth
century there was even a book published telling preachers how to get the best
laugh out of their people. It even got
a bit smutty, with sexual innuendo, obscene pantomimes and doubled entendres. For example…darn it, someone has spilt
coffee over my script. Anyway, they
would go through the story and Mary would haggle with the mean shopkeeper over
the ointments, while his wife engaged in a suggestive conversation with a
servant. Then the apostles have a race
to the tomb and have all kinds of accidents, the soldiers get beaten because no
one will accept blame for the catastrophe.
And in the Greek Orthodox
tradition, the day after Easter was devoted to telling jokes. . . .They felt
they were imitating the cosmic joke that God pulled on Satan in the
Resurrection. Satan thought he had won, and was smug in his victory, smiling to
himself, having the last word. So he thought. Then God raised Jesus from the
dead, and life and salvation became the last words. There was a phrase for all this:
Easter laughter. Laughter at death,
laughter because the cross has been faced and dealt with and life will never be
the same again.
A vicar, wanting to earn some money, decided to hire herself out as a
handyman-type and started canvassing a wealthy neighborhood. She went to the
front door of the first house and asked the owner if he had any jobs for her to
do. "Well, you can paint my porch. How much will you charge?"
The vicar said "How about 50 pounds?" The man agreed and told her
that the paint and ladders that she might need were in the garage. The man's
wife, inside the house, heard the conversation and said to her husband,
"Does she realize that the porch goes all the way around the house?"
The man replied, "She should. She was standing on the porch." A short
time later, the vicar came to the door to collect her money. "You're
finished already?" he asked. "Yes," the vicar answered,
"and I had paint left over, so I gave it two coats. "Impressed, the
man reached in his pocket for the £50. "And by the way," the vicar
added, "that's not a Porch, it's a Ferrari.”
Now some of you might have been
mistaken. You might have mistaken a
porch for a Ferrari. Or you might even
have mistaken Easter day as a solemn occasion.
But I would like you to laugh because this is the most ridiculous and
absurd belief you could possibly have.
And I would like you to laugh because this is the most wonderful,
awe-inspiring belief you could have.
Our problem is that we come to it
like the last chapter of a book we have already read. It does not surprise us any more. Or we come to it like our 72nd birthday. You know, when we are young we get loads of
cards and birthdays are the most fantastic experience. But by the time you get to 72, well maybe you
get an extra spoon of sugar in your tea and a pair of socks, but that's it.
But hang on a minute, Easter is ridiculous
isn't it? It is an intellectual
scandal. It conflicts so radically with
so many well established scientific laws that any attempt to revise them in
such a way as to allow for resurrection would mean you’d have to get rid of
them and start again. You can't fit
Easter into the way the world is. I
thought we'd try a little exercise out to see if we could get a sense of this. I'm going to imagine that there is someone
called Mr X. who is sitting in the middle pew, and who has never been in here
before or heard anything about Easter.
Are you ready?
Mr X. Welcome. You are
surrounded by people who believe that 2000 years ago a man who had been dead
for 2 1/2 days was raised again by God and started walking around, talking to
people and eating fish.
Okay Mr X. you are not so
impressed. How about this? You are surrounded by people who believe
that he is here now.
Mr X., this will really get you
going. We are going to live for
ever!
Did you begin to feel a little bit
strange? Good! Maybe you were like the preacher whose
congregation was being targeted by energetic missionaries. He listened for a while and then said to
them: "Gentlemen, look. I have a
proposal that will settle this. I have
here a glass of poison. If you will
drink this poison and remain alive, I will join your church-and not only
myself, but my entire congregation. But
if you won’t drink the poison, well, then, I can only conclude that you are
false ministers of the gospel because you do not trust that your lord would not
let you perish." This put the
missionaries in a bind so they went off to a corner to put their heads
together, and they said, "what on earth are we going to do?" Finally, after a while, they decided. They came back and approached the minister
and said, "Tell you what. We've
got a plan. You drink the poison, and
we’ll raise you from the dead!"
People have tried to cope with the
fact that someone was raised from the dead in two ways. Firstly they have tried to say that it is a
myth which has a spiritual meaning.
People may have believed its back then, but in these days of computers
and electric light we will only come to terms with the resurrection by making
it into a story. But do they think that
back then people found it easy to believe?
