Easter Sermon

In my last parish, confirmation students arrived at the church on Tues. afternoons, dropped by their buses after school. The buses never arrived at the same time –so I would have an activity for the students to begin with.  One of the activities was put in the kid’s Easter bags this morning.

The activity was a drawing page, where there is a large tree trunk and branch reaching out over a garden.  In the background is the tomb with the stone sitting to the side.  On the branch is a bird –beak open.  The instructions say to write the resurrection story from the eyes of the bird.  What happened according to the bird in the tree?

This morning began with yet another interruption in my beauty sleep.  As if the raucous band of people entering the garden Thursday night, awakening us from our slumber, scaring us into the air out of our night time rousts, was not enough; Friday followed with a day of weird weather, the sort that had every bird in the district hidden in the nooks and crannies of every tree, the sky was dark in the middle of the day and the air was ominous.  As if all this was not enough, this morning, in that time between sleep and awake, I heard faint music, the lilt of women’s voices in quiet conversation.  It was beautiful   -like listening to crickets, or the coo of a dove – I could have listened all day; but no - then came a sound worse than a blaring alarm clock.  The tree shock, rocks cracked, the ground groaned, the women screamed  -bang- I was awake.

Yes, as the dust settled and I straightened my feathers, all was not well with the world. I was disturbed, annoyed, put-out.  Can I not have one night of real bird sleep? Normal, without interruptions.

But as I watched and felt the morning sun rise over the garden, the air changed, something had happened.  And I was right there in the middle of it all.

I overheard Matthew’s version of the story being proclaimed to you earlier.  I suppose that is how it happened to the human eye.  From the branch of the olive tree, the scene seemed far away, hazy.  The story for me is not what I saw, it is what I heard; snippets of songs I had heard before, but now in  a new way; snippets of songs sung by my ancestors for centuries –and now human beings had heard them, and were starting to sing them –a little tenuous at first, but as the women left the garden the sound, the first movement of the music started to swell.

The snippets of the creator’s song from that morning were sung in a new light –resurrected.  God had never sung love like God sang love on this morning.  The angel sang...”do not be afraid” –one of the creator’s favourite tunes.  And God sang, not through someone, or something, or a creature, or through the wind...God’s own voice rang clear “he is not here, he has been raised from the dead”; then the angel repeated it to the women, the crickets cheeped it, the ants marched it, the spiders spun it, the dew dripped it, the flowers swayed, the trees waved –the world was alive with God’s growing, resurrected love song.  Yes, I was the closest bird...the tune floated to me with the words...”this is my message for you”....and that is the tune I tweeted to the other birds, who in their own languages added to the song, and the message of God dying and rising spread from garden to garden, forest to forest, and ocean to ocean.

Take a moment and think about a time when a piece of music touched you. Think of a time when you heard a song that pulled at your heart, caused an emotional reaction, perhaps tears or goose bumps, or joy so great you had to dance.  That piece of music was God’s love song of hope for you at that moment in time.  You encountered the resurrected God.  God put love in your heart, a lilt in your step, a song on your lips.  Isn’t that pretty amazing?!  A song, that humans finally heard in a garden 2000 years ago, echoes and continues to be sung now to us, experienced for real, and sometimes even sung through us to others.

For many years I took piano lessons from Mrs. Sudden, who lived in a quaint green house at the other end of the village.  You entered her house through the front door, where there was a coat rack, chair and stool –where one waited for their turn.  There was a floor to ceiling fenestrated screen that ran from the waiting chair almost to the piano –normal except that there were little mirrors and odd plastic toys twist-tied to it.

As one played the piano, not just plunking out tunes or notes, but when one played a little ditty one started to hear accompaniment.  You see, in the darken half of the front room, Mrs. Sudden had a budgie.  And did the budgie love to sing, and the better you played the louder the budgie sang.

Apparently the budgie was let out of the cage when students were not in the house.  It would take flight, particularly flying up a storm when Mrs.Sudden’s husband played his violin.

The bird loved music.  The bird loved to sing.  There was no amount of darkness that would keep the bird quiet- when it heard even just a little bit of music.

This is Easter Sunday and we have come to hear the Good News.  We have come and heard ALLELULIA, resurrection music.  When we leave here today, we return to our lives, to the distractions of the everyday, to those things that trouble us or are weighing on our hearts.  The prayer is that this morning you leave with God’s love song of hope resonating in your ears, your heart, your very being –and that at least a little bit of Good News music goes with you, so that despite what darkness may surround you –the music is enough hope that you can do no other than hum, than sing God’s love song that can heal any wound.

We have a story to tell, to sing to the world.  The song is one of hope, healing, and resurrection.  It is God’s love song, meant to be shared, for there are no copyrights on it.  The more we sing Good News, the more we excitedly pass on the chorus –with hummings of hope, jingles of justice, arias of action, rhythms of resurrection -  the other budgies will sing; and the better we play and sing, the louder our brother and sister budgies –the world-will sing with us; and ultimately the world will be resurrected through God’s love song.