Camp Everywhere Fun Fair ~ August 19-23 from 9 AM to noon

It’s time to register through the website or the Church Office for our vacation Bible camp. Grades K-6. $15.

Easter 7 Common Lectionary Year C

Acts 16:9-15, Revelation 22:1-5

©2013 Rev. Elisabeth R. Jones

This is a tight little story, one of a whole string of exploits of Paul, (along with Philip, Timothy, Luke and others) as they seem to be blown hither and yon by the Spirit of God, like dandelion seeds on a spring wind, spreading the Good News of Jesus from “Judea and to the ends of the earth.”
 
Forgive the sexism inherent in my next remarks, but doesn’t it sound like a ‘guy’s story’?  We get more details about the itinerary, more of a sense of the adventure of the sea crossings, than we do about their destination; it’s all action and adventure, and thin on conversation and nuance, and emotion.So it’s striking, really striking, that in the middle of this guy’s travelog, in the middle of the Book of the Acts of the male apostles of Jesus,  Luke, the writer, lets slip the name of a woman. Lydia. In fact, if truth be told, this story is not so much Paul’s story as it’s hers.It’s the story of her encounter with the Dream of God in the Gospel of Jesus.

Trouble is, other than her name, her occupation, her ethnicity, do we get enough from this story about her to be inspired by her? Luke, so intent on capturing the video clips of the guys’ next stop on their missional mapquest, simply leaves her, baptismally newborn; named, but unknown, when iftruth be known, we share more affinity with her, trying to live a Gospel life close to home, than with those adventuresome peripatetic preachers.

So, this is my tip of the hat to Mother’s Day. Lydia will take centre stage.We’ll engage in the risky business of midrash, of holy imagination,asking questions of the text, and where there are unfillable gaps, we’ll spin a tale, so that Lydia lives enough in our imagination to inspire our own faith in the Gospel of Jesus and the Dream of God.

Let Lydia speak.
 As I went down in the river to pray,
studyin’ about that Good old way,
and who shall wear a starry crown,
Good Lord, show me the way…..
 O sisters, let’s go down,
let’s go down, come on down,
O sisters, let’s go down,
Down in the river to pray. 

What do you do,
with three children around your knee,
a household to run,
when your husband is drowned
in one of those spring storms that rake the sea
and smash boats against the rocks?

He was a good man, really.
Took over his father’s business, back in Tyre,
crushing seashells to make purple dye.
Messy as all get out,
but worth its weight in silver, that stuff.

When he went down
with a boat load of it not yet paid for,
what was I supposed to do?
You can’t feed your kids with grief and regret.
I sold the business to liquidate
what was left of my assets,
and like a good widow, moved here,
to Philippi,
where my brother was stationed
with the Roman garrison.
Until he was sent on to Gaul, and we stayed on alone.
With all these retired Roman generals
and senators around these parts,
they needed clothing, and I knew cloth.
I knew Tyrian dye merchants too, from back in the day,
and so I set to, hand-sewing at night,
while the children were small,
making purple striped togas better than any in town,
until mine were the only ones in town.

That’s what you do, isn’t it?
You make do and get by,
and if hard work and the blessing of God allow,
you get along.
I don’t sew any more;
I have 12 orphaned girls who do that,
living and working alongside my own daughters.
I haggle with the merchants, and sell purple
to vain men to feed fatherless children.

You hear things, being in this trade,
because people travel far to get Lydia’s cloth these days.
I heard of trouble in Palestine
because of a man they crucified
about 20 years ago now,
but whose story won’t die.

A righteous Jew he was,
a believer in one Creator God,
like me, although I know that’s odd
here in this Pagan metropolis
with its statues to gods of everything.

I’m too busy to keep track of all those gods
who seem greedier than a pack of teenage boys!
Me, I come down to this river, to pray.
Here I feel connected to life, even to death.
I see water that drowns, and water that  gives life.
One of my sewing girls gave birth right here,
the water caressing her labour,
then lapping at her newborn,
soothing his cries while we tied the chord.

