Christ is risen!

Christ is risen indeed!

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen indeed!

Yeah, that’s the stuff.

It feels good, doesn't it?

Good to laugh at death.

Good to stick it to Caesar.

Good to remember that love and life get the last word.

It feels good to be on the winning side for a change - thank you Jesus - because the truth is, it’s been awhile.

As mainline protestants, as progressive Christians, as followers of Jesus who care deeply about protecting the earth and welcoming the stranger,

promoting peace and loving our neighbors,

caring for the sick and standing up for the marginalized,

to say nothing of our belief in freedom, democracy, the rule of law, basic civility… (you all know I could go on and on)

… for people like us the truth is that it has been a rough season.

We have sustained loss after loss.

We have taken blow after blow.

There have been small victories along the way and beautiful acts of resistance. But for all our efforts… we are not winning right now. We simply don’t have the power. We are not in control.

And, worst of all, because of this, we are living with the fact that damage is being done, day in and day out, irreparable damage to our planet and our people, people we care about and people all over the world whom God cares about even more. So much damage…and it is breaking our hearts.

Way to bring it down, huh? Yeah, I know, that’s not what you came for. But bear with me because as hard as this season has been, I truly believe that it is right here, in this place where our hearts are broken, that we will find the door that leads to Easter.

Not the Easter we have come to expect full of joyful pomp and circumstance - as wonderful as all of this is - but the quiet promise of that first Easter that is alive and well and still speaking a truth the world needs to hear.

It is a truth I am still wrestling with and trying to understand; the truth that Easter - at least according to Steve Garnaas Holmes, “is not a story of victory, but of resurrection.” Just let that sit for a moment.

“Easter is not a story of victory but of resurrection.”

As I said, I’m indebted to Steve for this idea and you can find it in his beautiful poem, “the Story,” toward the end of your bulletin. But for now, I invite you to let go of your conventional understanding of Easter for just a moment.

Let go of the idea that Easter is simply the story of Jesus winning in the end, the story of Jesus beating death, the story of Jesus triumphing over the empire and consider for a moment if perhaps the point of Easter might actually be that Jesus lost… that Jesus died.

After all you can’t have a resurrection without death…and he wouldn’t have died if he had won.

So I’ve been thinking: what if the point of the Easter story is actually that Jesus lost… lost to an unjust system: a system rigged to ensure that someone must lose in order for others to win, someone must pay in order for others to gain, someone must die in order for others to live?

What if Jesus - a gentle innocent who had done nothing wrong - allowed himself to be crushed by that system in order to expose just how inhumane and futile, morally bankrupt and unnecessary, that way of living - the way we still live - really is?

I know this might not make sense to you at first. It certainly didn’t make sense to his disciples. They had their hearts set on victory. They thought the point of Jesus marching to Jerusalem was straight up regime change.

They expected Jesus to slip in all incognito and then decapitate the beast, crush those at the top of the system, take up his power, and reign over the world better than any Herod or Caesar ever had. But at the end of the day, they still wanted him to reign. Taking over the world and making Israel great again was the point, and they wanted to be at his side when he did.

So when Jesus failed to fight back, when Jesus failed to take control, when Jesus failed to over power the bad guys and win, his disciples scattered. They didn’t understand what Jesus was doing back then and, in all fairness to them, the truth is that to this day very few Christians do.

But you know who did understand? The women…the women in Mathew’s gospel.

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary have been following Jesus all this time, right alongside their male counterparts. But unlike them, these two Marys have really been paying attention.

They understand that Jesus is playing to lose, which is why they stick with him even after he is arrested.  They understand he is willing to suffer, which is why they are there at a distance when he is crucified. They understand that he is even willing to die, which is why they are there when Joseph of Arimathea lays him in the tomb.

And yet they still trust, his death notwithstanding, that Jesus knows what he is doing, which is why they are still there three days later. Still there, not with spices to anoint a dead body as they are in the other gospels, but there to “see the tomb,” see where all this might lead, see how God might transform even death and defeat into something new.

