The Lord's Prayer focus for Easter Sunday:
"Forever and ever. Amen."
Scripture Reading: Luke 24:1-12 (Good News)
Very early on Sunday morning the women went to the tomb, carrying the spices they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the entrance to the tomb, so they went in; but they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. They stood there puzzled about this, when suddenly two men in bright shining clothes stood by them. Full of fear, the women bowed down to the ground, as the men said to them, “Why are you looking among the dead for one who is alive? He is not here; he has been raised. Remember what he said to you while he was in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, be crucified, and three days later rise to life.’”
Then the women remembered his words, returned from the tomb, and told all these things to the eleven disciples and all the rest. The women were Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James; they and the other women with them told these things to the apostles. But the apostles thought that what the women said was nonsense, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; he bent down and saw the grave cloths but nothing else. Then he went back home amazed at what had happened.
Meditation
Easter is a wonder. Resurrection, an ever-present mystery. It’s something more to be experienced, embraced and shared in, than just to be believed and taught and turned into doctrine.
So, maybe let’s start with a children’s story – or at least something like it. An object lesson.
Do you remember this Lenten cross with its six purple candles (all extinguished), and what we used it for the last six weeks?
It was our guide to help light our way into the Lord’s Prayer, line by line, step by step, lighting it a candle at a time – one each for a different part of the Prayer all through Lent. We did it because that prayer, when we pray it with attention and commitment, helps enlighten our lives in the pattern of Jesus’ life and the life of God’s kingdom, of God’s people alive in the world.
Candle one was, what? “Our Father who art in heaven” or as the ancient Aramaic suggests, “Our Father-Mother, Source together of all life, who breathes our life into this world.” (Relight candle.)
Candle two? “Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.” Focus your light and your love in us and through us, that your name and your way may be known in the world. (Relight candle.)
Candle three? “Give us this day our daily bread.” Give us what we need to share for the good of all. (Relight candle.)
Candle four? “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” What a good life this is – the kind of life the world really needs. (Relight candle.)
Candle five? “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” How good is that, to do good, not evil; and to do it in God’s way, not in some way that undoes the good that’s intended. (Relight candle.)
And candle six: “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.” The rule of thine, not of mine, is the way in which the world comes to reveal the good will of God for the well-being of all. (Relight candle.)
That’s the light that Jesus was. The light he brought into the world, to enlighten us. Until on Good Friday he was put to death on the cross, and in remembrance of that we snuffed out and extinguished the candles one by one as well. Until all was dark again – the light of Christ and of Christ’s way once again gone from the world.
And it surely seemed to his disciples on the day of his death, that the light was put out too soon. With his execution and his death on the cross, the world was once again plunged into darkness. Evil once again asserted its power.
Except … as we have prayed the prayer today, as a people of God and disciples of Jesus, look what’s happened. It’s all lit again; the light has returned. We’ve come to the truth of the last thing this prayer asks for – the line that says, “forever and ever, Amen.”
And that’s what the disciples found, beginning with the women who came to the tomb that first Easter morning. For one thing, the tomb was not dark any more, but illumined by two young men in dazzlingly white garments. For another thing, the body of Jesus was not there, because he was not dead, but alive again. Alive still. Alive once more. Alive in a new way. We hardly know what words to use.
What we know is that the prayer – the life and the way of Jesus, does not end. It is persistent. It keeps coming back. Like a weed, the evil powers of the world cannot root it out. It’s breathed by God over and over and over again, each day and each year and each age into the life of all the Earth. The Word is constantly and forever spoken. It is constantly and forever enfleshed. As the prayer says at the start, “O Father-Mother, Source together of all life, who breathes and breathes and breathes again your life into this world in us.”
In the world as it is, this means everything. It’s what gives us hope, and the ability to face even the worst that the present moment brings.
I received recently a
poem written in response to the collective suffering of the people of
Ukraine. The poem is written by Father
Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who leads the Centre for Contemplation and
Action in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He
reflects on what’s happening there through the lens of crucifixion and
resurrection, which he sees not as separate realities, but as two inter-twined parts
of one holy way.
How can we not
feel shock or rage at what is happening
to the people of Ukraine—
As we watch their suffering unfold in real time
from an unfair distance?
Who of us does not feel inept or powerless
before such manifest evil? In this, at
least, we are united.
Our partisan divisions now appear small and trivial.
Remember what we
teach: both evil and goodness are,
first of all, social phenomena.
The Body of Christ is crucified and resurrected
at the same time. May we stand
faithfully
Inside both these mysteries (in contemplation).
In loving
solidarity, we each bear what is ours to carry,
the unjust weight of crucifixion,
in expectant hope for God’s transformation.
May we be led to do what we can on any level (of action)
to create [or, to share in] resurrection!
The people of
Ukraine have much to teach the world.
What I take from this is that the hope of resurrection, the promise of the persistence of what is of God and of God’s Spirit in a people – in this case the people of Ukraine, will not end, but will persist even underground and under the radar, will be held by God and will flare forth and rise up again, beyond even its apparent destruction, beyond even the evil of genocide, and that this hope, this promise and this faith is what calls us as fellow people of God to be in solidarity with them, as God is.
And thinking of other times and situations … is this -- the conjoined mystery of crucifixion and resurrection in the life of the world, what sustained Nelson Mandela through his years of imprisonment? Living day by day and year by year not in increasing bitterness and anger towards his oppressors, but towards the hope not only of freedom for himself and his people, but of reconciliation and new life together for both black and white? The experience of apartheid and imprisonment, an experience and sign of crucifixion; the hope and experience of reconciliation, an experience and sign of qualitatively new, resurrected life?
In our own time and country, is this what we see in the persistence and refinement of life and energy among the First Nations of Canada? After five hundred years of diminishment, devaluation, discrimination, death and burial, indigenous people now emerging in so many ways with new dignity, power and identity as one of God’s peoples in this land? Especially after the crucifixion trauma that many suffered in the residential schools, the unearthing of bodies giving rise to resurrection energy not for revenge and further violence, but for transformative truth-telling and reconciliation?
And are we as white settler society also being called to this crucifixion/resurrection mystery, in the call to embrace the dying and the death of our illusions and assumptions about ourselves, our history, our moral high ground, and the absolute rightness of our structures of authority? To be opened to something new, more honest and more truly holy on the other side of our dying?
On a different scale, and in a different setting, is this also what the church is being called to as we come out of the pandemic and into new ways of living and carrying out God’s mission. Over the past few years we have suffered the loss of some of our members, and have also been pushed to face the passing of some of the old ways of doing things and old assumptions about our place in the community and how we live it out. In the wake of these losses, new things and new people and new ways have emerged. And the question comes to us, as it did to the women who were first at the tomb: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” It’s an important question as we begin to think about life returning to some kind of “normal.” Is it return to the “old normal” that we seek, or resurrection to a “new normal” that we desire?
And is this not the question we hear and the faith and hope we are called to, on a deeply personal level each time we stand at, and then walk away from the graveside of a loved one? Believing in, looking for, and trusting in the promise and the gift of new life beyond the dying, both for the other on the other side of the veil, and for ourselves, still on this side of it?
Is not this – all of this and more, our Easter faith – that as we let go of what must pass, what is no longer good or possible or sustainable, and what is taken away or lost, there is the promise of new life? Easter is a promise of the persistence and new-liveliness of God, of God’s Word and of God’s Spirit for us, in us and through us, in always new, always needed ways.
Not just in the past. Not just in the future. Even more, especially, and – when you think about it, maybe always only, right now.
As we are taught to say, "Forever and ever. Amen."
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