How can you not believe in the
Maker of Heaven and earth,
the sea the sky, the land,
Maker of all that breathes air and drinks water?

They say, those men,
the ones that came down to the river to pray that day,
that the  crucified man
liked to talk often of living water,
life-giving water,
and of one God of the living, and the dead,
holding all things, healing all things,
from palsied limbs to grieving hearts.
That spoke to my heart all right!

They told me about some of the things
this crucified one did.
No wonder they killed him!
He healed people, they said.
Broken people this world casts on the dung heap
when they’re no longer useful.
He touched them, looked into their blinded eyes,
smoothed their wrinkled hands,
and showed them love only a God can give!

They also said he could walk on water!
That’s foolish, but then there are days,
when this water is the most solid thing I know,
more constant than the fragile life
we try to cobble together for ourselves.

They said he ate with tax collectors and sinners,
that’s chutzpah in my world, I can tell you!
That he taught fishermen to catch people up
in the Dream of God,
that he touched and prayed for all the nobodies
who are pawns in this empire,
people like the fatherless girls I protect
from groping hands.
They say he fed people like the farmers around here,
whose crops are taken to feed soldiers
while the bellies of their own children growl with hunger.
They say he lashed at all the trinket sellers in their temple, saying God is about prayer and healing, not money-grabbing.

No wonder they killed him!

But the stories aren’t dead are they?
Those men, ordinary earthbound creatures
just like the rest of us,
were still fire-breathing his Gospel
as if it happened yesterday.
Talking of this Jesus as if he is still here,
down by the river, praying.
Still alive, free, generous, welcoming,
healing, mending,
salving like flowing water on a wound;
like a river flowing from a mountain in spring,
washing away the muck and mess,
the bitterness, the grief and the hatred,

everything the world needs, if only it knew it.

I suppose that’s why they’ve gone, those men,
to tell others.

I should too, I think.
Yes.

[1] The sermon text comes from the Lectionary readings for Easter 6C, used one week out of sequence, thanks to our fiery detour into Daniel last week!

[2] Sermon title is a reference to the Appalachian song of this title, which may have its origins in the African American song tradition (see http://www.choralnet.org/view/257262 for more details). 

[3] The story of Lydia as presented here is fictional, but it is based on research into the social history of first century Asia Minor and Hellenistic Roman culture, as found in the following works: The Historical Jesus in Context, eds. Amy-Jill Levine, Dale C. Allison & John Dominic Crossan (Princeton UP, 2006); John Dominic Crossan,  The Birth of Christianity,  (Harper One, 1998); Richard Horsley, God and Empire, (Fortress, 2002).

[4] Down in the River to Pray.  Lyrics in the public domain.

Easter 6 Common Lectionary Year C

Daniel 3: 1-30

©2013 Rev. Elisabeth R. Jones

And people say the Bible is boring! 
It’s stories like this that make good fodder for children’s Bibles,
and for show-tune type anthems  like the one we’ve just heard.

But because it’s in the Bible, we have certain expectations of it.
We expect it to be more than just a comic-book style hero story.
We expect more, well holiness; we expect it to be about some great revelation of God.
We expect it to be somehow true.

However, even though it sits inside this book we call “holy,”it’s not very holy at all.
It  is in fact a comic book hero story!
Complete with lots of mayhem, fire and brimstone, and unbelievably ridiculous evil guys,
and impossibly perfect good guys;and like most  hero tales, it’s not even true, at least not in the factual sense.

So what shall we do with it?
Well, perhaps first thing we need to do is
recall why such fables exist in all cultures.

Fables with heroes and heroines defeating
insurmountable odds
have arisen in every culture during times of severe crisis.
While they entertain and captivate,
they introduce some profound wisdom to the listeners
as the plot unfolds and resolves.
Most fable heroes are well-endowed
with a charism – some trait,
like fortitude, courage, perseverance,
fidelity, honesty, integrity,
upon which we, the enthralled listener,
now vow to imitate, as we face our own crises, trials and torments.
Fables are ultimately about us.

