After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.

How big is your Easter?

Last Sunday I shrunk Easter down and spoke of intimacy of Easter as we find it in the common things and places and people of our lives: our jobs, our homes, our worship. And that is essential, because if we don’t find Christ in our personal everyday things I don’t think we ever really find him at all.

But today I want to stretch it out, because I think – at times – that our Easter is too small, we’re glad to hear that Jesus is alive, and we are comforted to know that we will be alive and together with our loved ones, but then we put Easter back on the shelf, something to be dealt with only when death approaches.

Well, that’s so limiting! So today I want to stretch it out, because our concept rarely matches what John’s Revelation gives us: a wide diversity of people who will be gathered together in the world to come, the broad horizons of the ultimate Easter that we will know when God’s Kingdom has fully come.

But how do we get from here to there?

How do we get through the endless waves of short term changes, the births and the deaths, the jobs and the stresses, the lives that we live in good times and in bad?

Well let me spend a minute or two on the story from John’s Gospel, because I think that we can all identify with what Jesus was going through that day in the temple.

Jesus had reached a turning point in his ministry and from here on out things will change quickly. The early popularity had faded, the opposition has grown and when John tells us “It was winter” he is speaking about more than the weather.

We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

We’ve all had periods in our spiritual lives when it was winter, seasons of the soul are part of being human, I am always a little skeptical of those – self included – who try to deny the times, when we’ve got the blues, the times when we try to paste on a make-believe smile and ignore the frost that we are feeling.

In those winters of our souls we grow impatient with God and we to scream at God and say “show me a sign, tell me what to do.” And the voice of Christ comes back to us: “I’ve already told you and you do not believe”.

That’s not what we want to hear, and it wasn’t what they wanted to hear and so they picked up stones to attack him with and he slipped away.

We don’t want to hear that we already know what we should do with our lives, but it’s true isn’t it?

We don’t want to hear about God’s demands, not requests but demands, you know the 10 Commandments not the 10 suggestions, do we?

We don’t want to hear about things like weekly worship - we have important things to do - or daily prayer – who has time for that? - and we sure don’t want to hear that God demands that the first 10% of our income goes to him.

And so we find ways to stone or ignore anyone who dares to remind us of what we already know, but don’t want to hear; anyone who would even imply that so many of our problems – individually, families, Church, nation, world - are the byproducts of our lack of faith.

Oh, we’re good with the idea that other people lack faith and that’s where even more of our problems come from. We will latch onto – or it seems these days, vote for - anyone who will give us a chance to blame the government or the unions or Wall Street or the Muslims or the illegal immigrants or anyone else but the man or woman in the mirror.

But when we get done listening to those who produce the “who to blame” lists, when we turn down the talk show radio volume, when we stop making jokes about who we want God to kill and when we tune out all of the posturing bullies in Trenton and in Washington, when we seek God’s will instead of claiming that we know God’s will then we hear the loving, chilling, accusing words of Christ: “I’ve already told you and you do not believe”. For those of you who were here last week, I hope that you took a moment, somewhere along the line to do some of the personal, familiar and unique things that have defined you, and in those moments, I hope that you found Christ waiting for you.

But if that is the only place that we look then it will be a very narrow version of God that we encounter and John is clear: God’s kingdom is not a very narrow place. We know, we’ve known all of our lives that God’s love is not just for us, haven’t we? How many years ago did you first learn to sing, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world”? We have been told it, but do we believe it? “Red and Yellow, Black and White, they are precious in his sight”.

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages You see, God wants us to stretch our expectations of life beyond ourselves, beyond our nation, beyond our tribe and our people and our language, beyond the beyond the borders of our own experiences.

And that’s where being a part of the Church comes in.

That’s why we drag Tom in here every year to give him our gift of pennies so that he can, for those few minutes, drag us out of here and out of our complacency and out of our self-pitying obsession with how hard our lives are and tell us of the people whom we are helping, the people who are counting on us. You see, where Tom is we are, what Tom does, we do and it is Easter for all of us. That’s why the pennies are important, that why those of you who volunteer to work with SHIP throughout the year are important.

Easter is the resurrection of hope from despair and joy from sorrow, and it doesn’t only happen in Galilee or in Clover Hill it happens on the side streets and alleys of Somerville because we have been willing to go beyond our borders with Tom.

And it happens up at Warwick, it’s been happening this weekend as our YG joins with over a hundred other young people from all over NY and NJ to sing and pray and share their faith. My son Scott, who learned his faith from those of you who taught him in Sunday School and guided him in YG, he takes us there and in a few weeks he and Bob Valinski will drag us away from our busy schedules to work together and the camp grounds will be prepared for the hundreds of children and teens who will experience

Easter at camp this year.

Where Scott is, doing his work, we are as well.

And Easter happens.

And it happens every time Jason Reinhardt gets on a plane and flies to some barren and desolate corner of the world, that God loves just as deeply as he loves Clover Hill, and Jason uses his gifts of engineering and faith to bring new life to people who have been living with a culture of death and we are there. They experience the inexplicable reality of Easter and because they do, we do.

Easter shatters our borders of geography, they are no longer relevant, we have been to Africa, we have been to China, we have been to Warwick, we have been to the homeless of Somerville and we have experienced Easter through Jason and Scott and Tom.

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages

And our borders of time no longer exist either, that’s what today’s baptism is about, that’s what every baptism is about. The future is there in this child, our commitment to his future is our commitment to God’s future.

And I don’t know what any of our futures will look like in detail, I’ve been wrong so many times that I hardly even try anymore.

And I don’t know what all the tools are that we will need to live meaningful and joyous lives in the middle of the stresses and changes all around us, but I do know of the one tool that we will need, the one tool that we all need, the one tool that we can provide here and that is the gift of faith.

Faith that builds itself, each day, with knowledge and with experience, faith that sees in a child the reality of tomorrow, for tomorrow and yesterday and today all belong to God.

There are no boundaries to Easter. Neither geography nor time can limit it or define it, only you can limit your Easter. But you know that already, don’t you? “I’ve already told you and you do not believe”.

Here’s how big Easter is: Easter is the reality of living life abundantly in the midst of our silly lottery fantasies about great and meaningless wealth; it is the comfort that we receive in the midst of our sorrows over great and temporary tragedies.

Easter is the presence of God in our lives and our lives in God’s hands, it is quite literally Heaven on Earth when we experience Easter.

And we share it with each other and we share it with people who are completely different than we are, we don’t get to choose. How big is your Easter?

Well I am usually hesitant to describe heaven, our words and images are just not good enough but there are two things that I am sure of: There will be many, many people in heaven who will surprise me, people whom I can’t imagine belong there, people whom I have some reservations about and there will be many, many, many people in heaven who will be just as surprised, and probably more so, when they see me there!

“I’ve already told you and you do not believe”.

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages