Easter 3-B April 26, 2009 Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48
Easter changes everything.
We are transformed. God is transformed. We usually think of Easter as about, well, us: Jesus has come to us, if Jesus is raised from the dead, so will we be. Any of those death-dealing forces that we face in our lives – running out of money, people bossing us around, worry about the future, about losing our homes or our livelihood – all of us have a list of fears that overwhelm us – Easter means that none of those things can threaten us now. Jesus is risen from the dead – death has done its worst and still Jesus rises, AND SO WILL WE. Death can try to do its worst to us, and still we will live – still we will love; still people will love us; still life will be worth living.
But think about what Easter has done to God. Listen to this bit from a poem by Anne Sexton:
God owns heaven but He craves the earth, the earth with its little sleepy caves, its bird resting at the kitchen window, even its murders lined up like broken chairs, even its writers digging into their soulswith jackhammers, even its hucksters selling their animals for gold, even its babies sniffing for their music, the farm house, white as a bone, sitting in the lap of its corn, even the statue holding up its widowed life,even the ocean with its cupful of students, but most of all He envies the bodies, He who has no body.
After Easter, God will never be the same. What it means to be human has now become part of what it means to be God. And if the poet Anne Sexton is right, and I think she is, God had long yearned to know what it meant to be human. God had long yearned to be so close to us that God, in all of God’s utter all-knowing and all-powerful self, actually became one of us. “God owns heaven,” the poet writes, “but God craves the earth.”
Easter changes everything.
God has ushered us in to a new reality – a new reality so rooted in this world that the whole world itself is changed.
Look at this gospel story again: Jesus appears. Dead, and yet alive. Fully alive. The disciples knew that he had been killed, that there was no hope, and yet here is the proof: he walks, he talks, and in the most mundane, most ordinary and most wonderful of things, Jesus says, “Have you anything here to eat?”
I have a friend who once served in a parish in a poor neighborhood. He was up in his study, preparing a sermon on this text, where Jesus walks into the midst of his friends and says, “Have you anything here to eat?” and as he was writing his sermon, under his window, in a poor, city neighborhood, a man cried out, “I am hungry!”
Can you imagine: God, walking in here, among us, crying out, “I am hungry! Have you anything here to eat?” Easter changes everything.
We are transformed, God is transformed. And here, in this place, where we offer food and drink, bread and wine, where people walk in off the street and say, “Have you got anything here to eat?” Here in this place, where we and God meet, this very place is the beginning of the transformation of the world.
This world, this very neighborhood, cries out to us, “Have you anything here to eat?”
Easter April 12, 2009 Acts 10:34-43 Psalm 118 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 John 20:1-18
It’s kind of thrilling to see the bulbs I planted last fall peeking out of the soil. The perennials I received from Joanne’s stepmother’s beautiful garden are also beginning to show a little life. I was amazed that the vinca vine in the pot outside the chapel door is still green and alive. And the daffodils, kind of haphazardly growing out of the edge of the foundation, kind of hidden away in the front of the church, are showing their bright, yellow faces.
It’s spring. Alleluia! After such a long, dreary winter, it’s very surprising that spring comes around again – well, we say that. But really, we are expecting it. Spring is natural. It is built into the very DNA of all plants to stretch their limbs and get their sap moving in the spring.
Easter is the only Christian holiday based on nature – or rather, the date of Easter is based on nature. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. And did you see that moon the other night? Huge, and full, and early in the evening, rich and yellow. The full moon is always a surprise, a remarkable exciting event. But really, we are expecting it. The full moon is natural. The earth and the moon, held in place by the sun, travel their orderly courses day after day, year after year. It is part of the nature of the universe.
What is NOT part of the nature of the universe is resurrection. On this day, we are asked to suspend disbelief. The stone has been rolled away from the tomb. The body is gone. Angels appear with strange messages, and gardeners are mistaken for Jesus.
No, this is not natural. A man who suffered a terrible death should not come back to life.
Mary Magdalene and the other disciples do not know quite what to do with this good news, either. There is some confusion, running back and forth from the burial ground with conflicting stories. Mary is frightened half out of her mind, by this mysterious stranger that familiar Jesus has turned into. The natural order of things has been reversed.
These stories of the resurrection never seem like the “and they all lived happily ever after” stories we sometimes think they should be. We all know that life after Easter is not perfect – no more perfect for the disciples 2000 years ago than it is for us. We are Christians – we live in the light of the resurrection, so how come, sometimes, life is so hard?
