Sunday, April 4, 2010
Today's Text Prayer
Alleluia! The Lord is risen! Thank you God, for this great gift. Let me carry this gift – this day – with me every day. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
April 4, Easter Day
Easter Day
Fortunately for all of us, the Easter Bunny doesn’t have Santa Claus’s agent. As frustrating as it is to see the Christmas season overtaken by the retail machine that is sometimes known as Christmastime, Easter has yet to get totally lost in the mix of our culture.
This is it! This is the day that makes our God different from all other Gods. This is the day that tells the world that God loves us and wants more than anything else, even more than his own son’s life, to be in relationship with us. The empty tomb isn’t as graphically appealing as a cross, but as a symbol it says it all. Death cannot hold our Lord, and evil does not prevail. We are alleluia people. We share with Christ this day in this great victory, won on our behalf. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
In all reality, Santa and the Easter Bunny would love to have Jesus’s agent. After all, that’s what the Church is. We’re the ones to spread the word, and we’ve done it for two millennia. It started today, when the women reached the empty tomb. They told the disciples. The disciples told others. Those others told still more, and on and on it went right up until someone told you and me. It’s our turn. Alleluia! Praise the Lord!
Fortunately for all of us, the Easter Bunny doesn’t have Santa Claus’s agent. As frustrating as it is to see the Christmas season overtaken by the retail machine that is sometimes known as Christmastime, Easter has yet to get totally lost in the mix of our culture.
He is risen, he is risen!
Tell it out with joyful voice:
he has burst his three days’ prison;
let the whole wide earth rejoice:
death is conquered, we are free,
Christ has won the victory.
Come, ye sad and fearful-hearted,
with glad smile and radiant brow!
Death’s long shadows have departed;
Jesus’ woes are over now,
and the passion that he bore—
sin and pain can vex no more.
Come, with high and holy hymning,
hail our Lord’s triumphant day;
not one darksome cloud is dimming
yonder glorious morning ray,
breaking o’er the purple east,
symbol of our Easter feast.
He is risen, he is risen!
He hath opened heaven’s gate:
we are free from sin’s dark prison,
risen to a holier state;
and a brighter Easter beam
on our longing eyes shall stream.
Hymn 180, Hymnal 1982
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Today's Text Prayer
I know what tomorrow will bring, but for just a moment, Lord, help me imagine the solitude your disciples knew as they contemplated your death. Don’t let me rush too quickly to Easter, without first spending time here. Amen.
April 3, Holy Saturday
Holy Saturday
Holy Saturday is difficult for me, this day of lull between Good Friday and Easter. I can’t feel it. I can think it. But I can’t ache it. I can’t make my body, my heart feel what Jesus’s followers must have felt. Numb with shock, exhausted, devastated. I know the disciples’ world was turned upside down by Jesus, and just when they had gotten their “gospel legs” their world was turned upside down again by losing him. But my eyes don’t fill with tears, my body does not shake with sobs, my heart is not poisoned with fear and doubt.
I know what tomorrow brings. I can’t wake up on Holy Saturday and not on some level see it as Easter Eve. The disciples just knew Jesus had died and he was in a tomb. Holy Saturday is the day after the disciple’s world shatters. What do you do the day after your world shatters?
You can all answer that question. Everyone has had their world come crashing down around them. Everyone has sat in the midst of those precious pieces and wondered, “What now?” What did you do?
Death happens. It is part of our truth, our reality, our very being. We die. Relationships die. Dreams die. One day we find out that which we swore we could not live without is gone, and yet our hearts keep beating. Sometimes we wish our hearts would stop, because the pain would stop as well.
While I can’t make myself feel what the disciples felt like as Jesus lay in the tomb, I have lived through my own Holy Saturdays. I know the feeling. Ash Wednesdays, Good Fridays, Easter Sundays haphazardly occur in our lives. We are reminded of the fragility of life, we are shocked by the brokenness of the world, and we rejoice at God’s redeeming hand at work in the world. We even have little Lents, days we rage at how short we fall of the person God created us to be, days we stretch toward God’s dream for us.
Truth be told, we live in a Holy Saturday time. My world has been turned upside down by Jesus, and yet sometimes God feels so far away. And yet I know how the story ends, I know my Lord will come back and He will raise us all. I know that time is coming. But we haven’t gotten there yet. And so we wait, like I do on Holy Saturday. I wait for the “Alleluias” and “He is Risen!” I wait for the splendid banquet and the blessedly long nap.
We can’t help but think about Easter on Holy Saturday. In fact, some days the only thing that keeps me putting one foot in front of the other is knowing that resurrection always comes after death.
O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Rev. Jessica Hitchcock
Holy Saturday is difficult for me, this day of lull between Good Friday and Easter. I can’t feel it. I can think it. But I can’t ache it. I can’t make my body, my heart feel what Jesus’s followers must have felt. Numb with shock, exhausted, devastated. I know the disciples’ world was turned upside down by Jesus, and just when they had gotten their “gospel legs” their world was turned upside down again by losing him. But my eyes don’t fill with tears, my body does not shake with sobs, my heart is not poisoned with fear and doubt.
I know what tomorrow brings. I can’t wake up on Holy Saturday and not on some level see it as Easter Eve. The disciples just knew Jesus had died and he was in a tomb. Holy Saturday is the day after the disciple’s world shatters. What do you do the day after your world shatters?
You can all answer that question. Everyone has had their world come crashing down around them. Everyone has sat in the midst of those precious pieces and wondered, “What now?” What did you do?
