Epistle

The Trinity

Published on by Tina Shippey

Trinity Sunday
16 June 2019

The readings for this day are:

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

Click here to access these readings.

       Let’s start this morning with a field trip in the BCP.  Could you grab your red Book of Common Prayer and turn to page 307, please.  It’s right at the bottom of the page, marked with a nice big heading “The Baptism.”  Now, this section is right smack dab in the middle of the liturgy for Baptism.  This is where the actual baptism happens.  The part in italics (called the rubrics) tell us that each candidate is presented by name, then each person is immersed or has water poured over them.  And while they are in the water, these words are spoken: [person’s name], I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 

       Now, why do we do this?  Why do we, when we bring people into the Church through the Sacrament of Baptism, do so in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit?  Why not just “in the name of God”?  Why use God’s name at all?  Well, the easy answer is that Jesus told us to do this.  In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples to go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  But as we do this, and do it faithfully and joyfully, we may also ask: why?  Why do we baptize in the name of the Trinity and not in some other way?

       We Christians believe that the true nature of God is found in the idea of the Trinity.  God is One, but God is also Three.  And God’s how we might be when we’re in different groups, so, even though there’s just one of us, we act differently with our families, our friends, and out in public.  And it’s not as if God is a set of three identical triplets, each that looks very much alike but, at the end of the day, are really just different people.  No, God is One and God is Three.

And if this makes your brain hurt trying to imagine how God can be both One and Three at the same time, don’t worry.  The Trinity is a very complicated, often confusing part of our faith, and many good, intelligent people have spent their whole careers trying to find different ways to explain something so beautiful.  That said, the Trinity isn’t something big and complicated like, say, the motions of the planets or the tectonic plates, that if we think about them for a long time, we’ll be able to fully understand them.  But when we look at our lives, and when we look at what is revealed to us in Scripture, when we listen with our hearts and minds and souls, we begin not just to understand that Trinity but to live it, breathe it, and walk in it.

Our readings this morning are part of this revelation.  Now, historically, the concept of the Trinity – the idea of it – was not thought up until the fourth century.  Christians in the fourth century were very much concerned with the exact nature of the relationship between Jesus and God the Father.  And one of the things produced from fourth century discussions is the Nicene Creed, which can be very technical at times with its language about “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father.”  But all of these discussions weren’t just vague philosophizing and people making up theories off the top of their heads.  No, these early Christians were drawing the understanding of the Trinity from how God had revealed himself in Scriptures – in what we call the Old and New Testaments – and in the life of Jesus Christ.

We see some of this revelation in our readings today.  We see it in our reading from Proverbs, where the Wisdom of God stands like a master worker at the founding of the world.  And this Wisdom isn’t just being wise but seems to be a person, a being, for God delights in him, and Wisdom rejoices in God and the world that was created, and humanity with it.  And in Romans, St. Paul describes God’s life as being love poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, bringing to us a peace – even in suffering – through Jesus Christ.  St. Paul doesn’t tease it all out for us, or separate all the components of God like a little kid at school lunch who takes apart each piece of his sandwich; but instead he says that the life of the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are intricately intertwined.  For the language lovers of you, God is not just about nouns but about prepositions for St. Paul.  God’s about ‘through’ and ‘in’ and ‘with’ and ‘inside’, about poured into and living with and given through, so that God is revealed to be not just some bearded guy on a throne with people at his feet but a being of living, breathed life and who pulls us into that life so that we may be healed and sanctified into that relationship.

And there is, of course, Jesus himself: his words and his deeds and his very being.  Time and time again Jesus speaks, acts, or directly identifies himself with God the Father, and the Spirit together with them.  Jesus, and God, and the Holy Spirit are, in some way, revealed to be in an intricate relationship with one another.  And it was this relationship that the fourth century councils, through reading and contemplation and prayer, came together to write the creeds.

But we don’t believe only because the Bible and the Creeds tell us to do so.  The Bible and the Creeds are an authority in our lives as Christians, surely, but they themselves live and breathe in the context of our faith here in the present.  For we see, even in our own individual lives, that the God of the Bible and the God of the Creeds is still alive today, grounding us, healing us, and breathing new life into us.  We experience God the Son, God in Jesus Christ, in those times when we find healing and goodness in the most turbulent of times.  When we turn from our own darkness, when we turn from hatred or disdain or sorrow, when we are caught in that darkness and hatred and disdain and feel a steady hand turning our hearts towards light and life and goodness; that it is the life of Jesus Christ born within us doing this work. 

