Author: St. John's Episcopal Church

5/17/20

Lord, may my spoken words be faithful to the written word, and lead us to the living word, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

A few months ago (which probably seems like a lifetime to many in view of what we are facing today), Pastor Jack asked me to present the sermon today.  I read today’s gospel at that time, and gave some thought to what I would say, but then the Covid-19 virus invaded our world, and quite frankly, I had forgotten that I was to speak today. Pastor Jack reminded me just a few days ago, and so I re-read John 14, verses 15-21.  And I realized right away, that this Gospel is very appropriate for the circumstances that we find ourselves in today.

In this short scripture reading, we find the word “love” four times.  This is certainly the time for all of us to love and care for each other, and also important to remember that GOD loves us, and HE will never abandon us.

For those of us who believe, we encounter the Resurrected Christ, the one who has triumphed over the cross and the grave, our Lord Jesus Christ, who says to us as He did to his disciples, “I will not leave you as orphans.”

Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  At first glance, you might think that He is putting a condition on his promise to love and walk with us forever.  But, He is only reminding us that keeping the commandments of GOD is simply a natural expression of our love for Him.  It should not be difficult, if we truly love and believe in him.

In John’s writings, the commandment to “love one another” is emphasized over and over again.  I have a cousin who no longer associates with any particular church.  He and I grew up together. Attending the First Baptist Church in Ossining, NY: Sunday school every Sunday morning, followed by the regular church service with the adults.  But as we grew older, he moved away from any organized religion, and began to say that his religion was to follow the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  

This passage is found in both Matthew and Luke.  And it’s really not all that different than the passage in John that we are discussing today.  When you strive to love the Lord your GOD with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, you gain the help of the Holy Spirit which helps you to love all others.

Well, despite my cousin’s decision not to attend church regularly, and not to stay true to any particular sect, he has followed that path.  He has always been drawn to those less fortunate, and no that he is comfortable in life, he has made it his mission to spend as much money on charitable endeavors as he does on himself.  For every dollar that he spends on himself, he spends another dollar on one of his favorite charities.  He does that religiously, as the saying goes.

Well, there is a need right now, and we are called upon to fill it.  When you think about it, following the Golden Rule is very much what every religion is, or should be, about.  We want to please those who love and care for us, and they will return that obedience and love in kind, just as GOD has returned that affection by providing us with another advocate, to be with us forever.

There is no shortage of people today who we need to think about and remind them that they are not alone.  Those who have lost loved ones to this virus, those who have lost jobs, those who are home alone, those wh are having difficulty putting food on the table, those who are simply living in fear of the unknown.  

For the millions of people throughout the world who are facing this dreaded disease, without a knowledge of Christ, who si there to say to them: “Jesus has not left you as an orphan.  GOD will never abandon you.”  WE ARE HERE TO SAY THIS TO THEM.  We are here to bring them comfort, love, compassion, understanding.  Our lives are filled with technology: computers, smart phones, big screen tv’s. All these things bring us the news our world.  But they can’t bring us what we need most: the love and comfort of Jesus Christ. The knowledge that we are not orphans facing these perilous times alone.  Because we are never alone.  GOD made that promise to us, and HE has kept that promise.  This is a calling for all of us right now to be that voice in the dark.

More than 2000 years ago, Jesus assured us that we would never be alone when he gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit.  We are not forgotten.  We do not have to live in a state of fear, GOD is right there with us through the suffering, pain and frustration.

These are very difficult and trying times for many of us, but remembering that we are not orphans, we are not alone, will help to guide and give us strength. This is an opportunity for all of us to open our eyes, and truly seeeverything around us.  An opportunity to reinforce this message to others who may need our help. We can do this through our prayer, our words, our actions, and deeds.

Let us use this opportunity wisely.  We will all get through these trying times.  Because, we are never alone.

