The Resurrection of Our Lord
Sermon by The Rev Timothy A Leitzke
This journey
started with ashes: palm leaves, plucked green, waved joyously at Palm Sunday,
April 9, 2006, then dried, yellowed, browned, burned, ground into powder, mixed
with some olive oil in a black oily death, staring us in the face—stuck to our
faces. Death obliterates Life. Death touches all of us at least once, usually a
lot more often. It touched this community all too closely just 19 days ago.
It’s so close to us that it is said that the only two things in life that are
guaranteed are death and taxes. Taxes come next weekend—and, by the way, Jesus
doesn’t offer any escape from those—but today God deals with Death.
Death was
not part of the plan, according to the story of the Garden of Eden. Death snuck
in with Sin, and as long as this sinful, broken universe plods on, Death will
be a part of it. If our only hope is hope in this life, we are the most
pitiable of all people. Death obliterates this life. “Obliterate: 1) to make undecipherable or imperceptible by obscuring
or wearing away. 2) a: to remove
utterly from recognition or memory b:
to destroy utterly all trace, indication, or significance of c: to cause to disappear.”[1]
That is what Death does to us. Our hope is that Death isn’t the last word in
our story, and that our journey does not end in ashes.
Ashes would
be Jesus’ fate. No, not after only three days or, rather, parts of three
days—he would still look mostly like
he did before, but ashes awaited. Jesus’ body—Jesus—was as dead as a pile of ashes. God took that pile of ashes,
and made an immortal life out of it. How did God do it? How does one pass from
Death into Life? It is the mystery at the heart of our faith: Christ has died,
Christ is risen, Christ will come again. In the words of the medieval Easter
hymn, “Death and life have contended in that combat stupendous; the prince of
life, who died, reigns immortal.”[2] In
the words of
Our lives
are the battlefields in which the Reign of Death and the Reign of God fight for
supremacy; today, we celebrate God’s guaranteed victory over Death. Be wary of
projecting this reality away from ourselves. God and Death cannot be assigned
literally, God to one real life political entity, Death to another. Nor can we
say that there is an angel sitting on one shoulder and a devil on the other.
Death & God are two dueling aspects of human nature. We are capable of
great evil, and in us God is capable of inestimable good.
It’s the way
that things are right now. It is salvation already/not yet. We are already free
from Sin; we are not yet free from Sin. We are already raised from death daily
through Baptism; we are not yet raised from the dead at the Last Day. We live
in this broken universe, and Death is still a part of it, but all the while God,
in the risen Christ, is destroying all of God’s enemies, and the last of those
enemies is Death.
Friends of
Christ, Death will be obliterated. It looks pretty strong right now with its
100% efficiency rate, but it is going down. It will dry out, fade, be burned
and ground into powder. It will be annihilated—made into nothing, blotted out
like ink, deleted like a typo in a word processor, wiped off the face of the
earth…wiped off the face of the universe. It will blow away like dust. It will
wash off like the ashes from our foreheads. Our journey started with ashes. It ends when God takes us from ashes to
immortality, out of Death and into Life. The Life into which God brings us is
Life without Death. Hope in our current life is pitiable because Death will
obliterate it; hope in the new life into which Christ leads us is hope that
endures, because Christ obliterates Death.
The same
weak human who was handed over to Death now Reigns immortal until he defeats
all of God’s enemies and hands over his Reign to God, and then, Friends of
Christ, comes the fulfillment of our hope, our hope that despite the fact that
everything about us is lost to history, that we and everyone we cared about
have been gone for untold eons and no one is left to remember us, God
remembers. God remembers us because we belong to Christ who lives and reigns
immortal as King of the universe, and when he has defeated Death and he hands
over the Kingdom to his Father, we will be with him, raised to eternal life,
where the only thing forgotten will be Death. Today is the dress rehearsal for
Death’s funeral, the day that we fully realize what it means to say that our
journey started with ashes, but ends
with us resurrected, out of death and into life. Amen