Easter Authority

The practice of observing and celebrating Easter through and including Pentecost is not the way things have always been done.  Indeed there are lots of places where the paschal candle is extinguished and removed during the Ascension service.

That association of Jesus, as the one raised from the dead with the flame that first burns before we finish our prayers huddled in the dark predawn of the Great Vigil speaks to that foundational understanding that we are first and foremost Easter people.

Even as we rehearse the pain and fear, like that which brought the disciples back behind the locked doors of the upper room we rely on his kindled presence with us, singly lighting our way up to the first Alleluia of release and celebration.

And he is with us for a proper 40 days as the one raised so that we might enjoy a fulfilling transition to our own joys of resurrection living.

But I'll confess that I can't find much about how extinguishing that symbolic light with 10 days still to go until Pentecost was understood.  Or better said, I can't find much on what Christians did during those ten days that helped with teaching or confirming some truth or lesson.

Some understood Ascension as more than Christ's removal to God's right hand in glory, and the theological implication is that the Ascension was the final redemptive act conferring participation in the divine life on all who are members of Christ. In other words, Christ “was lifted up into heaven so that he might make us partakers of his Godhead.”

Pentecost finishes and expands that partaking.  But I still can't find much about how we should proceed liturgically through these last 10 days until the Holy Spirit crowns us with her fire.

But we can know this: the wounds that confirmed for Thomas that it was his beloved teacher now raised and acclaimed as "Lord and God," go with Jesus and are before God the Father while we await the harvest of power that is Pentecost.

If everything before the cross was God with us in the flesh of the carpenter's son, then everything after he ascends is our flesh with God.  And God knows all the more to whom the Holy Spirit descends with power and gifts.

Easter Correction

"And Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus, and said, Ye men of Athens, in all things, I perceive that ye are very religious.  For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. What therefore ye worship in ignorance, this I set forth unto you. (Acts 17: 22-23, New American Standard)

It didn't start with Paul in Athens but this is easily the most obvious moment in the long history of the Judeo-Christian people where the practice of another culture was appropriated and corrected into orthodox use.

The first verses in Genesis borrowed their theme and structure from the Babylonians and include the correction in describing how the creator God (Elohim/אֱלֹהִים) made a "big light to rule the day and a little light to rule the night."  It as a clear jab at the Sun and Moon Gods of the Babylonian pantheon now reduced to the status of creature made by  אֱלֹהִים on day four.  

Important to our current context are the ways in which the Feast of the Resurrection of our Lord finds it's place in the calendar.  For centuries long before the one including Jesus of Nazareth the ancient world marked the day when daylight became more than half of a full day's cycle from sunset to sunset.  We still call it the spring equinox.  

Good observation of the movement of the sun across the sky measured by length of shadows and locations on the horizon helped the ancients to know when the day was to occur.  It meant success, again.  It meant light had returned to its place of authority and presence and reliability.

Easter -- as the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus -- also recasts ancient pagan religious standards and tells our story of how God's Word/Light/Son was returned to a place of authority and presence and reliability.

There is no need for us to worry about the facts here.  There is and has always been a need to bring meaning to them, to make sense of them.  So when Paul stands and proclaims the "unknown" god is knowable by having acted in human history in particular by raising Jesus from the dead, Paul is correcting a set of meanings.

It is encouraging to see human history move from one understanding to the next, from sun gods, to big lights, from Ishtar's fertility to Easter's trustworthiness, from unknown gods to knowable God.  Our correction is to thank God for them but to see beyond the sun and moons, to think beyond our own inventiveness and trust God to make God's self known to us.  

Our Easter correction is still timed by finding the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.  But we do not worship the calendar, the sun, or the moon.  We give God thanks and praise for being one with us and just like us to have died and by returning to that place of authority, and presence, and trustworthiness to give us hope in our lives right now and forever, not just once a year. 

Easter Difference

We read from Psalm 23 last Sunday and I noticed one or two of us stumbled as the language varied from the King James version must of us have grown up with.  Right there at the beginning our BCP version says "shall not be in want."

Interestingly the KJV rendition is in our prayer books in the liturgies for the Burial of the Dead on page 476.  I'm not aware of any other similar accommodation.  There are other ways in which our worship is joined to that larger western christian memory and practice.