                                                                                               – Bill Kamp

5/12/20

            I grew up about five miles from my first cousins, my father’s brother’s family; and we were very close, we spent a lot of time together.  When I was 15, my oldest cousin married a young woman who, over time, became a mild irritation to everyone in the family: it seemed like she never really listened to what anyone else was saying, and she usually didn’t have much to say that anyone else was interested in.  I was no different than anyone else in the family, but I think now we just made her so self-conscious she could never relax and be herself.  Eventually they divorced; but, years later, my father told me that he had been sitting next to her at one Christmas dinner (a duty that everyone dreaded annually, but you knew your turn was going to come up sooner or later) and, completely out of the blue, a propos of nothing, she had said, Uncle Kay, why do you go to church?

            My father was a lifelong churchgoer, and told me this story as just one more example of what an oddball she was, but of course it’s not an oddball question at all, it’s one that we should make a point of asking ourselves every now and then: Why do I go to church?  And in these times, when we’re not meeting together in our church building, what is church?  What is it that we do here?

            Well, of course, there are many specific answers to these questions.   We worship God, in many different ways; we give thanks; we pray for others, and for ourselves; we confess our sins, we try to be honest with God about what’s really going on with us; and so on..  But there are also broad, overarching ways to answer the question; and one of them occurred to me to talk about today because a couple of things.  The first is something in one of the Scripture readings we just heard, which I’ll get back to.  

The second is something I read in a book a while back, called Flash Boys, by a financial journalist named Michael Lewis. It’s about a discovery that was made several years ago by a small team of people, at a bank in New York City.  It’s complicated, but just very briefly to summarize, they found that traders at an investment firm were using high-speed computers and complex software to steal money from trades being made on the stock market.  They had found a way to get an advance peek (just a second) at trading orders and shaving off for themselves just a penny or two, so nobody noticed, but it was from billions of transactions, so it added up to a lot of money. 

               And the team that was investigating this also discovered that, over a couple of years, people at a few other financial institutions had stumbled onto this racket; but rather than blow the whistle on these people, they joined them, they started doing the same thing.  

            The point of the story (at least for me) was contained in two sentences, buried in the middle: Lewis wrote: “The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia.  So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became.”  Now, it’s certainly not a startling revelation that there’s greed in the financial world, and that people will do dishonest things to make money.  But there’s something about this situation that I think the phrase “moral inertia” captures pretty well: it describes the mindset that holds, If I’m smart enough to understand something and you’re not, that’s not my problem.  It’s your problem.  You could call that survival of the fittest; but it’s also moral inertia – moral paralysis – and as Christians, we call it sinful.  It’s willful ignorance of the communion in which God intends us all to be.

            This is what can happen when we allow ourselves to be defined by the boundaries of whatever small world we choose to inhabit; and we each do inhabit a particular world, our family, our job, the path each of us chooses in life.  The danger is when, on that path, we abandon our awareness of God’s creation, the wholeness that each of our particular worlds is rooted in, and gets its life from, and thereby is joined to all the others.  So when someone else is being hurt, we’re all being hurt; and when someone else is feeling joy, we all share in that joy.  It’s the way God created us; and it’s the root of the second Great Commandment: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  If you don’t, you’re not living in the real world: you’re perpetuating a false world.

            The story Lewis tells is a specific example of that disconnect.  It’s an extreme example, but we all experience it.  We show it in our anger, in our impatience, in our selfishness; say, for instance, if we have an in-law who we think is a bore, and we don’t want to have to sit next to her at Christmas dinner; because we’re ignoring  who she really is, her real life, and our chance to learn something  new from her: like when she asks us why we go to church.

Sometimes it takes work to see all that.  And there’s a verse in today’s reading from the first letter of Peter which points us that way.  The author of this letter is writing to a very young church, in the first century, a group of people who have felt called to Jesus Christ, just like us; and what the letter tells these people to do is this:

            “Come to him, a living stone, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.”