What it means to be a Christian, a lot of people say, is practicing discipleship. Like the disciples long ago, like Mary Magadalene and the rest of them, we follow Jesus. We listen carefully. We are disciplined, we pray, we study, we think, we care for people in need, we love our enemies. Following Jesus, being a disciple, takes a lot of practice.
It’s the same way with life after Easter. We have to practice – but now we have to practice resurrection. Practice the improbable. Live as though we knew what it meant: resurrection. Life after death. Life in spite of death. Life that spits in the face of death. Life that cannot be contained in a tomb, that cannot be held back by a stone door. It’s a promise: no matter how hard life gets, there’s more to it than this – there is more to it than suffering and death. Practice resurrection.
Very few people actually saw the risen Jesus. But their witness has been enough to go on. From one frightened woman, to a small group of disciples. People who on the day after the resurrection still got up, still had their problems to face, but people who knew that everything had changed. They knew the natural order of things had been turned upside down. They began to practice resurrection.
This sentence is the beginning of the church:
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
And then they went out, and the practice of the resurrected life began.
“I have seen the Lord,” Mary Magdalene tells us, too, calling us, too, to practice resurrection.
Jews all over the world tonight are sitting down to seder dinners, to recall how God acted mightily in history, how God saved the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, how God intervened against an oppressive human leader and set the people he loved free.
Jews all over the world tonight are reminding us that God matters. And it is definitely a time to remember that God matters.
The news reports are full of stories of people beginning to crack under the strain of this economic depression. I heard today of a young woman, straight, and off drugs for 10 years, who fell into a relapse. Oh, it was the stress of worrying about finances, oh, it was an old back injury acting up, oh, just a little percoset, oh, just a little heroin.
There is a sense that people everywhere feel like we have been hit by a truck. Everything we had counted on seems to have slipped away – retirement accounts, housing values, steady paychecks. My brother works for Chrysler Corporation, and my mother is the widow of a retiree: will the assets they built over a lifetime be there for them when they need them? Nonetheless, Jews all over the world tonight are sitting down to seder dinners, to recall how God acts mightily in history – thousands of years ago, and even today. This very day, God is acting.
On Maundy Thursday, it is hard to see how God is acting. Is tonight a beginning, or the end? It is the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, of his teaching, his miraculous healings, his easy friendships, his confrontations with the people who didn’t get it.
If tonight is an ending, then we indeed have been hit by a truck. Why not despair, give up, hunker down, turn on, drop out? If tonight is an ending, then everything we had hoped and planned for is coming crashing down on top of us.
But if tonight is a beginning, and the Jews are right, then God does act in history, in our history, mightily in our history. God is here, among us, and the world around us is about to be made new.
If Christ is where God and the world meet, if indeed if Christ is the point where the encounter between God and the World is the most intimate, then the story we have just read is a tale of a relationship fraught with as much violence as love, as much terror as compassion, as much selfishness as generosity.
Mark tells us the story of a world we know very well. It’s a world of terror where thugs come in the night: the death squads in Central America, the Tonton Macoute in Haiti, the Nazis rounding up Jews in the 1930s and ‘40s. It’s a world of the banal, the numb, death and conflict are commonplace, swirling around us, as they swirled around the disciples during that long, dark night. A friend of mine, near despair, once remarked on “how battered and stressed and desperate people like you and me tend to be these days It has something to do with the fact that everything’s up for grabs, politically, economically, morally, and religiously in our world.”
The Jesus we meet in Mark seems to be giving up. “Are you the king of the Jews,” his accusers ask him. “You say so,” he almost shrugs. Surely he feels all the dread and fear that we would feel; he longs for God to change the divine mind; he sweats tears of blood, and at the end cries out lonely and abandoned. Mark never lets us think that the Romans are to blame for Jesus’ death. It’s the Jews who got out of control. Pilate appears to want to let Jesus go; it is the crowd who demands the release of the criminal Barabbas rather than Jesus.
What can it mean to us to follow such a Jesus? Will we meet an end of such loneliness and abandonment? Is this the cost of discipleship? In the 1930s a young German theologian wrote a book called, The Cost of Discipleship. Many of the Lutherans in the Germany of the day were willing followers of Hitler, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his community resisted: they wrestled with what it meant to be a Christian in a society of monstrous and growing militarism and oppression. In the 1930s, he thought, it could work out, step by step. “I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live a holy life,” Bonhoeffer wrote, much later, when he began to question his attempt to learn faith, as though by following a manual.
