Return to Archive

Sunday After Ascension, May 24, 1998

The word "novena" has the unmistakable ring of Roman Catholicism about it. I don't know of too many other Christians besides Roman Catholics who practice novenas, and that is probably too bad. A novena is a concentrated nine day period of prayer which has a particular objective.

One of the purposes of our church calendar is to help us reenact the life of Christ and the history of the early church. In that light, we are now in the middle of the first novena. When Jesus went up into heaven at his Ascension, he told the disciples to go back over to Jerusalem and "wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence."

Nine days intervene between Ascension Day and Pentecost or Whitsunday. On Ascension Day Jesus told the disciples to wait for the Holy Ghost to come to baptize them, and after nine days of praying and waiting the Holy Ghost came. Today, our Sunday after Ascension Day, is in the early middle of those nine days -- Jesus has gone to heaven, but the Holy Ghost is yet to come.

Contemplating the Ascension of Jesus raises some extremely significant and quite mid-stretching questions. If Ascension Day has any value, it is because it makes you think about heaven.

Is heaven a place? Do we really think it exists? If it exists, where is it? Can one go there now? Is it beyond the known universe? Is it part of the known universe? Is it just a poetic symbol? And more to the point -- am I going to go there and are the people I love going to go there so we can be together with each other and with God forever?

One of the first things I learned in seminary was that the idea that God is an old man up in the sky had to go. I was able to be fairly sophisticated about all that for awhile, until I ran up against the most significant Old Testament prophecy of the Ascension.

That prophecy is in Daniel -- and what do you know, Daniel describes God as an old man sitting on a throne up in the sky. It is quite stirring: "The Ancient of Days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire ... I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days."

It seems to me that just the title, "Ancient of Days" -- the old one-suggests that this is not someone to trifle with -- and not an image of God with which we can easily dispense. I'm afraid he can far more easily dispense with us and our silly attempts to cut him down to our size.

In today's Epistle, St. Peter writes, "the end of all things is at hand." We usually associate thinking about the end of everything more with the season of Advent than with Ascensiontide, but there is a reason we read what St. Peter says today.

The Ascension of Christ and the descent of the Holy Ghost are not the end of all things in the sense that everything stops and nothing more happens -- history has sailed along for two thousand years since those events and seems to be going strong. The Ascension and the coming of the Holy Ghost are the end of God's decisive invasions into the midst of history. When he acts decisively again, it will be to bring history to its close.

Jesus went back to heaven both to get our places there ready for us and to send down the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God could not be any more present or active in the world than he has been since the first Pentecost. What we have been experiencing for two thousand years -- and what we will continue to experience until God brings the final curtain down is his attempt to draw all people to him through the Spirit.

We are here to try to bring people to God ourselves to hasten the time of his coming again. We are not going to learn any more significant or different information about God or what he wants of us. We have everything we need to know now in the Bible which the Spirit wrote and in the church which tells us what the Spirit means.

We are living in the time of the end. We see Jesus up in heaven. He is at God's right hand because it is the place of honor. He is sitting down because his priestly sacrificial work is finished. He is pleading our case before his father by showing him the blood he shed to forgive our sins -- he is our mediator -- our go-between -- and our advocate -- our attorney -- the one who speaks on our behalf and makes our case.

We are waiting eagerly for him to come again -- to leave the throne room for one last time to come down here and bring history to an end, and gather us up to take us then where he is now.

Here is how St. Paul says it will happen, "The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words ." No greater comfort is available anywhere.

  Return to Archive

Ascension Day, May 21, 1998

The Ascension is the most astonishing and wholly and unquestionably miraculous event of Jesus' life. So he was born--lots of people are born, and since he looked convincingly human, who knows if the whole thing about the angel and the virgin mother was true? Resurrected from the dead--maybe he never really died, maybe he faked it somehow-maybe he only let himself look dead so it could seem that he rose again.

But an Ascension into the sky--it is difficult to imagine how one would go about faking that. If we can take what St. Luke tells us at face value--and there is no reason to take in everything else he says and question this--if we take St. Luke at his word, then Jesus went to the Mount of Olives and in plain sight of his disciples took off from the earth up up and away into the sky until he went into a cloud and they could not see him any more.

There are two other quite obvious reasons the Ascension took place. First of all, he told the disciples, "It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you."

Jesus had to go away so the Holy Ghost could come. As long as Jesus was on earth, the presence and power of God were localized in him. If he went back to heaven, the presence and power of God could be everywhere all the time and available to everyone.

