Don’t live in a smaller world than God has given to you.

I wonder the times when we’ve had to live in a smaller world: either when that smaller world has been forced on you by circumstances beyond your control, or, when that limited world is one we have chosen.

I wonder about Easter’s promise today coming to the woman who arose at 4am this morning to go to the first of her two jobs so she could provide for her kids; or to the older man staring into space in the nursing home TV room; or to the young person, who cannot escape the forces of stagnation and despair that leave so many wondering – how do I get to next?

An Ivy League college class with one of the longest waiting lists is called "Existential Despair." It meets once weekly for seven hours, with the purpose of building capacity for living today.

The instructor was interviewed about the class recently. "This is not about hope or heroic stories," she said. "I'm not worried about their 20-year-old selves, but how they live at my age - with breast cancer, a kid who is addicted, a father dying, a career not working, so that when they are dealing with bigger things in life, they know they are not alone." [1]

That's a first draft of attempting a life of capacity.

How do we live in God's expansive Easter world instead of the smaller, limited worlds we have so readily offered to you and me?

Last year, over 2 million videos were posted on TikTok, instructing folks how to "bed rot." Bed rotting involves staying in bed for extended periods of time—not to sleep, but to do passive activities for those who feel too burned out from work, from school, family demands, social engagements. You just don't get out of bed because life is too hard.

On this Easter Day, can we resolve not to live in a smaller world than God has given to us? Another way to say that is to pose the question: Whose story will you live today? Your own or God's?

Pulling the covers up to shut the world out, or doom scrolling the latest political ploys, or the most recent viral Instagram post: these are pale versions of living.

But I wonder what happens to all those shallow approaches when our diagnosis is dire, when addiction is gripping, when the divisions are heartbreaking, when injustice is searing, or when hope is shattered into a million pieces?

Whose story will you live then?

On this Easter Day, do we have the courage to receive God's story in God's way—nothing less than life out of death, hope out of despair, love in the most unlikely, broken places. John's account of Easter begins in the dark...and with lots of running to and from the (now) empty tomb. What's distinctive about Easter's story in John's Gospel is that all this running echoes the endlessly creative life of God—bursting with Easter energy. Easter is not about human capacities or human possibilities. Easter is wholly about God's capacity and intention. Goodness and mercy don't happen because good people try hard. Death is transcended, not because goodness just naturally lives on. God acts at that boundary of life we call death and does something altogether new—we are confronted with God's possibilities and not our own. [2]

Don't live in a smaller world than God has given to you. Easter's gift is the gift of capacity. [3]

The father of cellist Yo-Yo Ma spent World War II in Paris, where he lived alone throughout the German occupation. In order to restore sanity to his world, he would memorize violin pieces by Bach during the day, and then at night, during blackout, he would play them alone in the dark. The sounds made by the reverberating strings held out the promise of order and hope and beauty. Later his son, Yo-Yo, took up his father's advice to play a Bach suite from memory every night before going to bed. Yo-Yo Ma says, "This isn't practicing, it's contemplating. You're alone with your soul." [4]

How does your life this Easter hold out the promise of order and hope and beauty? Please don't live in a smaller world than God has given to you.

"It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow..." [5] One of Toni Morrison's characters says that, facing deep loss. Easter's capacity doesn't just lead us to wonder and awe, but also it expands our capacity to bear loss and grief.

The women who went to the tomb on Easter morning, and the men who received their astonishing news all were still stuck in the small world where grief is a sad, necessary transaction. But at the empty tomb, the "circles and circles of sorrow" are transformed. They're not adapted—they're transformed. They're not accommodated—they're transformed. They're not transacted—they're transformed.

"Easter is about giving up the dubious comfort of the earthly, of human appearances where everything works or seems to," Anne Lamott has said. "It's about giving up on the superficial. Because you have to give up some false stuff to get to the true. We can throw all this stuff off the side of the boat! The stuff gets thrown overboard, and you come to with that having happened. You come to. This is the Easter message—that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God." [6]

Don't live in a smaller world than God has given to you.

Wander into New York City's jazz club, The Village Vanguard on a weekday evening, and who knows—you might be treated to a trumpet solo by Wynton Marsalis. Indeed, one Tuesday night, Wynton Marsalis, exalted in the jazz universe, was part of a small combo offering up a series of bebop classics. The set started off in an unremarkable way, but then Marsalis stepped to the microphone to offer a solo called "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You." It was a melancholy song, full of murmurs and sighs, and Marsalis performed it with deep feeling and expression. At the climax of the song, he played the final phrase in such a way that the trumpet seemed to give actual voice to the heartfelt words "I don't stand a ghost of a chance." The audience sat in awe, listening in silence.

Then it happened. At the song's most dramatic point, someone's cell phone erupted in a chirping, sing-song electronic melody. In an instant, the spell was broken. Marsalis paused for a beat, and stood motionless. His eyebrows arched. The embarrassed cell-phone owner fled the scene, and the conversation in the club grew louder.

Wynton Marsalis could have stepped down at that moment, quit the gig, disgusted. But he didn't move. Instead, he put his lips to his trumpet and replayed the stupid cell-phone melody note for note.

Then he played it again, and began improvising variations on the tune. The members of the audience stopped chatting and slowly began to listen. He changed keys once or twice and then seamlessly eased back into a ballad tempo, and in just a few minutes, finishing his improvisation, exactly where he had left off: "I don't stand ... a ghost ... of ... a ... chance ... with ... you ..."

Easter truly means you don't have to live in a smaller world than God has given to you!

Like a breathless race, like an earthquake, like startling interruption, like a whisper... Easter comes today and finds you and me—often struggling despite our best intentions and our noble resolve—to live beyond the too-small worlds in which we often find ourselves.

Friends: Pray any prayer, cry any tears, laugh with a joy you have long forgotten, embrace what you don't know for sure. Let God improvise hope in the middle of your life, use all your vital powers to receive this word of resurrection, and with your whole heart, give thanks to God who remembers you always, but just don't ever again live in a smaller world than God has given to you, on this day, by this word: Christ the Lord is Risen! Hallelujah!

Footnotes

1. "Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries," The New York Times, May 25, 2023. ↩
2. D. Cameron Murchison, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary - Year A, Volume 2: Lent through Eastertide (John 20). ↩
3. Note: I heard a version of this phrase from two different preachers twenty of more years apart. First, in a sermon by H. Louis Patrick, and then in a sermon by Sam Wells. I am indebted to both. ↩
4. "Yo-Yo Ma's Musical Mind" by David Blum, The New Yorker, April 23, 1989. ↩
5. Toni Morrison, Sula, Random House, 2007. ↩
6. Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions, Anchor Press, 1993. ↩