Practicing Resurrection

I hope this finds you having a joyous and blessed Easter week. In the office, we’ve still been catching up after Holy Week, and I am pleasantly excited about all of the opportunities for outreach that have presented themselves recently. Thanks to the fellowship committee, an idea for providing diapers to local families in need is taking shape in the form of the “Diaper Depot” we hope to open the first week in June. It would operate once a month, in the shape of a food pantry but with diapers instead. Diapers are being collected already. We are also trying to purchase our “Easter cow” for a family in need with the Heifer Project. The Heifer Project operates in many countries to help people become economically self sufficient in providing agricultural education and livestock. See www.heifer.org for more information.

This Sunday at 11:15, I hope you’ll join me in watching an informational video on the B Safe (Bishop's Summer Academic and Fun Enrichment) Program held in Boston each summer and discuss if we would like to partner with them in providing this important resource for inner city children. The day camp program runs in July and August in Boston, and has components of athletics, art, and academic enrichment. Partner churches sign up for a week, and serve lunch each day (for about 75 kids) and read with the children during “DEAR” time (Drop Everything And Read). Christ Church would be able to join with another church, so we wouldn’t be doing it all on our own. You might remember when Liz Steinhauser spoke about this program at Bishop Bud’s visitation of last year. I hope you’ll come to the meeting and help Christ Church discern whether there is interest in working with the program. B Safe is a program of St Stephen’s Episcopal Church in the South End, but parishes all across the diocese help to make it possible.

What is exciting about all of these opportunities is that they give us a chance to really celebrate Easter—in the words of poet Wendell Berry, to “practice resurrection.” The resurrection isn’t just something that happened 2000 years ago; it happens now, and we are part of it. God rolled away the stone on Easter morning in the resurrection, and the life and love of Christ burst from the tomb. Today, God asks us to help roll away the stones that harm the wellbeing of people in our world. The heavy stone of dangerous streets, of random shootings and drug deals on the corner; the boulder of poverty, that prevents a baby from having a clean diaper and a full stomach; the rock of despair, where a family sees no way to support themselves. These outreach opportunities that have come before us are real ways that we can help roll away that stone here and now, to practice the resurrection, the gift that God gave us and that we can give others.

Alleluia, Christ is risen!

Holy Week

I hope you are having a blessed Holy Week. In many ways, this week is just like any week. Easter is coming and we are all busying ourselves with shopping lists and guest invitations, as if it were any holiday. All of the “church talk” around Holy Week can seem awfully abstract and seems perhaps less connected to what’s going on in our own day to day lives.

Yesterday, we shared a service of healing and reconciliation, a time to spend some more time in confession of our sins, and also some time to pray for each other individually. Tonight, we’ll tell the story from the Gospel of John, when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet as they met for their last meal together. Tomorrow is Good Friday—but of course there doesn’t seem much “good” about it, since it’s the day we remember the crucifixion.

Good or not, though, the truth of Good Friday is that it’s real. Suffering and death are real. Our liturgies aren’t museum pieces; they draw us into a deeper truth of our faith. They are in some ways a mirror of our own experience. Jesus Christ was fully human. Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself. (Philippians 2: 5) Jesus emptied himself and took on all of the uncertainty, pain, and suffering of human living. Nothing human is alien to the heart of God because of Jesus’ closeness to us. This week, Jesus enters the depths of human love, and also human grief and suffering. This week is about us, not just about God.

As he washed the disciples; feet, Jesus invites us to share the self-emptying love he showed in his ministry—wash each other, he says, as I wash you. He gives us an example to follow. But something else happens, too. “Wash each other,” our faith tells us, and as we do, we wash Christ himself. This week, we observe this sacrificial closeness God has to us.

But isn’t this all of this a little obscure? We all bathe regularly, so what’s the point of foot washing in church once a year? We all see the cross every Sunday, so what’s the point of going up to it and kneeling in front of it? Or, even more bizarre, kissing it? The answer, I think, is that it’s because liturgy helps us to enter the truth of that mystery of God become human, and was willing to suffer death. In our liturgies we have these very ordinary things that become extraordinary signs of God’s presence with us. Foot washing and reverencing the cross aren’t “sacraments” strictly speaking, but they are (if you’ll work with me a little here) sacrament-ish. Like the bread and wine of communion that satisfy fill hungers we didn’t know we had, the liturgies of Holy Week bring us into the mystery of Christ’s ministry and death in a bodily way that invite us into truths deeper than our own intellectual reflection. That reflection is a crucial part of the life of faith, but it’s not the whole story.

