We Live By Faith (Easter 2025)

“Are you out of your freakin’ minds?”

Now that’s a better translation of what the men said to the women on that first Easter morning.  Our reading this morning says “these words seemed to them an idle tale.”  But believe me, at that very moment when the women returned from the tomb and blurted out their story, the men thought they were delirious. Out of their freakin’ minds.

You see, some things are hard to believe.  If you tell someone that a dead body didn’t stay dead, chances are they’re not going to believe you.  Because it’s hard to believe things that go against our usual way of thinking. Give me the facts. I want to see it with my own eyes. I want proof. Even though he didn’t believe them, Peter gets up and runs to the tomb. He wants to see for himself. And he does, and he’s amazed – but he still doesn’t believe. Not yet. It takes time. Faith isn’t easy.

Faith means believing, trusting in things for which we don’t have proof.  It might seem hard. It might take time. It might go against the wisdom of our age.  It might go hand in hand with doubts and questions.  But faith is essential.  Faith is essential to life. We all live by faith.

Now I’m not talking specifically here about Christian faith or even religious faith more broadly.  I’m talking about the faith that underpins the life of pretty much everyone on this planet.  For all of us, from the most fervent believer to the most hardened skeptic, many of the most important things in our lives, we take on faith.

I believe that my wife loves me.  Now, I can’t prove that beyond any doubt. I certainly wouldn’t ask her to prove it to me, that would only get me in trouble.  But I believe it.  I have faith.  And I base my life on it. Now some might argue that love is an illusion, that it’s simply a trick our brain plays on us based on electrical signals and chemical reactions, and they would say I can’t prove otherwise.  And the truth is, they’re right, I can’t.  But I have faith.  I believe in love not because I can prove it, but because I experience it to be true and because that faith helps me make sense of my life – no, it doesn’t just help me make sense of my life, it actually enriches my life, makes my life better.

We have faith in a lot of important things.  We believe that there is good and bad, right and wrong, and that at some fundamental level these things aren’t just preferences or social conventions.  We believe, or at least we long to believe, that our lives matter in some sort of ultimate way, that our lives have meaning and purpose beyond our own invention.  For the philosophers among us, you know that we humans believe that we have free will, though we can’t actually prove it.  For fans of the Matrix movies and quantum physicists, you know that each one of us takes it on faith that there actually is a world out there that corresponds to our experience of it.

None of these things can be proved.  All are taken on faith.  And we believe them because we experience them as true, because they enable us to make sense of our lives and most importantly, because they enrich our lives.

Of course, after a while, we tend to get into a comfortable pattern, where these things we believe in kind of all hang together and make sense, and eventually we take them for granted and even forget that our lives are based on faith.

But what about when something new happens?  When an event takes us by surprise, when someone makes a claim that we find hard to believe?  Well, often we respond as follows:

“You’re out of your freakin’ mind!”

About a hundred years ago, a scientist and priest named Georges Lemaitre proposed that our entire universe, including space and time itself, had its beginning in an infinitely dense singularity which exploded in an event that came to be called the Big Bang. That energy expanded rapidly in all directions to become the stars and galaxies and eventually the people which we observe today. The initial reaction to Lemaitre’s theory from the scientific community was a profound skepticism. When he presented his theories to Albert Einstein, Einstein’s response to Lemaitre was that “your mathematics is correct, but your physics is abominable.” Or in other words, “you’re out of your freakin’ mind!”

Einstein couldn’t bring himself to believe that the universe had a beginning in time. If we can’t count on the stability of the universe, what can we count on in this life? And of course, there was no way to replicate Lemaitre’s theory on the origin of the universe in a lab. Yet, over time, as Einstein began to see that Lemaitre’s theory was starting to make sense of some of the observed astronomical data, he started to come around. Six years later, at one of Lemaitre’s lectures, Einstein stood up, applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”

Today, pretty much of all of us believe in the Big Bang Theory.

On that first Easter morning, the women returned from the empty tomb and told the men what they had seen and heard.

And the men responded, ‘Are you out of your freakin’ minds?”

After all, if the dead won’t even stay dead, what can we count on in this universe?

Today we report once more the claim made by those first witnesses that on that first Easter morning, the tomb was found empty, and that by evening, Jesus, risen from the dead, had appeared to a small number of witnesses, to the women, to Peter, to the eleven apostles.

When we make that claim, don’t be surprised that some people will tell us we’re delirious.  Some won’t want to hear another word.  Some will ask for proof.  Others will want to see for themselves.

But some of us will believe.  Why will we believe?  Not because we don’t have doubts and questions, we do.  But we’ll come to believe for the same reasons that we believe some of the other big things that underpin our lives. We’ll believe because we trust what others have told us. We’ll believe because we encounter God as alive and present. We’ll believe because our faith in the resurrection helps us make sense of our experience, of experiences of awe and wonder and mystery. And perhaps most importantly, we will believe because we find that our lives are greatly enriched as a result. New possibilities emerge. Life overcomes death, hope banishes despair, love becomes stronger than hate or indifference. The world becomes bigger, and more beautiful.

We all live by faith. Faith changes everything.

My marriage is hugely enriched because I have faith that my wife loves me.

My life is so much more awesome because I believe that it has meaning and purpose, and that I have the ability to choose, and that my choices matter.

Easter works that way too.  Check it out for yourself the way Peter did, and be amazed.

Easter will enrich our lives beyond our imagination.  It will let us dream dreams the way that Isaiah did, dreams of a day when there will be no more weeping, when everyone will live out a lifetime, when there will be no more violence or war, when the wolf and the lamb will lie down together.

Easter will let us do the unthinkable the way Peter did when he walked boldly into the home of Cornelius, the Roman soldier, his sworn enemy, and proclaimed to him the Easter story and welcomed him as a brother, in total violation of the rules and conventions of his day.

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb.  They found the stone rolled away and Jesus’ body missing.  They were perplexed.  But suddenly they had a vision of angels who told them that Jesus is alive.  And the women remembered what Jesus himself had said and they ran to tell the apostles.

The apostles responded, “Are you out of your freakin’ minds?”

But what if the women’s testimony is true?

May your faith be strengthened, may your lives be enriched beyond imagination and may the joy of Easter be yours, today and always.

Amen.

Homily:  Easter Sunday, Yr C, April 20 2025, Trinity

Readings:  Isaiah 65.17-25; Ps 118.1-2,14-24; Acts 10.34-43; Luke 24.1-12