And so it is with this biblical fable.
It may as well begin with “Long ago and far away” because it is set in the fabled time of
King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in the 7th century before Christ.

This was one of the many and repeated times when Israel
– the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob –
have been conquered, dispossessed, and almost wiped out by a vast, dominant empire.
In fact, since its beginning, Israel’s story is one of how to maintain identity,
culture, language and faith while surrounded, threatened or captured by the empires of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia,  Macedonian  and Seleucid Greece,  Rome, then various manifestations of Christian and Ottoman and Muslim Empire, and eventually, horrifically, that of the Third Reich.

While the story is set in Babylon,
it was written four hundred years later,in the time of one Antiochus IV, king of the Seleucid empire.This Antiochus was intent on doing what all empires have learned to do;
you subjugate the conquered peoples and keep them docile by a show of unmatchable force, imposition of crippling taxation, and you globalize, economize,
and homogenize culturally, religiously, politically, linguistically,
all the peoples who live in the territory you have conquered.

This Antiochus 167 BCE invaded Judea,smashed Jerusalem to smithereens,
and he set up a huge statue,an idol – of himself as god,  in the Jewish Temple.

Faced, yet again, with the threat of annihilation of identity and faith,
this fable was written as a piece of faithful resistance,
a thinly disguised historical satire that parodied the latestimperial threat.
It also provided a model, in its three heroes,
of how to survive as a  faithful Jew in a hostile world;
how to keep their unique identity as people of God in a world that demanded of them a soul-selling to the Empire.

The writer fashions a heroic tale of human shrewdness, wisdom and survival,
grounded in a basic fundament of the Jewish faith;the fidelity of Yahweh,
the persistence of the character of God
who brings forth life and identity out of chaos and destruction,
and who models for God’s people a way of being,
of being just, noble, wise, pious in the best sense of the word,
peaceful,  according value to all,
as humans, as all creatures made in God’s image,
how to live as children of God
in the midst of a commodified world of
arms, graft, acquisitiveness, zealotry and cruelty.

If that’s not a fable for the ages, including our own,
then I don’t know what is!
How to be citizens of the kingdom of God,
and for us as Christians, how to be followers of the
Way of Jesus Christ,
seeking justice and resisting evil,
living with respect in creation,
when our own empires ask us to bow down to
the 90 foot high golden idol of consumerism.
We may not live as indentured slaves
and refugees outside our homeland as did these three,
but we are caught up unwittingly in systems of empire
which rape the land to meet global demands for fossil fuel,
which spends more on militarism than on clean water or education;
we discover 6 generations too late that we complied with an imperial program
of cultural genocide upon the first nations of this land.
 
We are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego;
we are dual citizens, bicultural, bilingual inhabitants
both of God’s world, and the empires of human construction.

We have the same questions they faced:

Will we find a way to keep faith with the best of what it means to be people of God?

Will we have the shrewd worldly wisdom we need to inhabit the world of faith while surviving in a faithless world?

And …. where will God be while we strive to breathe in the middle of the furnace?

Like the threesome, we will spend a lifetime
working out faithful answers to the first two questions.
But the last question : where will God be,even faithless, feckless old King Neb worked out the answer to that one!

He looked into the fiery furnace, and gasped:
 “ I sent three men to the flames, but behold I see four men, walking unharmed in the midst of the flame! And the fourth looks like one of the sons of the gods!”

God is in the furnace. In the midst of the mess.

God is with us. We are not alone.
Thanks be to God.

Easter 5 Common Lectionary Year C

Acts 11:1-18

©2013 Rev. Elisabeth R. Jones

Audio file

We’ve all seen the movie moment, or lived it, when the accusatory voice asks “Who did that?!”  and the response is “They did/He did!” “It wasn’t me! It was her!”

