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Wondering Pilgrim

~ the ramblings of a perambulent and often distracted sojourner

Wondering Pilgrim

Tag Archives: Easter

Easter where the rubber hits the road

27 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal, Spirituality, theology

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Corinthians, Easter, kerygma

Rubber roadIn the closing phrases of his first letter to the Christians in Corinth, the Apostle Paul delivers what biblical scholars call the kerygma – the announcement of the good news of Easter.   From the content of the letter, we can tell that the fledgeling church had some serious issues, and the apostle’s frustration mingled with love in dealing with it all has been palpable.

Here, in his final appeal, he calls them to remember the good news in all its detail. None of it happened in isolation from the grit and challenge of daily living. They are living examples of its power for transformation. So it is with you!

8 days B4 Good Friday

22 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal, Spirituality, theology

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Alexander Shaia, Easter, Good Friday, Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday, Triduum

candleToday the lectionary gives us Mark’s terse account of the crucifixion.  Why so early? We haven’t even engaged the joyful and celebratory Palm Sunday celebrations yet.

Worship planners are often flummoxed when coming to the Revised Common Lectionary to plan Palm Sunday celebrations. They are confronted with a choice – Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday. Either pull out all the stops on palm leaves and hosannas or focus on what happens afterwards, particularly the crucifixion of Jesus.

Some will opt for celebration – shorter passage, less angst. Others, noting that many eschew the solemnity of Good Friday services, choose the longer passion narrative in order to present the completeness of the passion, crucifixion, resurrection story by the time the faithful return next Sunday (if they aren’t taking advantage of the extra long weekend elsewhere).

Many get lost in the confusion and herein lies the challenge for contemporary Christian communicators. How to convey the drama of the Easter message, the core of the Christian understanding of inspiration, transformation and spent living in a way that entices and awakens a world that is mostly only half awake.

Ancient church rites centred on the Triduum may hold a key. Contemporary reworkings of the practice as suggested by Alexander Shaia in the following podcast may even be a good start to re-entering the journey of Easter:

https://jamesprescott.podbean.com/e/shaia-easter/

Easter choices…

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal, Spirituality

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Easter, Parker Palmer, Resurrection

Parker Palmer is someone I enjoy immensely – not the least for his reflection on our choices in response to Resurrection Sunday!

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Easter, Passover, Refugees & Memory Loss

17 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal, refugees, Spirituality

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Easter, refugees

This excellent article by Andrew Hamilton in Eureka Street speaks so much to the themes of this past week as well as being a timely reflection on the long Aussie weekend about to begin:

Easter memory loss makes plastic of the present – Eureka Street.

Terror at the Empty Tomb

08 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Spirituality, theology

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Bridge, Christianity, Easter, Empty tomb, Mark, Tomb

“So they went out and fled from the tomb,  for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone,  for they were afraid.” Mark 16:8

So ends the earliest gospel narrative, describing the reaction of the women who, on arriving at the tomb where Jesus’ crucified body was laid, and expecting to perform the last rites of anointing, were confronted instead with his absence and a startling message of resurrection. Terror and amazement were the initial response, not joy and vindication of realised hope.These were for later.

This picture of a flimsy suspension bridge across a wide watery chasm evokes for me something of what I imagine such a confrontation may have meant to those who first entered the empty tomb. Like a good many folk, I have my irrational fears and phobias. When I first saw this image, it awoke my two boss bêtes noirs – a panic of water and a fear of heights. Both evoke instant nausea. Yet the picture draws me in. I am curious to see what’s on the other side, and I am almost compelled  to make the first tentative step, trusting that the cable and the flimsy slats of wood will hold. Terror, amazement, hope and purpose combine into a terrific maelstrom that can be negotiated only one step at a time.

Is resurrection like this? It is a call to something new and transformational. Bridges are archetypes of transition. What is known and familiar is left behind for a new thing that is as yet undiscovered and inviting of exploration.

Terror and amazement are appropriate initial responses.

The empty tomb of the first Easter must have been like that for the friends and followers of Jesus. They said nothing to anyone for they were afraid. Obviously, someone sometime took that first tentative step and said something, because we tell the story today.

 

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Clowning around

01 Sunday May 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Easter, Holy Humor, postaday2011, Risus Paschalis

I am told that my stated childhood ambition was “to be a clown in a circus.” Upon my ordination, my mother said “I see you’ve achieved your ambition.” A devout salt-of-the-earth sort of Christian, she knew how to keep her boy from taking on airs and graces.

Today is “Holy Humo[u]r Sunday”, Risus Paschalis, God’s Joke, the Easter Laugh – the Orthodox tradition goes back to about 13th century and was part of the Roman Catholic tradition in 15th century Bavaria. It was marked by funny stories, hilarious anecdotes, folk-dancing and feasting. It marked the invitation to participate in God’s final laugh over Satan through the resurrection of Christ, a relief from the sombre and reflective season of Lent and Passion Week.