            “A living stone.”  Both Old and New Testaments frequently use “stone” as an image of the presence of God.   It represents permanence, absolute reliability, something you can stand on, that will always support you.   Today’s passage from 1 Peter follows this invitation (“Come to him, a living stone”) with several quotations from Scripture, which have to do with stones, two of which speak specifically of a cornerstone, seen in this letter as a prophecy of Jesus Christ: from Isaiah: “See, I am laying in Zion…a cornerstone chosen and precious…”; and from the Psalms: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner.”     

            Now, back then, when you built a building, the cornerstone was the very first stone put into place.  So every other stone was set in reference to that first one.  So the cornerstone determined the building’s orientation, the solidity of its foundation: everything that followed in the construction of the building was determined that first step.

            This verse from 1 Peter asked those people then, and asks us now, to make Christ our cornerstone: that first stone of the spiritual house which each of us builds.  Every single human being, in church or not, builds a house in life, one way or another. The question is, are we paying attention, when we build our house?  Are we recognizing the life that is real?  Do we build it for the life lived in communion, the life of love and peace and joy; the life God wants for all of us?  Do we build our house on a living stone, from which life eternally opens out in front of us?  That’s what we’re doing here.  That’s why we come to church: wherever church is: where two or three of us are gathered together.  Thanks be to God.

5/3/20

(Acts 2:42-47; Ps. 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10)

            “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

I read something on the internet this past week that was written by a college professor, lamenting one of the many little tragedies that the coronavirus pandemic has created, that was specific to his life as a teacher: that, because of the shutdown, his students (like students in college courses all across the country) would not be taking their final exam. (Of course most students would think yeah, what a tragedy.)  But the fact is that this professor, like any good teacher, knows that the purpose of a final exam is not just to make sure people have done their homework.  It’s a chance for them to bring together what they’ve learned in the course (whatever it might be), to see how the pieces fit; it’s a chance for them to use their knowledge, to be creative, to see that they can be creative.  In the language of faith, it’s to embrace the gifts that God has given each of them uniquely; to grow into who they really are, what they can be.  In fact on one level that’s the whole point of the course. Of any course.  It’s the point of all education.  Of any kind.  “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

In our Episcopal Church the fourth Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday, because in each of the three years of the lectionary cycle the gospel reading for this Sunday is a passage from John chapter 10, the discourse of Jesus in which he calls himself the good shepherd.  Jesus speaks about his caring and protective relationship with “the sheep”, meaning, of course, us.  All of us.  A lot of people instinctively have a negative reaction to that characterization of themselves: sheep being understood as brainless creatures who need to be, and can be, led by the nose in order to survive.  (Of course this is not what Jesus means.)   Our reading today is the first part of that discourse in chapter 10, in which Jesus establishes the world of sheep as the metaphor for his ministry, but refers to himself, not as the shepherd, but with a different image: one which I think deserves a lot more attention than it tends to get.

            But first we have to remember something. This whole discourse is actually the conclusion to the story we hear in John chapter 9, Jesus healing of the man born blind.  And we cannot really understand the whole Good Shepherd thing outside of that context. So – very briefly to remind you – Jesus comes across a man who’s been blind all his life.  The healing happens very quickly, at the beginning: Jesus spits on the ground, makes a little mud, puts it on the man’s eyes, tells him to go wash in a nearby pool, which he does, and comes back able to see, Jesus having gone on his way.

But the bulk of the story is what happens afterwards. Because word spreads that it’s Jesus who’s done this miracle, an uproar starts among the religious authorities, who’ve already identified him as a dangerous renegade and troublemaker.  At first they deny that the healing really happened; when it’s proven to be true, they deny that Jesus had anything to do with it, saying to the man, it’s God who did this, we know Jesus is a sinner (so he cannot possibly have done it.)   The chapter ends with Jesus and the man he healed talking about what happened, the man coming to faith in Jesus, and Jesus trying to teach the Pharisees something, which they reject.