The second most powerful reason for the Ascension is that it gives us a preview of our own ascensions. We shall follow Jesus up into heaven just as we follow him through birth, death, burial, and resurrection. Again he told the disciples, "I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."

For us now, in the midst of this transitory life, we have the guarantee of how our story is going to end--exalted to the right hand of the throne of God, sitting in heavenly places with Christ. If it were not so, he would have told us.

  Return to Archive

Easter V, Rogation Sunday, May 17, 1998

We are now in the home stretch of Eastertide. The forty days seem to have gone by pretty fast--certainly faster than the forty days of Lent ever seem to go. The Prayer Book's calendar winds up Easter with a sort of mini-season we call Rogationtide. It is composed of today, Rogation Sunday, and then the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week--the days leading up to Ascension Day which we call the Rogation Days.

"Rogation' comes from the Latin word which means "to ask"--as in "interrogate." In, this morning's Gospel Jesus says, "Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full."

What he says justifies our practice of asking God for things in prayer. We ask for things because he tells us to--not necessarily because we have a complete understanding of how the process works. It is much like Holy Communion--he says it's his Body and Blood, we take him at his word. He tells us to ask for things, we ask for things.

The specific thing we ask for that is most closely associated with Rogation is a good fall harvest. Old Testament Judaism prescribed various springtime festivals in which the people would thank God for the rebirth of flowers and crops. They prayed that the new life they saw in the spring was a preview of an even more bountiful outpouring that would come later on in the fall.

What came up in the spring was called the firstfruits--implying that there would be later fruits--which was the fall harvest. In Judaism the idea of firstfruits provided the basic discipline for giving to God. Starting with Abel, the Israelites gave their tithes and offerings to God first, before they met any other financial obligation.

Giving firstfruits is, of course, the practice we should follow as well. It you tithe to God first, you show that you trust him enough to take care of you with the other ninety percent--and it lets you enjoy the other ninety percent without that nagging feeling of guilt.

Waiting around to see what you have left over before you give anything to God shows that you don't take him at his word. It is no way to build up the trust and confidence in God's care for you that is an essential part of being a Christian. If you trust God enough to give to him first, then you develop an ever greater sense that he is your Father who is taking care of you in material ways.

In the New Testament, the idea of firstfruits takes on some other poetic significance. In last week's epistle, St. James wrote, 'Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures."

He is talking about the members of the church--about us. God makes us his children in baptism--he begets us, or gives us life, by the power of his word. That new begetting--being born again--makes the church the firstfruits of creation--the first part of creation God has been able to buy back from the devil. The church is a foretaste and preview of Christ's final and total victory which lies ahead at the end of all things.

St. Paul goes through his most elaborate explanation of what the resurrection of the body means in First Corinthians. He says that the dead body which we bury in the ground is to the resurrected body we will get later on as a seed is to the plant that comes up out of it.

To further the comparison he writes, "Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the firstfruits of them that slept." That is the Easter connection of Rogationtide. Jesus is the first dead person to come back out of the ground alive. If we can call his resurrection "firstfruits" that implies that there will be more resurrections later on.

The more resurrections later on are our own resurrections which will take place at the end of time. St. Paul goes on, "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming." What happened to Jesus on Easter will happen to us on the last day, as surely as nature's new birth in spring promises a rich harvest in the fall.

Christopher Wordsworth writes in our wonderful Hymn #92, "Christ is risen, Christ the firstfruits of the holy harvest field/ Which will all its full abundance at his second coming yield."

The best way to say good-bye to Easter is to take encouragement from St. Paul's stirring description of what is going to happen on the last day when all the fruits appear:

"Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed ... thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ ... therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord."

  Return to Archive

Easter IV, May 10, 1998

If you look in your hymnals in the Easter section you will find that the texts of three of them were written by the same man. Hymn number 93, "That Hallowed, Chosen Morn of Praise," hymn number 94, "Come, Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain," and hymn number 96, "The Day of Resurrection," all have at the bottom of their respective pages these words: "St. John of Damascus, 8th century; Tr. J.M. Neale." They are translations by the nineteenth-century Church of England priest John Mason Neale of poems written in Greek by St. John of Damascus some twelve hundred years ago.

