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Easter is Resurrection Sunday. Our liturgy begins with the great affirmation of life:

“Alleluia! Christ is risen!”
“The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!”

Easter Sunday challenges one’s deepest assumptions. If you could dig down to the deepest foundations of reality, would you find Life or Death?

Is the earth a garden of eternal beauty bursting with life? Or is the earth a tomb?

William Cullen Bryant, at the young age of 16, embraced the earth as a tomb when he wrote the poem Thanatopsis. English teachers everywhere consider this one of the great poems in the American anthology -- written by a teenager. The title means, “ Meditation on Death” or perhaps “Vision of Death.”

Bryant says, in death you will:

. . .mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock.

He says you will:

. . . lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world -- with kings,
The powerful of the earth -- the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre.

And of the emerging loveliness of spring he says:

. . . the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and,
poured round all,
Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,--
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.

A more clear minded approach to death would be hard to find. Not very comforting, but there you go. The loveliness of spring is “but the solemn decorations all/Of the great tomb of man.”

Not very pleasant thoughts on a Easter morning, but appropriate. The great acclamation of Easter does not deny the reality of death. It does not encourage us to close our eyes to death but challenges us to look deeply into death and see through the other side a reality that is deeper still.

As common as death is, there remains rising up in every heart, an eternal longing for Life. So people gather on Sunday morning to hear the great acclamation of Easter.

Is it possible that it is true?

Is it possible that Jesus’ disciples were greeted by the Resurrected Lord?

Is it possible that the disciples truly encountered a reality that removed forever the sting of death?

It is possible. It is more than possible. It is true.

William Cullen Byrant concludes his poem with a hollow hope:

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but,
sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Pleasant dreams? Forget it. Today we greet the risen Lord. Life prevails over death. Believe it and live.

“Alleluia! Christ is risen!”
“The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!”