Sunday
May 2
Responding to Easter
By Marsh Chapel
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May we respond to Easter in worship, in history and in life
Responding in Worship
Let us respond to Easter in worship.
For here we are, just for a moment, in worship. Hearing the hymns of Easter. Hearing the Easter word. We yearn for the day, may it be soon, when we can sing with each other, greet each other face to face, offer each other a Methodist handshake. For now, we rely on daily prayer; we gather outside for morning prayer; we especially listen together, drawn in from around the globe, come Sunday at 11am. Right now.
Others too have known the yearning of and for worship. The beloved community which gave birth to our Gospel today did so. For a moment, move by the imagination to a borrowed upper room, say in Ephesus, maybe in the year 90ad. Candles burn. A meal has been offered and received. There is among the fifty, say, there present, a gradual settling, a quiet. It may be a long quiet, starting from that late first century numinous circle and ending—hic et nunc, here, now. Acute pain abides in this circle, the pain of the loss of a beloved leader, the pain of the loss of a venerable religious lineage, the pain of the loss of a prized eschatological hope—love, faith, and hope, lost. Our global radio circle today bears too a shared pain, the global trauma of global pandemic.
Yet as the circle settles, a prayer and reading and a further silence and a long hymn sung, THE ONE who has held them…SPEAKS. Imagine the early church, small and struggling, in worship, in a borrowed upper room. In the silence and in the singing and in then the antiphonal, mournful and joyful, worship antiphon. Were these Gospel words first sung?
I am…light, life, resurrection, way, truth, Good Shepherd, door, bread, water.
I am…the true vine. You shall know…’the truth’. That they may know Thee the only ‘true’ God.
Every heart has secret sorrows, especially now, by Covid time. Every land has cavernous grief, especially now, by Covid time. Back then, for the antiphonal, ancient singers of our scripture, the hurts were dislocation, disappointment and departure. And they named them. Can you name yours? Have you named your hurt?
Hear the Easter antiphon: ‘Abide in me…As I abide in you’. Stay. Remain. Settle. Dig in. Locate. Vines take a long time to grow. But so?
John’s portrait of Jesus arose from his constant awareness, which he shared with members of his community, that they were living in the presence of the Glorified One. So dazzling was this glory, (repeat) that any memory of a less-than-glorious Christ was altogether eclipsed. (J. Ashton) (The Gospel of John and Christian Origins).
With the ancient beloved community, can you lift a muted alleluia? Every hymn, for all its joy, carries a guttural memory of acute hurt. In worship, today, can you pray with joy without forgetting the brokenness out of which that alleluia comes? Let Charles Wesley, let Charles Tindley, let the poor of your own ancestral family’s older past guide you.
Let us respond to Easter in worship.
Responding in History
Let us respond to Easter in history.
What about our place in history, our communal responsibility in real time? A surface glide across Holy Scripture will not allow, cannot provide gospel insight. You want to sift the Scriptures. You want to know them inside and out, upside and down, through and through and through, and then, it may be, by happenstance or grace or the clumsy luck of a very human preacher, you may hear a steadying, saving word. Look back an Easter month. Not activism alone, but engagement matters most in history.
Through this Easter season, Easter tide, you have perhaps noticed, noted, or winced to hear the letter of John, 1 John, amending, redacting, muting and amplifying the gospel of John. You are keen listeners, practiced and adroit, so you will have wondered a bit about this. Why does 1 John nip at the heels of John?
The two ‘books’, John and 1 John, were written by different authors, in different decades, in different circumstances, with different motives. The Gospel acclaims Spirit. The Letter adds in work, ethics, morals, community, tradition, leadership and judgment from on high, rather than judgment by belief and by believer. We may just have, it is important to say, the Gospel as part of the New Testament, with all its radicality, due to its brother named letter, vouching as it were for the sanity of the Gospel. The letter, like James Morrison Witherby George Dupree, takes good care of its Gospel mother, the very cat’s mother, you see.
On April 11, the Gospel in chapter 20 revealed the Spirit, elsewhere called Paraclete or Advocate, come upon us, received and with it received the forgiveness of sins. But at the heels, nipping, comes along 1 John in chapter 2, which names the Paraclete or Advocate not as Spirit but as Jesus Christ—the righteous—whose commandments all are to keep, on pain of disobedience become lying, and truth taken flight. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other, in loving disagreement.
On April 18, the Gospel Alleluia still lingering with the Lord and God risen, the letter in Chapter 3, on the qui vive and on the attack, spells out again in no uncertain terms that the righteous do the right, handsome is as handsome does. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement.
