If you were here or in another church last Sunday, you know the power of Easter worship, which is a response to the spiritual power of Easter. As I said a week ago, the truth of Easter is not something we explain, or analyze. It is something we experience and proclaim. The Easter story is told in the concluding chapters of all four Gospels and in several of Paul's letters and other letters in the New Testament. Our first reading this morning is one of the Easter stories in the fourth Gospel, the Gospel according to John.
In the story, which takes place on the evening of the first Easter Sunday, "the disciples," most probably including more than the eleven previously named followers of Jesus, were in a room, trying to figure out what had happened. Mary Magdalene had told them she "had seen the Lord," whom she had expected to be in the tomb where his body had been placed. But he wasn't there, and he spoke with her in the garden outside the tomb. In John's story, the disciples were digesting what Mary Magdalene had reported, when Jesus himself became present in the room. He greeted them by saying, "Peace be with you." Then he identified himself to them and repeated the greeting "Peace be with you." He commissioned them for service as he had been commissioned from service by God his parent. Then he breathed on them, saying, "Receive the Holy Spirit."
When the scene was repeated a week later with a previously absent disciple present, Jesus added the words "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen me and have come to believe [or have come to faith]." During the centuries that have passed since the event John describes, millions of people have come "to faith," to a stance of "believing." They have come by different routes, and the nature of their faith is multi-faceted. But they have come to faith, and I believe their faith has been the work of the Holy Spirit whom Jesus breathed on the disciples that Easter evening. John's Gospel telescopes Easter and Pentecost in a single happening, unlike Luke, who writes of them as separate events. It doesn't really matter. After the resurrection of Jesus, a new manifestation of God's awesome Spirit became a powerful reality in people's lives and in the world.
This morning I want to emphasize the fact that the Spirit Jesus breathed on those disciples two thousand years ago is dynamically active in our world today. The power of Easter has never left the Church or the world. People have tried to tame it, suppress it, deride it, and manipulate it, but God's vital power has been, and still is, alive and well, untamable and irrepressible. I could tell you about people who have acknowledged the power of God in their lives, but you know the stories of such men and women as Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Jr. Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Chris Glaser, Janie Spahr and others.
On one of my visits to France, I spent some time in the small city of Nîmes, which his near Avignon in Provence. I went to Nîmes because I had heard that the French Protestant Church was strong there. I discovered in the Protestant library of Nîmes, that a man, whose name I have forgotten, came to the conclusion during the Second World War that his Christian faith constrained him to resist the Nazi exportation of French Jews to the prison camps in Poland. He did what he could to help Jews escape and to resist the authority of the collaborating Vichy government.
The man himself was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. One of the few survivors of that death camp, he returned to Nîmes after the war and wrote about the connection between his faith and his conduct as a resister. The power of the risen Christ was active in his life, the power of the Spirit the risen Christ breathed into the world of his followers. The power of that Spirit continues to motivate people of faith to speak and act in the causes of peace and justice. People in this congregation can testify to that, and I salute their dedication.
There is another aspect of Easter power that a colleague brought to my attention a month or two ago. She is working in a hospice ministry, and she gave me a book entitled Final Gifts, understanding the special awareness, needs, and communications of the dying. It is written by two hospice nurses, Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, both of whom have cared for dying patients and their families for several years. Here is an excerpt from their book.
A sharp young man with a well-developed sense of humor, Steve was the youngest in a large, fun-loving Boston family. Until he started his professional career, each summer was spent at the family's beach house on Cape Cod. There he became fast friends with Ralph, his next-door neighbor, whose family came each summer from Ohio. Both were avid swimmers; Steve's mother called them "the Devilish Duo," as their summers were full of activity and pranks.
Both boys graduated from college and established themselves in good careers, but sadly that was the end of their care-free summers together. They rarely got to see each other, and apart from Christmas cards, didn't correspond.
A tragic automobile accident left Steve paralyzed from the neck down at the age of twenty-seven. After he had spent many months in the hospital, then more in a rehabilitation facility, his family decided to try to care for him at home, but within two months became exhausted by this twenty-four-hour needs. With heavy hearts and a terrible sense of failure, they placed him in a nursing home.
Through all of this, Steve hadn't lost his sense of humor. Despite being unable to do anything for himself, he threatened to run away if the nurses didn't spoil him.
"But it was easy to spoil Steve," one nurse told his mother. "He liked to be in his wheelchair in the hall so he could be in the middle of everything. He was such a nut—he kept us all laughing! When one of the patients was upset or depressed, we'd push Steve in to visit, and he was so good with the new patients we called him 'the welcome wagon man'!"
Unfortunately, as is common with quadriplegics like Steve, pneumonia developed, which didn't respond to treatment. Steve died. His family was devastated and a wave of grief rippled through the nursing home.
Weeks later a letter arrived with an Ohio postmark. The correspondent identified herself as Ralph's widow. She was writing to say that Ralph had died of cancer. Ralph hadn't known of Steve's paralysis or death. However, in the last few weeks before he died, Ralph began to have visions. Initially his wife dismissed it as confusion. Just before he died—and just after Steve had died—Ralph sat up.
"Oh, look!" he said excitedly. "Here comes Steve!" He's coming to take me swimming."
Steve's family took great comfort in that letter and the thought that somewhere Steve was whole again, doing what he loved.
"The 'Devilish Duo' are up to their old pranks again!" Steve's mother said. And Ralph's widow took comfort in knowing that her husband's boyhood friend had truly come for him; he hadn't died alone.
It's easy to dismiss such stories. But people who work with the dying know that such stories are not uncommon. They do not lend themselves to rational explanation. They point to realities available to faith and intuition.
As Easter people, we use all the faculties God has given us: our rational and analytical powers, our intuitive powers that are comfortable with mystery, and our capacity for faith in a higher power. We are not ashamed to proclaim that Christ is risen, and to say that we have experienced the power of God that raised Jesus from death to life.
There are people in this sanctuary this morning who can tell you that God has raised them to a new kind of life. What they have experienced is something like a resurrection. Whereas once they were living in the darkness of fear, addiction, stubborn willfulness, arrogance or grief; now they experience a kind of joy they never thought possible. Not an unrealistic, irresponsible frivolity; but a deep satisfaction that wells up inside them and gives them a sense of being centered, at peace, in the midst of life's realities.
We are Easter people. We live realistically in the here and now. We are clear-eyed about life, its joys and sorrows, its pleasures and its pain, its challenges and opportunities for service. We do not think about leaving this world for the next. We live as fully as we can. We care about the poor and the powerless, about economic injustice, about governmental misconduct, about the equality of rights—including the right to marry. But we believe there is more than the here-and-now, and we believe that it is good.
Earlier in the service our choir gave us an eloquent reminder that "The heavens are telling the glory of God." To their witness, I add mine: The power of God's love is alive and at work in the world. It is the same power that raised Jesus from death to life. I know that God's power can bring hope where there has been despair, healing where there has been pain, and joy where there has been sadness.
The power of Easter goes on and on. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.