Well, this is pretty much what Peter concludes when he is hauled up before his peers for scrutiny of his errant behaviour while visiting the home of Cornelius, the Roman centurion. “It wasn’t just me, it was her! It wasn’t my fault I enjoyed some pork tenderloin and clam chowder, it was all the doing of the Holy Spirit! She made me!”

Now to be fair to the blessed memory of our favourite, bumbling, but whole-hearted disciple, Peter isn’t trying to evade anything out of a sense of guilt. He’s just naming a spiritual reality. He, as a disciple of Jesus Christ, is caught up in something much bigger than he can fathom, something much more powerful and lively and wild than he’d ever imagined, and he’s no longer afraid to admit it.

Where once this timid fisherman couldn’t find the courage to claim kinship with the Son of God, now  he’s boldly going where no Jew has gone before….. – Well, none except that same Jesus – showing up at parties with the uninvitable, just the sort of forbidden and forbidding places where God just loves to be found.

Do you see us in this ancient story? I do. We too have tip-toed timidly around the edges of faith, and we too have suddenly found ourselves slap bang in the middle of a party that knocks our breath away with its radical welcome, not just of us, but of the oddest collection of strangers now become our friends, our soul-mates, our brothers and sisters in Christ. And for the life of us, we don’t know quite who got us there, except to say, shrug-shouldered like Peter, “It was her! The Holy Spirit did this!”

Once God’s lively, wild Spirit, once the stories of Jesus leap off the page into renewed action in the life of one person, or a community, once the Dream of God is glimpsed, once God’s persistent love,   or healing grace, gets a toe hold,  lives change. We are changed.

Look at the work of God in Christ in this place; look at the seeds of Spirit sown like salad greens among us in just the past  few weeks!  (Slides only – words speaking 1000s of words!)  KidZone  Transfiguration  Coffee House  Worship – singers and playdo  Café du livre

Like Peter’s inquisitors, I’m rendered speechless by the surprising explosions of Spirit-filled life in this place!

But let’s be real and hard-nosed for a moment and ask, is all this just a happy blip in our Cedar Park life cycle? is this the result of hundreds of hours of sweat equity by a dedicated, faithful core? Or is it also truly the work of God in our midst, taking our mustard seed faith and multiplying it a thousand fold? The Luke-Acts text gives us some clues or benchmarks:

a)Is it the result of prayer?  Is what we do or plan, the fruit of prayer and attentiveness to God in Christ?  -recall that Peter begins his testimony,  not with the acts he did,  but with a recollection of his prayer to God for guidance.

b) Does it build on tradition Does what we are doing build something new on the shoulders of tradition?  In this story we have the wise and wary resistance testing the newness  to discern if the novelty is just a flavour of the month, or in fact a Spirited liveliness that builds on the old mold to create something new?   (Think Café du livre!) (Think 5 Year Plan, built on the shoulders of our Identity and Values work of  2008-9).   c) Does it build community? Does it involve more than one person in the extraordinary activity?  Human history loves heroic individuals, but God LOVES community!  Peter names three men from Caesarea and the six who companioned him for the entire journey;  they are as much a part of this outbreak of Gospel . How do we partner, work together , share diverse talents? Think Voices for Hope, a FULL to the brim Coffee House, partnerships with Literacy, FMH, Nova, with other churches to create and support DMV, CAC,….

d) What are its fruits? Love? Joy? Justice? FRUITS: what is the outcome?  Is there genuine love that breaks down walls, brings more people into lively contact with God’s love in action? Does it look like something Jesus would be happy to be involved with? – remember, a real test for this is “Is it fun, worthwhile and life giving?”

e) Does it encourage growth? Does it push the envelope?  Call forth from us a stretching of love, compassion, action, faith?  Peter’s story is a stretching of known limits.  Think of your own growth in faith…. stretching childish notions of fairness towards a deeper sense of long-term work for systemic justice…. think of how we have been stretched to extend our welcome to the LGBTQ communities….

f) Does it move outward? Is it outward focussed?   (Is it about shoring up our own, or about sharing God’s love and radical welcome?)  Is it about moving beyond our wood and stone?  does it lead us onward ?  Think F4 and Coffee House and VBC, and DMV,  and think about how we will respond long term to the TRC?

