Scriptures for today are here.  Options chosen are Acts, 1 Corinthians, and Luke.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!  [The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!]

This feels like a very happy Easter to me.  Last week, unexpectedly, I got a call from my mother that my father was dying, possibly within hours.  I dropped everything and flew to Austin to be with my parents.  And it turned out that it was a complete misdiagnosis – he just had a simple infection.  He is on antibiotics now, and is much better.  So for us, this year, the words of the hymn we just sang took on special meaning:  “Our despair he turned to blazing joy.”  This feels like an Easter miracle to us.

And so I feel optimistic about the future.  Optimism is something you feel when there are good signs, when it looks like things are going well.

But there are times when optimism is very difficult.  My friend works as a teacher for homebound high school students – some who are unwed mothers with infants, some who are ill with terminal diseases, some who are handicapped and unable to function in a regular classroom.  She sees teenagers and their parents in all kinds of difficult situations.  A couple of years ago she wrote me – I’m finding it hard to be optimistic these days, she said – she sees so many things to worry about.  And I wrote her back – when you can’t have optimism, try hope.

Optimism and hope are two different things.  Optimism is believing that a situation is heading in a positive direction.  Optimism means looking on the bright side, finding the silver lining, believing that evidence shows that events will come out well.  Optimism is a good thing when you’re facing a challenge: when you’ve interviewed for a job and the signs look good; when you think there’s a good chance you’ll get a good grade because you studied hard; when you’re undergoing treatment but the doctor says the prognosis is good.  Optimism is a belief in happy endings.

But not all endings are happy.  There are things that optimism doesn’t touch.  Optimism doesn’t help the cause that is lost.  Optimism doesn’t prevent the people we love from dying, eventually.  Optimism doesn’t bring the dead back to life.

Optimism is doing what the women did in our gospel story today, looking for the living among the dead – understanding that the dead stay dead, wanting only to anoint death with burial spices, finding something good and sweet and kind about the whole sad situation.

If Easter simply means optimism, a feeling that things will turn out all right if we look on the bright side, then we can enjoy our beautiful music, flowers, our pastel colors and Easter bunnies, our plastic eggs and marshmallow Peeps.  We’ll enjoy a little sunshine today, we’ll remember Jesus as a nice man who did good things.  But we won’t go home changed –our lives won’t be different.  The dead will not be resurrected.   When we wake up tomorrow, we will still be worried, distracted, will still be certain of only one thing in life – death – because optimism can take us only so far, but it cannot finally conquer darkness, evil and death.  Optimism can never do anything more than search for the living among dead.

But hope – hope is something different entirely.  Hope is not based on indications that things are going well.  Hope is born in the darkest of times when optimism has failed.  Hope means that all is not lost, even when nothing good is left.

In the movie The Shawshank Redemption, two inmates are in a hellish prison.  One of them, Andy, never loses hope.  He tells his friend, Red, “You have to have hope.  Hope is all you have when nothing is left.  Hope is a good thing, and no good thing ever dies.”  Red shakes his head and says, “Hope is a dangerous thing.  Hope can get a man killed.”

Well, hope IS a dangerous thing, because hope upsets everything we know.  Hope arises from the belief that some unexpected, inexplicable power outside the situation will change things; hope is a light that begins to gleam in utter darkness; hope opens our eyes to new possibilities optimism could never see.  Hope understands that God has hold of us and has no intention of letting go.

Hope is dropping the burial spices, losing our faith in death, listening to the voices of angels, and beginning a new day where we look for the living among the living, the blazing light of resurrection in each face gathered here today.

And hope – if we can find hope today, in our Easter celebration –then we will go home, transformed, renewed, newly created people shining w Easter light.  Because we will know that there is no darkness so deep, no evil so powerful, no death so final that God’s light cannot shine into it and bring us hope.

And friends, this Easter morning, we who follow Christ are not optimistic – we are hopeful, we are filled to the brim with hope – a hope that outshines optimism – a hope that begins in darkness and bursts into the light of day – a hope that is born in despair and becomes a blazing joy.

And we say with all the angels in heaven, Alleluia, Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!]

The thing is that Christ’s resurrection is true, and real, and makes a difference to this world.  Jesus gave himself up to death out of love for his disciples, love for his fellow Israelites, love for the Roman soldiers who crucified him, love for all of us.  He had choices: he could have fought or fled or called down legions of angels.  But he chose to die; Jesus allowed all of the evil and hatred and fear and sin of this world to overwhelm him; he went to his death willingly.

Jesus went into the darkness of death because all of us will go there too.  And it is only when all cause for optimism is lost, that God can give the gift of hope.  Hope arises out of darkness, when there is no more reason for optimism.  And friends, in our lives, we need hope.

