Theme: Three Ways to Easter
Easter is easy. In one way.
It comes every year. Whether we
like it or not. Are ready for it or
not. It’s as regular as sunrise every
morning.
Of course, it comes
at a different time every year. It’s on
a calendar calculated by cycles of the moon, and set in accord with the ancient
Jewish practice of Passover – the feast of liberation from bondage to the pain
and powers of this world. Both the
timing and the meaning of the feast reminding us that God is not bound to the
patterns of this world, and God’s calendar and timing are a little different
sometimes than ours.
And that’s one of
the things that can make Easter difficult – that its gift of hope and its
promise of new life don’t always come in the way we expect or are ready to
accept or are able at first to understand.
On that first
morning when Jesus was raised, it was dark and all that Mary Magdalene, John the
beloved disciple, and Peter were able to see was the empty tomb.
Does the world seem
dark, still? Or maybe, dark again?
Politically and economically,
the world seems a darker, more anxious place to many. And I heard of something new this week – that
the American Psychiatric Association has officially labelled a new kind of
depression disorder, called eco-anxiety – a clinically diagnosable debilitating
anxiety about the degradation of Earth.
In Canada, our sesquicentennial celebrations happen under the shadow of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
And even at home town in our daily news we wonder if there is any light
at the end of the tunnel of higher taxes, fatal accidents on the Linc and the
Red Hill Expressway, and the LRT debate.
We go to the old
familiar places for answers, and the cupboard seems bare. The familiar temples of wisdom, of leadership,
and of inspired and inspiring answers seem empty.
And personally – do things
pile up? Is life increasingly hard? This week I’ve come to know a woman in her
90’s in the process of dying, wanting to see her twin sister to be able to go
in peace and it probably won’t happen. I
visit people I’ve always loved talking with, who now find it hard to converse
at all. At home, Japhia’s health is not
good – day by day we are never sure what to expect, or how to respond sometimes
to what does come. And you face a lot of
things too that throw shadows across your days – big questions, new anxieties,
regrets and guilt, new limits and fears, and unfamiliar – or maybe
all-too-familiar, hard-to-deal-with feelings.
Where do we go? Is there light?
The church
struggles. The Spec last week had a
front-page story about Mount Hope United closing next month to merge with
Barton Stone, hoping that closing one church will create a new one out of
two. We struggle here, with both Sunday
offering and people available to manage the front yard for the spring sale down
from last year. And like everyone else
we struggle to know what religion, faith, prayer and faithful action really
mean these days.
The places we are
used to going to for answers often seem empty.
Things we have clung to seem to be gone – to have been taken away from
us. The stone has been rolled away, the
doors have been blown open, what we loved is gone, and all that’s left are the
discarded wrappings. And like Mary
Magdalene, John the beloved disciple, and Peter, we’re not always sure what to
do next.
Yet, Easter comes
and new life comes. And their confusion,
their not-knowing, and their anxiety become part of the story of the coming of
new life. How does that happen? For them?
And for us?
John, for his part,
when he sees for sure that Jesus really is no more where he used to be, immediately
and intuitively knows – just believes that God in Christ is now on his way to
being somewhere else, doing some new kind of thing that if he is patient and
open enough, he will come to see and be part of. There is something about John’s heart, his
openness to relationship with others and with God, and his ability to dwell in the
presence of others and of God that makes him both the deeply beloved and the intuitively
believing disciple.
Sometimes do we have
that kind of faith – to meet loss, change and the end of what we knew, with
simple faith that if GFod is no longer here in this thing and in this way, it
just means that a new thing is afoot, and a new way is being prepared, and that
we’ll be led into it in God’s own time?
Peter, on the other
hand, has a harder time. He sees the
empty tomb, the discarded wrappings, the absence of Jesus where he thought he
would be, and he goes away in confusion, anxiety, maybe anger at who or what
took away what he loved, maybe fear at the prospect of there being nothing to
believe in any more. He goes home
heavy-hearted, his more impulsive faith overshadowed by all kinds of un-faith,
and it will take a little time, a little process and a little pastoral care for
him to find his way forward.
At times are we like
that, and in need of that kind of care?
And then there is
Mary -- Mary Magdalene. Not the Virgin
Mary who first brought Jesus into the world, but the more questionable and
mysterious Mary whose life was changed in relationship with Jesus. Her faith is not intuitive and instinctive
like John’s; nor impulsive and mercurial like Peter’s; hers is harder-won, more
earned by experience and the school of hard spiritual knocks, more won by real and
deep-down change in who she has been.
She stays at the tomb. She doesn’t go home either in simple faith or
terrible doubt. She stays at the only
place she knows to be at the moment, and lets herself cry – to express and share
her grief at the loss of what she had come to count on. She’s not afraid of her tears and what she
feels. Nor is she afraid to poke around,
to look into corners, to ask the difficult questions, to not settle for simple
answers – and as she does that, it is she, alone of the three who comes to see
angels. It is she, of all of them, who
is the first to hear the voice of her beloved and God’s Beloved, speaking directly
to her and reaching her heart. It is
she, of all of us, who is the first to be changed once again, led by the living
Christ into new life once more beyond the death of what she had and what she
has been.
Perhaps sometimes we
are like her. At if not, at the very
least we can, like the other disciples, take courage and take heart from what
she and others have to tell us.
And isn’t that the
promise of Easter? That when the temples
we know become tombs, when the things we cling to for hope and reassurance
disappear or are taken from us, that God in Christ is not absent, not gone, not
dead – but only beginning to do some new thing, wanting to meet us in some new
way, waiting to lead us into an even deeper life and way of life with God.
It happens, of
course, in God’s own time. The promise
of new life doesn’t come in the way we expect, or at first are even able to understand.
But we all shall
come to see it, each in our own way because God in Christ is not dead. He is risen.
He is alive and coming to us in and beyond the darkness.
No comments:
Post a Comment