This Sunday's gospel lesson is from St. John's account of the long speech Jesus makes to his disciples at the Last Supper. He is preparing them for the coming of the Holy Spirit -- which we shall celebrate on Whitsunday, three weeks from today. Jesus tells them, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will guide you into all truth."

I think the easiest way to begin to explain what Jesus is talking about is to remember that when he went back to heaven, he left the church with no New Testament, no Creeds, and no Prayer Book or Hymnal. We tend to take all of those essential elements of our life together for granted. But we have them only because the church worked them out in the earlier stages of her history under the Holy Ghost's guidance.

The first major theological question which confronted the new church was whether a Gentile had to become a Jew before he could become a Christian. Jesus had never addressed that issue directly. The way the church determined its answer was to gather all the apostles together to discuss it until the Spirit brought them to unanimous agreement. We read about their meeting in the fifteenth chapter of the book of Acts.

Gathering the bishops together became the way the church decided all major matters. Seven such meetings -- called "Ecumenical Councils" -- took place in the first eight centuries of the church's history. The church was still more or less one in that period, so it was at least theoretically possible to collect all the bishops in one place.

The last Ecumenical Council was the Second Council of Nicaea, held in 787. The writings of our hymn-writer St. John of Damascus had a decisive influence on the way the bishops answered the great question of the day. The question was, "Is it legitimate to make images or representations of Christ and the saints, and use them in the church?" Churchmen who said no were called "iconoclasts" -- literally "image smashers." John of Damascus defended images, and his view carried the day.

The iconoclasts rested their argument on the Second Commandment - the one which forbids worshipping graven images. John responded, "In former times God, who is without form or body, could never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the flesh conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake." The dispute over images became a debate about the meaning of the Incarnation of Christ.

What added spice to the debate was that it took place during the first decades of the rise of Islam -- which has an attitude toward images similar to that of Judaism. John's grandfather was an official in the Byzantine government of Damascus. After the conquest of Syria in the late seventh century, John's family stayed on as highly placed advisors to the Moslem governors. As a small boy, John himself was tutored with the son of the Caliph of Damascus, the Moslem ruler. Christians and Moslems coexisted, at least then, without any apparent difficulty.

John of Damascus wrote the earliest Christian tract about Islam that I am aware of -- called "On the Heresy of the Ishmaelites." He praised Mohammed for returning the Arabs to some sense of monotheism after centuries of outright paganism, and he seemed more interested in informing Christians about Islam than in fomenting hatred. But John criticized the new religion for the same reason he opposed the iconoclasts. They did not believe properly that in Jesus Christ God had come to earth in the flesh.

Our culture is increasingly non-literate. We can no longer assume that most people can read and write. John of Damascus lived in a similar world, and he defended the use of pictures in Christianity for just that reason. He writes, "Just as words edify the ear, so also the image stimulates the eye. What the book is to the literate, the image is to the illiterate. Just as words speak to the ear, so the image speaks to the sight."

John's victory in the iconoclastic controversy made it completely legitimate for Christian worship to appeal to the senses, as well as to the intellect. Jesus not only had all the human senses, but he also redeemed them, so we can use all our senses to perceive him and adore him. Without John of Damascus, it is hard to imagine anything we could call distinctively Christian art. The fact that John's view prevailed led directly to the flowering of icon painting in the East in the high and late Middle Ages and to the magnificent Christian art the West produced in the Medieval and Renaissance periods.

The iconoclastic heresy returned with a vengeance at the Reformation when many Protestants eliminated crucifixes, icons, and statues, and abhorred churches that were decorated in any way. Their worship became primarily an exercise for the mind, rejecting sacramental worship like our own which tries to appeal to the body and the senses.

The writings of St. John of Damascus put the teachings of the Eastern Church into an orderly system, much as St. Thomas Aquinas did in the West several centuries later. John also standardized liturgical music in the Eastern Church as St. Gregory the Great had done in the West, and John wrote those wonderful hymns which we still sing.

But what unites all of John's achievements is his defense of the Incarnation. In Jesus, God has made himself known to us in our flesh. We need to hear this Christmas doctrine again in Eastertide, for if Jesus is not flesh and blood just as I am, the fact that he rose from the dead in his body holds out no hope for me.

Let us let John himself conclude. "(Christ) is like us in everything except sin, and partakes of our nature ... he has deified our flesh forever, and has sanctified us by surrendering his Godhead to our flesh ... he rose by the excellence of his power, keeping the immortal flesh by which he had saved us from corruption." "Come, let us taste the vine's new fruit/For heavenly joy preparing/ Today the branches with the root/in resurrection sharing/ Whom as true God our hymns adore/Forever and forevermore."

