Saturday, April 23, 2011

Easter Sunday 2011

I want to take a little circle tour here, First with a poem from the great monk and priest Symeon, the New Theologian, written about a thousand years ago and translated by Stephen Mitchell. Symeon writes:

We awaken in Christ’s body

as Christ awakens our bodies

and my poor hand is Christ, He enters

my foot, and is infinitely me.




I move my hand, and wonderfully

my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

(for God is indivisibly 

whole, seamless in His Godhood).




I move my foot, and at once

He appears like a flash of lightening.

Do my words seem blasphemous? - Then 

Open your heart to Him

and let yourself receive the one

who is opening to you so deeply.



For if we genuinely love Him

We wake up inside Christ’s body. 

where our body, all over,

every most hidden part of it, 

is realized in joy as Him, 

and he makes us, utterly, real,




and everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in Him transformed




and recognized as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in his light

we awaken as the Beloved 

in every last part of our body. 


But how does this Jesus, this dying-rising miracle man, become a way of life renewed, a pledge of love and life meeting and transcending death? How can we make sense of this crucified and resurrected one who pledges to meet us in the middle of the day and at the end of the road? And, as importantly, if this is true, how do we respond in our own living and dying, as friends and followers of this Jesus? How do we live our lives, order our priorities, spend our days?

I think we can best see Jesus with a kind of double vision; like two strands of DNA interweaving to create new life: First, there is the majesty of the savior walking through history, the son of the distant king, coming among us and reminding us who and whose we are. This is the big picture, the royal pilgrimage, Jesus as a great holy hero, a miracle man reminding us of the immeasurable distance between humankind and God, as Scripture says elsewhere, “My ways are not your ways.” As we listen to the Gospel story we come to  see the immensity of God, how big the reality of God is, how far it all extends, how long it might go on.

But Jesus also shows us how close God is willing to come: close enough to meet  foreigners and fallen women, noisy tax-gatherers and inquisitive temple personnel, self-proclaimed saints and sentenced sinners too. To each of them and every one of us, Jesus offers the ultimate intimacy of God, an invitation to speak love, make love, let love live in us: meeting with us in the very middle of our lives. That’s the close-up: we are face to face with the great humanity of Christ, when God comes, as St Augustine puts it, closer to us than we are to ourselves.

And that’s the surprising place where the Gospels take us, into the mystery, into the moment where Jesus prays that we may be one with him as he is one with the Father. “I in them and they in me…  so that they may be one as we are one.” That is the connection, the communion we are called into, the relationship that is offered to all of us, comes to all of our lives lived in the insight of God’s love! 



All of our lives: that is the tough part of the Good News; not just in the peak moments, the happy travels, the good years, the precious harvest. But in the times when life is spare and sad, when hopes fail, when death seems to stalk us, in those times as well. When the crowd comes unfriendly and the end is in sight: Then he is one with us as well, intimate with each of us: meeting our failures and our endings: when the snakes bite, the sadness stays, the story pours out towards failure and a sad ending, he meets our death. He dies with us for that very reason.

For if anyone shouldn’t die, it would be him. So if he dies, meeting death as we all will, and if we are, as he says, one with him, then all our deaths meet his death and his life too. For in the loving life of Jesus, God love sews the thread of a majestic love and a deep connection right through the middle of everything. That amazing intimacy, where God hugs the world with the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross, threads through life and death, success and failure, ending and beginning, weaving past, present and future into one eternal now where love is all in all.

This is not easy to understand, and can be seen as a sacred mystery, as all loves are, as so much of life is. Listen: as a person who really can’t understand how his computer works, I don’t worry too much about the mechanics of it: how all the parts fit together or how it might be diagramed. As long as it works, I can’t live without it. And as I go along the Christian way, I worry less about doctrines and trust more in the love and the light, the heart of the journey, and the hope of coming home at the end.

But we’re not there yet, we’re still on the road. But the Good News is that God is on the way as well, has taken this route, walks besides, will see us home. All we need to do is live towards the light, do what we can, give over when we can’t, to allow God to live in us, love us, so that we can begin again, day after day, now after now, to learn over and over to live in that love, face that face of forgiveness, mercy, renewal, humility, hope. And to keep letting God love us  - - even when everything falls flat and all we can do is cry, “Why have you forsaken me now?” For God can be there, has been there, will be there, too. 


Again, Symeon the new Theologian


We awaken in Christ’s body

as Christ awakens our bodies

and my poor hand is Christ, He enters

my foot, and is infinitely me.



I move my hand, and wonderfully

my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

(for God is indivisibly 

whole, seamless in His Godhood).



I move my foot, and at once

He appears like a flash of lightening.

Do my words seem blasphemous? - Then 

Open your heart to Him

and let yourself receive the one

who is opening to you so deeply.


For if we genuinely love Him

We wake up inside Christ’s body. 

where our body, all over,

every most hidden part of it, 

is realized in joy as Him, 

and he makes us, utterly, real,



and everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in Him transformed



and recognized as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in his light

we awaken as the Beloved 

in every last part of our body.


Amen

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