The Ending of this Comedy: Love Wins

April 20, 2025 - Easter Sunday

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Happy Easter, Church of the Epiphany! It’s so good, especially good to be with you this morning. I’m going to start my first Easter sermon today with a joke. Our priest in Charlotte, the one who recommended me for the priesthood and the one who some of you met at my ordination, my good friend Father Josh Bowron, well, he always started his Easter sermon with a joke, and it was usually a really lame one, like mine is today. I’ll tell you why he starts with a joke in a minute. So, my joke for this Easter, hopefully my first of many, some of you may have heard it... it goes like this.

What do you do when all your chocolate Easter candy is gone? You give Peeps a chance.

Yes, that’s a lame joke, some of you probably didn’t get it, but it’s a joke nonetheless. Jokes are appropriate on Easter Sunday morning because we are happy, we’re laughing, we’re celebrating, and there is good, good news, but most of all, we are reminded that this life is a comedy, not a tragedy. Now it’s not a comedy in terms of Adam Sandler or Amy Poehler or Will Ferrell movies. It’s not Chris Rock or Jerry Seinfeld or Sarah Silverman stand-up. But it is a comedy in dramatic structure in that this life, our story, it has a happy ending, and not a tragic one. There are comedies and there are tragedies, and this life is a comedy.

This story we find ourselves in, especially true on this Holy Week but also in the grand scheme of things from the creation in Genesis to the kingdom of God as found in Revelation, it ends not with the violent and the powerful having the last word, but in resurrection and in happiness and in beloved community and in glory. We know the ending is a good one because of today, because of Easter, because Jesus is risen and because death and sin have been defeated, once and for all. This life, for all its ups and downs and toil and strife and anxiety and difficulty, it is a dramatic comedy.

Now, that does not mean that all have recognized this truth quite yet, that Jesus has defeated sin and death, that life is a comedy. Not even all Christians have recognized it. We do know that God, the Almighty, was born incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary as Jesus Christ, truly human and yet also of one being with God the Father. We believe these things, or at least we try to; we profess them in the Nicene Creed every week, we’ll say them in a little bit today. We also know Jesus was crucified on a cross, as we read twice last week, and that today he has risen from the dead, as detailed in our Gospel reading. That was something John and Peter and Mary could hardly believe was true, but then they could not stop telling everyone about it in the years that followed as they built the first-century church. We know that Jesus ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of God and that the Holy Spirit descended on those who would live Christ’s way of love. These are things on which most Christians can agree.

But there are undoubtedly some parts in there that have gotten a little convoluted, a little confusing over the last few centuries. My family and I went to see the new animated movie King of Kings yesterday in a theater in Holland, a movie produced by Angel Studios. The movie (clearly intended for kids) tells the entire story of Jesus, birth through resurrection, almost word for word from the Gospels. I think it was good for our girls to see a portrayal of these stories, cartoon visuals to go alongside Disney characters, visuals that connect with the words they hear in church. Jane leaned over during the portrayal of the Last Supper with the bread and the wine, and she told her sisters, “Hey, that’s what dad says in church.” We loved that.

But at times, it was clear the movie was not written by a room full of Episcopal priests and theologians. And that's okay. The focus occasionally fell hard on the brokenness of man, on our inherent sinfulness, on our need for sacrifice and atonement. It also landed more on the miracles than we tend to, less on the teachings, the life of service. Now these are not bad focuses on their own, I think the movie and the traditions that lean in those directions do have their strengths, but here at Epiphany and in the Episcopal Church at large, we know that there is one word that leads the way when it comes to Christ and the crucifixion, and really in the entirety of the story of God-with-us. That word, of course, is love.

We know because of the resurrection, because of Easter, we know that love wins. We know that violence loses, that domination loses, that separation loses, that brokenness loses, that sin loses, that death loses. We know that love wins.