Death happens. It is part of our truth, our reality, our very being. We die. Relationships die. Dreams die. One day we find out that which we swore we could not live without is gone, and yet our hearts keep beating. Sometimes we wish our hearts would stop, because the pain would stop as well.
While I can’t make myself feel what the disciples felt like as Jesus lay in the tomb, I have lived through my own Holy Saturdays. I know the feeling. Ash Wednesdays, Good Fridays, Easter Sundays haphazardly occur in our lives. We are reminded of the fragility of life, we are shocked by the brokenness of the world, and we rejoice at God’s redeeming hand at work in the world. We even have little Lents, days we rage at how short we fall of the person God created us to be, days we stretch toward God’s dream for us.
Truth be told, we live in a Holy Saturday time. My world has been turned upside down by Jesus, and yet sometimes God feels so far away. And yet I know how the story ends, I know my Lord will come back and He will raise us all. I know that time is coming. But we haven’t gotten there yet. And so we wait, like I do on Holy Saturday. I wait for the “Alleluias” and “He is Risen!” I wait for the splendid banquet and the blessedly long nap.
We can’t help but think about Easter on Holy Saturday. In fact, some days the only thing that keeps me putting one foot in front of the other is knowing that resurrection always comes after death.
O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Rev. Jessica Hitchcock
Friday, April 2, 2010
Today's Text Prayer
How did we get here? God, your son endured such pain and death for us? Are we really worth it? …of course you’ve answered those questions, and are still answering them now. Let me see your son’s cross as your definitive answer. Amen.
April 2, Good Friday
The first time I experienced a three hour Good Friday liturgy, I had a very difficult time understanding what was really “good” about Good Friday. The entire liturgy to this young college freshman seemed dark, foreboding, ridden with guilt, and overly sentimental. It took a long time for me to understand that there was a whole lot more in play than what my simple, somewhat agnostic mind could grasp back then in a small Episcopal church in Ohio.
Good Friday, sometimes viewed as a mistranslation of the old English, “God Friday,” is incongruous with the concept of God’s unconditional love. It can be a very difficult thing to understand. But a good friend of mine, The Rev. William Sloan Coffin, one-time chaplain at Yale, explained it to me this way. In Saint Luke’s Gospel Jesus asks, “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Yet not one of them is lost in God’s sight.
In those days the rich bought animals to sacrifice while the poor could only afford sparrows. Sparrows went two for a penny, and if you bought two pennies worth, a fifth was thrown in. God cares for the fifth sparrow, the tossed in one! Nature is made the symbol of God’s supernatural mercy. It is with an unbounded, unfathomable love that God loves every last human being on the face of the earth, from the Pope to the lowliest wino. “Do not be afraid, adds Jesus, you are of more value than many sparrows.” And God’s love doesn’t seek value – it creates it. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.
Just think: We never have to prove ourselves – that’s already been taken care of. All we have to do is express ourselves – return God’s love for our own – and what a world of difference there is between proving ourselves and expressing ourselves.
I never get over the huge gift and huge demands of Christianity, the gift of God’s love and demands of human possibility. Christianity has certainly not been tried and found wanting; it has been tried and found difficult, and watered down again and again. The founding pastor of the Riverside Church in New York once wrote, “The world has tried in two ways to get rid of Jesus: first by crucifying him and second by worshipping him. Jesus doesn’t ask us to worship him. He said, ‘Follow me.’”
Good Friday is a powerful day in our Easter journey when each of us can choose to reclaim our discipleship as a follower of Jesus Christ and when we once again can place Jesus at the center of the circle of our life and love.
The Rt. Rev. John Bryson Chane
Good Friday, sometimes viewed as a mistranslation of the old English, “God Friday,” is incongruous with the concept of God’s unconditional love. It can be a very difficult thing to understand. But a good friend of mine, The Rev. William Sloan Coffin, one-time chaplain at Yale, explained it to me this way. In Saint Luke’s Gospel Jesus asks, “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Yet not one of them is lost in God’s sight.
In those days the rich bought animals to sacrifice while the poor could only afford sparrows. Sparrows went two for a penny, and if you bought two pennies worth, a fifth was thrown in. God cares for the fifth sparrow, the tossed in one! Nature is made the symbol of God’s supernatural mercy. It is with an unbounded, unfathomable love that God loves every last human being on the face of the earth, from the Pope to the lowliest wino. “Do not be afraid, adds Jesus, you are of more value than many sparrows.” And God’s love doesn’t seek value – it creates it. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.
Just think: We never have to prove ourselves – that’s already been taken care of. All we have to do is express ourselves – return God’s love for our own – and what a world of difference there is between proving ourselves and expressing ourselves.
I never get over the huge gift and huge demands of Christianity, the gift of God’s love and demands of human possibility. Christianity has certainly not been tried and found wanting; it has been tried and found difficult, and watered down again and again. The founding pastor of the Riverside Church in New York once wrote, “The world has tried in two ways to get rid of Jesus: first by crucifying him and second by worshipping him. Jesus doesn’t ask us to worship him. He said, ‘Follow me.’”
Good Friday is a powerful day in our Easter journey when each of us can choose to reclaim our discipleship as a follower of Jesus Christ and when we once again can place Jesus at the center of the circle of our life and love.
The Rt. Rev. John Bryson Chane
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Today's Text Prayer
To love as you loved us…it’s a tall order. You might as well have said, preach the gospel standing on your head! Ok, I’ll try, and I’m grateful for your help. I love you too. Now for everyone else…
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