I have been reading "The Good Book" by Peter Gomes, published in 1996.  Pastor Gomes was preacher to Harvard University at the time he wrote this marvelous book.  He died in 2011 at the age of 68.

At the end of this book, Peter Gomes writes about preaching on Christmas and Easter.  He says that there is a temptation to ". . . let out a year's accumulated bile against the 'twicesters,' as those who came but twice a year were called. . . . The problem of clerical anger on these great holy days is one thing,but there is an even greater problem, and that is what to say to people who give you at best two opportunities to tell them all they need to know about the gospel."

Gomes' contention is that people come to church on Christmas and Easter because they are hungry and thirsty, and the job of the preacher is to feed them.  It may be inconvenient that they only want to be fed on Christmas and Easter, but that is beside the point.

What meal do you set before them?  Gomes says, ". . . don't give them an explanation."  Don't attempt to explain Christmas and make sense of Easter.  "How much clerical jaw-breaking has expanded upon making reasonable the incredible, and hence the extra-rational, phenomena of Easter morning?"

He says ". . . it matters that the tomb was empty and the stone rolled away, . . ."  But what people want to know and need to know and have a right to know is ". . . what it means to them, here and now."

If I understand Gomes, he is reminding the preacher that those who come to worship on Easter are asking this question:  What difference does it make in my living and in my dying that the tomb was empty on that Sunday morning long ago?

The preacher need not explain the mystery.  Rather she will tell the mystery and invite the listener to enter in to the mystery.

Gomes closes this part of his book with a brief poem by T. S. Eliot:

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report.  You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

Gary