And in this healing, in this turning from despair and darkness, we are not only led back to a sort of status quo but are lifted higher into light.  This is the work of the Holy Spirit, who won’t let us remain in complacency, but will show us a deeper life, a fuller life, a more hopeful and giving life that is ever the promise of God.  And this life is founded on something strong, something sure, something that will never move, something that is not a “thing” but is the Creator and Guider of all Creation, a being of truth that will never stop loving us; and this being we call God the Father.  And all this work of God, the work of Jesus and of the Spirit and of the Father, all of this is to bring Creation into a fullness where there is no grief or despair, no hatred or resentment, but goodness and love for all eternity.  

We as Christians have dedicated our lives to this Trinity.  In Baptism, whether we were baptized as a child or led into the faith by others, in Baptism, we were all brought into the Church; in the Eucharist we meet Jesus and are healed with his hands of love; in the Sacraments we are nurtured into the Life that was born and is growing within us; and in our mission, our good work as the Church, we bring that Life out into the world that is so deep in hurt and sorrow.  For that Life that we have seen in Scripture, and that the Church has proclaimed for the past two thousand years, is here now in this present day, in this very room, in your very hearts, speaking to the Life that is in the hearts of those sitting around you as well.  For the life of the Church is a Trinitarian life that seeks to heal, to love, and to ground things in the source of all goodness and love, which is God, our creator, our savior, and our light in this world.

The Language of Our Salvation

Published on by Tina Shippey

Pentecost

The readings for today are:
Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-27

Click here to access these readings.

        If you’ve ever spent time in a foreign country, you know that something funny happens with your language.  It happened to me while I was in Japan.  And it was this: suddenly, with any warning (it seemed), I was utterly and completely illiterate.  Signs – they meant nothing to me.  Menus at restaurants, safety information that comes in furniture, my receipts, even my teaching contract; I couldn’t read a thing.  Nor could I understand anything that was said, either.  I sat in teacher’s meetings and only understood a few names.  Every week I bought food at the grocery store and only understood a “please” or “thank you.”  My students, who had about as much skill with English as I had with Japanese, tried in vain to tell me about their studies, or baseball, or themselves, or to ask about the U.S.  And I could understand, or say, a little bit.  Here I was, in a country that I had studied and loved for many years, and I couldn’t interact with it beyond, “Isn’t it sunny today.”

        Now, I always knew that I’d be basically illiterate in Japan.  I knew that my language skills (especially in speaking and listening) were pretty poor.  I know that I’d have a hard time.  But I didn’t expect it to be so frustrating.  I’m a reader by nature.  I like talking to people.  I wanted to talk to people.  I met people my own age, older folks who had lived through WWII, Buddhist monks who had such different beliefs than my own, and even fellow Christians who were about as excited to speak to me as I was to speak to them – and yet, there was that barrier between us.  There was that barrier of language – a barrier that so often connects people together but here it was like the Tower of Babel, and language kept us apart.

        And in all this frustration, there were little havens of calm and grace.  One of these times I was up in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan.  I was on vacation with a bunch of friends, and they went off skiing.  And since I’m horrible at skiing, I wandered around on my own for a bit.  Then, on the train back to Sapporo, this young Japanese guy comes up to me and says, “Hey, are you American?  Do you speak English?”  You see, this guy loved English, just about as much probably as I loved Japanese.  And he had just gotten back from studying in Australia, where he spoke this language he loved day in and day out.  And, really, he was kinda lonely for it.  He wanted to hear it again from a native, and to speak it himself. 

        We were immediately friends.  We told each other about our families, where we grew up, our dreams and excitements and hopes, everything.  In the seat in front of us was another guy, a young man from Korea who was travelling alone, and when he heard us talking and laughing, he turned around and joined in.  His English wasn’t as good as the other guy’s, but he kept on with the story-telling as best as he could.  It was great.  And, for a while, I was home.  Yeah, sure, I was fourteen time zones, 6,237 miles (I checked this) from where I was born.  I was on a train, in a country where I was completely illiterate, talking to people who I had only met just that day, but I was home.  In my language, I was home.

