Easter Sermon, April 16, 2006


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Easter
April 16, 2006
Rev. Andrew Walmisley

Is that all there is,
Is that all there is,
If that's all there is, my friend,
Then let's keep dancing.
Let's break out the booze
And have a ball...
If that's all there is.
– Peggy Lee

Peggy Lee’s song, which I remember from my childhood in the sixties, is a bitter comment on the emptiness of life. When she was a little girl, she sings, she watched her house burn down and “the whole world went up in flames” and she thought, “Is that all there is to a fire?” When she was ten her father took her to the circus and the poor desperate child can only say, “Is that all there is to the circus?” Later, she meets the boy of her dreams, but “then he went away. I thought I’d die, but I didn’t, and when I didn’t I said to myself, Is that all there is to love?” Finally she turns to the audience and says, “I know what you must be saying to yourselves, If that’s the way she feels about it, why doesn’t she just end it all? Oh, no, not me. I’m not ready for that final disappointment. When that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath, I’ll be saying to myself, Is that all there is?” Yikes!

Still we can't blame Peggy Lee for her ennui, for her sense of meaningless and despair in a world aching with cruelty and pain (though, perhaps we can blame her for the kitschy rendition of that song!). I hardly knew what to do with myself when I read, in Friday’s paper, the piece about Zacarias Moussaoui taking the stand at his trial in Alexandria. In relation to the tragedy of 911, he said that he would do it again today, if he had the chance. He said that he was regretful that Army Lt. Col. John Thurman, who crawled out of the wreckage of the Pentagon barely alive, didn’t die. When he heard that another soldier didn’t make it out, he said, “Make my day.” And, as I read these terrible things, I thought to myself, “Is this world of hatred and war all there is?”

Just this week, I heard that a friend who has been struggling with cancer for years, was told that her medications will no longer help her. She is now waiting to die. And I thought to myself, “Is this world of pain and disease all there is?”

This past week, we have also seen stark images, such terrible, familiar images, of people starving to death in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. People still die of hunger in a world that exhibits mind-boggling excess: where people in the U.S. spend billions of dollars on weight loss programs and hundreds of billions of dollars on a war to maintain our addiction to the automobile. And I thought to myself, “Is this world of hunger and injustice all there is?”

Had Easter Day never happened, Peggy Lee’s ennui and hopelessness would have spoken the final word on the human condition; Moussaoui’s searing hatred would inspire us, too, to live by the law of hatred and revenge; my dying friend would spend her last days with no possibility of hope; our greed and consumption would actually define who we are; and the Cross of Calvary would be nothing more than an instrument of torture.

But Easter speaks to the stunning truth that this is not all there is! Easter is not about a resuscitated corpse! It is about the transformation, through undying Love, of all creation; it is about the truth that we are set like a diamond in God’s perfect Love, which is infinitely greater than the hatred, cruelty, pain, injustice, and death of this existence. I believe (like my old mentor Gary Davies) that at the moment of resurrection the entire DNA of the universe changed forever: despair is swallowed up by hope and death is swallowed by victory.

Easter is not about individuals believing that Jesus rose from the dead: it began in the formation of a faith community, so transformed out of fear, meaningless, and despair that they entered a new life, which they knew to be eternal, because eternal is the love of the God revealed to them in the life of Jesus. And they shared in this eternal, resurrection, life by setting out on a mission to change the world into God’s reign of Justice and Love.

If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing! Let's break out the bread and wine (“booze”) and have a ball! For, because of the glory of this Day, hope and joy and peace and abundant life is ultimate truth of what's “all there is!”