  Return to Archive

Easter III, May 3, 1998

The Gospels for today and for the next several Sundays all come from the same section of St. John. They are excerpts from the long address Jesus makes to his disciples at the Last Supper. When we think about the Last Supper, we are most likely to remember how Jesus set up Holy Communion -- taking the bread and the wine of the Passover seder and saying, "This is my body ... this is my blood."

But St. John talks about Holy Communion in connection with one of Jesus' feeding miracles, not in his description of the Last Supper. St. John's account of the Last Supper begins as Jesus washes the feet of his disciples -- illustrating for them how they are supposed to serve one another, rather than try to control and dominate one another. He continues with a speech several chapters long, and then ends with a prayer he addresses to his Father.

In today's selection he is trying to get the disciples ready for the fact that he is about to leave them. It should not surprise us that they have a hard time figuring out what he means. He has told them several times that he is on his way to Jerusalem to suffer and die and rise again, but they have resisted any such idea all along.

He says, "A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father." Jesus is talking about two separate events. First of all, the disciples will not see him for a little while after he dies and is buried, and then they will see him again on Easter. Next they will not see him when he goes away into heaven at his Ascension, and then, after a rather longer little while, they -- and we-will see him again at the Last Day.

The disciples find this all quite confusing. They say to one another, "What are these little whiles all about? What does he mean about seeing him and then not seeing him and going to the Father? We can't tell what he is talking about at all -- we cannot tell what he saith."

They may think they have hidden their puzzled mumblings from Jesus, but he knows exactly what they are saying. He says, "So, you are asking one another about little whiles and seeing and not seeing? -- you can't figure me out? Let me see if I can draw you a clearer picture of what I mean.

"Here is how it is going to go -- you are going to be sad, and the rest of the world is going to be happy; but then your attitude is going to turn from sorrow into joy. " Jesus is following along with what we explained before. When he is executed on the cross, his disciples will be sorry, but his antagonists will be glad. Then the disciples will be happy again when he rises from the dead on Easter.

The second part of it is that they are going to feel deserted when he goes back into heaven to be with his Father -- forty days after Easter. He will turn that sorrow into joy in two ways. First, he will send them the Holy Ghost to keep them company, and then he will come back to earth-after a little while which has already lasted about two thousand years.

Jesus goes on to say, "If that doesn't help clear it up, then think about this. Labor pains are a horrible thing for a woman going through childbirth (of course, since Jesus invented the system, it is not fair for a woman to ask him what she might ask if her husband said the same thing-namely, 'How would you know?'), but the joy of seeing the baby when he comes finally overwhelms the memory of the pains of labor.

"When I rise from the dead, when I send you the Holy Ghost, and when I come back to earth, you are going to be so happy that you will forget all about whatever sorrow you endured because I was not here. Ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you."

At the beginning of today's epistle, St. Peter addresses the Christians to whom he is writing as "Strangers and pilgrims." That gets at what Jesus is talking about. In this world, we Christians are in a sort of interim state.

We know our sins have been forgiven, but we know we are not yet perfect. We known that Jesus conquered death for us by rising from the grave, but it hasn't happened to us yet. God has promised us that we are going to heaven in the end, but we are, quite clearly, not in heaven yet.

We are trapped in a state of being perpetually in between -- we are in the midst of a rather extended "little while." We know it won't go on forever, but we still can't be sure just when it will end.

As far as this world is concerned, this is not our real home. In the deepest sense, we don't really belong here -- we are only strangers. We are not expecting to hang around here forever, either. We are pilgrims -- only passing through -- on our way to somewhere else. This life is exactly what the Prayer Book says it is -- transitory -- passing away.

In baptism and confirmation Jesus gives us his Spirit to keep us going until the last little while has ended. His Spirit is the Holy Ghost-the presence and power of God in our hearts, working on us from the inside to change us into exactly what he wants us to be -- what St. Paul calls, "No more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God."

  Return to Archive

Good Shepherd Sunday (Easter II), April 26, 1998

One of the more poignant moments in the New Testament takes place during Jesus' early ministry in his home territory of Galilee. St. Matthew describes what his usual day was like by saying, "And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people."

The preaching and the hearings attracted crowds wherever Jesus went. St. Matthew continues, "But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd."

