A Sermon from the Church of
Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Florida
Preached by the Rev. Timothy E. Schenck on March 31, 2024 (Easter Day)
When my wife Bryna and I were newly married and our first Easter came around, she decided to take on a long-standing family tradition and make a lamb cake. Her very Polish and very Catholic grandmother made a very large number of these every year for her very large family. The traditional lamb cake involves a metal mold that you pour batter into and once it comes out of the oven, it’s bathed in vanilla frosting and coconut flakes to create the fleece as white as snow, and then adorned with jelly beans for the eyes and mouth. It’s as tasty as it sounds, but it’s hard to get it just right.
Now, please don’t tell her I said this, but the early years were a hot mess. Despite frantic calls to her grandmother in Western Massachusetts, the batter was never right and the poor lamb just wouldn’t stand up straight. Or at all. Whenever it would be gingerly brought to the table, propped up by God knows what, it would inevitably do a face plant. Right into the dyed green coconut grass. Bryna never actually threw the entire thing across the dining room — but there was always a lot of kitchen drama, a few tears, and my comments of “it doesn’t actually look too bad” and “I bet it still tastes good” were not well received.
As her grandmother slipped into dementia and eventually left this mortal life, Bryna continued the tradition and, truth be told, perfected it. Her lamb cakes are now masterpieces, and they have long been an important Easter tradition in our home. Easter just isn’t Easter without Bryna’s lamb cake.
We all have Easter traditions, some sacred and some secular. But there is always a bit of the mundane to go along with the miraculous. Our gospel account of that first Easter Day, begins with a rather mundane task. Or if not mundane, exactly, certainly practical. The women brought spices to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body. This burial task often fell to women, and they were simply doing their duty by following the appointed customs of a Jewish burial. Amid their profound grief, they were leaning into the muscle memory of routine.
But they also had another very practical concern. Along their journey they kept saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” And that’s a fair question. They needed the large stone rolled away so they could be about their business of preparing Jesus’ body.
But as they arrive, they look up to see that the thorny issue of the stone had been resolved. It had already been rolled away. And what they encountered as they entered the tomb that morning was a portal that transported them from the mundane to the miraculous.
The angel they encounter who announces the resurrection, lifts their gaze and shifts their perspective. He beckons them away from the mundane and towards the miraculous. Their routine, if loving, task of caring for a decomposing body is derailed, and the very trajectory of their lives is forever altered. That’s the power of Christ’s resurrection. Our lives are indelibly changed by the news that the tomb is empty, that our Lord lives.
And we start to realize that the stone wasn’t rolled away on that first Easter morning to let Jesus out. Nothing could have stopped that. But it was to let us in. To let us in to the miracle of Christ’s resurrection; to let us in to a vision of humanity where peace, joy, and love abide; to let us in to a life where death is not the end; to let us in to a new worldview that drives out fear and ushers in hope.
And that, my friends, is the miracle of Easter. That we are led from the mundane to the miraculous. That we share in the miracle of Christ’s resurrection. And through it, everything changes. Because the deep joy of Easter is rooted in God’s love not only for all of humanity, but specifically for you. Jesus loves you not in theory or in the abstract. Jesus loves you. Not part of you or only the parts you’re proud of, or only the parts you’re willing to let the world see. Jesus loves all of you. Despite what you’ve done, despite what you’ve left undone. Jesus loves you for who you are, for what you are. And who and what you are is a beloved child of God. Forgiven, redeemed, and loved with abundant and reckless abandon.
At the end of the day, when you take off the fancy Easter clothes, and somehow find room in your closet for that big hat; when you’ve found that last Easter egg, when the sugar high has worn off, when you finish that last piece of lamb cake, when you’ve finished washing the last dish, when you’ve done all the mundane things that need to be done, you can still revel in the miracle of Christ’s resurrection. Because it changes everything.
May this Easter Day fill you with the joy of the risen Christ. May it open up for you an ever-deepening relationship with the God who banishes death and despair and offers us new life and hope. And may Christ’s victory over the grave transport you always from the mundane to the miraculous. Alleluia and amen.
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