Easter brunches today will be smaller this year – ten or fewer by order of the Governor! Perhaps it’s one leg of lamb, not two. But, whether we’re talking about five folks, or fifty, I’ve noticed a few unspoken rules over the years about something I’ll just call “Easter etiquette.”
I’m talking about small, unspoken rules covering a range of matters – like what to wear, for example. Growing up in Alabama, sear-sucker was the rule for gentlemen, and ladies of certain generations believed hats were required. There are also unspoken rules about what to eat – coconut cake and hams were pretty sacred in Alabama.
But, there is a particular rule I want to talk about in this little Easter Day homily, and it is this. I guarantee you that the host of the Easter meal, whether it’s brunch, lunch or a formal dinner, will meet you at the door when you arrive and say, “Happy Easter. How are you?” This is what I call the Easter greeting rule. And, if you play by the rules, you and I are supposed to reply, “I’m great. We’re great. Happy Easter! How are you?” And then the host or hostess is bound by Easter etiquette to reply like this, “Oh, we’re great. Come in.”
But, if you want to be a rule-breaker – if you want to channel your inner Sammy Hagar by singing “I can’t drive 55” in your head – say this. The host or hostess will say, “Happy Easter. How are you?” And you say, “Well, Sam’s drinking is worse than ever, we lost our retirement in the stock market, I gained too much weight binge-eating in self-quarantine to fit in this dress, Sarah is so depressed she won’t leave the house, our dog has an unidentifiable fungus, and I just found out that Dave has a girlfriend, but, yeah, happy Easter.”
And, if you say those words – if you have courage to level with the host – he or she will still say, “Come in. I love your dress!”
But, after the party is over, you will have done something unthinkable but exceedingly wonderful. By breaking Easter etiquette, you will have ironically put Easter in perspective – you will have revealed Easter’s real power, actually.
What could I possibly mean?
Well, at the end of the day, there are really only two types of people. There are those of us who want to add something to everything – bring some sense of accomplishment, some flicker of “got my act together” behavior or some good triumph to the table. I’m talking about how your sister always insists on making her version of your mom’s ham glaze, and your brother-in-law always brags about his latest merger and acquisition.
And then there are those who really know the joy of Easter has nothing to do with accomplishment, past performance, inner-strength or perfectly glazed hams. And those people are called Easter people. And they have real joy: they’re “so very, very happy,” to quote Blood Sweat and Tears in 1968.
And that’s really all I want to say in this homily; I want to talk about happy Easter people.
Early on in the gospel according to St. Luke says, “The Pharisees and the Scribes murmured against Jesus, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
Blinded to their own needs by their own sense of self-righteousness and supposed moral superiority, the Pharisees were the first to encourage social distancing: they preferred “love in the abstract.” They were content to stand six feet away, bragging about their accomplishments, their moral and spiritual “got-it-together-ness.”
Bp. Fitzsimons Allison writes, “Concrete situations of diapers, debt, divorce, or listening to and being with someone in depression and despair is the real test of love.” And because Pharisees can’t deal with people who won’t perform – who have real bruises and make real blunders – they fail the real test of real love every single time.
It turns out, upon further review, that Jesus was altogether different. Less like Cinderella’s stepmother, Lady Tremaine, who will do anything to become a noble socialite, Jesus was basically the original Garth Brooks – short on “social graces,” his friends were in “low places.”
At one point the Pharisees got so put-off by his circle of friends, they put Jesus down publicly, basically in the town square – in the middle of Publix at Paradise Plaza, if you will – saying, “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”
If Jesus came to Sarasota this afternoon, with whom might he rub elbows? If the bible is a reliable guide, he’d find somebody like Zacchaeus, whom the Pharisees called a “notorious sinner.” He’d then go find someone like the Samaritan woman at the well, who was on her sixth man (she was probably humming “Lookin For Love In All the Wrong Places” by Johnny Lee as she drew water). And He’d find somebody more crooked and corrupt than Matthew, the tax collector.
I’m saying, he’d absolutely have dinner with Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, “the baddest man in the whole *!#$ town” before he spent any time looking for someone who’d been Time Magazine’s “person of the year.”
How does that make you feel?
It makes many uncomfortable, honestly. The inner-Pharisee in each of us is sacred to death that this hanging with Leroy Brown thing might make Jesus look too much like he’s more comfortable on the set of Animal House or American Pie than He is running around telling everyone how to behave.
Do you feel a little bit like the overly-scrupulous woman in the old joke about Jesus and the miracle at Cana? A very devout Baptist woman objected to her husband’s moderate use of wine at a wedding. The husband said, “But, honey, Jesus Himself turned water into wine” to which she replied, “I know, and I would have thought more highly of him had he not.”
In Fil Anderson’s latest book, Breaking the Rules: Trading Performance for Intimacy with God, he writes these words:
My highest hope is for all of us to stop trying to fool others by appearing to have our act together. As people living in intimate union with God, we need to become better known for what and who we actually are. Perhaps a good place to begin would be telling the world – before the world does its own investigation – that we’re not as bad as they think. We’re worse.
Jesus said, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” St. Paul said, “Christ died for the ungodly.”
Jesus didn’t join sinners in their sin, of course; he died and rose again for sinners – for you and for me. And happy Easter people know this is true, and that’s why they have real joy.
I want to say it as clearly as I possibly can: your best friend – my best friend is alive. Jesus lives! “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” I Cor. 15:57
Sermon preached by the Rev. Charleston D. Wilson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
Easter Day
12 April 2020