So Jesus went to his death, but he didn’t stay dead – he rose from the dead.  Which means that death and evil and hatred and sin don’t rule this world any more – a new creation has begun.

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, says:  at Easter, “we are really standing in the middle of a second ‘Big Bang,’ a tumultuous surge of divine energy as fiery and intense as the very beginning of the universe.”  If you throw a stone into water, it creates ripples in circles that radiate out.  In Jesus, on Easter day, the resurrection started a ripple of new creation, a wave of energy that has spread out for 2,000 years, an energy wave that hasn’t stopped yet, but will keep on growing until the evil powers of this world are completely destroyed, and all of us are brought from death into life.

This is not optimism, because it makes no sense. You can’t deduce resurrection, new creation, from any facts in our world today. You can’t get resurrection by looking on the bright side of a bad situation.  You get to resurrection only by dying.  And out of the darkness of death, God brings new life and new creation.  God gives us hope in Jesus Christ.

There are people here today, who are living in dark and difficult times.  Even if I didn’t know you, I would know that to be true.  I can be sure that in a crowd this size, there is someone experiencing the loss of a relationship, someone facing a serious illness, someone mourning the death of someone they love.  Optimism won’t touch those situations – not every cloud has a silver lining.

But, in the darkness of human life, God brings hope.  Resurrection hope, hope so glorious that it breaks all the rules, that no one can understand it.  For anyone who lives in darkness, the resurrection tells us that God’s love enters even into the deepest and darkest parts of human life.  And God’s love takes hold of us, and refuses to let us go.

Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, and we, his beloved ones, are raised along with him, to new life and new creation.  And to this, there’s only one thing we can say: Alleluia, Christ is risen!  [The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!]

Scriptures for today are here.

I have never been fond of roller coaster rides.  The slow chug up to the top, looking out at the crowds and the amusement park below, the hesitation as the car reaches the top, the fear that wells up as you realize what is about to happen, the sudden swoosh as the car leaps over the peak and hurls you straight down at the ground, the dizzying whirls and loops as your stomach leaps up into your chest.  All these are things I can live without.

Well, if you don’t like roller coaster rides, then Palm Sunday may not be your favorite day at church – because this liturgy is like nothing so much as a huge, dizzying roller coaster ride, hurling us from jubilant high to stomach-churning low with barely a pause for breath.  It is a day of polar extremes – from the beginning of joy and jubilation, as we hail Jesus as our king and shout Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest! – to the dizzying drop into darkness and sorrow as we watch Jesus die, slowly and painfully, on the cross, with helpless loved ones looking on.

This is a day so bipolar that we have to give it two names:  the official name of this day is Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday.  And if you want to ask, why is the Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday liturgy so strange, why couldn’t they adopt one theme – either Palm or Passion – and stick with it– there are several excellent practical answers: the foremost being the fact that you truly cannot experience Easter as a day of resurrection, unless you have also experienced the death that preceded resurrection – you can’t have Easter without Good Friday.  If you try, you will end up with celebration that involves pastel colors, eggs, bunnies, visits from grandma, but you will not have Easter.  Since many people will not or cannot worship on Good Friday, our calendar is set up so that we all experience some of Good Friday today.

Fair enough–but there is more to this roller-coaster day than that.  Because when I read the gospel, I think Jesus set this whole thing up knowing that it would come out exactly as it did.

To give you some context, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan (two writers whose theology I don’t agree with, but who give interesting historical context), in their book “The Last Week,” describe two processions arriving in Jerusalem that day.  From the west arrives a column of Roman soldiers, Pontius Pilate at their head; though they live and prefer to stay in Caesarea Maritima, the new Roman capital of Judea on the coast 60 miles to the west, once a year at Passover, they make the journey to Jerusalem.  They come, not out of any reverence for the Jewish festival, but in order to keep an eye on the population and the 200,000 pilgrims who swell a town of 40,000 to celebrate the Jews’ deliverance from an earlier empire that held them as slaves, and to squelch any trouble that might arise.

So imagine the Roman procession, say Borg & Crossan: “a visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold.  Sounds: the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums.  The swirling of dust.  The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.”

The Roman procession demonstrates not only Rome’s power, but also Rome’s theology:  Caesar was called Son of God, Lord, Savior – he was considered divine.

On the other end of town, from the east, an entirely different kind of procession is occurring, almost as a parody of the first, certainly as a challenge.  A ragged prophet from a no-account town in the northern countryside, has found a donkey to ride into Jerusalem; his crowd of followers follow him, proclaiming him king, and curious onlookers who are avoiding Roman procession on other end of town flood into the streets to join in the mayhem – not necessarily understanding what the fuss was about or even knowing about Jesus and his mission, but enjoying the insult to Rome.

