Easter     

Is. 25:6-9; Ps 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Cor 15:1-11; Mk 16:1-8

Easter sermons usually involve the phrase the pascal mystery, and rightly so. However, it’s not always clear what that phrase means. Let’s start by saying what it is NOT. It is not the same as the passcode mystery. Computer experts tell us that we should never write down our passcode because someone might see that piece of paper and have access to our files. And they also tell us that we should have a different passcode for each web site. So I am supposed to memorize 15 or 20 different passcodes? That’s the passcode mystery and it has nothing to do with Easter.

Also, there is the Pascal mystery — meaning Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time — the father of probability and statistics, which in turn are the basis for chaos theory and game theory. Pascal also dabbled in philosophy and theology, and his most famous contribution in those areas was Pascal’s Wager. He said: If you are uncertain about the existence of God and an afterlife, you may gamble that God does exist or that God does not exist. If you gamble that God does exist, and you die, and there is no God and no afterlife, you will never know that you lost the gamble. If you gamble that God does not exist and lead a licentious life, and then you die, and then you wake up to find that God does exist and is not happy with you, you will certainly know that you have lost the gamble. I spoke of Pascal’s mystery because it is a mystery to me why anyone would organize his life on the basis of an abstract philosophical question. Christianity is not about abstractions It’s about the relationships between humans and God, and humans and each other.

The word pascal is simply an English form of a Hebrew word; and that Hebrew word is also translated as Passover. We heard a lot about Passover at our Seder meal on Thursday. Passover is a familiar word — perhaps too familiar. One problem with religious vocabulary is that we hear the words so often that we often pay them little attention. They become like very smooth stones that slip right through our fingers. Sometimes it helps to replace a too familiar word with a synonym. Instead of pascal or Passover, let’s try the word transition.

We all have transitions in our lives, some small, some very big. For example, last month I was driving on Connecticut Ave. and stopped at a red light. The car in front of me had a bumper sticker clearly visible on the back. It said: “I am the proud father of triplets. I nap at red lights.” Imagine Daddy’s big transition when the triplets learn to sleep through the night!

Here’s another example. I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, and I was used to the language of Catholics versus non-Catholics. In 1968 I started hanging out with the Community of Christ. There I discovered to my amazement that I was a non-Lutheran. That was the beginning of an enormous transition for me.

On this Easter day we celebrate the biggest transition imaginable. It all started when God, for reasons unknown, decided to create. “And God saw that it was good.:” [Gen. 1:25] But not for long. Human beings, who were supposed to be the acme of creation, as often as not, turned out to be stubborn sinners. So God decided to tweak the system. God sent a flood … but that didn’t work. Then God thought: I’ll pick a single tribe and whip them into shape. So God picked Abraham and his descendents and gave them commandments about how to live, but then God discovered that almost nobody can keep the 613 commandments that are in the Torah. Next, God sent prophets who by word and by symbolic action told the chosen people what was what and what they should be doing. That worked, but only for a while.

Then God said: I will go to earth myself. But there was a problem. Moses had been told that no one could see God and live. So God said: I will go to earth inside of a man, whose name will be Jesus. And Jesus will demonstrate perfectly how a human being should live, how living means loving, means healing, means seeking justice for all, even at the cost of one’s live. And so it was. And God saw that it was good, even though the cross looked like a failure.

Now according to the Lutheran theologian Krister Stendahl, when St. Paul looked back at Abraham and at Jesus, he saw two things especially. First, Abraham and his wife Sarah were very very old; and in terms of procreation their bodies were dead. But God raised their bodies from the dead, and they became the parents of Isaac. And this foreshadowed God’s raising Jesus from the dead.

Secondly, in the book of Genesis we read that when God promised Abraham that he and his wife would have a child, “Abraham put his faith in Yahweh and this was reckoned to him as uprightness.” [Gen 15:6] Another translation says that “…this was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Uprightness and righteousness – these as just two ways of translating the Greek word dikaiosyne. That word can also be translated as setting things to right, or things being set right. Because Abraham had faith in God, his relationship with God was set right, set straight. And the same is true for each of us. As Bob Pohlman reminded us last Sunday, we are all damaged goods; but if we have faith, and live that faith, then we are straight with God.

That’s looking at the individual’s relation to God. Paul was actually much more interested in a global perspective. What’s happening to the human race? Is it always going to be mired in sin? Is it always going to be the one part of creation that is a failure? Paul says NO. Paul says that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God is setting things to right for the human race. That’s hard for us to see because our lives are so short – like sparks in the night. God’s transition takes centuries, takes millennia. Like Abraham, we need faith that’s its happening.

So the Pascal Mystery is – to use a phrase from the gospel of John – God so loved the world - there’s the ultimate mystery - God so loved the world that God became Emmanuel – God with us in the person of Jesus, whose resurrection tells us: LIFE WILL TRIUMPH. And so we say Alleluia and Amen.

Dunstan Hayden

April 12, 2009