by CCW | 8 April 2012 14:58
Mary’s word to God at the Annunciation has provided us with a way of contemplating the Passion of Christ through Passiontide and Holy Week. Her word signals the most profound idea and reality. God engages our humanity in the most intimate manner imaginable in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. In the Christian understanding of things, the Incarnation has its beginning in time with the Annunciation which marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary. The larger significance of that is the greater celebration of this day, Easter.
Christ is risen, Alleluia. Alleluia!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia. Alleluia!
For Mary’s word signals her affirmation of God’s new creative act, the act of redemption. The Resurrection is the new and radical creation of our humanity. Such is the joy of the Annunciation in the blessedness of God being with us through Mary but such is the greater joy of the Resurrection in the renewing of our creation, hence all our alleluias on this day!
New life and new birth, the triumph and overcoming of all sin and folly, marks the celebration and meaning of Easter. And, in a way, all because of Mary’s word to God. It signals our task as well. What is that? To let the word of the Risen Christ define us; to let his word be unto us; to let Christ teach us the great good news of his Resurrection. Why? Because it defines our Christian identity and witness. Because it is about the radical truth of God’s being with us. Because the Resurrection celebrates the divine purpose for our humanity.
Death and Resurrection. These are the two basic and fundamental principles that define Christian witness and Christian life. We have had them wonderfully and graphically and dramatically presented to us in our service this morning. In the baptisms of Kayla and her daughters Savannah and Hailey we are reminded in the strongest possible way of our Christian identity and profession. It is, like Mary, “according to [God’s] word,” the word which engages our humanity in the intimacy of Jesus Christ and goes to the Cross for us and for our salvation. Christ’s Resurrection is the strongest possible reminder that we are more, though not less, than dust and death, more, though not less, than our physical and material bodies. They are all part of the story, the story that is about God’s will to restore and recreate, to transform and renew.
Christ’s Resurrection affirms both the spiritual nature of all reality and the spiritual nature of our humanity. We are spiritual creatures, created beings who think and love. Such things recall us to the God in whose image we are made and now remade and renewed, restored and redeemed. Baptism is about our incorporation into the very life of Christ, the very purpose of God’s new creation. In Baptism we are made “the children of God, the inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven and members of the body of Christ.” This is who we are. We have now only to live and to live it “according to thy word,” the word of the one who has created and redeemed us, the word of life and love.
The Resurrection is radical new life and marks the strongest possible affirmation of our individuality as well. In Baptism, we are named in God’s own naming of himself as Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We are named individually; we are signed with the sign of the Cross, that token of sin and love, that sign of God’s redeeming grace and mercy. We are incorporated into the life of God; our bodies are an integral and important part of that new life and new reality. We live no longer simply for ourselves but for God and only so can we live for one another. Such is the triumph of love, the love which renews us in love.
It becomes the meaning and purpose to live this new and redeeming love in our lives with one another and in the communities where we are placed. It means to be defined by God’s creative and redemptive word without which we are simply dead and dying spiritually and in every other way. Christ’s Resurrection is the affirmation of the divine will and purpose for our humanity. God unites himself to us in Jesus Christ so that through his humanity we might be who we are in God’s will. It is “according to thy word,” the word of God that conveys to us the will of God and nowhere more profoundly than on this day. Christ’s triumph over sin and death signals our new creation. “Likewise reckon yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin,” Paul says, “but alive unto God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
God is life and light and love. We are given to see and feel these realities in Jesus Christ, in his Death and Resurrection for us accomplished in the very soul and body of our humanity.
The Easter message is about hope and life in the face of death and despair. It speaks to all of the confusions and complexities of our culture. The Easter message of Christ’s Resurrection counters the despairing and deadening fatalisms of our world and day. Our hope cannot be found in the ups and downs of human experience but only in God, the God who renews and recreates. We find in the Easter message, I hope, the strength and the joy of living with God in the midst of all that confronts us, in the face of each and every hardship. It means to learn to rejoice in the God who is Creator and Redeemer. Christ’s Resurrection gives us the grace to see ourselves and one another and even our world in a new way.
As always it seems to me, the poets understand this best of all. Gerard Manley Hopkins shows us something of what Christ’s Resurrection means for each of us.
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood,
immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond
It has altogether to do with our life in Christ, he in us and we in him, to his glory and our everlasting good. It is, as Mary’s word signifies, “according to thy word.” May it be so for each of us this day and for evermore. Live the Resurrection! Live it in the life of Christ and in his body, the Church.
Fr. David Curry
Easter 2012
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/04/08/sermon-for-easter-day-3/
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