Jesus has chosen this mode of entry to not only proclaim himself king, a king of peace, but also deliberately to set up a contrast and a challenge to Rome.  If the Roman procession describes the world as it is, a world ruled by power and brutality, Jesus’ procession describes the world as it should be: a world that recognizes and hails the Son of God when he comes, bringing healing and forgiveness.

Jesus does this knowing that Rome’s answer will be swift, unhesitating and brutal – knowing that the fate of anyone who challenged Rome was slow death on a cross.

And Luke, our gospel writer, of all the four gospel writers the one who writes most from the heart, catalogs the emotions of the week with precision:  the shouting; the exultation so fierce that the very stones might cry out; the betrayal; the arrest in the garden; the armed defense that Jesus stops by healing the ear of the servant; the denial and then the bitter weeping of Peter; the trial; the complicity of God’s Temple in the death of God’s Son; the contempt of Herod and the soldiers; the sudden friendship of two incompetent tyrants, Herod and Pilate; the release of an insurgent terrorist while the king of peace is put to death; the weeping of the daughters of Jerusalem; the crucifixion; the prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”; the women watching from afar. The darkness. The death.

It is a roller coaster ride from jubilation to agony, this Palm Sunday / Passion Sunday.  And why would Jesus set us up for this?  Why take us on this ride, why go to Jerusalem at all, why not hide out till all the fuss blows over and live to minister another day?  Why come riding into Jerusalem in a way guaranteed to get him killed?  Why celebrate this colossal disaster in this liturgy of Palm Sunday / Passion Sunday?

Jesus is determined to get himself killed, because he believes that dying is his mission. That somehow, the brutal death that he dies will display a kind of kingship that puts the paltry human kingship of Herod and Pilate to shame.  That his death will somehow open a path for all of us of reconciliation with God.

How does his death help us?  Luke, our gospel writer, gives us a clue, a new understanding.  The executioners nail Jesus to the cross, and he responds, incredibly, with love: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

The Son of God is in physical agony – and yet the love of God looks at people who are doing this terrible thing, sees that the violence they are doing, the violence that has become their way of life, has de-humanized them, has left them ignorant people who hurt others without thought.  And the sight of a human being de-humanized by the sin he is committing is so horrifying to the Son of God that it outweighs even the pain of crucifixion.  Jesus loves his executioners so much he wants them forgiven, reconciled, restored – as the centurion will be restored, praising God by the end of this story.

Jesus loved the centurion, his head executioner. And Jesus loves us too –every bit as much.  Even though we sometimes don’t know what we’re doing, even though we are sometimes de-humanized by our own sins.

The great poet W.H. Auden was asked once why he was a Christian, instead of a Buddhist or a Confucian, since all these religions share similar ethical values. And Auden said, “Because nothing in the figure of Buddha or Confucius fills me with the overwhelming desire to scream, “’crucify him’.”

Like the crowds in Jerusalem who one day shouted Hosanna, and  days later shouted out for him to be crucified, we are not innocent bystanders.  We are the same people shouting Hosanna and Crucify him.  As the Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge says, “The liturgy of Palm Sunday is set up to show you how you can say one thing one minute and its opposite the next.  This is the nature of the sinful human being.”  It’s the nature of each one of us.

On the cross we see Jesus identifying with the innocent victims of the world, those put to death, mired in poverty, stuck in hopelessness, homelessness, or despair, those who watch as their loved ones suffer, those who have lost their way and those who have nothing left – we see Jesus giving his life for them.

But it is not only the suffering victims Jesus identifies with on the cross, it is the other extreme too: the torturers and perpetrators, the arrogant and the guilty.  When Jesus says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do,” he is taking on the burden of the innocent and the guilty.  And as we shout the words Hosanna and Crucify him, we recognize that we are both of these things – the victims who need to be rescued, and the sinners who are causing their suffering.

As Rutledge says: “he makes himself one, not only with my pain but with my sin–because I myself, and you yourselves, and all of us ourselves, are sometimes victims of others and sometimes torturers of others and sometimes both, and when we recognize this we are, as Jesus says to the scribe, ‘not far from the kingdom.’”

So here we are, on this dizzying roller coaster of a day, hovering on the brink of disaster, careening madly downhill into Holy Week.  And yet here we are, not far from the kingdom of God.  As we veer downhill, there is one still point in this turning, churning world: the Son of God is motionless, suspended on the cross – fixed there by his love for you and for me.