Easter Day     4/4/2010

          Isaiah 65:17-25; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Luke 24:1-12

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

            In the prophet Isaiah, the Lord says, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.”  The New Testament is filled with the conviction that is actually happening:  in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has begun a new creation, drawing us into a new configuration in which sin and death are overcome, a new creation in which eternal life, in unimaginable bliss, have been opened up to us.  A new creation!

Have you ever pored in wonder over pictures of fractals—those intricate patterns which emerge out of chaos, and resemble galaxies and nebulas, ferns, paisley prints, fantastic creatures, or snowflakes?

No one much knew about fractals when most of us were born; the term didn’t even exist until it was coined by a mathematician in 1975.  We probably never studied them in school, though now they show up in elementary school math classes.  Now terms like “fractals,” “strange attractors,” and the “butterfly effect,” aspects of “chaos theory,” are part of popular culture, and they have significant technological applications as well.  They’ve even been used to get a handle on the behavior of the stock market.  Who would have thought that the discipline of mathematics would generate such a wild new field?  Albert Einstein famously said that mathematics is thinking God’s thoughts after him.  Apparently we haven’t gotten to the bottom of God’s thoughts yet!

In the beginning, as the Book of Genesis describes it, the Spirit of God moved over unformed chaos and ordered it:  separating light from darkness, waters from solid earth, earth from sky, sea from dry land.  And then God created from these basic elements living things of increasing, amazing complexity:  stars and planets, plants and trees, fish and birds, mammals, and, as creation’s crowning glory, humankind, male and female, made in God’s own image and likeness.  Though intended as liturgical poetry and theology, not science, this Genesis account has remarkable resonance with the current scientific story. 

For instance:  We’re all familiar with how chaos comes out of order; one only has to consider how housework doesn’t stay done, or take a look at my desk.  But in some mysterious way—Genesis says by the Spirit of God—primeval chaos is ordered into increasingly complex forms:  order comes out of chaos—like fractals. 

A fractal is a geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.  Mathematically, they can be generated by iteration, that is, doing the same operation over and over.  But fractals aren’t just mathematical generations.  They’re all over nature:  snowflakes, ferns and trees, coastlines and mountains, even cauliflower and broccoli, are familiar examples.

And they offer us an interesting metaphor of what we’re here for today.  The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a fractal, in which every Easter celebration, every Eucharist, and every one of us, is a component part.

A week ago, we noted that in every Eucharist we recall Palm Sunday and Jesus’ “triumphal entry” into the holy city:  At the beginning of the Great Thanksgiving, we echo the welcoming cries of “Hosanna!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest!”  That part of the story was the beginning of Holy Week, and it continues in what follows:  We re-tell how, on the night he was handed over to suffering and death, Jesus reconfigured the meaning of Passover—drew is, by the “strange attracter” of love, into a new significance without losing the old--and initiated a new covenant:  He took bread, blessed and broke it, gave it, and told his friends, “This is my Body.”  He took the cup of wine, and told them, “This is my Blood, poured out for you and for all.”  So our Eucharistic prayer re-members both Maundy Thursday and the Last Supper and Good Friday, Jesus’ loving, self-giving, saving death.  We “re-member” these things, not simply by recalling them or portraying them symbolically, but by configuring them here and now:  We re-present them, so that they’re living, powerful, saving actualities in the present.  It’s like a fractal:  every Eucharist is an iteration, a repetition and a living reproduction of the whole great Event.  If the world endures long enough for there to be a hundred billion celebrations of the Eucharist, each one will faithfully re-present Christ’s Body and Blood, and his redemptive death for us, and convey its full saving power.

If this were it, it would be amazing enough.  But there’s more.  The “Paschal Mystery,” of which each Eucharist is a fractal-like iteration, includes both Jesus’ death and his resurrection.  But how – where is the resurrection?  Where is it in this living picture?

The answer is almost too much to bear.  The resurrection is in us—in us who receive Communion, and take the life of Christ into our own lives.  Christ is risen, and now he lives in us.  We are his Body.  We bear the Paschal Mystery within ourselves, like a piece of a fractal which reproduces the whole.  Think of it:  We carry in these fragile mortal lives the imperishable seed of Christ’s own life:  we are becoming part of that wondrous new creation, where wolf and lamb feed together, there is no longer any hurt or destruction, where sin and death have been conquered, and Life reigns—eternal life, endlessly blissful.

At every Eucharist we pray for the Holy Spirit to bless and consecrate the bread and wine—and us ourselves—as the Spirit moved over chaos and brought forth creation, so the Spirit moves over the ordinary elements of our lives and brings forth the new creation.  Our frail, half-real, broken, inadequate, chaotic lives are being re-made, reconfigured in the image of God, so we will be able to say, with Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

The word “fractal” actually means “broken.”  A fractal’s shape often looks broken; it’s always too complex to be analyzed geometrically.  And they can be broken, some of them into an indefinite number of pieces which all re-produce the pattern of the whole.  Yet these pieces, these iterations, in nature and sometimes even in mathematics, are not just carbon copies; they may approximate the whole in their own distinctive way.  So also with us:  Christ living in us doesn’t destroy our own distinctive personality, but rather fulfills and completes it.  The bread of the Eucharist, Christ’s Body, is “broken” for us—and we each receive, not just some tiny portion of Christ in his death and resurrection, but Christ whole and entire, yet accommodated to and expressed through our own unique being—fractal-like.  Christ lives in us; so death will not be our destruction, but instead will bring us to our own proper perfection, and open for us the gate of eternal life.

No wonder Paul wrote, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”  Being a follower of Christ is not only a way to get along better in this world, to be nice to others, be more generous, forgiving, peaceable and patient.  It’s not just about becoming better people.  It’s about resurrection.  It’s about re-producing in our own lives, fractal-like, Christ’s death and resurrection, and entering into the outskirts of eternal life, which is to be our inheritance, even here and now.

“In fact,” Paul continues, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits.”  Christ’s resurrection is the beginning of the new creation.  Like the flutter of the butterfly’s wing which changes the weather of the world, that one event, Christ’s resurrection, changes everything.  That’s what Paul implies by “Christ the first fruits”:  he is the beginning of the ultimate triumph of God, which leads finally to the destruction of death itself.  And we get to share in that!

Every Easter, every Eucharist, every Christian, reproduces the Paschal Mystery.  Every Easter, every Eucharist, every Christian, is the seed, the beginning, of the new creation.  That new creation is our inheritance, and now there’s nothing left to fear.  We can go forth into the world to continue Christ’s work in it, confident that “in all things”—success and set-backs, joy and sorrow, life and death—“we are more than conquerors through him who loves us.”  Death is conquered, we are free!  Christ has won the victory!

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!