This sermon was preached for Easter Sunday, April 9, 2023 for St. Mark's Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow, MA. The texts for this sermon were: Jeremiah 31:1-6, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, and John 20:1-18.
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
Love wins! Alleluia! The love that has triumphed this Easter day is about God’s love for all of us. And it is about God’s love for you, in particular.
Thus says the Lord; I have loved you with an everlasting love.
Every Easter Sunday growing up, my sisters and I would wake up in my grandmother’s house to chocolate bunnies placed lovingly at the end of our beds. My sisters’ bunnies were chocolatey brown but mine, mine was a delicious, creamy white. White, because each year without fail my mother remembered that I was one of those strange people who actually prefers white chocolate. One Easter morning, one of those first early years I started to get really into my faith, it was a white chocolate cross instead.
It may sound silly that I still cherish the memory of receiving white chocolate instead of milk chocolate, a cross rather than a bunny, but for little Mia it was everything. I felt seen and known, and, best of all, encouraged to continue being my weird little self.
To be loved particularly, to be seen fully, is no small thing at all.
In the Episcopal Church, we are fond of saying: God loves everyone. No exceptions. We also love to say: All are welcome. These are beautiful sayings people need to hear, today and every day. When I first came to St. Mark’s last year, I encountered a twist on those sayings that I like even better. It’s not unusual for an Episcopal priest to invite folks up to receive communion by saying, Christ welcomed all. But here at St. Mark’s, there’s a congregational response. Every person in the pews says, We welcome you. Not we welcome everyone, not we welcome all, we welcome YOU.
The authors of the parenting advice book my mom swears by, “Siblings without Rivalry,” argue that a parent’s job is not to pretend to love each child equally, but rather to love each child uniquely for who they are - and to let them know it. To illustrate their point, they tell a parable of a young husband whose wife asks him one day, Who do you love more? Your mother or me?
“Had he answered, ‘I love you both the same,’ he would have been in big trouble. But instead he said, ‘My mother is my mother. You’re the fascinating, [beautiful] woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.’”
“To be loved equally,” they write, “is somehow to be loved less. To be loved uniquely - for one’s own special self - is to be loved as much as we need to be loved.”
Perhaps you have known what it feels like to be loved for being you. Perhaps you haven’t ever been loved as you’ve needed to be loved. Perhaps you’ve encountered that sort of particular-to-you love here and there or maybe even your whole life, and still, at times, you find it hard to believe. And if you have ever thought for even a second in some small secret way, well sure, God loves everyone but not me, not really, not like that, then this sermon is for you, in particular.
We see today that Jesus knows how to give us what we need to believe the most unbelievable thing of all.
When Mary discovers that the stone that covered Jesus’ tomb was rolled away that first Easter morning, she doesn’t know what to believe - but she knows what she fears. So she runs and tells Simon Peter and another disciple what she has seen. They race where Jesus’ body had been laid. As soon as the other disciple sees the abandoned linens in the empty tomb, he knows that Jesus has risen from the dead. But Mary, outside the tomb, is weeping, she’s still afraid. Even when the resurrected Lord speaks to her himself, she does not know what to think. But then Jesus says her name. He says her name and she sees him. Then, then, the joy of Easter is hers. She runs to tell the others, too.
Each disciple comes to the truth and joy of Easter at their own moment, in their own way. The disciple whom Jesus loved just needed to glimpse the abandoned linens to know what they meant. Later on in John’s Gospel, the disciple Thomas will need to physically touch Jesus’ wounds to believe. For Mary Magdalene, it was when she heard her name, spoken with great love by her beloved teacher, that she knew. And she believed.
The triumph of Easter is simply this: nothing, nothing on heaven or on earth, no word or deed, not even death, can separate you from God’s love. On Good Friday, the religious authorities, the governmental forces, and the crowds tried to remove God’s love from the world in the most violent, most permanent way they knew how. Love had demanded too much of them.
There is still so much that attempts to get between you and God’s love. And there are moments when it looks like all that hate, all that injustice, all that cruelty and violence, all that loneliness and neglect will prevail - in our world, in our neighborhoods and churches, in our schools, and within ourselves. And yet the resurrection declares, once and for all, that love wins, in the end. Love over all. And God’s love for you, specifically.
This is my prayer: that sometime, somehow the joy of Easter will come to you today. That there will be a clear moment when you will know, in your heart, in some deep way, that God loves you, wholly and completely, no matter what. That the cross, the tomb, the descent into hell, it was all for you. My prayer is that this truth will come to you in a way that you can hear it, as clearly as if Jesus has said your name.
Thus says the Lord; I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. May God bring you today whatever you need to believe it. It’ll be different from what I need, or your neighbor needs, or even what you needed last year or next year. And that’s okay.
The twofold power of our faith is that it is both all about our individual relationships with God through Christ and it is all about deepening those relationships together, in community. It is about believing this good news for ourselves, and helping others believe it, too.
Each disciple had their own discovery of Easter’s good news but they depended on each other, too. Mary needed someone to run to when she was still unsure and afraid. Peter and the other disciple needed somebody to race to the tomb, someone to enter first ahead and someone to hang behind. And all three turned around to share the unbelievable joy with someone else, who in turn shared it with someone else, all the way down through history until that joy came to be shared to each of us.
Baptism makes this twofold power of faith, the individual and the communal, even clearer. This morning we celebrate God’s particular love for one special individual. In doing so together, we renew our own unique relationships with God. We promise to resist all that threatens love and to uphold all that love demands of us.
Little Teddy, who will baptize this morning, is loved particularly. He is loved by his mothers, by his godmother, Laura, by his godfather, Larry, and his wife, Cindy, who are practically another set of grandparents. He is loved by people who have gone before, like the father who baptized his mother, Michelle, and by people who are here in spirit. He is loved by St. Mark’s.
Today, we declare together, once and for all: God loves Tadeusz Jozef Stallworth, fully, completely, with an everlasting love. Today, we celebrate the community that will remind him of that love as he grows into his own unique self.
Today, as a symbol of that particular love, we give Teddy his baptismal name. And as we do, we remember that years ago, someone gave each of us a name that God has held in God’s heart to this day. A name that Jesus says with love, even now, if only we stop to hear it.
Tadeusz Jozef Stallworth is loved particularly by God. And so are you.
Amen. Alleluia!
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