The First Sunday of Easter 2009

Suncay, 12 April 2009
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator

New York City

In the name of our life-giving God, the father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The mysterious young man dressed in white looked at the women who came to the tomb and said to them: “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.”

The body was gone. The human body of Jesus was gone. The body of the man so many of them had known, loved, and followed, was gone. The body that reached out to them and touched them in their illness was gone. The body that had turned water into wine at Cana was gone. The body that had raised Lazarus from the dead was gone. The body was gone.

Despite the obvious intellectual difficulty of the idea of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, it is, always has been, and always will be the center of the Christian faith. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is a part, the central part, of a system of thinking.

That system of thinking goes like this: God loved the world so much that he decided to fix this problem of human suffering and death. Her did it by living a life like we live. But he did it in such perfect faith that it shows us what men and women are meant to be like.

But he did these things for more than just being a good example. If good examples were enough, philosophers and sages more original than Jesus would have solved the problems of men and women centuries before he came on the scene.

Jesus did more than give us an example. He offered us a way out. God promised that if we would connect our lives to the life of Jesus, trust in his love, God would give us la new life which would not be limited in the ways that this one is limited.

How do we get hooked up with Jesus? Simple, by being baptized. In baptism, we are taken under the water, as if we were drowning, and we rise from the water as if we were rescued. In this way, we pass through death, as if we were given something of a talisman to protect us from the ultimate power of death. In baptism, we link up our lives with that of Jesus.

And when we link our lives to Jesus’ life, we are given a wonderful gift. That gift places us right in the story of the resurrection. Imagine someone coming to your tomb after your burial, looking for you. Imagine that mysterious angelic messenger turning to them and saying, “You are looking for___________________or ____________________, or ____________________, or Lloyd.” They aren’t here, they are risen!”


The nature of the gift given to us is the gift of following in the pathway of Jesus, the path to resurrection, and the path to a life in a new order of reality where the powers of death can never again hold final sway over us.

But why such a fixation on the body? Why do we need to believe in the resurrection of the body?

Jesus body was raised to new life because God likes bodies. Our bodies are part of God’s creation, and they are good. God made them; they are wonderful things. God liked them well enough to take one of them an live in it—as Jesus Christ. God raises bodies because bodies are good; he likes them. He made them.

God raises bodies because “the idea of the body” means more than just the physical corpse. When theologians talk about the body, they are talking about the physical body, but also the intellectual life of a person, the creative life of a person, our spiritual life, our life in love and passion. It is the whole human experience, the whole “body” of everything that makes us human.

And, the human condition is this: Our whole body, every realm and dimension of our existence, the whole body of our qualities and dimensions, needs repair. The kind of repair job we need involves our physical bodies, because we use them to cause pain for others. Our intellectual life is corrupted when we use it for selfish and cruel purposes. Our spiritual life needs redemption because sometimes spirits are the source of motives and hopes, which are hurtful to others and us.

In fact, so many of the dimensions of our live need a repair job that the human condition requires not just repair, but starting over. New life. Rebirth. That is why we call it resurrection of the body. What we need is new life. We need it in the whole body of our human selves. There is no part of who we are that does not need new life.

So, we get a new body. As we got a body when we began our first life, so we get a new one when we begin our second life, our life in Christ. And that is the gift.

What you celebrate this morning is nothing less than a gift sitting on your table next to the stuffed Easter bunny, the roasted leg of lamb, the dyed Easter eggs. If that is a gift you would like to open, stick with the Church and lets open the package together. As we begin to undo the outer wrapping begin to discern the mystery, lets take a look at the packing slip inside the package as we join, in a moment, in singing the church’s story of creation, redemption, and sanctification, the story of our belief.