        Pentecost is about being home.  Well, Pentecost is about a lot of things, but one of the big things it’s about is being home.  But it’s not just about being home but about hearing home.  Because on the day of Pentecost, we remember a miracle.  And it’s not just the miracle of the tongues of fire above everyone’s head, as I have pictured on the front of your bulletins.  It’s the miracle that, suddenly, the disciples were preaching the Gospel, they were speaking of the devotion and love and hope of God, not just in one language, but in every language.  But not as if the Holy Spirit were some sort of spiritual Google Translate, where you put in the Gospel and it churns out some wacky translation that makes little sense to a native speaker.  No, the miracle here is that the lonely Parthian over there, far from home that he can taste it in his dreams, suddenly hears the tongue he grew up with; or the Egyptian hears the exact accent of Egyptian of his beloved wet-nurse.  These people hear the Gospel, the Gospel of salvation and love and hope, not in a foreign language that they barely know, or a second language they’re struggling to make sense of; but their own language, their mother tongue, the language they were raised in and in which they were taught who they were, the language they thought in, dreamed in, argued in, and hoped in.  It was in this language, so close to their hearts, that they heard the Gospel.

        And this is a miracle, I think, that we often miss: that God saw fit to say, not “Come over here, I’ve got something to tell you” but “I will come to you.”  Now, there are many things in Christianity to which we need to align ourselves.  We are to die to sin and be risen (not “raise ourselves” but “be risen”) by God into new life.  We are to remake our lives, by the Holy Spirit, according to the Scriptures and the teachings of the Church.  We are to practice the virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, faith, hope, and charity.  And all of these things are not in ourselves but in God.  Just as we say in the Baptismal Covenant, we must turn, each and every day, from the powers of evil and to the goodness of the Lord.

        So are we called to live a life to Christ, but the language of this call, and it’s voice, speaks to our heart of hearts.  In the story here in Acts, on the day of Pentecost, this took the form of an actual language, but it’s much bigger than that.  God created each of us not as carbon copies of one another but as distinct individuals.  And God, in raising us up to be his own daughters and sons in the image of Jesus Christ, God does not erase who we are.  We aren’t like those old floppy disks full of corrupt information that God needs to reformat and start again.  We aren’t even like a weedy garden that God has to spend time with in the dirt, yanking out the bad and sticking in new, prettier plants.  We are God’s children, his beloved, and those good things that we love, those things we hope for and yearn for, all those things that we go to in love, these are the things through which God calls us and hopes for us as well.  There’s quite a bit of death before the resurrection, surely, and that death can sometimes feel like being nailed up on a cross, but at the end of the day what God is aiming for is not the death, not the pain and sorrow of loss, but the resurrection, the golden light of the new dawn on all of our Easter day.  And God gave us these things that we love – be they our gardens or our children and grand-children, works of great literature or whatever college football team you root for – God gave us these gifts in love to pull us up towards himself.  Just as the people on Pentecost heard the Gospel in their own tongues, erasing the destruction of Babel, so too do we hear the Gospel in the love language of our own soul, which God made.

        Today is Pentecost, and it’s the start of the season of Pentecost.  We call it Ordinary time, but it’s anything but ordinary.  For the past half-year, ever since Christmas, we’ve been hearing about and thinking about Jesus’ life, his death, and his resurrection, and about the life that he brought to us in Salvation.  But now, now in Ordinary time, we listen to God’s call to us on Pentecost to help bring that light out into the world.  And what does that look like?  Well, we’ve got six months of Ordinary time to talk about it and discuss it.  But at its core, it’s the same work of Pentecost: for just as God met us where we are, and called us through our joys and sorrows and hopes, so are we called to be present in the lives of others, to speak to them the Good News of Jesus Christ in a language they understand.  In our world, putting ourselves – our own needs and our own path – aside to sit and listen to another, then to preaching a Gospel of mercy, forgiveness, and love; that’s a rare thing in our world.  But it’s the work of the Spirit.  It’s the life of Jesus Christ that we’ve just heard about and walked through ourselves these past six months.  And it is a call from God, our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier, to love, to love, and to never stop loving.

 

Seeing Clearly

Published on by Tina Shippey

Seventh Day of Easter

Today’s readings are:
Acts 16:16-43
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 17:20-26

Click here to access these readings.