Let me be clear: they are not there because this is going well. It is very obviously not. They are not there because they secretly think he is winning. He has most certainly lost. To quote Steve Garnaas Holmes, “There is no triumph (here) only tragedy and sorrow.” Jesus’ story has ended badly, just as he said it would.

No, they are there, still there, simply because they are still faithful to Jesus: faithful to his call to love even in the face of hate, faithful to his way of being in the world even if it leads to death…which in some shape or form it aways does.

But, if we hang in there with him we will find that losing doesn’t mean you give up. If we stay with him, the way the women did, we will find that losing is no reason to go home.

In fact, it is in staying put when all is lost,

loving when you have no reason to love,

forgiving when you have no reason to forgive,

living when you have no reason to go on,

finding joy when you have no reason to be happy,

and holding out hope when there is nothing else left to hold on to,

that you come to experience the power and paradox of resurrection.

Friends, Easter is not a story of victory. Not in any conventional sense. Easter is not about winning or conquering or taking back control. If it were, Jesus would have come back with a host of angels, defeated Rome, and deposed Caesar. But he didn’t.

He didn’t come back to rule over the system.

He came back to set us free from it.

He came back to call us out of it.

To show us that there is another way to live and love in this world that is good news for all people.

And we could use some good news right now. We need some good news right now.

Friends, I know it feels like we are losing …because we are. But Jesus shows us that there is no shame in losing in the context of an unjust system that requires us to harm others in order to win. That’s not a failure. That’s actually resistance.

To win at this zero sum game we find ourselves in would require playing by its rules. It would look like nothing more than tearing down our enemies in order to replace their way of doing things with our way of doing things. But hear me when I say that this would require us to deny, abandon, and betray Jesus. Thankfully this is not our only option. Through this story, Jesus shows us that there is another way.

Jesus shows us that our job is not to defeat our enemies, but to bless those who persecute us until they no longer want to be our enemies at all. Our job is not to take over but to keep modeling a world where we pour out our power for the sake of others. Our job is to love one another the way Jesus loved: loved those who crucified him, loved his disciples as brothers even though they abandoned him, loved the women on the margins who stuck by him. Our job is to just keep loving no matter the cost.

And there will be a cost.

Death, suffering, risk, pain, loss, humiliation…it’s all part of the long game…but as disciples of Jesus we know this is not a game we are playing to win. No, it’s the game we show up for but refuse to play.

Instead, we show up so we can call people out of the system by showing them there is a better way. We meet their violent force with soul force - as MLK used to say - refusing to hate them even if they hate us. Rather than show up locked and loaded we come to the fray empty handed, with a vulnerability that invites our enemies to see our humanity in the hopes that it will help them get back in touch with their own.

Our job is not to beat them into submission any more than the spring beats down the winter. No, in this season of resurrection, winter is not destroyed by spring, but slowly and gently wooed to release her death grip on the world so life can flourish again.

We are here to woo each other back to a life of love. Which I fully realize sounds about as woo woo as can be in times as dire as these. But the truth is we can’t force our love on others anymore than we can force them to love us back.

All we can do is love them first, the way Jesus did. Stay present, the way the women did. Hold the line and keep showing up to see if something better might just break forth and be born anew. All we can do is to refuse to give up on them the way Jesus refused to give up his disciples. Refuse to give up on them the way God, even now, refuses to give up on us all.

“Don’t be afraid,” Jesus says, “but go and tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee.”

In the story of Easter, Jesus invites us all back to the place where his ministry began and commissions us to go out and share the good news that we don’t have to live the way we have been living any longer. We can turn. We can change.

Jesus invites us to come and play a new game, a game where we build a different kind of world that plays by better rules. A world where we serve one another, care for one another, and refuse to compete with one another.

No winners.

No losers.

Just friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters.

Because Easter, ultimately, is not a story of victory.

Easter is a story of resurrection, a brand new story we can live in to being, the story of a new and better life for all. Amen