Here We Are...

They will be making one of their two annual visits to church next week.  You know, the people you haven't seen since Christmas.  Among the "regulars," the Christmas and Easter crowd is definitely a source of mixed feelings.  On the one hand, it's really nice to have a full sanctuary, it makes you feel important and popular, like having a big crowd show up for your birthday party.  But on the other hand, you know they're mostly there for the wrong reasons, and you know you are probably not going to see them again until December.
Pastors can get nice and snarky about "them."  We wonder whether it matters at all that we're going to stand up and tell them what God has done in Jesus Christ.  I know I have preached two main types of Easter morning sermons: the challenge and the conciliation.  The logic behind the challenge is pretty solid: since this might be the only sermon (or maybe one of two) that they hear all year, give to them straight and true, preach the resurrection in all it's death defying glory and draw as much attention to the light breaking the darkness as you can.
But the logic behind conciliation can be good too, if you're really trying to "sell" the church: remember that they are obviously not strong in their faith, they are not very rooted at all in the worship of the community of faith, nor are they walking steadfastly down the path of discipleship.  They are "baby Christians," therefore give them the Good News with a bit of sugar coating, make them feel welcome... show them all the really warm fuzzy things that come with being part of a church.  Under no circumstances present anything really challenging, tell the story everyone expects to hear, and maybe, just maybe, they'll come back some other time.
As I typed that last paragraph, I realized that I'm not doing a very good job of making my point, because as I described the second type, a type I have almost certainly preached and a type that will be preached in many, many churches on Easter Sunday, I realized how I can't even sell it to myself.  I can't keep the sarcasm out of my tone, I can't make it sound like the right path to take.
So I guess what I ought to do is pay attention as to where the hazards are in presenting the resurrection as a challenge, what are the stumbling blocks that we try to avoid so desperately that we wander completely off the trail?  This is a list of descriptive factors about most of the preachers I know.  I am fairly certain that there are many people out there that don't fit this mold, but I generally try not to associate too much with them, because they're probably dangerous.
1. We don't want to be Priggish.  Thanks to C.S. Lewis for familiarizing me with the words prig and priggish, it allows me to avoid using profanity.  Over the past, say 40 years or so the pastoral vocation has become more and more friendly to introverted types.  This means a lot of the people who stand up in front of crowds of people to preach on Sunday morning are not in it because they like the attention, they are in it because they feel called to use the gifts of inward reflection in the service of the community.  This also means that, unlike some of our more extroverted brethren and sistren, we worry about being perceived as obnoxious and overbearing (not saying that introverts cannot be those things or that extroverts are always those things, I just mean that, for introverts becoming such is a major worry).  This means that the bombastic hell-fire sermon really doesn't fit with our idiom, it's just not who we are or what we tend to believe about God.  We want people to like us, and we don't really like loud, in-your-face people, so therefore, in a room with lots of new and strange people, we tend to get more reserved, often to a fault.
2. We equate challenging people with making people mad.  Mostly because we live in a world where disagreement almost always comes with lots of name calling and pissing contests.  Rhetoric as a general field of study has nearly shuffled off of the mortal coil, and people don't know how to present their opinions or refute the opinions of others without breaking rule number one.  Therefore, how do we challenge people, who are obviously fairly content doing whatever else they happen to do on 51 Sunday mornings a year, without making it sound like we're judging them, and thus making them angry.  Because, let's face it, nothing makes a 21st century American more red-in-the-face angry than being judged.
3. We are fairly certain that us preaching a sermon is an act of unmitigated grace.  Meaning that when the pressure grows, as it does on Easter week, we lean back into God's grace, instead of forward into the work and danger of discipleship (I know, I know grace is there too, but it's too hard to trust that when things are crazy, that's why we're having this talk).
4. Deep down, we wish all these people would like us enough to come see us every week.  That's right, "us," not God, "us," as in the preacher.  We will lament the cult of personality type preachers, we will be able to give treatises as to why Joel Osteen needs to be stoned to death, but deep down, because we're human, we want to be a rock star.  The peculiar mixed emotions are really seated in this reality, it's not enough that people come to church because it's what they're supposed to do on Easter, we want them to come because they like us.  Therefore, the C&E Christians really only remind us that without the prop of an institution and the rather hollow observance of what should be the holiest days of the year, we are really not all that interesting.
5. Ultimately, the fear that we have about bold proclamation is really just self doubt.  That self doubt can be important, if you use it to help develop understanding of the people who need to hear the Good News, but that same self doubt can lead you to relativism and equivocation faster than you can say, "boo," if you don't give full attention to the absolutely scandalous truth of the empty tomb.  No one wants to be the desperate ex-boyfriend begging for another chance, but that's what we become, and that's why there seem to be fewer and fewer people in church.
It's a psychological reality: differentiated people are more attractive.  That means that if you want to be attractive to others, know and accept who you are.  It's a lesson that the body of the church needs to learn.  It doesn't matter how physically attractive you are if you don't know who you are.  Should we then get stuck up and stuck on ourselves, as Paul liked to say, "by no means!"  And that's really the biggest danger of the challenging, pull no punches sort of Easter sermon, you are in danger of being a bully.  You can't approach it as a platform for your own genius, because it's not.  It doesn't make you sound logical and clever, it forces you into contact with mystery and something that makes no sense by most of the standard "rules" of life.
Easter Sunday is the perfect time to introduce people to an idea that can rock their world: resurrection.  Resurrection not just as something that happens somewhere over the rainbow, but as something that happens every day, in life, as we suffer together, as we rejoice together, as we live together.  Maybe that's where we go wrong, maybe we just think of resurrection as a one day a year sort of thing, and maybe that's where all "those people" got the idea.