Can we imagine where it leads us next? This is a trick question!  The answer should be yes, and no! As a community we’ve created a Five Year plan, built on prayer, to foster community, to work for justice, to stretch us and grow, in order to share God’s abundance of love, forgiveness and welcome far beyond ourselves.  * Click to reveal: If so then God is at the heart of this work

But we know fine well that the God who created Peter’s wild vision is capable of doing so with us too. We begin, we take the first steps, We find our place of belonging and growth. Who knows where this journey of faith it will lead us,  but of this we can be sure:  If we do this (the screen), with every thing we plan and do in this place,   * click to dove on black it is the Holy Spirit whose blazing trail we will follow!

Thanks be to God!

Audio file

In our United Church of Canada creed we have two statements  worth pondering today:
“I believe in God, who has created, and is creating,…”
and
“We are called to live with respect in creation.”

The first is a statement of hope as well as faith.
God is not done with this creation.
God’s life energy is still at work;
God’s love is still holding this world together.

Which means that when we acknowledge the second statement -
the call to live with respect in creation -
we do so trusting that whatever we do to respect our planet home
we do with the fullness of God’s love, blessing and healing power.
This too then is a sign of hope.

I believe that to live with respect in creation is to treat the earth
as God does.
The poets who wrote our Creation story
picture God looking at everything she has made,
loving it, enjoying its majesty,
staring in awe at the power of God’s creative word
unleashed in molten energy
its eruptions of  vitality,
and even its cycles of devastation, that make way for new life.
And God sees wild liveliness, it’s earthiness, its diversity,
and calls it Good!
So, for us to live with respect  in creation is to see the world as God does,
and to call this earth Good.

But also to tend it.
To tread lightly upon it,
to respect its force, its own right to be itself as a creature of God.
And to find our true place within it.

What we’ll do now are three very simple activities
which respect God’s wonderful creation.
We know there is plenty we can do,
and I want you all to believe,
that with God at work with us,
every single thing we do to care for our planet home
is worth it.
It is GOOD!!

So, what we’ll do for the next few minutes is
invite EVERYONE to do the first activity:
We will all plant a nasturtium.
We’ve made little greenhouses out of re-used roast chicken trays…..
go to one of the garden tables and pick up one seed, and follow the
leader’s instructions about where they should go in the tray.

THEN you have 3 other places to go:
1. Jess will do a demonstration of how you can make your own cleaning
products out of simple, non-toxic to you or the earth ingredients.
We’ll be posting the recipe on the website after this service – not printing handouts!  (see below)

2. There is one little pot for every child here today.
You can write your name on the side of the pot, (without tipping out the soil!)
then you use the seed shakers to sprinkle salad seeds into your pot.
Then you put the pot into the baggie, and bring it up to the table.
At the end of worship you take your pot home, you keep it by a window,
keep the soil moist, and in a few weeks you’ll have your very own salad greens to eat!
(Local, seed sown, diverse, tending)

3.  On scraps of recycled paper, you are invited to write  or draw a prayer for the planet,
and then  put your prayer into the half globe, and we’ll use some of them for our prayers of the people.

Jess’s simple non-toxic clearning products

Glass or mirror cleaner:  In a spray bottle, mix 1 part water with 1 part vinegar.  Shake, spray and scrub.
This doubles as an upholstery or carpet cleaner. Spray on a stain, let sit for 15 minutes.  Scrub with a sponge and hot soapy water.
“Wonder Cleaner” all-purpose cleaner:  In a bowl or spray bottle, mix 1 part water with 1 part vinegar.  Add 40 drops of tea tree oil and 15 drops of lavender essential oil OR lemon essential oil.  Mix/shake, wipe/spray and scrub.
Grout cleaner: for mold growing on tile grout.  In a spray bottle, mix 1 part hydrogen peroxide (3%) with 2 parts water.  Spray on grout, let sit for an hour.  Spray again and scrub.
I also recommended the following items, which are affordable, easily located and can be used in a variety of ways: borax, lemon, soap (without petroleum distallates) and baking soda.

