When I told my partner that I was invited to preach again, he said “Awesome! When?” I said, “the Sunday after Easter!” And he said, “Great! You can talk about the significance of one week after Jesus rose from the dead!”
And I thought that was funny, because I think all of Chas’s jokes are funny, even the ones about math that I don’t understand. But I also thought: That sounds really off to me; I’m not sure whether it’s even possible to preach on the topic “one week after the resurrection,” and I tried to figure out why.
And the answer came from Facebook, because I am a millennial who loves my social medias. I follow a bunch of Episcopalian groups that talk about faith formation and youth ministry and things like that, and starting last week, I started to see lots of talk about how Easter lasts more than one day - how it’s an entire season! There were memes directed at Episcopalian leaders and parents, exhorting us to celebrate all fifty days and not let the glory of the resurrection stay limited to one day of candy and bunnies and giant candles.
So I thought: why does “one week after the resurrection” sound like an oxymoron to me; even while I was surprised to learn that Easter actually lasts all the way to Pentecost?
I think it has to do with how we, people, who live in linear time - moment to moment, a present defined by past and future - think about newness and change.
Let me give an example, which requires me to make a very un-Episcopalian confession to you all. I absolutely love altar calls.
For those who are unfamiliar, altar calls are a ritual common in Evangelical and Charismatic churches - any denomination that invests heavily in what they call “winning souls to Christ” or “leading people to Jesus” - basically, converting people.
An altar call happens as the climax of an emotionally charged part of the service - usually a passionate sermon or a period of musical worship - and consists of the pastor explaining to the gathered congregation that if anyone here feels the call to accept the love of Christ; if anyone has been walking a path that isn’t God’s and wants to return to the fold - now is the time! People who want to respond to that call are invited up to the front - hence the term “altar call” - where the pastor and members of the congregation pray over them.
It’s a powerful experience - being called to respond to God’s grace in an immediate way, and being welcomed and encouraged to do so by a community present to you and the struggles that led you to make that choice. Altar calls, and the culture around them, shaped a lot of my early experiences with Christianity as a newly-converted teen, and were really positive for me then.
Here’s the thing, though: altar calls, and conversions, are often seen as a one-time thing. There’s a before, there’s a moment of change, and then there’s an after. At first, I didn’t really understand that. Because a lot of pastors who do altar calls phrase it in different terms: they offer the opportunity to become a first-time convert, but then also use language like “if there is a burden you’ve been carrying and you want to lay it down at the cross,” or “if there’s a part of your life you need to invite God into,” in their invitation, making it sound like it’s open to anyone who wants to make a change, who wants to step back into grace, who has a specific problem or struggle they want to reframe in the context of faith.
And that almost always applies to me! Which is why, even years after committing my life to Christ, as they say, I still often found myself up at the front during altar calls, being prayed over and reassured. But then afterwards I’d have a Bible pressed into my hand and a “new believer” card to fill out. (Many of the Bibles stocking the youth room come from experiences like this.) It was awkward to explain to a really excited church volunteer, who thinks she’s about to lead a soul to Christ, that I’m already a pretty passionate Christian; I just, you know, felt led to respond to the altar call.
I learned pretty quickly that just getting caught up in the promise of grace wasn’t *really* what altar calls are meant for...so I usually stay in my seat, though I must confess that when I’m visiting a new church for the first time, to check out their music or because I’m traveling to a new city, I still sometimes indulge in the rush of the altar call, though I never misrepresent myself as a prodigal daughter returning.
Why have I spent so much time talking about a ritual that has very little to do with our church’s beliefs and practices? Because my craving for an altar-call experience every Sunday is, I think, a clue to why Easter is fifty days long, and why we often forget and leave it at the one Sunday, and why none of this really matters in the context of the Gospels and what they tell us about the resurrection.
We like to think of things in linear timelines: before, after. Then, now. Past, present. It makes sense: there’s cause and effect there. Something happened, things changed, now they’re different. So today, we have a Gospel passage about the after-effects of the resurrection: Jesus died, he came back, now he’s going around with the Disciples doing stuff.
But this image of the resurrection leaves us with a problem: the same problem that leaves me craving the spiritual high of an altar call week after week. If the resurrection is a point in time, then everything that comes after is just...what comes after. The world was in darkness, then light came, death was overcome, love won, and now, we keep on going. That’s one shining point of cleansing and two thousand years to mess it all back up. And that makes Easter just one more altar call leaving us hungry for more, trying to hang on to the newness for as long as we can until we’re just holding out for the next renewal.
To use a much more Silicon Valley friendly example than altar calls: I remember when I got my new iPhone after we had too much fun at youth group and my previous phone got destroyed. Every time I get a new phone or computer, I commit to keeping it as nice as the day I got it. I’ll go through and delete photos I don’t need; I’ll do frequent backups; I’ll update the software every time it asks. I promise!
And that always lasts a little while; until eventually, I’ve got seven million photos I don’t have time to curate, and I’m always getting little pop-up notifications like “this iPhone hasn’t been backed up in 108 weeks because there’s no space,” and it’s basically begging me to install thirteen pending updates. And by then, it feels like a mess too big to handle without another hard reset, a clean slate, a fresh start. And I start to plan rowdier and rowdier youth group games...
It’s the same problem as the altar call: I did something, I took a “reset” at some point in time, and everything was new. It was the first day of the rest of my life! And then the second day came. And the next. And the grime of life built up. I had one clean slate, and slowly it started getting dusty and smudged, until, eventually, all I want is just another clean slate. I gave my problems to God a few Sundays ago, and that was great, but now I have new problems, and I’ve made new mistakes, and I need another refresh.
But there’s another way to see the resurrection; not as a discrete point in time but as a new resonance for the world. I think the Gospel is calling us to live a life where “one week after the resurrection” truly is an oxymoron - where the resurrection is not a thing that happened, changed things, and now we live in the world after the change - where, instead, it is something that happens; that is happening; here and now and in every place and every moment. Every morning, Jesus is risen; every afternoon, love has won; every evening; death is overcome. The tomb’s emptiness and the truth of the resurrection is a reality that rings out in every cell, every atom, every sound.
So while it’s tempting to think: I want to start again! I want to make things new! I want a big, dramatic statement, a big ritual, to cleanse me and wrap me back up in God’s love and presence! The reality is, God doesn’t work like my iPhone. While it’s beautiful and healing and powerful to participate in things like baptism, renewal of our vows, altar calls, confession, and other “clean slate” rites, it’s not those moments that actually clean the slate. They simply help us, in our limited, temporal, human way, access what we have available to us in every moment.
“He is Risen” is not meant to be taken as a simple, past-tense statement; about something Jesus did at some point that we’re now reporting about. It’s a truth we can claim in every moment. Right now, right here, He is risen. The resurrection is not a thing that happened. It is a truth, and a power, available to us always. It is a way of being, an alignment of the universe. It is here, coming into being, right now: victory over death, the triumph of love, the tearing of the veil, freedom and justice and mercy, at our fingertips, present in every syllable we speak and every breath we take. We have fifty days, and then eternity, to celebrate this truth: He is risen.