Wednesday, November 20, 2019
got fish?
Have you got anything here to eat? A simple, reasonable request. Coming at an extraordinary time. Jesus had just been through one of the most painful and terrifying, and so far unique, experiences a human being has ever undergone. Three days earlier Jesus had been crucified. Thousands had been crucified before him. Thousand would be crucified after. That is not what was unique to Jesus’ experience. But no one of those thousands, except himself, had undergone what was probably one of the most terrifying and painful experiences a human being could undergo. He rose from the dead. Nobody had ever had that experience before. And so here he was a few days later, visiting his disciples. And he said, “have you got anything to eat?” Maybe that would show, per the Evangelist, that he was a real human person after all. All the times the gospels took pains to show he was more than human: now they show that he was truly human. Truly human: I think he was hungry. For three days he had not eaten. (Perhaps a good reason for our three days’ fast.) Before that he was up all night praying, then grabbed, interrogated, tortured, mocked, marched through the streets, and hung up on a cross. And then he was in a rock-hewn tomb. Three days. As promised, he had not eaten since the Passover meal he shared with his disciples. No wonder he was hungry. Wonder that he was. (Luke 24:41)
Sunday, November 10, 2019
Children of the Resurrection
Children of the Resurrection
The service of Burial begins with, among other words, these:
I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.
Job (19:25-27a).
For me the key words in the Gospel lesson for today are “children of the resurrection” and, even more so, “to him all of them are alive.”
As we approach the Lord’s Table we go to meet the Lord — who is alive and those too who are alive in Him, alive in the Resurrection. And even, I’ve been thinking, we go to meet those who are yet to come.
Hope for the future, as well as peace about the past, and faith — both comfort and challenge — for the present, are all proclaimed to us in this gospel.
For in Christ we are in communion with all the saints, all who live and die and are raised with him.
So as we go up to take communion we go up not for ourselves only but for all who share in the joy of the saints.
My professor Donald Nicholl worked this out while he was lay rector of the Ecumenical Study Institute in Jerusalem, a community comprising both Protestants and Catholics. He found that the Protestants would only be able to take communion with other Protestants, and the Catholics with Catholics. So at first his response was to take communion with neither. Then he realized, that will never work. I’m the leader of this community, and I’m never taking communion? So he decided, and said to the rest, that when he went up to take communion he would do it not just for himself but for everyone who could not come up themselves.
Well, sometimes that would be all of us. And this is a sacrament that we take never so for much for ourselves as when we take it as members of the body of Christ: one bread, one body.
From Isaiah (25:6) we receive this vision of a feast at the end of time:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.
The heavenly feast! Our practical idea of neighbors feeding neighbors is not far off. For what we do here on earth trains us for life eternal. Indeed, if we take resurrection seriously, a couple of things happen.
For if we take resurrection seriously, we take each other seriously. How shall I regard you if I know you are an eternal being, that you will live forever, that in Christ you have a home in his heart? And how then shall I look at myself - at my own actions, at my self-regard or self- envy, my self-criticism or my downward looks, if Christ is real?
“Eternal life starts here” could be written over the gates of your life - today, any day, as you enter the church, as you approach the communion rail, as you start again, today, to live life as you want it to be lived.
***
Even the sorrow of life cut short — or spent badly — is redeemed in the resurrection. And its hope is in us, and we in it. So we can resist despair and live on, live now, in the fullness of that hope, the assurance of redemption.
Father Fuller (from St Frances Cabrini) said: “Our faith in our future resurrection must affect our lives now.” Knowing who we are and believing in the future changes how we treat each other, how we treat ourselves, how we approach life.
We are called to live in the fullness of confidence that death is not the end — the end is in Christ — the finality of the goal of all life… as all things are gathered to him.
For love is strong as death (Song of Songs, 8:6).
Death be not proud, the poet said, but death cannot conquer those whom Jesus loves. And that includes you in.
***
To live now with the resurrection life before us means living now not only for ourselves but for others:
— in our sacramental life,
— in our workaday life,
— in our home life,
— in our social and political life…
How we treat one another,
how we treat ourselves,
how we live -
is in the light of the life of Christ,
that frees us,
empowers us, and
leads us - into strange, new places.
Now, we may not all agree on particular actions — I’m thinking of the social-political realm — but we know of one another who sends us, why and what is behind our actions, the source of our motivations.
“To seek to serve Christ in all persons” — and uphold their dignity as children of God, affects how we conduct our public lives - not just how we vote, but in how we speak to others with whom we disagree. Our attitude of certitude or frustration or despair or even anger over public policy must be leavened with hope — with knowing that we are children of God.
How are we then to live?
— as God’s children,
— as transcendent beings of infinite value,
— as creatures of dust and glory whose mortal acts of the moment are significant in light of
our immortality,
of the hope of the resurrection, that is,
of our presence now in Christ.
And this presence of Christ in us, which we enact and celebrate as we go up to communion, motivates us, not only to kneel or stand before him Sunday morning, but to stand with him in all the moments of our lives.
***
Last Wednesday evening at Grace Saint Paul’s church a representative of Sea-Watch, a humanitarian aid group working for refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, talk about the externalizing of frontiers, from Europe across the Mediterranean to the borders of Libyan territorial waters.
And Scott Warren, a cultural geographer from Ajo, told us about the separation of people in that small community into American Town, Mexican Town, and Indian Village.
But — one bread, one body.
In Christ we are all one people. Using desert or water to separate us does not, ultimately, work. For we know that our redeemer lives, and on the last day he will triumph — and we with him.
We begin to realize, as Christ draws all people to himself, that we are already one in the Spirit, and those boundaries we may seek to draw will all evaporate, dissolve, and blow away in the wind of the Spirit. That Holy Breath that in the Beginning moved across the face of the waters has not been still since creation’s dawn — it is still moving. And as it moves, what the world puts up against it will not stand.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)