The people in the crowds didn't have anyone to take care of them, and they didn't have anyone to point them in the right direction. That is what it means that they were like sheep who don't have a shepherd.

So the preaching and the teaching and the hearings were all tied up in Jesus' compassion for the crowds. The things he had to say and the miracles he performed had a shepherdly purpose. They showed Jesus' intention to take care of people and to point them in the right direction.

It is almost trite to make the point that many of the greatest heroes of the Old Testament literally were shepherds -- men who took care of sheep. The list includes Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Amos, and, perhaps most notably, King David. Moses had a direct encounter with God while he took care of his sheep in the land of Midian.

Very early in Israel's history, sheep and shepherds became more than the basis of the national economy, important as that was. Sheep and shepherds became the favorite poetic way of talking about the relationship between God and his people. Isaiah calls God the shepherd of Israel; and David says, "We are his people and the sheep of his pasture ... we are his people and the sheep of his hand... the Lord is my shepherd."

Shepherds and their sheep also became the image of the relationship between God's people and the leaders he set over them. When Moses asked God to identify his successor, he gave a specific job description, saying, "Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation, which may go out before them, and which may go in before them, and which may lead them out, and which may bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep which have no shepherd."

Jesus echoes Moses' words later on when he says, "I am the door of the sheep ... by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved and shall go in and out and find pasture." Joshua succeded Moses and Jesus and Joshua are identical names -- and they are all shepherds.

God shared his shepherding in Israel with the kings and the priests. With some exceptions, the general run of kingly and priestly shepherds was bad. They didn't take care of the sheep and they didn't provide any direction.

The prophets spoke God's judgment against the shepherds of Israel, but at the same time they held out the hope that one day God would send his people the right sort of shepherd. Jesus announces in today's gospel -- I am the one for whom you have been waiting -- "I am the good shepherd."

When Jesus appeared to the disciples at the Sea of Galilee after his resurrection, his marching orders to St. Peter were, "Feed my lambs ... feed my sheep ... feed my sheep." St. Paul says that it is part of the way the Holy Spirit works in the body of the church that he singles out some men to be pastors -- shepherds.

Last week we talked about how the church is an apostolic institution -- built upon various kinds of sending out. Today we see that the church is also a pastoral institution -- a place where people can get direction and be cared for and fed -- a place where they don't have to be scattered abroad as sheep without a shepherd.

The relationship between the sheep and the shepherd is by no means all one way. The shepherd directs the sheep and feeds the sheep, but he knows it is in his interest to be good to the sheep because he lives off the sheep. He takes care of them so they, in turn, can take care of him.

Good Shepherd Sunday fits nicely into the Easter season, because Jesus says, "The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." When Jesus showed that he was willing to pay the ultimate price to protect us sheep from the power of the devil, God gave him back his life again so he could be our Good Shepherd in the church for ever.

Jesus is the reconciliation of many seeming opposites: he is both God and man; he is both priest and victim; he is both king and servant. Today we see that he is also both shepherd and sheep. He is the one who takes care of us and gives us direction, and he is also the one who is sacrificed to take away our sins. Jesus is the Good Shepherd, and Jesus is the Lamb of God.
St. Peter says that he died without putting up a fight -- like a lamb who is silent in front of his shearers. But the quiet death of the Lamb is what reconciled us to God. "For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls."

  Return to Archive

Low Sunday (Easter I), April 19, 1998

At the Last Supper Jesus said to his disciples, "in the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." His statement is a perfect expression of the completely realistic attitude toward life that Christianity promotes. On the one hand, life in this world is full of difficulty and trouble, and there is no way around it. On the other hand, in his death and resurrection Jesus has beaten the world. Easter shows that difficulty and trouble don't last forever, and they don't get the last word either.

Those ideas constitute what we might call, "the Easter attitude"-the cast of mind St. John talks about in today's Epistle. He tells us that by faith and by the power of the Holy Ghost inside us, we can share Jesus' victory over the world. It is a similar idea to what St. Paul said in last week's Epistle, "if ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above."

Living in the power of Easter begins with accepting the teaching that Jesus Christ, who was dead on a Friday, was alive again in his body on the next Sunday. It begins there but it does not end there. The next step comes in applying that teaching to ourselves.

When we are baptized, we become part of Christ's body. What happened to him will happen to us. He died, we shall die. He was buried, we shall be buried, he rose from the dead in his body, we shall rise again from the dead in our bodies. He went to heaven to live with God forever, we shall go to heaven to live with God forever.

