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Homily

Easter Sunday 2011

24 April 2011

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

Daily Readings

Jesus Christ is Risen just as He said! Alleluia! Alleluia!

This joyful Easter proclamation goes out from the Church to the whole world today, symbolized by the Holy Father giving his Urbi et Orbi (to the Church and to the World) blessing at noon on Easter Sunday in St. Peter's square. It goes out from St. Lawrence as well, as we with incomparable joy join in the Easter proclamation that has given new hope to the world for 2000 years and counting. Jesus Christ is Risen. Jesus Christ is truly Risen. Jesus Christ is Risen just as He said! Alleluia! Alleluia!

This proclamation of our faith should be easy to make on Easter Sunday. The earth is springing to life around us, and the Church is filled with new colors, new flowers, new sounds of Alleluias ringing. Beginning with Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the Resurrection of our Lord, through the apostles, through the countless martyrs of the centuries from every corner of the world, to the millions who are joining the Church this Easter, to the newly baptized here at St. Lawrence who have professed the faith for the first time, to my own parents and godparents who perhaps passed this faith on personally to me, the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ has come down to us who will renew our baptismal promises today. The truth of Easter has beautifully captured since the time of Christ the lives of men and women who yearn to become saints, to live a new and more meaningful kind of life, and has been passed down to us today at great cost. It is a gorgeous faith that brings incomparable hope and meaning to the world and to each person within it. Jesus Christ is truly Risen from the dead, just as he said. We are proud to profess this together, to the world today, in Christ Jesus our Lord!

We are richly supported in our profession of faith today, so much so that our proclamation of Jesus' Resurrection is not so much something we individually generate, but something we receive and pass on. It is a faith in which we live and move and have our being. It is a faith that today of all days surrounds us, and captures us. We should not hesitate to join in the chorus of faith. Yet this does not mean that the renewal of our baptismal promises today should be automatic, or thoughtless. We do not say I do because everyone else is doing it, or because today in this Church is the easiest time all year to proclaim with boldness that I am a Christian. Quite the opposite, today's proclamation should be the most personal and difficult and meaningful proclamation of our lives. We should only say I do if our faith in the Resurrection this year is stronger than it has ever been, only if I can say I do from the depths of my own heart. If Jesus is truly Risen, then the renewal of our baptismal promises on Easter Sunday is the most dramatic moment of the year for me personally. Far from automatic, to renew our promises is to profess that we will live out the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus in a more dramatic way in the days ahead of us. There is no other way to look at it. So although we renew our faith today not only as individuals, but with the support of hundreds right next to us, and in chorus with billions of those in the church who have gone before us and stand with us, still in the profession of faith today we must say a deeply personal 'I do.' It is not automatic, but a challenge to witness today through our baptismal promises our deep personal relationship with Jesus, whom we have come to know intimately as the way, the truth and the life.

For as St. John has taught us - this is eternal life - to know the one true God, and to know Jesus Christ whom he has sent. When we renew our baptismal promises, it is a proclamation that we personally know Jesus. Christianity is nothing if it is not intensely personal. It is the most personal of religions, for God in taking on our humanity made it possible to know him and to love him in the most intimate of ways, and through him to enter more deeply into relationship with one another. It is a faith of intense personal love, a love that is the foundation of life, so much so that the definition of eternal life is to know the love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. If we think that eternal life pertains to who gets to live the longest, then we have missed the boat. Eternal life is the fruit of an intense personal relationship - eternal life is more vertical, having to do with dying and rising, than horizontal, pertaining to more time. Eternal life is to know Jesus Christ with all our mind, and our heart and our strength, and so our profession of faith must be the most personal of any proclamation we can make.

Sometimes the Easter proclamation of the Church limps because we rob the Resurrection of Jesus Christ of its intense immediate meaning for us. The Resurrection is not some vain hope of Christians, that by following archaic formulas and doing what God says without questioning, we might get to fly off and be an angel or spirit in some far off place at a time to be determined. No, eternal life is an ever-present and ever-deepening reality. It is an entering personally into the depths of love, a love once powerful enough to create the world and each person in it, but a love shown even more powerful on the cross, the source of the world's redemption. Eternal life, the life of the Resurrection, is nothing else than a love that is stronger than death. What is more, it is not a fantasy. It is not bonus time in a far off place for those who are lucky. It is not time at all. Eternal life is born of an intense personal love that was present to us at our baptism, is perfectly present to us now in the Holy Eucharist, and will be present to us tomorrow in the loving promises God has marked out for us.

Once again, the Resurrection is not a vain hope. For a Christian, it is a present reality. It is something we dare to profess in a world that will never completely understand it. When we turn away from sin and toward love, we grow younger. When we stop measuring life, and instead with self-forgetfulness give and receive the love brought near to us by the blood of the cross, we enter into Jesus' promise that whoever loses his life will save it. When we fulfill Jesus' commandment to love one another as He first loves us, we enter into a life not measured by time but by the depth of our relationships, a life supported by a love that death cannot destroy.

Against those who say the Resurrection of Jesus is an outdated myth, and suffering and death are sure arguments against God, those of us who renew our baptismal promises today proclaim a life that grows stronger as we follow Jesus through his suffering and death, an eternal life that we know to be true because in our conversation with Jesus, he has shown us how to die to self and to live in true freedom. We proclaim the Resurrection to be true because we are right now in the middle of a conversation of love between Jesus and His Father, and know personally the Holy Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

The Resurrection is not a vain hope! St. Augustine was fond of saying that he who was willing to share in our death out of love for us, will surely also share with us his life! If our Easter proclamation limps, it is because we have only just begun to understand God's love for us. For Christ redefined life forever through the prism of the cross, and revealed that since God is love, love will always set the parameters for life, not life the parameters of love. The Resurrection then is not some trick, it is the fruit of God's love for us, and it is a certain truth and hope for those of us who have entered deeply into a communion of love with God and with one another.

So with great faith, in the most personal of ways, with more strength than we have mustered before, I invite you to dare to renew with me the promises of your baptism. I invite you to do so not only in the comfort of this safe and holy place, but in solidarity with the millions of Christians who stand in harm's way on Easter Sunday because of their faith in the Resurrection, and in remembrance of the Christian martyrs of the past century, the bloodiest century for Christians in history. I ask you to dare to renew your baptismal promises in the midst of a Church that is exploding in many parts of the world, but is in danger of dying out in other places because of the lack of faith. I dare you to renew your faith right here and now, in the midst of a church that needs to repent of her sins, so that the light of the Gospel may have a new chance to reach the fasting growing demographic in the United States, fallen away Catholics, and those who no longer practice any faith. In rejecting my sins today, and in promising to walk in the light, in the most personal of ways I confess that my sins have discouraged those who might meet Jesus in me, and with me and through me, those who through my witness are yearning to stand in the light of His Resurrection. Most of all, I renew my baptismal promises so that I might renew my vocation to be holy, to be everything I have promised myself I would be, and to bring Jesus' mercy to my own family by what I say and do. I promise to live Jesus Resurrection by bringing his life, his light, his redeeming love that remakes the world perfectly from the inside out, to those souls he has given me to save.

All this we dare to proclaim with unparalleled faith, hope and love, on this beautiful Easter Sunday morning. For Jesus Christ is Risen. He is truly Risen! He is Risen just as he said! Alleluia! Alleluia!