Agents of Life

They arrive together this year, the movable holy feasts of Passover Week and Easter. These are ancient holy days determined by lunar calendars, not the fixed regularity of our secular time-keeping. You may remember learning in Sunday School that Easter is set for “the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox.” The Jewish Passover does not always fall concurrent with Christian Holy Week, as it does this year; as. indeed, it did in the Gospel account of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem the week of his crucifixion and death.

There are years when Easter falls weeks earlier, sometimes in March when the snow is barely melted and winter still feels raw in the air. This later April timing feels more apt for Easter, at least in my mind and spirit. Its religious theme of resurrection and new life seem more apropos with the arrival of Spring and the loosening of the earth and the appearance of crocus and shoots and tulips in the yard.

Andrew Greeley once said that the Easter message of new life in the face of our mortality is a much harder holy day to celebrate in the Southern Hemisphere, where it falls in autumn – on the verge of Winter’s grayness – rather than in Spring. In medieval Europe when the Gregorian ecclesiastical calendar was set, the timing of Easter specifically as a spring festival was an intentional counter to the pagan festival of the goddess of planting.

In its wisdom the church timed Easter for the cusp of Spring, at the end of a long winter’s worth of grayness and cold. This holy day is forever linked to that part of the human soul that yearns for rebirth and renewal and redeeming. But Easter is not Spring, and the seasonal metaphor, while powerful, is limited and inadequate to describe an Easter theology.

Despite the proclamation of the already convinced, Easter if finally not about theological disputes over what happened to the body of Jesus after his death. Easter is about what happened to those who loved his teachings, what happened to their spirit, to their vision, to their faith and hope and love after his death. Easter is about their refusal to allow what they loved in him, and what he loved in them, to die.

In his book, Life Lines, Forest Church puts it that :

“Easter is a story of love and death. Jesus’s disciples expected him to live and save them. He died and saved them, which is all the more powerful, however you choose to interpret it. Even after death, Jesus lived on in his disciples’ hearts. Everything that mattered about him was theirs now. The way he cast out fear with faith. His love of God and neighbor. His disdain for pretense and cant. His courage and his passion. Each was more present than ever before because Jesus now lived within them, not simply among them.”

Easter is a theological invitation to shift our vision. It is a story about that part of the human spirit that does not end with our death. It is an ancient sacred story recounting how faith was reclaimed in the face of death, in the midst of despair, in the aftermath of defeat and disaster. Easter is a declaration that “when we ourselves die the love we have given to others is the one thing death can’t kill.”

It was in an unlikely place, in the Book of Deuteronomy, written many centuries before the first Easter morning, that the challenge of this holy day was first laid down. The speaker is Moses, but the words are Yahweh’s — “I declare to you this day that you shall perish…. you shall not live long on the earth….. I call heaven and earth to witness that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.”

“You shall not live long upon this earth….” This terrible knowledge – that we are each of us living and dying every minute of our existence – is the burden of being sentient human beings. Tennessee Williams wrote that “this is great magic trick of existence, to snatch the eternal out of the desperately fleeting.”

The poet Elizabeth Spires has a heartbreakingly haunting poem, “Easter Sunday, 1955,” in which she looks at an old photograph. She writes,

…. No one has died yet.

No vows have been broken. No words spoken

that can never be taken back, never forgotten.

I have a basket of eggs my mother and I dyed yesterday.

I ask my grandmother to choose one, just one,

and she takes me up – O hold me close! -

her cancer not yet diagnosed, I bury my face

in soft flesh, the soft folds of her Easter dress,

breathing her in, wanting to stay forever where I am.

“But we can’t stay forever where we are. We don’t even know where we are, until after we’ve been there, until we look back to see what happened ten, twenty, thirty Easters later,” writes Forrest Church.

…. Now my daughter steps

into the light, her basket of eggs bright,

so bright.

One, choose one, I hear her say, her face upturned to mine, innocent of outcome, beautiful child,

how thoughtlessly we enter the world!

How free we are, how bound, put here in love’s name -death’s too – to be happy if we can.

(Quoted in Life Lines, by Forrest Church. Beacon Press. Boston. 1996. p.50-51.)

Only love remains, Forrest Church reminds us, only the love we give away.

Easter is the church’s reissuance of that great Old Testament invitation to choose life. On the most hopeless of days, when your dreams lie shattered and broken, here is the invitation: choose life.

When it seems that all is lost, when that for which you’ve worked and planned seems crushed, when despair beckons and when hurt is overwhelming, still comes that ancient invitation: choose life.

When cynicism threatens to harden the arteries and close us off to love and caring and connection and community, this is our great saving graceful privilege as human beings: we can choose life. We are the creatures who can choose life.

I like the way Bruce Southworth at Community Church in New York has said it. “To be human,” he writes, “is to be an agent of Beauty, of Grace, and New Life. That’s all. That simple, that difficult.”

To be human is to be an agent of life. We are called, you and I, to resurrect each other from the hurts and defeats of life, from the tendencies to withdrawal and surrender and isolation. You are an agent of life every time you reaffirm the worth and dignity of another person.

You are an agent of life whenever you take the time to listen to another person’s pain or bind another person’s wounds, or assist in another person’s time of crisis. You are an agent of life every time you offer safety to the endangered or the frightened one, food to the hungry one, shelter to the homeless one, protection to the lost or the abused.

You are an agent of life whenever you empower the powerless, whenever you speak for the voiceless, whenever you defend the oppressed. When you help another to be brave, to take a risk for growth, to be more than they thought they could ever be, you are an agent of life.

That is what we are here to do and to be for one another, I truly believe it. That how the world advances, hand-in-hand and through our mutual covenant to push and to pull one another over the hard places, the desert places, the dying places which we could never negotiate alone. This is the great saving covenant that prevents us all from dying before our time. We choose life. And more: We become agents of life. And of Grace. We find reasons to say Amen and Alleluia every day. And every time we do that, we resurrect life in each other, in every person to whom our life is joined.

If you are alive and struggling like most people, you do not need to be told that this world is full of brokenness. Our calling as agents of life is to redeem this broken world, to transform it and breathe life into it, breathe love into it, breathe hope and trust and faith and justice into it, every day. To resurrect it in the name of the God of Life.

That remains our work for this Easter morning, as it has been since first we walked upon the earth. To take our place as Agents of Life still capable of transformation by surprise and by intention.