April 20 2025, Everything is Gift: Easter Sunday

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Everything is Gift

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church

by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

given April 20, 2025

Easter Day: John 20:1-18

Alleluia! Christ is risen. Happy Easter! I love Easter. I love it because no matter what is happening in the world, we celebrate. Easter teaches us that even when the worst happens—even when violence, anger and hatred, murder of the innocent and abuse of power all happen—there is something that is stronger, and that is the love of God in Christ which is powerful enough to raise the dead. There is no force that can quench God’s love and the presence of God here on earth, not just in heaven.

And we need this today, this impossible paradox at the heart of Christian faith. Even though the worst does happen, life and love and joy and resistance are still possible. Love wins because it cannot be killed. Now that statement is a little misleading because love “winning” makes it sound like someone “loses,” and God does not operate a zero-sum universe. The only losers in the victory of love are those who exclude themselves, and even that is artificial, because everyone intrinsically belongs. My own belief is that God spends eternity seeking those who have excluded themselves, endlessly offering the chance to heal. Everyone, without exception.

Bishop Desmond Tutu was the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of South Africa who spent his life nonviolently opposing apartheid. He was also active against other kinds of oppression, including the Chinese occupation of Tibet, so much so that in 2006 the Dalai Lama gave him the “Light of Truth” award for his efforts to end Chinese oppression of Tibet. And in these efforts, Bishop Tutu refused to demonize the Chinese government. He reminded the Chinese government that they had helped Black South Africans in the struggle against apartheid, and based on that history, he called on them to do the right thing toward Tibet. Bishop Tutu insisted that if you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. He insisted on the indigenous African concept ubuntu which means we are all family, we are all interconnected. This is the truth for which the Dalai Lama honored him with the Light of Truth award. This is the truth that empowered Jesus to say to his murderers, as he was dying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

As Rex said in his sermon last night, Bishop Tutu used to tell the South African government, “you may have the guns and all the power, but you have already lost. Come, join the winning side.”  What does the winning side look like, really? How are we to operate, acting as if the side of truth and love and justice are winning, even if for all the world it looks like these things are losing, and badly?

When the risen Jesus encountered his beloved Mary Magdalene in the garden, she did not recognize him. Let that sink in. They had spent countless hours together. She had watched him die a terrible death. She knew what his ravaged face and body looked like, and she knew what he looked like when he was well and healthy. Jesus was not resuscitated to the form she was familiar with. He was resurrected to something different, something she did not immediately understand. When she did finally recognize him because he called her by name, because he showed that he knew her and loved her, she embraced him with an embrace that never ever wanted to let go. And yet he told her, “do not cling to me.”

I believe we are being called to open our fists and let go of control, let go of the need to possess. As unrecognizable as Jesus was to Mary that first sacred day of the new creation, I believe the faith to which Jesus calls us today may not be immediately recognizable either. We are seeing how deep are the distortions of a worldview that embraces dominance as its primary value. This dominance has impacted everything—even our own faith and culture. Although it looks like it has all the power and all the control, I believe it is dying, and it is doing tremendous damage in the process—harming the innocent, demonizing anyone different, and taking the balance of the earth’s fragile ecosystems with it. But just as the spring is sending up countless shoots of new life—just as Jesus appeared to Mary in a new form she came to recognize over time—so too our faith is invited to be born again, to wake up to its essence which has never changed. When Jesus called Mary Magdalene by name, she knew him and knew herself again also. It may be that we need an unfamiliar voice to call us back to who we have always been.

A good friend of mine is a Lakota Sundancer. I had the honor to support him at two Sundances, which are a powerful and sacred four-day ceremony of prayer. During that time I was invited to make offerings to the Creator and the Earth. Being a European American I overthought this. What could I offer the God and the Earth that did not already belong to them? For example if I were to offer sage or tobacco, wouldn’t I just be offering the Earth back to itself? Now of course this is always true in every circumstance. There is nothing I have that does not come from God. After a long time thinking about this and observing nature, I noticed something obvious. In creation, in nature, everything offers itself extravagantly to everything else. The only thing we can offer, and the thing we should offer, is ourselves in service to the good of all life.

Rather than seeing nature as resources available for the good of humans, each life form has intrinsic value. There is an incredible, wildly abundant natural order. Each plant and animal and life form, by being itself, nourishes and teaches everything else. There is wild extravagance and there is enough. Jesus stepped into this natural order and offered the only thing he could—himself. This was not so that a bloodthirsty God could tolerate sinful humanity. It was simply what happened when he kept doing the right thing no matter what. That is all any of us can offer, and it is precisely what is natural, what is needed, and what is sacred.  It is precisely what is called for in today’s world. It is what love, the verb, looks like. Even though the human world as it now is may teach us otherwise, nature has not forgotten how the Creator made us to operate.

Wahinkpe Topa “Four Arrows” is a Cherokee Indigenous elder who has written many books, including his latest called Restoring the Kinship Worldview. In a recent interview he spoke about having hope during times like this. He said that we must “redefine hope as the certainty that what we are doing is the right thing to do regardless of the outcome.”[1]

The right thing to do begins with remembering we are all related. We are related to everyone who voted in this country. We are related to every guest and immigrant. We are related to the First Nations people who graced this continent far before Europeans arrived. We are related to the robins and the earthworms, to pine trees and buckthorn. We are related to Martin Luther King and Donald Trump, Charles Manson and Dorothy Day, Vladimir Putin and Mark Carney and everyone in this room and neighborhood and city.

The right thing to do is very simple, even if it is not easy. It is outlined in our baptismal covenant which we will say soon. Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers? Will you keep learning and not try to go it alone, will you keep praying, opening yourself to the power and love and wisdom of God? Will you continue to resist evil and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? Will you resist the temptation to believe you cannot make a difference in this world, and instead say no when evil presents itself, and when you fail, simply repent and start again? Will you by word and deed live Jesus’ Way of Love? Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice & peace and respect the dignity of every human being, and I would add, respect the intrinsic value of all life?

If you will do these things regardless of the outcome, you will be offering yourself for the good of all life, as Jesus did, as creation itself teaches us to do. Everything is a gift. There is nothing we can ultimately possess or keep. But we can do the right thing. We can surrender to the flow of God’s love and God’s will in each moment, letting go of the illusion of control and paying attention to what is asked for in each moment, offering the unique gifts we each carry in this world. This is all we can do and just as in nature, it is enough. Alleluia, Christ is risen!

[1] See Four Arrows, YouTube video with Veterans for Peace, “Worldview and Peace Workshop,” accessed April 20, 2025 at https://youtu.be/j9ne-fq0iIY?si=SAd4JEtfx-sXQqHi

10am Service