We humans are so often pessimists.  We look at situation – be they in our lives, or in the culture around us – and we say, ahh, this isn’t going to end well.  We do our best to hope and to keep an open mind, but often there’s that little voice in the back of the head that whispers that everything is going to go south.  We do this a lot with the weather – I think a lot of us spent all week last week prophesying rain on Friday and Saturday for the fair – about traffic and delays and how horrible a dinner will turn out.  And we know this about ourselves, so much that movie makers take advantage of it with suspense.  The other night, Helene and I were watching a sci-fi show, and the main characters were investigating an abandoned ship. They were wandering through the dark hallways, looking this way and looking that, searching for what happened.  And it was all so suspenseful, which means that Helene and I both knew that something bad was going to happen: something would go wrong with the ship or some monster was going to pop out and scare everyone.  And at one point Helene just said out loud, “Get off the ship!  Just get off that ship already!”  And in the end, nothing happened, but we felt justified in thinking this anyway.  We humans are pessimists.

And it’s not just us in our culture, either.  In our first reading this morning, from the Book of Acts, we hear about a pessimistic set of magistrates and a pessimistic judge.  Here are Paul and Silas dragged before the authorities in the marketplace.  They’re accused of disturbing the city and just being generally un-Roman-like.  And what do the magistrates do?  They say, “Yeah, sure they’re probably up to no good,” and they have Paul and Silas beaten and then throw them in jail.  There’s no trial, no questioning of witnesses, and it doesn’t seem like Paul and Silas get to speak for themselves.  The magistrates, it seems, already know the outcome.  They’re pessimists.  They see these two raga-muffin characters, and, without hearing what they’re saying or seeing what they’re doing, they assume the worst, and throw them into jail.  And they probably think they’re justified in doing so.

And then there’s the jailer, who is, really, our hero in this short story.  He’s not a hero yet, but he will be.  Here’s a man who is, quite simply doing his job.  The magistrates tell him to keep Paul and Silas securely, and so he casts them into the innermost cell and fastens their feet with shackles.  He’s not taking any chances.  He wants to do his job and to do it well.  He doesn’t care what Paul and Silas are in for; he got an order, and he’s going to follow it out.

Then there’s the earthquake.  Then the ground shakes so violently that all the doors of the prison are thrown open and all the chains are broken.  And the jailer wakes up and sees everything that he has been tasked to protect split open and destroyed.  And, yeah, I’m coming down hard on pessimists this morning, but your heart really goes out to this man, doesn’t it?  Put yourself in his shoes for a moment: your one job in life is to make sure that these doors stay locked.  It’s your job to make sure that the doors that hold all these people – all these people that the culture has deemed so dangerous that you’ve got to lock them up – that these doors are now split open and torn from their frames.  Imagine working in a bank, and coming in to find all the doors (and to your terror) even the door of the vault thrown open.  Or that you come home from vacation and you find your front door wide open.  These doors, this vault, these chains, they’re here for a reason, and that is so that things stay inside and definitely not outside.  And when the jailer sees all this, he assumes the worst: everyone’s fled away.  And then he assumes the worst again: the only proper response is to fall on his sword and kill himself.

Now, when I take this man to task for being a pessimist, I think that he’d do better in being an optimist.  We should still criticize this man if, after waking up from the earthquake and seeing the doors thrown open, he just kinda shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’m sure everything’ll be fine.”  The cure for pessimism isn’t just a good dose of optimism.  This story isn’t here to encourage us to just look on the bright side of life and make the best of what we have.  And, to look a bit outside the story, the point of the Christian life isn’t just to move from pessimism to optimism, to just be happy and go-lucky, to look for the silver lining because Jesus has our back and nothing bad can happen to us.  No, one of the main points of the Christian life, and one of the main points of this story, is to see clearly, to call for a light, to rush into the darkness, and to see what is actually there.

This is what the jailer does, and what he finds are Paul and Silas, sitting and waiting for him.  But that’s not all.  He also sees their wounds, fresh from their beating and certainly in need of some medical attention.  He sees them for the situation they’re in: that they’re cold, tired, probably hungry, and most likely bleeding.  He sees them and, within an hour, has them home, and is cleaning their wounds.  And Paul and Silas, in that light, see the jailer, too, and they see what he needs: they speak the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in the house, and they baptize them.  And the night ends, not in a dark jail cell, but in the full light of a household with everyone rejoicing in God.