It is very tempting to read the passion story hoping that it will all “blow over.” I very much want to make sense of the Passion, to make it into a tidy story with an ending, a lesson which I can learn and then come out the other side a good disciple, full of the fruits of the spirit and the joy of the resurrection.
Sixty-four years ago Thursday Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged in a German prison, for the crime of plotting to kill Hitler. His resistance to the slaughter of the Jews began by preaching against anti-Semitism, fueled by accusations against "the Jews" like that found in today's Passion Gospel. Then he banded with other Christians against the German churches which collaborated with the Nazis, and then joined a conspiracy to fight the powers of death. It was during his years in prison that he began to question some of what he had written earlier about faith as learned (and controlled) and began to embrace an understanding of faith as “profound this-worldliness:
"... it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself ... By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world ..."
This is a different way of looking at the “battered and stressed” aspects of life: not to tidy them up, give them meaning, as I would like to do, but to embrace them, to throw ourselves into the arms of God -- yet the arms of a God on a cross cannot embrace, nurture or offer us much comfort.
We are Christians, so we know this: the day of resurrection will come, but we cannot leave the here and now to get to it. To be a Christian is to hold both together, all of the time, to live a faith of profound this-worldliness; as Bonhoeffer wrote, “Characterized by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection.” It means to live that ordinary life facing death, not expecting the triumphant outcome but knowing it just the same.
Sunday, December 19 at 4:00 p.m. St. Paul's Church
The Rt. Rev. Roy Cederholm, presiding and preaching
Advent
-- Kate Huey
St. Paul's WIndows
Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died!
The reactions I get when I tell people of the decision to close St. Paul's Church begin with shock, move into sadness, and then go different places.
Some people shake there heads in recognition that the this has been hard work we have been doing. Others feel the sadness come back from years ago, when other crises brought the congregation to a similar time of decision. Some feel relieved, others deeply disappointed, still others hopeful, that without the burden of maintenance and upkeep that comes with the blessing of a big, beautiful build, the Episcopal Church can thrive in new ways in this city.
The curious wisdom that is the lectionary of scripture readings for the church year has led us this fall to many weeks of Jeremiah, the theologian of the exile. In the 6th century before Christ, the holy city of Jerusalem was invaded, the temple destroyed, and the chosen people of God carried off into exile in Babylon. Jeremiah's task was to help them come to grips with what this devastating experience meant to the people who had defined themselves in relationship to a God who had promised always to be with them. Where was God now? Now that they were left in a colossal lurch?
So this fall, as the people of St. Paul's Church contemplate for us to go into our own kind of exile, Jeremiah has been our companion along the way. He is not always an easy companion to walk beside, but he offers guideposts. He can help us interpret what it means to be forced to leave home, to imagine what it might mean to sing God's song in the strange land of a new church or community.
Try as we might, our plans, our hopes and dreams for a revitalized St. Paul's Church, in a revitalized neighborhood, could not be realized.
We operate, however, as Christians, who know that resurrection comes only after death. Mary and Martha knew death was final, as they mourned the death of their brother, Lazarus. Dear friends of Jesus, they were angry and so disappointed that their beloved friend could not get there in time to heal Lazarus before he took his final breath. When they saw Jesus walking into their village -- too late!! -- they did not know what we know. They did not know the end of the story.
We do not yet know the end of the story of St. Paul's Church. We are grateful if you walk along with us over these next few months, pray with us and listen to us as we tell our stories.
Most important, stay tuned! God is still speaking ...
St. Paul's Table is always looking for volunteers!
It doesn't look like this any more! The corner has been cleared!
Here's the door ...
... come see me!
... in Brockton's Green and Pleasant Land
JERUSALEM (from 'Milton')
by: William Blake (1757-1827)
AND did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Are we all the woman with her waterjar?
O Jesus, Image of the invisible God, Word made flesh, tired stranger, waiting in the noonday lull at Jacob’s well.
Are we all the woman with her waterjar, bent on the chore of the moment, angry memories in our bones, our thirst for God hidden in the business of the day?
Do you meet us gently too, hardly recognized, quietly leading our thoughts towards the deeper waters, where our souls find rest?
Probing too, uncovering secrets we would rather forget. “Lord, you have probed me, You know when I sit and when I stand, You know my thoughts from afar.”