The Lord's Prayer is written or listed in every one of our rites from Morning Prayer to Compline and all those liturgies that are meant to be joined to Holy Eucharist from Baptism to Marriage to Ordination to the Consecration of a Church.  Interestingly the verses of the Lord's Prayer in Compline do not include the doxology of "kingdom, and the power and the glory," and another stumble like our Psalm 23 happens.  Whether or not your tradition is to forgive debts, sins or trespasses it seems we are all praying "lead us not into temptation."  When would "Our Father" do that?

Popular religious culture has its own library, hymnal and "prayer book."  "Amazing Grace" can be sung in just about any city in the US and people will sing along for more than one verse.  There are few other hymns so universally known.  Those hymns that are carols for Christmas get their own cultural niche.  Are there hymns for any other season of the church known as well?

All of this is to say that we live much of our religious lives according to culture and to a certain extent according to our neighbors whom we rarely if ever see on Sunday morning.  But some of our particularly Anglican/Catholic/Episcopal practice is not like our neighbors'.  A few of those churchyard crosses that were adorned first in purple sashes and then in white are already gone like Christmas trees on December 26th.

We are still in Easter's season and our "library, hymnal and prayer book" are great supports for how we continue to distinguish this time from culture's calendar and interests.  Maybe it is in this "second half" of Easter that our lessons are better learned and we shift away from the smaller lexicon of our culture's religion to a deeper, more exuberant reveling in resurrection as God's promise kept.

Easter is not the story the world around us tells.  Neither does it give us the time we need to honor it.  God has done a new thing and we are made different by it.  It's OK with me if we continue for awhile longer.

Easter Endurance

Rachel Held Evans died last week.  She was 37, married, mother of two.  She was first known for taking the Bible seriously enough to try to live by its rules -- mostly Old Testament -- especially those governing the behavior and role of women.  Here's a link from her webpage,   https://rachelheldevans.com/biblical-womanhood. 

She shared her experience and developed a voice from her insight that was courageous and filled with grace.  I'm going to miss her commentary.  I will mourn her passing and cry for her husband and children again and again. 

But more than anything I will share her work and I hope in so doing to exhibit a kind of Easter endurance.  I want to live day to day, minute by minute in gratitude for how death and resurrection is the way God shows divine love to and for us. 

Too easily Easter is co-opted by society and reduced to a day with much about its observance that can't be traced to biblical sources.  I'll stop at bunnies.

Our practice is to give our Easter observance 50 days to happen, making it the longest season in the Christian year.  We take the time of the season to rehearse through our worship and devotion a way of living that is all about God first raising Jesus from the dead. 

There is a larger intention than the observances themselves.  We expect to learn and train ourselves and to become habituated to death and resurrection.  We want that understanding to replace all its competitors; all those other ways of describing God, our relationship to God and our expectations about heaven, etc.

Here's how Rachel said it:

Baptism reminds us that there's no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement plan to follow.  It's just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair.

May she rest in peace and be raised in glory!

Easter Honesty

This is not an easy season.  Yes there are many opportunities to celebrate but as one attempting to  function with a modern mind I am always wondering how we are to live as a people who profess that God raised Jesus from the dead.

Soren Kierkegaard likened faith to living by "virtue of the absurd."  Bringing his thoughts to our context and you could say that when we stand and recite those bookend exchanges, "Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!" we are not doing something that is logical or reasonable.

My sense is that I am not alone in this concern.  The fastest growing number in demographic studies of religion in the U.S. is of "nones."  More people are refusing to claim a religious affiliation -- especially the one practiced by their family of origin -- than ever before.  Pretty soon the nones will out number all other designations.  They already outnumber Episcopalians.

Fear not. Theirs is not an "enemy camp." I think it is in most ways a healthy response to how most mainline denominations, Roman Catholics, evangelistic mega-churches, dominionist, millenialist and neo-protestants have practiced their religion in recent years.

Every religious group is prone to the error of demanding something less of its members.  Every time that happens an insult is at least implied.  When our children are first befuddled by the absurdity of our claims we shush their innocent questions.  I remember parents asking me if confirmation classes would help "settle them down."

Please let's be honest with each other and the world around us.  We have chosen and are still choosing to be faithful to a God who by definition does not need us.  Who does not benefit from any human attempt to be proven as existing.  Who is seen as failing whenever and wherever evil persists or tragedies happen.

But when we celebrate Easter we have gone far beyond seemingly simpler claims that there is a God.  We have pushed all reasonable concerns aside.  We are saying that God is love.  More than anything else, love.  Not Episcopal love, just love.  Not Christian Science love, or Mormon, or Buddhist, or Muslim and on and on.  No love is easy.  Not ours of our children and especially not God's of us.

We need to be honest about love.