That means that in the long run, everything is going to turn out well. God gives us no guarantees at all about the short run -- about life in this world in which we have tribulation. We have the guarantee of his love and his presence, but no guarantee about how things will turn out here.

But we do have a guarantee about the long run -- resurrection of our bodies made perfect, and then life forever in heaven where, "God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes."

Our task as Christians is somehow to live our lives with two realities in front of us -- Jesus on the cross and Jesus off the cross. Jesus on the cross reminds us that this world brings tribulation -- and that Jesus hung there both to forgive all of our own cooperations with tribulation and to break the hold tribulation itself has. The empty cross tells us that Christ's suffering -- and the world's despair -- ended on Easter morning when God beat death in Jesus' body.

So the Easter attitude is "trouble for awhile, rest for awhile, life in heaven forever." The church is the way God's recharges his Spirit in us so we can have that Easter attitude more and more -- the attitude of good cheer in the face of the tribulations this world will bring -- good cheer, because Jesus has overcome the world for us.

But the Easter attitude is more than merely a mental thing -- a way to reprogram your mind. The Easter attitude involves a series of commitments -- commitments to action as well as commitments to belief.

On the basis of such passages as this morning's Gospel, from St. John, chapter 20, we believe that Jesus set up a church -- an organized structure in which his Word can be preached and taught and his Sacraments celebrated and received in an orderly, but not stultifying, way.

The church's structure is apostolic -- that is to say, it is a matter of sending out. The word from which we get "apostle" is the Greek word which means "send out." God the Father sent Jesus out, Jesus sent the apostles out. The apostles became the bishops of the church. The bishops are involved in sending other people out -- some to preach and administer the sacraments -- and more to tell others the good news about the Easter attitude.

The specific power Jesus gave his apostles was the right to forgive sins. Apostles are the human channels who apply the power of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection to specific situations and people.

Forgiveness is the way the once-for-all accomplishments of Good Friday and Easter extend into time, until he comes again. We cannot see Jesus alive as the first century witnesses did, but we come closest to the direct impact of the resurrection in the forgiveness of our sins.

Jesus also expresses the Easter attitude in a rather more forbidding way. If the worst thing something or somebody can do to us is kill us, we are silly to waste our time being scared. It is better to focus upon a healthy respect for God, whose power to punish extends beyond death Jesus speaks, "I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more than they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: fear him which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell. Yea I say unto you, fear him."

That is just a more downbeat, if no less effective, way of saying, "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."

  Return to Archive

Easter Sunday, April 12, 1998

I have officiated at more funerals so far in 1998 than I did in the previous several years combined. I hope that means that I have used up my quota, and there is no reason for any of us to be nervous. I was about to conduct a graveside service several weeks ago when an extremely thin woman who was smoking compulsively came up to me and said, "Don't you just hate funerals? -- I know I do."

I can remember a time when I hated funerals, and I realize I hated them because I did not believe in the resurrection. One of the great values of funerals is that they provide an extremely worthwhile spiritual test -- a test of whether we really believe what the Bible tells us and what the creeds and the sacraments of the church affirm.

The New Testament says the strongest power the devil has is that he can make us afraid of death. We know what that power is all about -- we don't want to die, we don't want our friends and family members to die, we don't want to be separated from them, we don't know what being dead is going to be like, we don't want to be lost and forgotten and cut off forever.

In the face of the certainty of death, the church proclaims that Christ is risen. We proclaim that Christ is risen, because that idea fits perfectly into the pattern in which God acted in the Old Testament. We proclaim that Christ is risen, because over five hundred people who knew he had died saw him alive again later on. We proclaim that Christ is risen, because those five hundred people were all willing to be put to death themselves rather than deny what they knew was true.

We proclaim that Christ is risen, because at some point we decided to surrender, and give God and the eyewitnesses the benefit of the doubt, and then after we opened ourselves up to the possibility of the resurrection, the Holy Ghost showed us it is true.

St. Paul tells us, "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" -- saved from being afraid of death, saved from dying forever.

In the Prayer Book's funeral service we say to the dead Christian, "We are sorry to see you go, but we'll see you again later on. You are dead now, but Christ is risen, and because Christ is risen, at the end you will rise too, and we'll all go to heaven together." I don't hate funerals at all.

Funerals scream out the most important fact anyone needs to know: "Christ is risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept ... for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."

  Return to Archive