Well, I know on this side of the first Easter we celebrate resurrection every day – but it also helps to participate in the full light and shade spectrum of the divine/human drama.

My lament is to be on leave and not be taking my church through this celebration and giving full vent to my childhood ambition! My opportunity is to look around for a service to attend which just might be observing this tradition.

Happy holy hilarity!

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Reflecting on Easter Sunday… a sermon

24 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Personal

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Easter, postaday2011, Resurrection

Easter, old greec salut

Image via Wikipedia

“But how did it happen? I don’t understand how when he was dead he was alive again. How did it happen?”

The class had finished. The next class was waiting and I was halfway through the door. A nine year old, engrossed in the drama of the Easter story, required an answer to this question or he would be most disgruntled.

I had at the most ten seconds to reply.

Little did he know that he was asking a question that has proved to be one of the greatest stumbling blocks to a full minded, full hearted, full bodied embrace of faith in the Crucified and Risen One.

The disciples themselves had enough trouble coming to grips with it.

Even though Jesus had spoken many times of his coming death and being” raised on the third day.”…

Even though the concept of resurrection had already been adopted into mainstream post exilic Judaism …

The disciples were just as confused and disoriented on the day of Jesus’ resurrection as we often find ourselves to be. They were looking for answers that required more than a passing ten seconds.

Often we think we have to have it wrapped up so neatly.

Christian tradition has spent two thousand years developing and narrating through art and music the Great Triduum  – the events leading up to and including Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday.

Good Friday services – with their focus on the vicarious pain and suffering of Jesus seem to draw the most crowds. Our own human experiences seem to be so well expressed in the shame, scapegoating, grief, disappointment and seeming failure of the Passion of Jesus.  We are drawn, not through masochism, but an eternal value that breaks through the most awful things we can humanly experience.

It is the demonstration of love – it is the culmination of a truth that Jesus demonstrated and taught throughout his time amongst us “Greater love has no one than they lay down their life for their friends.”

We can feel part of the Good Friday story – it is our story that beckons us to be more complete expressions of who we are called to be, even though it culminates in death.

Holy Saturday seems to be a hiatus – an “in between time”. The gospel narratives graciously omit the thoughts and activities of Jesus’ followers at this time. Grief deserves a season of silence – where nothing is said and nothing is done.

Easter Sunday immediately throws us into the unexpected. Grief and trauma experts would say it’s far too soon to come to grips with new realities – we are still trying to assimilate and adjust to fresh loss.

Yet here it is. On the third Day the Son of Man will be raised.

The women attending the tomb at dawn with their embalming supplies must replan their day and their emotions.

The disciples must contend with their disbelief and confusion.

And I suspect this morning that many of us may find ourselves among them.

This week we have farewelled two significant fellow travellers, both well known to our community of faith, both an integral part to our understanding of who we are.

At the service for Keith and again at the service for Bruce,  we uttered the words that give expression to resurrection hope, yet this morning on resurrection day, we are still dealing with our feelings of numbness and empathy for their families who are in the early stages of readjustment to “the great absence.”

Others of us, for ourselves or our friends, have received grim news about our health and once again we are confronted with finiteness and mortality.

There were those of you who, at our Good Friday service, came face to face in a deeper way with some of the grief that you have carried daily with great courage and faith.

But this morning, Easter Day, the Day of Resurrection, you are brought face to face with a new reality.

Traditionally, the Great Triduum marks this day as one of joy and celebration.  We may feel under pressure, in spite of ourselves, to put on a brave face and join in with gusto the alleluias and the Easter shout.

I know that we often do these in defiance of our feelings than because of them.

Our question is not “How did it happen?” but what does the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, God’s anointed one really mean? What does it mean to the grief I carry for myself and others?

This question moves us beyond the debate of the mechanics of resurrection and the debate around its physical, metaphorical and allegorical interpretations. The question, “What does it mean?” transcends them all.

Bruce Sanguin, who blogs at If Darwin Prayed, also reflects on the meaning of resurrection in the face of personal loss:

Paul had this theology that Christ was alive in the gathered community, risen in them, or not at all. I’ve never felt that the church took itself seriously enough as the mystical body of the risen Christ.  Church is a community that knows all about despair and so is able to create a space that can hold the grief. Like Jesus, we can be a healing presence…

When the time is right, we can also play the part of the mysterious stranger in the story of the road to Emmaus. The road to Emmaus is the path we all walk when we discover that much of life is beyond our control. The conversation can turn to despair, but the stranger miraculously sets this conversation within a larger narrative of promise. Then he sits the heart-broken disciples down, feeds them, and explains that the worst thing that can happen is never the last thing that happens.