During this intergenerational service, we were moving and singing, laughing and celebrating this wonderful planet that God has given us to live on. and. After a brief message, the congregation was encouraged to visit the various stations that were set up in the sanctuary: three planting stations (for creating little greenhouses and to plant little lettuce plants for each child to take home), a station explaining Earth-friendly cleaning products, and a prayer station (each person was encouraged to write a prayer on a slip of paper and put it in a half-globe that Rev. Elisabeth used later in the service).

Wondering what our previous intergenerational services have been like? Have a look  here and here!

Stay tuned to hear about upcoming intergenerational services at Cedar Park United…

 

My grandmother told me the saddest day in her life was the day she went outside and there was no longer the sound of children playing in our community. There was silence because all of the children had been taken away to a residential school.

- Barney Williams, Member of the TRC Indian Residential School Survivor Committee

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is coming to Montreal on April 24-17, 2013. You will be hearing a lot about this in the news during that week. In an effort to help people understand what happened and to stand in solidarity with the people who will share their stories, the United Churches on the West Island are holding an information session on Saturday, April 13, from 10 am-3 pm at Roxboro United Church (116 Cartier Ave.) Speakers from the native community and some videos will be shown as well as an opportunity for discussion and questions.  Bring a bag lunch. Tea, coffee and dessert will be provided. There will be a freewill offering to help cover expenses.

Members of Cedar Park United are going down to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel to attend hearings on April 26.  Call the office for more details.

Easter Sunday Common Lectionary Year C

Luke 24:1-12

©2013 Rev. Elisabeth R. Jones

Audio file

“The perplexity of a ridiculous tale”
could be a quotation from one of the best-selling faith busters like
Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, (though it isn’t)
and it is hardly a fit title for a sermon in a Christian Church on Easter Sunday morning, where surely the task is to say it loud and clear, without  equivocation “Jesus Christ is Risen Today! Hallelujah!”  So let me explain myself.
Let me assure you that you have indeed come to the right place
and the right time to hear the Easter proclamation of the resurrection.
I will not lead you down some faith-less blind alley of cynical skepticism,
because I am on the most solid of foundations possible for a Christian preacher on Easter Sunday.
I’m quoting Scripture.
I’m quoting the Lukan account of the
Resurrection of Jesus  by the power of God,
from death and from the tomb.

So Luke it is, not I,
who tells us that when the women –
Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James,
Joanna, and at least 2 others -
went to the tomb in the early light of the post-Sabbath morning,
and found the stone rolled away, and the tomb empty,
they were ‘perplexed’.

Now that’s a rich word, perplexed.
Merriam Webster throws us a fistful of synonyms:
“bewildered, fazed, confused, befuddled, non-plussed, disconcerted,
to be “baffled” by something confusing or unaccountable.
The Germans have an even better word “verblufft”.

Where was I? Oh, right, those women
arriving at the tomb, finding it empty,
and being verblufft/ perplexed….

No kidding!!
Because let’s be clear here.
They weren’t expecting resurrection.
Not really.  Look at them.
They have spice jars and linens with them.
They are going to the tomb of their beloved Rabbi,
to give to him a decent burial.
If evil had conspired to torture and kill him
at the hands of complicit religious leaders
and Roman functionaries, then the least they could do
was straighten his twisted body, bathe its dried blood,
smooth the agony from its face, wrap it in clean linen,
and lay it gently into the earth, dust to dust.

They were not expecting  resurrection.
They were not expecting a heavy stone rolled away
(though the dear Lord knows how five women were going to move it by themselves).
They were not expecting an empty tomb.