They were just as much as in shock as anyone would be today. When they found the tomb empty they didn't
say, "Oh, well that must mean he's been resurrected then." For them it was a further tragedy which they
couldn't get to grips with. And a
disruption to their view of the way the world functioned. More importantly, if the resurrection is
only a spiritual event, then why bother with an empty tomb? And, for that matter, why construct a myth
out of something that didn't happen anyway?
The
other way we try to cope with it is by making it sound as reasonable as
possible. There is plenty of evidence
to suggest that it is possible, and I would be the first to present it to you. But if by constructing a legal style case to
back up the resurrection we think we will be able to make it a reasonable
event, we need to think again. It can
certainly be likely, but never reasonable.
So laugh, laugh because if you ever thought that Easter was predictable or what you would most expect from God then you have missed the ludicrous nature of our celebration.
But
laugh even more because this is the most wonderful morning. Sure, we are people of the cross and we know
about the pain that death brings. But
death has been destroyed in a most fantastic way. You know, people today are hungry for an end to death. They want to hear what God promises. Easter doesn't sell them short. Did you know that we can say so much more
than a vague “Everything will be all right in the end?” We can't describe it in detail. But what we can say is this: we will
continue, we will have bodies like Jesus’s body-that's why he is called the
first fruits before the rest of us. We
will live in a restored creation where heaven and earth are one. And whereas now death is the inescapable
fact of our existence and the principle which drives so much of the way this
earth functions, in the world and existence to come, life will be the governing
principle. A river of life which flows
through a creation where there is no suffering, and where the lion and the lamb
lie down together. Easter tells us that this world has a future, that who we
are has a more real future. I think in
the light of all of this good news it's time for an Easter joke, don't you?
A man was blissfully driving along the
highway when he saw the Easter Bunny hopping across the middle of the road. He
swerved to avoid hitting the bunny, but unfortunately the rabbit jumped in
front of his car and was hit. The basket of eggs went flying all over the
place. Chocolate, too. The driver, being a sensitive man - as well as an animal
lover, pulled over to the side of the road and got out to see what had become
of the bunny carrying the basket. Much to his dismay, the colourful bunny was
dead. The driver felt guilty and began to cry. A woman driving down the same
highway saw the man crying on the side of the road and pulled over. She stepped
out of her car and asked the man what was wrong. "I feel terrible,"
he explained. "I accidentally hit the Easter Bunny and killed him. There
may not be an Easter because of me. What should I do?" The woman told the
man not to worry. She knew exactly what to do. She went to her car booth and
pulled out a spray can. She walked over to the limp, dead bunny and sprayed the
entire contents of the can onto the little furry animal. Miraculously the
Easter Bunny came back to life, jumped up, picked up the spilled eggs and
chocolate, waved its paw at the two humans and hopped on down the road. Fifty
yards away the Easter Bunny stopped, turned around, waved, and hopped on down
the road another fifty yards, turned around, waved, hopped another fifty yards,
turned around, and waved again!!! The man was astonished. He said to the woman,
"What in heaven's name is in your spray can?" The woman turned the
can around so that the man could read the label. It said, "Hair Spray:
Restores life to dead hair. Adds permanent wave."
I
said laugh, not groan! This final story
sums up for me the ridiculous wonder of Easter. It faces the cross but then laughs at death. In 1977 Archbishop Janani
Luwum was murdered in Uganda on the orders of Idi Amin. Unlike Pilate, Amin refused to release his
body for burial and banned any funeral gathering. In the grounds of the cathedral, however, the grave had already
been dug, and thousands of people gathered there. Margaret Ford describes the unforgettable moment that followed:
Our eyes fell on the empty grave, a
gaping hole in the earth. The words of
the angel to the two women seeking Jesus’s body flashed into our minds. "Why do you seek the living among the
dead?" Namirembe Hill resounded
with the song that the saved ones have taken as their own:
Glory glory, hallelujah,
Glory glory to the Lamb!
Oh the cleansing blood has reached
me.
Glory glory to the Lamb.
At
the beginning of our service we said “Christ is risen, He is risen indeed” Hallelujah!” We are going to say it again, but this time with the echo of a
laugh And just to help you I am going to need to consult my preacher’s book on
laughter.
Get
into pulpit. Put on wig and nose.
Christ
is risen! He is risen indeed. Hallelujah!