Beatrice Bruteau , in The Easter Mysteries, reflects on resurrection thus:

It’s about “anointing” the world to be the real presence of God. This is what is celebrated in the Easter vigil and Eucharistic Feast. What we call “resurrection” is the full manifestation of the Incarnation itself. This is the revelation of what and who we really are…

…Thus the divine life comes down from heaven and is sown in a perishable body. But the divine life gradually rises up as the imperishable that it truly is. The world itself is to be wrapped in the mantle of divine praise, the presence of the life-giving Spirit. And this takes place through us, the highly conscious elements of the world, the humanity made from “humus,” from the dust of the earth, the dust of the stars, and organized into a “living being,” which is ultimately to realize itself as the “life-giving Spirit.” The first humanity was from the earth, a humanity of dust; the second humanity is from heaven….Just as we have borne the image of the humanity of dust, we shall also bear the image of the humanity of heaven. (1Cor.15:47,49)

If that wine is too rich and heavy, try this. Rebecca Lyman writes:

In his black and white photographs, [Ansel] Adams portrayed the whole range of tones from deepest black to pure white. Black and white are not oppositions as much as ends of a continuous range of light. His development technique overcame the limitations of the photographic paper to reproduce more closely the ratio of the human eye: we see much more than what a camera could reproduce. In his photographs of Yosemite snow and granite, Adams revealed to us what we physically see. Our minds and eyes are no longer disconnected. In Adams’ photographs we see light spread throughout the zones of black and into white again.

On Easter the resurrection stories of Jesus connect our eyes and hearts to our minds as Gethsemane becomes Eden. We have spent a week soaked in pain, separation, betrayal, and fatal suffering. What our hearts sought, our eyes did not find in the awful torture and death of Christ. None of this was what should have happened to a good man in Jerusalem. The male disciples flee and the women disciples stay, but all see nothing but the relentless victory of death.

Now in the early morning, the women encounter grief and joy as the darkness of the tomb gives way to light as dazzling as snow and lightning. The places that we knew were empty of hope are filled with divine presence, and the world as a whole has been remade new. We go to the garden looking only to be near our lost beloved, and find ourselves embraced by Love itself.

[At the Easter Vigil before dawn, we pray] This is the night … when Israel came out of Egypt, when all who believe in Christ are delivered, when Christ broke open the bonds of death. This is the most holy and blessed darkness where restoration and healing come from “Christ, the Morning Star who knows no setting—he who gives his light to all creation.”[1]

These places in ourselves that we avoid are exactly where God makes a home. What we consider to be tombs of our buried hope and dreams become the gardens of God’s renewal. The sharp realities of suffering, death, and grief are essential to the continuum of love and joy at Easter; their very darkness is what causes the light of resurrection to dazzle.

We don’t have to come to grips with it all at the mouth of the empty tomb on Easter morning. On the calendar, Easter is a season that runs, not just over this long weekend, but fifty days. Indeed, every Sunday is a reorientation to resurrection affirmations.

We ponder at leisure the fresh realities that the empty tomb of Easter places before us. And, like the women and the Twelve who were amongst the first, as Jesus’ intimates, to reflect on the new reality that confronted them, we  too can move from confusion and despair to a courageous embrace of resurrection faith and drive.

So how does one satisfactorily answer a nine year old’s question about resurrection in 10 seconds?

“But how did it happen? I don’t understand how when he was dead he was alive again. How did it happen?”

“I don’t really know how. God did it!”

His look of relief and wonder was transparent.

“Oh, God did it!  Wow!”

I also breathed a sigh of relief. That was all he wanted to know for now. And it’s a starting point.

Christ is Risen! Alleluia! Wow!

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Reflecting on Holy Saturday…

23 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in Spirituality

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Easter, Holy Saturday, Holy Week, postaday2011

Their waiting was different from ours. We wait in anticipation of resurrection celebration.

They waited in despair for the Sabbath to pass so they could tend a cadaver and complete a proper entombment.

Our waiting is for the completion of a cycle in a story that continues.

Their story had been destroyed – pilloried on a shameful instrument of execution reserved for the worst rebels against institutional authority.

Our hope is in the invitation to participate in the drama of a life fully lived, courageous in death, transformed in resurrection purpose.

Their hope was yet to be revived – but they had to wait…

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A Christian Peacemaker reflects at Easter

21 Friday Apr 2006

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in mission, theology

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Tags

Easter, peace, Sojourners

“Christ teaches us to love our enemies, do good to those who harm us, pray for those who persecute us. He calls us to accept suffering before we inflict injury. He calls us to pick up the cross and to lay down the sword.
We will most certainly fail in this call. I did. And I’ll fail again. This does not change Christ’s teaching that violence itself is the tomb, violence is the dead end. Peace won through the barrel of a gun might be a victory but it is not peace. Our captors had guns and they ruled over us. Our rescuers had bigger guns and ruled over the captors. We were freed, but the rule of the gun stayed. The stone across the tomb of violence has not been rolled away.”

– Christian Peacemaker Teams member James Loney, in an Easter reflection published by the Toronto Star about his 118-day captivity by Iraqi militants and rescue by British special forces troops.

As cited in Sojomail, the weekly newsletter published by Sojourners. See www.sojo.net for more information on how to subscribe. The editor, Jim Wallis, is an alternative Christian voice in America while still identifying strongly with the evangelical scene. He recently visited Australia.

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