In this sermon, Dr. Chris Erdman, interprets Easter not as a supernatural event baffling to the rational mind, but as a potent symbol and metaphor (sympathetic to the creative mind) for natural realities that cannot be denied. When embraced these realties and truths are a source of immense hope and creativity. It is based on The Gospel of Luke 24.1-12 and a reading from Kosuke Koyama.

Preached at the Davis Community Church, Davis, California, Easter 2022. The video is available here.

I want to speak this Easter about the beauty of hope. I want to speak to those of us who may be prone these days to negativity, pessimism, and cynicism because there’s plenty to be negative, pessimistic, and cynical about. It’s not hard to be swallowed up by the ugliness, brokenness, and apparent hopelessness that flows toward us, endlessly, through the news cycle. Sometimes, the news cycle isn’t just out there; sometimes there’s news inside us that rattles around in our own brains, reported to us by those parts of us made fearful or anxious by the challenges many of us face on a personal level. It’s not hard to let these stories of woe wind their dreadful fingers around our minds, bodies, and souls. When we do, it can be hard to stay optimistic, able to see signs of life’s goodness, of hope, of beauty.

The story of Easter comes to us at a time when many of us, like the women who went to the tomb long ago, don’t have a lot of hope, a time when we, like the women bearing spices to tend Jesus’ dead body, figure we’ll just do what needs to be done without much hope that things will change. We can’t end the violence, disease, divisiveness, corruption, and intolerance—we feel powerless against the forces of death—so we’ll try to do something to make it all just a little more bearable. We’ll do what we can to just get through.

The story of Easter comes to us and wants those of us who are afraid and anxious, maybe even prone to cynicism these days, to behold enough beauty, even in the trouble around us, to awaken to a truth that transcends the realities that hound and haunt us.

On behalf of the story of the resurrection of Jesus, I want to ask you to give up negativity, pessimism and cynicism for Easter. And then keep giving it up. I want you to see hopefulness as something essential to what it means to be human, something responsible that we human beings can do in the world, and ultimately something beautiful that can change the world.

In a recent essay she entitles, “Hope, Love, and the Remedy for Despair, from Gabriel Marcel to Nick Cave,” the brilliant and remarkably articulate public intellectual, Maria Popova, says that cynicism is inexcusable and dangerous to life, and that it is the capacity for hopefulness that is the hallmark of being human. “The cynic,” she says, “would hasten to retort that this openhearted expectancy is precisely what makes hope a portal to disappointment — but cynicism is, of course, the terror of sincerity, the cowardly attempt at self-protection from the heartache of unmet hope.”

“Cynicism is the terror of sincerity, the cowardly attempt at self-protection from the heartache of unmet hope.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better explanation of what cynicism is and why we choose it.

How many times have I talked with someone who has given up hope because they didn’t want to be disappointed? How many times have I lurched toward hopelessness myself because I thought somehow that not-hoping was a good way to protect myself from“the heartache of unmet hope?”

I wonder, this Easter, how much of our world is struggling with this heartache. In the face of the merciless onslaught of threats to human existence, how many of us are actually quite tempted toward cynicism as an “attempt at self-protection from the heartache of unmet hope”—an attempt Popova deplores as cowardice?

Have you ever thought of cynicism as cowardice?

Have you ever considered negativity, pessimism, and cynicism as an attempt at self-protection, a gesture born of fear, an inability to see something else at work in the world?

And so, we come back to Easter.

To follow where Easter leads is an act of courage because Easter is ultimately about hope; it’s about having the courage to see that something else is at work in the world that refuses to be dominated by disappointment, despair, and death.

The story of the resurrection of Jesus is a sign, a symbol, a witness to the truth that death, while part of life, is not ultimate.

The resurrection of Jesus is one way to talk about this truth. An acorn is another. Just as an acorn becomes susceptible to the force of death, falls into the earth, decays, and dies, so do we. Death is a powerful force. We will all die. Death influences almost everything we do. But the acorn’s death is not the end of its story. Nor are the forces of death the end of ours. The forces of death incite violence, war, poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and the many -isms that inflict us. But they don’t have the last word.

This is what Easter wants us to see.

Inside the acorn—like what the Easter story says is always at work even in a dead body like Jesus’—another force is at work. There’s always a force tied to the creative impulse of the cosmos, a force that drives the expanse of the universe: the birth of stars, the coalescing of gases that form galaxies, the configurations of atoms that make mountains and flowers and babies and breakfast. That force, call it Life, is present inside the acorn. And Life is present inside every person and thing that eventually comes under the influence of death. And there is, therefore, always a greater force in everything, working for life. The seed becomes a sapling, and the sapling becomes a tree that drops a seed and starts the cycle all over again—life always pressing through the hard ground of winter to see the light of another spring.

Easter is another way of saying that there are always good reasons for hope, no matter what we are facing.

Earlier, I told you that I’m going to ask you to give up cynicism for Easter. And then keep giving it up. Hopefulness is something essential to what it means to be human. Hopefulness is something responsible that we human beings can do in the world. Hopefulness is ultimately something beautiful that can change the world.

“Watching the wrinkled faces and rough hands of the old Russian women,” wrote the 20th century theologian, Kosuke Koyama, “I saw that trouble produced endurance and that endurance is sustained by hopefulness and that hopefulness is essential for human life if life is to remain beautiful.”

There have been plenty of times when despair grows in me and the shadows of fear grow long. Doubt is not an uncommon visitor to my life.

But here’s what I’ve learned, this is what sustains me in the hardest of times:

Hope doesn’t mean that you have to believe you’ll get what you want or that everything will be ok—too often things aren’t ok, too often we don’t get what we think would be good for us or for those we love or for the troubled places in our world.

Possessing hope means allowing the troubles of life to cause us to cherish the beautiful truth Easter proclaims—

that dawn always breaks through the dark of night;

that the seeds of spring always rise up through the hard, barren ground of winter;

that there’s always another wave bringing something new ashore;

that every boundary and barrier can be transcended . . . somehow.

You just have to keep going, for you never know what the God of Life is bringing our way next.