“Perplexed” indeed.

Luke tells us that it took the sudden appearance of
transfigured men, glow in the dark messengers…..
supra-normal beings  in the not-yet light of dawn,
to signal that something more wonderful than foul play,
or a mis-tagged grave plot were to blame for this empty tomb.

Now who’s perplexed? Verblufft?
Confounded, befuddled, hard-put  we ourselves may be
at this part of the tale,
-being as how we’re scientifically sophisticated folk,
not easily given to belief in dawn-lit conversations
with angelic shiny people.
But then again, “perplexed” is what Luke expects of us
who read his tale.
He knows he’s telling mystery here,
he knows mere words won’t hold
the wonder he’s trying to convey.

But he presses on anyway,
calling from the women  -and from us -  the power of memory.
The shiny men say to the women,
“Remember how he told you…. Jesus….
more than once, about God’s Dream,
and about how the cost of his own discipleship to
the Dream of God
would likely be as high as death itself.
Remember how he told you more than once,
his conviction that even death couldn’t  stop
God’s Dream of bringing life beyond death… remember?”
“Then they remembered”  seems a bit choppy and short,
but Luke wants to get to the next part of the story….
He skips over the bit where they drop the spices, and
head back to wherever the eleven are holed up.
Five women, tripping on their skirts to get through the door,
all talking at once, as only women can….
“He’s not there!” He’s risen!”
“There were these two men, all lit up like Time Square,
flashlights in the tomb…!  And they told us to remember what Jesus
had said … and … and..”

The men, when they heard all this,
were they perplexed?
No, actually they started laughing at them.
Luke’s unique little word, translated in most versions
tamely and politely as “an idle tale.”
is a lot less Sunday-best than that;
it’s a word used to describe the addled rantings
of someone in the throes of a delirious fever.

The men apparently found the prattle of the women
deliriously ridiculous.

Do you really blame them?
The tale the women tell is ridiculous, preposterous.
It breaks all the rules of normalcy then and now.
The dead die. They don’t come back to life,
they don’t roll the stone of their tomb aside,
wander off to cook fish on the beach,
or break bread in Emmaus.
….Do they?
It is preposterous, ridiculous,
when you look at it through
the mortal lenses of human life.

But those may be the wrong lenses.
Looking through God’s glasses,
life, death, new life, transformation,
chaos turned to fractal beauty,
wildfires that explode the seeds of new growth,
five months of frozen ground that does yield to the snowdrop
and the warming sun,
the hidden plasticity of the human brain,
the supple dexterity of a human hand,
the miracle of recovery from illness…
Looking at creation as God sees it,
don’t we start to see resurrection everywhere?

Life does defeat death in God’s creation!
All the time!
Why not  then, in this ridiculous tale
of the life from death of Jesus?

It just takes looking at it with God’s eyes.
It takes remembering, and looking.
It took Luke’s men in this story longer to look and remember
than it did the women (which is typical of this Gospel,
where the outsiders, outcast and women
are always the first to see,
the crazy hand of God wrinkling time and death
with eternity  and life).

But think about it, good Christian folk
in this year of grace, 2013 or so, since.
They did remember, they did look through God’s eyes,
and they did keep telling their ridiculous, perplexing,
verblufft-provoking story enough so that we too,
can with newborn Easter eyes see this resurrection,
as ridiculously Good News!

Because,
uniquely in this tale of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen,
we get to see God bringing resurrection  to bear
on the most intractable of deaths:
some call it sin, or alienation,
or the death of faith,
or the death of hope.
The raising of Jesus, the Nazarene
who lived, breathed and died
the Dream of God in every fibre of his being,
is this ridiculous, joy and hallelujah- filled tale
of God’s determination to put forgiveness
in the place of sin,
hope in the place of despair,
humility and grace in the place of fear and aggression,
reconciliation in the place of alienation,
new life in the place of all deaths.
And this, we call Gospel.  Good News.
We call it Resurrection.
Hallelujah!