Easter Day, Year C
April 11, 2004
Christ Church, Covington

“On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (Ps. 118:24).

Easter is the great festival of transition for Christians, the point where something old ends, and a new thing begins. The transition that we recall today is the transition from sadness to joy, from darkness to light, from death to life, in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s actually a biblical metaphor, used by the Gospel of John to describe Jesus’ death and resurrection, a “departure”, “passing over”, or “transition” (transitus), from this world to the Father (Jo. 13:1).

The biblical understanding of transition, however, is a bit different from our modern one. We all wish for good transitions, but the word has an almost ironic air when we use it, like “job reassignment” as a euphemism for being “fired”. There’s a chaotic element to transition, so that in modern corporate jargon transition has to be “managed”. Transition turns into a sort of bloodless way of describing major blood-letting. In this sense we might talk about transition in Iraq right now, or transition at Enron a couple of years ago. Transition like this is inherently ambiguous.

But for Christians, transition is a resurrection word. We don’t want to lose the energy that comes with the metaphor, the sense of freedom and movement. The notion has its roots in the Passover celebration of the Jews, a transition out of Egypt into the freedom and peace of the Promised Land. Jesus was crucified and rose again at the time of the Passover, and so his great transition from death to life was always understood this way. Paul calls this action of God, this transition, a “triumphal procession” (2 Cor. 2:14), and so it is.

Paul’s metaphor of procession is transitional, as well. Sacred places in the ancient world often incorporated a via sacra, a sacred way for movement and procession, for transition, to bring the worshiper from the place where they were in the world to the sacred place they needed to be. The religious tradition of ancient Israel, the tradition which formed our Lord and Savior, was no different. The “day that the Lord has made” from our psalm this morning is clearly a day of transition and procession, an entrance into the Temple in Jerusalem. Check it out sometime when you have a chance.

The religious procession is nothing less than a ritualized form of transition, where something old ends and a new thing begins. Unlike the notion of transition as “managed chaos”, the great transition that is at the heart of Christianity is processional, a purposeful movement from where we are in the world to where we need to be. Transition in a worldly sense is all too often a dead-end, while the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ never dead-ends but proceeds forward to life. If humanity is to have something else than a dead-end, corporately and individually, then the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is our only hope.

Think about the great transitions of your life for a moment. Any married person knows what I’m talking about; anyone who has left their hometown to go to another place to stay knows what I’m talking about. Leaving a job and beginning a new one is transitional; the birth of a child is transitional; and to be even more acute, the death of a loved one or the end of a marriage in divorce is transition on a grand scale. We’ve even had our share of transitions at Christ Church, Covington, over the past year, and we’ll have some more over the next nine months, what with clergy sabbaticals and new calls and learning to operate in a different, larger pattern.

Now these things, these various manifestations of transition, might be dead-ends for us, or they might be tremendously exciting and life-giving, but in either case we will need to have faith: trust in God toward new life. Where are you, in your life, in transition? Can you see that transition in terms of Jesus’ death and resurrection, as the beginning of new life? Is this day, this day of transition, just the latest one in a chaotic series, or perhaps in a worst case a dead-end for you, or is it “the day that the Lord has made”, in which he is moving you from where you are to where you need to be?

God has brought you here this Easter to experience the passage of Jesus Christ from death to life, and to share in it. He has gotten you dressed and pulled together and here in time (in spite of the rain). He will bring you in procession to this altar to be a part of this community. Wherever you are in your life, whatever transition you are “managing”, God is faithful to bring you out of death into life, through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.

Return to Recent Sermons