Sermon, 6/15/25. Easter: When is it really over?

Trinity Sunday

Psalm 8; Proverbs 8:1–4, 22–31; Romans 5:1–5; John 16:12–15

On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads [Wisdom] takes her stand. –Prov. 8:2

As you may well expect, on your behalf as your priest and as well as on my own, I turn to accounts screened on videos using the new technology which is available to all of us via the Internet.  So it was just two weeks ago, late evening on the Feast of Pentecost, I viewed the beautifully choreographed celebration of the Mass, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, in an equally beautiful church in another diocese.  Prior to the beginning of the liturgy, the rector announced, among other things and events, that Pentecost marked the end, the conclusion, of Eastertide.  On an earlier occasion and in a different geographical location, another rector had announced that relief was in sight because in one week the program year of the parish was over.

And then, in the week now passed, our diocesan bishop, the Right Reverend Julia Whitworth, posted to us the epistle which I have just read to you, knowing that some of you may not be registered in the diocesan webpage and therefore not have access to her letter which supports the position which our Presiding Bishop, the Most Reverend Sean Rowe, has taken via-a-vis immigrants in our nation, a position with which I agree totally.

This all, together with other occurring and recurring events in our world, prompted me to question: “Is Easter really over?”  “Did Pentecost of millennia long past reach its goal, have the effect that it was supposed to bring?”  “When does the Church’s program year end?”  “What may have motivated our Presiding Bishop, to stake out his position against the power of the mighty government of the United States of America?”

Not many years ago, I would pose to my students in my upper division literature seminars such questions as “What has the author actually entered on the printed page?”  “What, from the author’s personal history, shines through if our text is not autobiographical?”  “Does your own biases impede an objective interpretation of the text?”  And today, I want us, as people of faith, to do some background fact checking, in order to understand what lurks behind the Holy Trinity which may have informed our Presiding Bishop’s position.  And relax, there will be no final exam and nor I shall not ask you to submit your reflections as a term paper.

Hear the words from Scripture:

• Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God…When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.  The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.  –Leviticus 19:31, 33–34
• Let brotherly love continue.  Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.  –Hebrews 13:1–2
• Then they also will answer, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not minister to thee?”  Then he will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”   –Matthew 25:44–45
• But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where [the robbed and beaten traveler] was and when the Samaritan saw him, he had compassion…And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, “Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’  Which of these three, …proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”  –Luke10:25–37
• And Jesus said…”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”  –Matthew 22:37–40

Over many, many years, centuries, people of faith, ourselves included, have turned to our Book of Records, the Bible, to discern what God’s intention has been since creation for all humankind.  Our first lesson from the Book of Proverbs reminds us of that history and why.  Absent the Messiah in person, God through that indwelling element, which we acknowledge as God’s Spirit working in and through us, women and men of various tribes and religious reflections have connected with us in The Way, as occurred with my favorite disciple Thomas and have corrected us by word and example in their lifetimes, as well as in our own.

To compile a list of such spirit-influenced and -led individuals and to recite and acknowledge them by name would require more time than we require, in order to celebrate on the altar to my right the Holy Mysteries of Christ’s Resurrection.  However, given my background, it should not surprise me when I mention two and quote one of countless individuals who gave their lives to keeping Easter and Pentecost alive, and beyond the Program Year.

I mention first Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Bonhoeffer was born 4 February 1906 in Breslau, formerly Prussia, now Poland.  Already at the age of 21, he had completed his doctoral dissertation in theology (1927) and traveled to the United States in 1930 on a Sloanes Fellowship to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.  1931: he returned to his native Germany to become a lecturer at the University of Berlin.  1933: with the rise of Nazism and its authoritarianism, Bonhoeffer became a spokesman against Hitler.  He decried the ease with which the church, both the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical or German Protestant Church in Germany, accommodated the Hitler Regime, all in an attempt to keep the peace.  Appeasement was not on Bonhoeffer’s agenda.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo (Geheimstaatspolizei), sent to Tegel, a concentration prison for political opponent to the Nazi Regime.  He was executed 9 April1945 at Flossenburg concentration camp. 

The second individual, also a German, whom I introduce to you, is Pastor Martin Niemöller, also a theologian, and also a companion of Bonhoeffer.  Niemöller, who lived from 1892 to 1984, resisted Nazism and the complacent Evangelical Church, founded what became known as The Confessing Church.  Pastor Niemöller served as President of the World Council of Churches.

However, what stands out in my mind is a statement, often attributed to Bonhoeffer, but written by Niemöller as a recognition of the courage with which Bonhoeffer confronted authoritarianism.  Hear his Pastor Niemöller’s words regarding Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.  Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.” 

On Thursday of this week, 19 June, we observe a Federal Holiday, Juneteenth, a day commemorating a dark time in the history of our great nation.  Although the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order freeing all enslaved persons in the United States had been proclaimed earlier by President Abraham Lincoln, words reached various areas and were shared only later with those who had been enslaved.  You have perhaps by now concluded that I refuse to accept a date by which Easter comes to an end.  Declare me a heretic, if you will, but like Bonhoeffer and Niemöller, Easter will never be put away into a storage box until the appropriate time in the church’s program year.   That Good News of God, as the disciples were instructed on the Day of Pentecost to broadcast, must be taken still to all the ends of the earth.

You and I, as people of faith and descendants of those disciples of the Pentecost and witnesses to the moving strength of the Trinity, have a homework assignment.  I read about it in our Book of Records, the Bible.

Jesus said: “Where I am going, you cannot come.  A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.  By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  –John 13:33–35
Amen.