Is the woman, sure and strong, our reflection: sure but unsure, strong but so weak, seeking but afraid to find our Savior so close by?
by Victor Hoagland
The Sisters of St. Margaret need our help
The sisters have provided needed services and education in Haiti since 1927. The earthquake of January 12 destroyed their convent, and many of their buildings. Click on this image to go to the website of the Society of St. Margaret, to find out how you can help
Can the Episcopal Church make good on its call to fight poverty in the U.S.?
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefforts Schori's bold words give hope to us in the trenches.
A Call to Action: the Episcopal Church and Domestic Povery Alleviation
What is it about Anglicans and murder? I was given a spicy mystery novel recently: "Criminal Intent" by William Bernhardt. THe RECTOR of a church in Oklahoma CIty is accused of murdering his warden -- a woman. Sex scandals and politics, along with vengence-determined right-to-lifers, abound.
"Black Narcissus" by Rumer Godden: I got this book in a discard pile. It's about an order of Anglican nuns, with slight allusions to the Society of St. Margaret, who have taken up residence as missionaries in the Himalayas, I think on the Indian side. It is a meditation on the shortcomings of first-world missionary endeavors amid cultures who have vibrant cultures of their own. A dusty book but terrifically written and up to date in its observations of the collision of worldviews between "we who know it all" and people who know very well who they are.
"The Forties" by Edmund Wilson: a couple of years ago we made a pilgrimage to Wilson's family house in upstate New York -- the place he lived "Upstate," as his journals of that period are called. We were very impressed that he learned that the Iroquois had been had by the State of New York in its massive landgrab, which began after the Revolution and extended even into the 20th century. Here, these journal from the 1940s, Wilson expresses ambivalence, at best, at the results of the air war over Europe. "It may be that one thing which is responsible for the war is simply the desire to use aviation destructively. It must be a temptation to humanity to blow up whole cities from the air without getting hit or burnt oneself, and while soaring serenely above them. ... It is the thrill of the liberation of some impulse to wreck and to kill on a gigantic scale without caring and while remaining invulnerable oneself. Boy with a slingshot shooting birds -- can't help trying it out."
The First Christmas, by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan: very rich Advent and Christmas reading
The Percy Jackson series: Simon has gotten me hooked on a series of books he is madly reading -- books about the children of the Greek gods, children who live in the U.S. and have all sorts of adventures based on the characters and themes of the Greek myths. All these adventures are set here, for Mt. Olympus is located at the center of power in the Western World (above the Empire State Building -- a location with which I thoroughly concur!) and Hades (where the hero is in the first book chasing something on a quest) is located in Los Angeles. I like LA, too, so I'm not entirely in favor of that as location of ultimate darkness, but I get the point. So check out the novels of RICK RIORDAN.
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster: spectacular! I am chagrined I have not read this poignant novel of all kinds of people caught in the maw of colonialism and desire.
Morgan: the biography, written about 10 years ago, of J. Pierpont Morgan. Yes, even I who never finished that course in microeconomics, is slogging through -- and understanding a little!! -- tales of robber baron deal-making and financial restructuring. Helpful, really, in our current climate. Plus, every other chapter details Morgan's romantic exploints, and how much he spent, oh so discretely, on these women. The author also takes seriously the influence of religious faith, and the Episcopal Church, on Morgan, his life, his actions -- his infidelity? Hmmm ... the record is silent.
Sermons in Stone ... is a lovely little book that tells the story of New York and New England in terms of its landscapes and stone walls.
Rabble-Rouser for Peace: the authorized biography of Desmond Tutu, by John Allen -- this is a wonderful read about the beloved Desmond. It's a social history of Africa in the late 20th century, of the end of colonialism and the power of the Christian faith in a place where it was not supposed to incite a revolution.
Doing Theology in Altab Ali Park -- by Ken Leech. I'm reading it carefully and taking notes. It really is an excellent reflection on the work we can do here in Brockton.
RevGalBlogPals - a conversation among women pastors
On the day after the election, after one of the guests at The Table said grace, giving thanks for the meal and getting through another day, ended by raising her hand in the air and saying, "And thank you for the first Black President of the United States!" All of us, 50 hungry and poor people, white, black, immigrant, disabled or unemployed or none of the above -- all of us applauded and cheered. The First Day of the New World.
autumn altar
Bill the Cat
... likes to dress up
The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes
I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
Easter 3-B 
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