Now, it’s easy to be pessimistic.  It’s easy to assume the worst.  Or, well, it seems easy.  It seems easy because getting your hopes up is hard sometimes, especially when disappointment is so often waiting just around the corner.  Once hurt, shame on you; twice hurt, shame on me, as the saying goes.  But in being pessimistic, and, really, in being too optimistic as well, we miss what is right in front of us.  We miss seeing the problem for what it actually is, and we miss seeing the people in the problem.  And, perhaps most of all, we miss seeing the grace of God.

Now this seeing, this act of looking not on the bright side or the dark side, but of seeing, this is something that Jesus Christ was (and is) really good at.  Time and time again in the gospels, Jesus encountered people up on life and down on life.  He encountered prostitutes and rich young men, he met tax collectors with pockets full of other people’s money, and he met those who struggled every day to glorify God.  Jesus met sinners and those who had been blessed.  But Jesus looked beyond all this and saw the person, the person himself or herself, whoever they were in the eyes of God.  And perhaps most of all, he met them where they were thirsty, where they yearned for something more or better or more holy.  He met them at their core, and it was from here, from seeing who they were at their depths, that he sought to heal them and to make them whole.

And, if I can speak for you all, I think we’ve known this sight of God, too.  God has looked at us and seen us.  He’s looked past the bad and the good, beyond everything who think we are to who we are inside.  And God looks with eyes of love – not love that ignores the bad and puffs up the good too much, but eyes of true love, that see us for who we are, which is beloved children of his own making.  God lights a candle in the darkness of our own soul, and he picks us up and brings us to his home.  And there he tends to our wounds, so many of them self-inflicted, so many of them at the hands of others, but without blame, without hatred, without anger, God washes those wounds with the hands of Jesus Christ and the cool waters of baptism.  And then he feeds us with food fit for the soul, that grows Daughters and Sons in the image of his own Son.  This is what we experience in the sacraments, in the community that we call the Church, and in our prayers.  This is the life lived with Jesus Christ growing inside of us.

And so we, too, are asked to see.  Not to hold ourselves back in pessimism or to shrug our shoulders in optimism, but to open our eyes and see the light of Jesus Christ.  And in that light, we see those who are hurt, we hear the call from God to go to them, we see the hope of God in his Creation, and we see and experience the healing hands of Jesus Christ, his Son, our savior.

 

Sheep and Freedom

Published on by Tina Shippey

The Fourth Sunday of Easter
Good Shepherd Sunday

Our Readings for this week are:
Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

Click here to access these readings

        Sheep get a pretty bad rap in our culture.  Sheep are seen as obedient, simple, and sometimes rather stupid animals in God’s great Creation.  Sheep follow without thinking, do what they are directed to do without much foresight or reflection, and often get themselves into trouble.  There’s a word in pop-culture, “sheeple”, that is a merger of the words “sheep” and “people”, and it means that people who are, simply, sheep: they are dull, uninteresting and uninterested people who just follow the status quo.  Sheeple are not individualists, striking out into unfamiliar territory and striving against expectations.  Sheeple, sheep-people, just do what they are told.

        And so it is, perhaps, a little strange that we Christians are so often described as, and describe ourselves as, sheep.  In our Baptismal Covenant, we are asked to continue in the apostles’ teaching, persevere in resisting evil, proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ, seek and serve Christ in all persons, and strive for justice and peace among all people – not exactly dull and unimaginative work.  Christians are called to be a people apart from the world.  We are called to be not citizens of our present world but of the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus proclaimed.  We are to be in the world but not of the world.

        If we are, then, sheep, we are a very strange sort of sheep.  You see, when we Christians talk about “following”, we are saying something very special.  It’s not “following” like a duckling follows a mother duck, all nice and tight in a row, or how a train car “follows” the locomotive, just being pulled along a track without much will of its own.  It’s more like how we talk about how we’re asked to read and “follow” the Bible.  The Bible isn’t just a rulebook, like you use when you open up a new board game but don’t know how to play it yet; or when you are preparing your taxes, and you don’t understand the forms and so you look at one of those instruction sheets for which figure to put where.  Parts of the Bible are about instructions, certainly, and there are a few books that are, quite literally, a set of laws: when this happens, do this; when that happens, don’t do this.  But on a whole, the Bible isn’t a set of do’s and don’t’s, but is instead a story, and we follow stories much differently than laws books or instruction manuals.