So I hope I will see you tonight and tomorrow.

On Sunday, we will celebrate the resurrection of Christ. The depth of our solidarity with Christ in his suffering now will also be the depth of our joy in rejoicing with him in the victory of life over all death. Thanks be to God!

Telling Stories

This week, I’ve been thinking about telling stories.

This morning I woke up to a piece on NPR about the movie director Dave McLaughlin talking about the power of stories. McLaughlin is the writer and director of the movie “On Broadway,” (small) parts of which were filmed here at Christ Church two years ago. He was talking specifically about stories and myth in his own Irish American culture. In the interview, he spoke about how he had wanted to convey some of the more positive stories of Irish culture than those that we see in violent movies like “The Departed” or other mobster films. If our stories tell us who we are, then his community, he felt, needed some more positive stories on the big screen. The plot of “On Broadway” goes something like this: the main character writes a play to remember his dead uncle, and in the process (as tends to happen on screen) surmounts remarkable obstacles and wins the acclaim of his family and friends. It opens around town tomorrow, and in wider release after that. I hope it’s a good movie—let me know if you see it!

Another place I’ve been thinking about stories has been with our Connect class. On Tuesday we talked about how our relationship with God is understood through story telling. There are, of course, Biblical stories that instruct us about our faith. The parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, teaches us how we are to be neighbors to each other. The story says, “be like this.” At Connect, we also talked about the whole of our salvation story: all the way back to our creation and the calling of the people of Israel and the ministry of Jesus, and his death and resurrection and coming again. It’s almost like a play in 5 acts. We are created good, but we sin. Jesus is crucified, but he is raised. And, act 5, Jesus will come again. At Connect, we were encouraged to ground ourselves in the original blessing of the story of creation, (God created, and it was good) rather than the sin that came after that: original blessing, not original sin. We talked about how that goodness runs through and under everything else that happens afterwards, even when we fail to live up to it.

Film maker McLaughlin was talking about the importance for a community to be able to identify with good stories (families reconciling), instead of not so good ones (mobsters blowing each other up). The place of narrative as he was talking about it is like a mirror: it reinforces what you see in yourself, and you can choose to reinforce the good, or the bad. But the “Big Story” of our faith as Christians can do even more than that, and we tell it every Sunday morning. The way we make communion—that bread and wine become body and blood—is by telling this story. But we don’t just tell the story in a commemorative sense, as if we were looking back on it and these things happened to different people at a different time. We tell the story because it’s ours, and in that telling around that altar, something extraordinary happens-we ARE the story. As we remember Jesus and his friends in that upper room, we go there ourselves. That story doesn’t say “be like this,” it says “you are this.” And as we become that, we are transformed even more fully into the goodness that we were created for.

Thanks be to God!

A Poem of Thanksgiving

I hope you will be able to enjoy the beautiful day we are having here in Waltham. As the days get longer and the sun shines brighter, you can feel that Easter is coming. This Sunday’s Gospel tells about of the raising of Lazarus; his story is a mini-Easter in the midst of Lent, as Jesus calls him out of the tomb. “Lazarus, come out!” and so he does.

In the light of Christ’s resurrection, every death becomes a festival of Easter. This Saturday we’ll gather at 11:00 to celebrate the life of Marguerite McCullough (mother of Sally Lobo, grandmother to Alison Coates and Meredith Larade, and great grandmother to all of their children), who died this week. We pray for all of her family and in thanksgiving for the gifts she gave in her life.

This week, I’d like to share with you a poem I wrote when I was on retreat in January. I’m not sure how Lenten it is, but I hope you enjoy it.

This is my prayer for this week.

The prayer of enough.
That I pray enough.

That it is a life lived toward prayer, even if not always

(aware of being)

in prayer.

That that seeking is

miraculously

gloriously

Enough!

The blue jay in his blue

Enough!

Trees without their leaves
Enough!

Tea with honey

Enough!

A path swept clear

Enough!

Grace, made perfect

Power made perfect

In weaknesss, and small small signs

of enough.

To be enough, always and already,

That is the grace

To know it and give thanks,

That is the glory.

To sing and to pray,

That is the gift.

Blessings,

Sara+