While some in this room may have heard preached from pulpits that few (if any!) make it to heaven so we all must be on our best behavior, at all times, we must not make mistakes, grace and mercy be damned... while some may have heard that we are in a war, and if we do not fight the evil other for Jesus or for some definition of a Christian nation, we will end up losing... while some may have heard that only the elect few are chosen by God (and of course, those who preach that are the elect and others are not)... while some may have heard that those who look different or act different or love different from the dominant class are sinners doomed to an eternity burning alone in hell... while some of you may have heard all those things from fellow Christians, let me assure you today on Easter Sunday 2025 that we know that our God is love, impossibly abundant sacrficial love, and that love always wins.

Theologians throughout the centuries, though they may be oft-ignored today, they have pointed to the resurrection as proof of this, of Jesus’s ultimate victory over sin and death. I mentioned during our Advent book study back in December that in some medieval art, Jesus is depicted as descending into hell on Good Friday and Holy Saturday to save all who were lost. There is plenty of debate between and within Christian traditions about who was saved in those days between Jesus’s crucifixion and his resurrection, about what “descended into hell” means in the Apostles’ Creed, even about the existence of hell itself. We are not sure about these things, and anyone who says they are sure is lying.

But I was drawn to a poem this week by Ruth Etchells; some of you may have heard this before. Ruth Etchells was a leading figure in the Church of England in the late twentieth century, only passing away in 2012. She was called “the best female bishop we never had” in her obituary; she was dean of a prominent Anglican ordination college in Durham, England, before women were allowed in positions of authority, and she led commissions throughout the English church. Her poem is called “The Judas Tree,” and I’m going to read it in full here for you in hopes that today you can see the comedy, the happy ending of Easter more fully. It goes like this.

In Hell, there grew a Judas Tree, Where Judas hanged and died

Because he could not bear to see,

His master crucified

Our Lord descended into Hell,

And found his Judas there

For ever hanging on the tree,

Grown from his own despair

So Jesus cut his Judas down,

And took him in his arms

“It was for this I came” he said,

“And not to do you harm

My Father gave me twelve good men

And all of them I kept

Though one betrayed and one denied

Some fled and others slept

In three days’ time I must return

To make the others glad

But first I had to come to Hell

And share the death you had

My tree will grow in place of yours

Its roots lie here as well

There is no final victory

Without this soul from Hell”

So when we all condemned him

As of every traitor worst

Remember that of all his men

Our Lord forgave him first.

God’s love extends even to Judas, of course it does. And first to Judas. I just love that.

Friends, your understanding of the resurrection this morning, your history with Easter, it may be different from mine, especially on this, my first Easter as your priest. We have all taken different paths to get here this morning. You may personally lean into the atonement narrative, on the necessity of the cross because of our and Adam's sins, on the love of God so abundant that he had to suffer the worst sort of death in our place, to understand all we might go through and more. Or you may simply love the resurrection imagery of dying to one’s self and rising again as something new, imagery that shares a lot in common with our understanding of baptism, but imagery that is found in other religions as well. You may love Easter because of all the hope, hope in our own resurrection, hope in seeing loved ones again, hope in new life made clear in the flowers that bloom every spring. Or you may even be skeptical of the whole thing, of resurrection, of Jesus rising from the dead. That’s okay too. You’re still here this morning, and all are welcome wherever we are on our journeys of life and faith.

What I do want you to hear this morning though, no matter how you come to Epiphany on this Sunday of the Resurrection, is that love wins. Love wins. I want you to hear that the ending is a good one and that Christians can know it is a good one thanks to Easter. That death and sin have been defeated once and for all, and that violence and domination are never the answer, that those in power who rely on those ends, as Pope Francis put it this week, they are building in the construction site of Hell.

Choose love. Choose love today. It is enough. It is more than enough. Choose to follow a Savior who loved us enough to die, who defeated sin and was risen from the dead, and who is eager for us to join in on building the kingdom of God in our communities here and now, always, for ever, with love.

Amen.