        Think back to some of the stories that you’ve told me since I arrived last summer.  I’ve heard stories about how you celebrate: and not just Christmas and Easter, but birthdays and anniversaries, Thanksgiving and even that light, calm, joyous celebration of coffee hour.  I’ve heard stories about Ann Drake, Barbara and OJ Endicott, about who brought you into this church and why you stayed.  I’ve even heard stories about the different plants and trees around the church building, so that when the bushes outside the office erupted with blossoms, I had already been waiting all year in joyful anticipation for them.  You’ve told me stories while laughing, while in tears, while in hope, and while in grief.  You’ve told me stories of your life.  And while I’m sure some of those stories were meant to teach me something specific, or to make sure I do something (or don’t do something) very specifically, you told me these stories because you love your church, you love one another, and because you love your life in God.  And you want me to be a part of that, not just because you hired me to be your priest, but because you want me to love St. James, too, and to love you all and the way you all live your lives to God.  And I do, which helps me (I think) lead you into a deeper love of all those things as well.

        This is how we follow the Bible.  We hear its stories and we allow its love and hope to work within us.  And yeah, sure, there are times when Jesus says do this and don’t do this, and St. Paul, it seems, even moreso.  But are these the parts that really speak to us?  Truly?  Those parts that move us, that dig deep into us and challenge us to live more fully and opening and with more love, are those parts like the Annunciation, where the angel comes to Mary and says, “Rejoice!  For you shall bear the Son of the Most High!”; or Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, where he prays, “May this cup pass from me; but not my will, but your will.”  We read about Adam and Eve, about Cain and Abel, about David lamenting the death of his son, his son who betrayed him and revolted against him but was still his son and so beloved.  We read these stories and don’t learn something that we could answer on a test but, instead, learn about life and what it means to love God through thick and thin.  And even in that great passage in St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, where he writes that love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious or boatful or arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Even here, where Paul seems to be teaching specific lessons to be followed and obeyed, we give ourselves to this sort of love not because Paul said so but because we know, in our hearts and minds, in our guts and in our spirits, that love is the ground of all Creation.  And we want to live a life to God in love not because it has the greatest results in controlled experiments, but because the call to love answers something at the center of our being. 

And so we answer that call, given forth by Jesus on the cross and on the morning of the Resurrection, and follow the way of love.

        We are sheep, we Christians.  We are sheep, and we are called on to follow God in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit.  But in doing so, in following and modeling our lives on our great shepherd, we are led to freedom.  And this freedom is a freedom from sin and despair, from hatred and malice, from our own slavery to evil.  In this freedom we find true health, true hope, true goodness that is so great that it cannot be contained in this world but smashes even death, which seemed to have the last and final word for we humans.  We follow, not just to obey, but to live, and to live without end, forever and ever with our God.

Life and Resurrection

Published on by Tina Shippey

The Second Sunday of Easter

Readings for this week are:
Acts 5:27-32
Psalm 118:14-29
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31

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After Christmas, there’s always this discussion of when to put away our decorations.  And this is an important question during Christmas because decorations often involve a huge tree in your living room, a tree that is beginning to dry out and get a bit withered-looking.  But even still, we don’t want to let Christmas go.  We prepared all through Advent, we celebrated on Christmas Eve, we continued celebrating on Christmas morning and during our Christmas nap (I hope you take one of these, too) and at Christmas dinner.  But by the New Year, we kinda start to feel that maybe we should put it all away, or maybe at least tone it down.  We might let Christmas linger, but by the first week of January, most of us, and our culture included, are looking forward to the next holiday.

        Easter is no different, though here in the springtime we don’t have a big evergreen tree to hold us back.  We prepare and prepare and prepare all through Lent, then celebrate Holy Week and Easter Vigil and Easter morning and, on Monday, begin to put away the plastic eggs and baskets and little bunny figures.  And even if we don’t, even if we keep Easter deep into the Easter season, our culture puts it away pretty quickly.  And that’s because, our culture is a culture of anticipation.  We look forward to holidays, celebrate for a single day, then move on and, often, forget.  What happened last week is not always as important as what will happen next month.  If you need any evidence of this, look at all the Easter candy in the discount bins.

