The Long, Strange Trip - Easter Day Sermon 4-20-25

What a long, strange trip it’s been, these past eight days. A joyous Easter Day to you, and for those are celebrating concurrently the weekend’s other high holidays, happy Bicycle Day and happy 4-20. (If you don’t know about these two, go ask Alice or anyone you see vested in tie-dye on Haight Street.)

The Church’s long, strange trip began with the retelling of the performance art and political theater of Jesus’s Palm Sunday entrance into the holy city Jerusalem – the Christ, the Messiah, this long-hoped-for conquering king, to shouts of hosanna, riding not on a war-horse but on a donkey’s colt.

Our long, strange trip continued with the memory of the last supper Passover meal held in private in an upper room, where Christ Jesus startled and confused his disciples by stooping to wash their feet and offering them, in bread and wine, his Body and Blood.

And then, as Thursday turned to Friday, in a midnight garden darkened by melancholy and doubt, Christ Jesus prayed for an easy trip but accepted the hard one willed by his Father – betrayal and denial, arrest and torture, a death sentence pronounced and carried out. How quickly the crowd’s hopeful “hosannas” turned into the cynical “crucify him.”

Saturday, as his lifeless body lay in a borrowed tomb, our long, strange trip took a peculiar turn, tradition tells us, as Christ Jesus descended to the domain of the dead. Starting with the first patriarch and matriarch, Adam and Eve, and following the biblical story right through to his beheaded cousin John the Baptist, Jesus unlocked the gates of hell that held these faithful ones captive, freeing them for the promised eternal paradise they waited so long for.

And today, Easter Day, the Church’s long, strange trip catches up in the celebration of Christ Jesus’s own resurrection, a tale thought idle by the men, as told to them by the faithful women who went and found the open and empty tomb.

What a long, strange trip it’s been for the Church these past eight days.

So, what do we do now?

First, we give thanks today for Christ Jesus’s victory over sin, death, and the grave that his passion, death, and resurrection won for us.

Second, we celebrate that the trip isn’t over. We rehearse today what began two thousand years ago and what was forever in the mind of God. Our calendar may tell us that this Easter season continues for fifty days, but truly the season of Christ Jesus’s resurrection goes on until God’s creation of the new heavens and the new earth is complete; until not the Age of Aquarius, but the age of the Kingdom of God, when every ruler and authority and power – even death itself – is put under the risen Christ Jesus’s feet.

Third, we wait, and we hope for the day when all this will happen. But ours isn’t a passive hope. Ours is an active hope built on our faith and trust in God’s promises.

Ours is an active hope where we embrace our roles as co-creators of this new Kingdom, following the lead of God as we come to know God in Christ Jesus.

Ours is an active hope where we are converted daily by the loving-grace God freely gives us through the Sacraments and traditions of the Church to become ourselves more like Christ Jesus.

Ours is an active hope where we use this ever-maturing conversion of heart and mind and will to work to transform this world into something less violent and vulgar than it is, less combative and competitive than it is, less suspicious and siloed than it is.

Ours is an active hope because Christ Jesus is alive and well and with us. The Church is the counterculture that speaks and shares this Good News! Thanks to God’s abiding love, we are the Grateful Living! What a long, strange trip it’s been…and is…and will be. Peace!

Fr. Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Easter Day – April 20, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“The long, strange trip.”