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McCoy Sermon

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Long ago in southern Germany, in Bavaria, during the late middle ages there was a custom in many of the Catholic churches of that region that was quite unusual. At the end of the Easter church service, the Easter Mass, the priest would leave the altar and
come down among the people and lead the congregation in what was called the "Risus Paschalis" which means "the Easter laughter." The priest would tell funny stories and sing comical songs, and the church would ring with laughter. Of course the
point was obvious, the laughter echoing through the church was a tangible testimony to the merriment born out of the tidings of this great day, Jesus Christ alive and loose among us. All the forces that conspired to lay him in his tomb, the fury, the
lovelessness, the violence, the vaunted powers of kings and empires, they are made a laughing stock.

Do you get it? It's a thing to ponder. The laughter of God, the laughter of his people rolling out into the spring time world from doors and windows of churches where the story is told on an Easter day.

Laughter is a wonderful gift of God, and those ancient mediaeval Catholics in Bavaria were right to give a space for mirth and laughter in the Easter worship of the church.

But on this greatest day of the church year I want to be sure that none of us miss that utterly unique thing that is the Risus Paschalis, the Easter laughter.

Certainly the most obvious element of this laughter is joy. But I think there is a great deal more than just joy. You see the laughter of this day is the laughter that bursts forth when the totally unexpected, the completely unanticipated, the utter surprise of
a thing strikes us.

Did you notice in the Easter Story, it's only the women who go to the tomb. Where are the men? We know don't we. They are off somewhere sunk in a consuming sorrow.
They have crept off in a corner like hurt animals, and their hurt is devastating. Well, what else do you do when your world has tumbled in ruins about you. They had not only forsaken their Christ, their Christ had forsaken them. He had died!

Can you see them on that dark Friday, gazing, at a safe distance, at the figure writhing on that death machine, the cross. Can you see them clap their hands to their heads like people who had suddenly awakened from a stupor and mutter to themselves,
"How could we have been so brainless to imagine this man was really any different from the rest of us? That he wouldn't suffer, and bleed, and be overtaken and brought down to death like the rest of us mortals. How could we have believed that he stood
somehow immune, and most surely immune from a catastrophe like this?"

If only Jesus had just been a teacher, if only that had been his claim; dispensing wisdom like a kind of Socrates, or teaching us the rules of sound reasoning or logic like Pythagoras.

Then his death might not have mattered so much. For his teaching could have lived on like the wisdom of all the ancients. They died but their truths outlived their discoveries. But this one, he wouldn't just teach about God's love. No, instead he proclaimed himself to be the one who could fill the great void between God and us. He claimed to be able in himself to restore a world all out of joint and lost.

In himself He challenged the awful majesty of death. The disciples were thinking, "How could we ever have imagined that he was thus somehow sheltered and secure from the hands of sinful people who could so easily lay a strangle hold on him and sling him crossed against the sky and in a few short hours be rid of him?"

Surely that is why the men were so conspicuously absent.

But it must be noted that the women in the story came to the tomb with no better expectation. They came only to offer a dead man their melancholy memorials.

Trudging up the path in the early dawn, they were thinking, "Here lies our well beloved nobleman. Of course, he failed, but we bring these last loving tender offices to his grave because we don't want to forget that for one bright shining moment he brought us comfort and light; and he gave us a dream of a father in heaven and a savior in whom we might find peace." Well at least we have him as a memory.

Don't you see, not one in this cast of characters at the dawn of this Easter day expected what was soon to break upon the world. The concern of these women was only, "Who will roll the stone away for us?" They were just seeking the dead among the dead. The world was back in its usual groove.

Psychologically we are all ill equipped for what happened next. At first it is stark, panicky terror. The women come stumbling back out of a graveyard. Their ointments and herbs prepared for a dead body are left spilled and forgotten along the path. They
take flight.

But then like some huge impending tidal wave, the truth of what they have seen begins to break over them. Rumbling down in the core of their souls there is surging upward the conviction of that thing most incredible. It's consequence, no longer an object of terror, but an unspeakable joy. Can God really do this? Can the whole course and pattern of the universe, life to death, be overturned so that now it reads, life, death…..life? Can you see the radiant smile that comes upon the faces of these women? When our mental equipment proves inadequate to a situation, when the irony is so deep, when the apparent contradiction to all we have known and believed is too blatant, then laughter takes over. It is our way of testifying to something that breaks through all the tried and true processes of history. When that tomb burst asunder, the smithereens flying through the world were the peals of Easter laughter.

And the church through all the ages passes on its merriment from generation to generation, like a baton, daring to tell the world that the very hinge of all of history turns right here. And now this old world with its iron laws and its fixed immutable patterns, is no longer that world at all. It is a world wild with possibility where the laughter of God booms out, and the son of God steps forth from a tomb…alive.

The laughter is contagious. The disciples are seized by this news, body and soul.
They are totally transformed people.

Those disciples took their merriment out across the Roman world and to any who would listen they would say,
"Do you remember the man who just, a short time ago, made his way along the way of sorrows, the one who was followed by his mother and a group of weeping women?
Do you remember the sound of the hammer on the nails, the wracking agony and the rattle of death as he breathed his last?
Listen now! He is alive!"

Much of the world both then and now laughed, the laughter of scorn and ridicule. But they who told the tale also laughed, and they were laughing because it was true. They were laughing because they had come to discover, as one author put it, that this
"wayside planet, bears as its chief treasure, one forsaken grave."

How odd that we, even in the church, should forget we hold this treasure. But far too often, come Monday morning, we lose the mirth of Easter. We lose the sense that it really happened right here in our world. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is as real as his death, and if we could but keep that centered in our lives, with all that it implies about where the real power of this world is, what counts, what is lastingly secure. But
sometimes, I fear, we're like that man in the allegory who spends his life looking for a marvelous flower. He is sure that contact with this precious bloom will change his life.
He is convinced that this miracle flower must be growing somewhere.

But all the while he fails to notice that he is carrying the seeds of this flower in his own pocket. He has only to sow them to bring his dream to reality.

If we would but let the seed of Easter grow within us, then as the psalmist put it, our mouth would be filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy.

My Christian friends, we carry in our pocket all we need to fill our life, and that is so because we carry in our faith the wonderful laughter that accompanies this day.

When we come to those times when it seems that the Christian faith is too weak and powerless a thing to contend against all the powers of the world that are loose out there. When we grow very weary of the crushing routine, or when sorrow mounts, or we just get lost, then give ear and listen very closely and we will hear from the throne of God a wondrous thing … laughter.

RISUS PASCHALIS
Psalm 126:1-6
Mark 16:1-8

Sermon preached by  Dr. John M. McCoy
At Highland Park Presbyterian Church
3821 University Boulevard
Dallas, Texas 75205

Easter Sunday
April 23, 2000
 

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