        The Church, however, does things differently.  Holidays start seasons.  Christmas isn’t the end of the Christmas season: it’s the beginning, the start of the twelve days of Christmas.  Nor is Easter the end of the Easter season.  Easter is only the beginning.  And we don’t do this just to be different, but because Christians are called on to live not in anticipation but in the presence of God.  Christianity is less about looking forward and more about living.

        Here’s an example of what I mean.  Gwendolyn was born in 2015 and Fiona was born just last year in 2018.  And let me tell you, in case you forgot, that there’s a lot of planning that goes into welcoming a new baby into the world.  You’ve got to get a crib, and then you’ve got to put it together.  You’ve got to have baby clothes and bottles and blankets and stuffed animals that don’t have little sequins or buttons that the baby can bite off.  You’ve got to tell your parents and your siblings and your aunts and uncles and your cousin that you haven’t seen in ten years and your best friend from collage, but also the government and the insurance companies so everything is squared away when the big day comes.  And when Fiona was on the way, we lived an hour from the hospital, and there was often traffic, so I went out in the car and drove all through the back roads to make sure, in case there was a traffic jam, I could know the perfect way to get Helene to the hospital in time.  We prepared and prepared for that one, single day.

        And when that one day came, and first Gwendolyn and then Fiona came into the world, I felt a relief and a joy.  I was a father, and here were my two little daughters.  And now, we thought, with the birth over, we could finally rest and sleep.

        But the thing about being a parent is that you don’t really get to rest, not in the way you do beforehand, that is.  Being a parent isn’t just having children; being a parent is about waking up in the middle of the night to feed the kids, to read books to them, to think about their diet and their exercise, who the children are and how you can best encourage and support them.  Being a parent is about talking to them about bullies, about how to respect and love others, how to live a life to God, and then to love them even still, and perhaps even moreso, when they fail.  Being a parent, like being a Christian, is much less about preparing for the day when the child is born and much more about living a life dedicated to the life of our children; or, as a Christian, living a life dedicated to God.

        We do this same thing in the Church for Easter, and the same thing during Christmas and for Epiphany, and for Pentecost as well.  And we do this because, just like when we have a child, or when we get married, or when we make our confirmation, in Easter we remember and enter into the new reality that was given to us the morning of the Resurrection.  And all that preparation for Easter morning was important, so desperately important, and that’s why we still model our lives on the Jesus’ teaching.  But what is important – what is essential to us as Christians, is that the tomb is empty – that Jesus is alive.  Because Jesus’ Resurrection was not just about some guy two thousand years ago coming back from the dead, but that in being raised, Jesus poured out Life into this world.  And not just once but for all time.  The disciples, as we read today, and as we will continue to read, met with the Risen Christ and experienced this outpouring of Life.  And in this Life they were moved to speak forth the Gospel and to dedicate their lives to God with a tenacity and a joy that they had never before known. 

Nor was it only the disciples who Jesus knew who felt that Life, but it continued to be felt beyond their time and place.  In medieval times, people experienced this same Life and were moved to found orphanages, hospitals, and universities, and they were moved to live lives of deeply dedicated prayer.  In each age we see again and again, be it medieval or Renaissance or our own time, that Life present and thriving – or, better, causing we humans, who grow weary and tired, causing us to thrive and live to a fullness that we had never before thought possible.  And all this because that one man, who was more than a man, but was God, died and rose again.

And it is this Life that we are living in right now.  That Life is what we meet in the Eucharist, which is the Body and Blood of that Life, each and every Sunday.  And that Life is what was planted firmly in our hearts in Baptism, and what speaks from us when we love our enemies, tend to the sick, give hope to those in despair, and spread the Good News that the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the very foundation of our world, is Love and Truth and Beauty and Goodness. 

        Easter season, then, is not just about remembering but living the abundance of life that was given to us and all the universe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Easter season is the cup that runneth over from the 23rd Psalm.  Easter season is the flowers that are blooming all around us, and just when we thought everything was done, another bush erupts in pink or white.  Easter season is having a need for something sweet and looking in the refrigerator and discovering that there’s more cake.  Easter season is that scene at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, where people keep on flooding in to tell George Bailey just how much they love him.  Easter season is the Eucharist, where the fullness of all Life is poured forth from a little bit of bread and a sip of wine. 

Easter season is all these things, and more, because Easter is the true reality.  Beyond all doubt and despair, all death and sorrow, Easter is our true home.