On April 25, the Gospel in chapter 10 acclaimed the pastoral image of the Good Shepherd, whose one glorification on the cross is meant to obliterate the need of any other such, even as the Letter, worried, worried out in chapter 3, a long and sorry recollection of Cain—Abel’s one-time brother—and the demands of love from one who laid down his life, and with whom and for whom we are then meant to do something of the same. ‘Let us not love in word and speech but in deed and in truth’, says 1 John 3, when the whole of the Gospel says simply ‘love’, says that words outlast deeds, and that speech, that of the glorious Risen, ever routs works. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement.
And now today, May 2, when and where our one Great Gospel, the Spiritual Gospel, counsels ‘abide’ and ‘remain’ in chapter 15, just here the letter of 1 John in chapter 4, fearing antinomial abandon, appends to his own most beautiful love poem, the charge again of lying, of lack of love of brother, of schism that surely created this letter, 1 John, as the spiritualists and the traditionalists, the Gnostics and the ethicists, parted company, one toward the free land of Montanus and Marcion, the other toward Rome and the emerging church, victorious, against which the Gospel was born, bred, written and preached. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement.
Of course, both are right. Or we would not still need or read them, let alone together. But you are right, too, to feel some neck pain, some whiplash, as Gospel soars and Letter deflates. It is as if the Song of Solomon were being sung by Obadiah.
The blessed Scripture bears incontrovertible, conflicted witness. Easter is a conflicted, and so a muted, Alleluia, and was so already 20 centuries ago, as the resurrection cross of Jesus was raised up, in mournful joy, in a real joy made real by its honesty about sorrow. Real joy becomes real by its honesty about sorrow. For us to move out of Covid time and on into joy, we shall need honesty about what we have lost. And whom. (repeat). The Scripture, read hard and deep, can help us. For history is endless contention and intractable difference, including religious history, perhaps especially including religious history. To respond to Easter in history, for you, will mean bearing the cross of endless contention and intractable difference, the daily labor of history and community, where ‘the best of intentions run afoul of circumstance or chance’.
And more: there may well come a discreet time, for you, as a person of faith, to say something or do something, a time when some somewhat risky and uncomfortable mode of social involvement, or existential engagement, will beckon you.
Let us respond to Easter in history.
Responding in Life
Let us respond to Easter in life.
The Gospel prepares us for the lifelong work of responding to Easter. The Gospel tells about resurrection largely on the basis of experience. Experience and troubles, troubles that provoked lasting question.
The Gospels and Letters respond in life to Easter, in a muted alleluia, in a sober acclamation.
An Empty Tomb
The church is alive they acclaim.
Especially when we come to celebrate the life of a dear sister or brother in faith, we have a powerful experience of the church alive across the river of death. The church is the body of Christ. We affirm a bodily, physical resurrection, tasted for a time in church. I give you Emily Dickinson:
This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond—
Invisible as music—
But positive, as Sound—
It beckons and it baffles—
Philosophy—don’t know—
And through a Riddle, at the last—
Sagacity must go (E Dickinson)
Or, as one of our wise beyond years undergraduates said this spring, ‘I will be careful with any kind of hope that I have’.
A Trumpet Blast
The future is open they acclaim.
There is, that is, a spiritual resurrection in your future.
Once, we met a psychiatrist who said his work was to offer the possibility that stories might have a different ending. You know that story of your life at its worst, the one that seems to have the same ending no matter how you live and how you tell it? That story can have a different ending, another conclusion. It can.
Your repeated narrative of inherited addiction can be overcome in sobriety.
Your national adolescence in forgetting the limits of power can be overcome in a more collegial, humbler, more mature foreign policy.
Your usurpation can give way to response. Your isolation can give way to community. Your imperialism can give way to justice. We can learn lessons from our experience.
Your religious amnesia about what is fun in faith—giving and inviting—can be lifted like a fog at dawn, and you can sing out your soul.
Things can, and will in Christ, be better for you and for us. That repeated tale of employment and unemployment, love and loss, relationship and rejection can change. The cycle can be broken, when what is in place is invaded by what is taking place.
An Existential Awakening
Love is real they acclaim. In this way, at least for once, the letter surpasses the Gospel, the child outdoes the parent:
7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Who would or could or should say more?
Let us respond to Easter in life.
Coda
The church is alive. The future is open. Love fills the heart. Foretastes of heaven. If the heavenly banquet has this menu, perhaps we need over these few earthly years to acquire a certain taste for certain things, faith and hope and love.
May we respond to Easter in worship, in history, and in life? It is an Easter call to the altar. It is your Easter altar call.
So, dear friends, then travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel. Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem. Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken and heard, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together, able to respond to Easter.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