There’s a lot more to this story, and you could spend a lifetime talking about it.  The point for our purposes today is this.  The Pharisees and Sadducees – the religious establishment – are insisting that they know how God works in this world: in certain ways which they have long since identified, which they alone can provide knowledge of and access to; and which they therefore control.  Jesus is saying, That’s a lie, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.  In fact, worse: you are preventing people from seeing the love of God that is alive around them, and inviting them to join in, all the time.  And within the metaphor of the sheepfold, he calls them thieves, and bandits.

And here’s where, in chapter 10 verse 9 Jesus uses another image to help us understand who he is, and what he’s doing: he talks about the gate of the sheepfold, and tells them, “I am the gate.”  And then he says what that means: “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

“I am the gate.”  It’s one of the great “I am” statements that Jesus makes in this gospel: I am the good shepherd; I am the light of the world; I am the way, the truth, and the life; I am the gate.  These metaphors all represent a means to an end: whenever Jesus points to himself, he is pointing through himself to God.

But there’s a unique beauty to this one: in the way that it’s about this life, our lives.  “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.”  “Saved” does not mean “admitted to heaven when you die.” “Saved” means fulfilled; redeemed; “saved” is the coming-to-be of who we really are.  “Whoever enters through me will come in and go out and find pasture.” “Come in”: to the place we know is home: where we know we are loved for who we are; where we are safe; where there’s trust, and communion, and rest.  “Whoever enters through me…will go out and find pasture”: this is our life, every day: we go out into the richness of creation. Pasture is what grazing animals eat, it’s what gives them sustenance.  “Pasture” isn’t a big empty field: it’s what is in that field.  Pasture is the nourishment, not just for our bodies, but our souls, that God gives us: that God is giving us, all the time.

            This is Jesus, the gate: through whom we wake up; through whom we open our eyes; through whom we go out and find pasture; through whom we come in, and are home.  “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  Thanks be to God. 

4/26/20

(Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Ps. 116:1-3, 10-17; 1 Peter 1:17-23; Luke 24:13-35)

            We’re not in the same room, at the same time, you and I, right now; nonetheless, please allow me to say: Grace to you, and peace from God, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

            If those words sound familiar to you, it’s because (with some slight variations) they are the words with which the apostle Paul opens pretty much every one of his letters in the New Testament.  He does this because he’s writing to people who, in their emerging identity as the Christian church, in the Roman Empire of the first century, find themselves living day to day in circumstances that are much different than before they became Christians: circumstances that are unfamiliar; sometimes  hostile. Paul greets them with these words because he wants to remind them all of the truth about God: that God is gracious; and God gives peace: truth which exists regardless of adverse circumstances, and is not affected by them at all.

            Well, we are living now in a time that is unfamiliar: that can feel hostile.  And of course it’s not this way just for Christians.  The covid-19 pandemic threatens us all, everybody in the world (that’s one of the unfamiliar things about it.)  And we know we’re going to get to the other side of it; but we don’t know how long that’s going to take, and we don’t know how differently that other side’s going to look.

            But for us, just as for the people to whom Paul was writing, the truth remains the truth, now and always.  The grace of God, and the peace that comes from God, do not change.  And I want today to offer a couple of examples of something which, as Christians, we might keep in mind as we navigate our way through these choppy seas.

The name C.S. Lewis is probably less familiar to most people today than it used to be, but for several generations in the middle years of the twentieth century, Lewis was certainly the best-known Christian writer in the English-speaking world.  He wrote books about many aspects of Christian faith, one of which was called Surprised by Joy.  It’s the story of his own conversion to Christian faith, a process which took place over the course of several years.  Lewis had been a confirmed atheist; he was a professor of medieval literature at Oxford University, and a very methodical, logical thinker (which probably had a lot to do with why it took him so long.)

            The book is 238 pages long, and describes step by step his strenuous wrestling with religious belief, and with the whole idea of the existence of God.  It’s about three-fourths of the way through that struggle – about page 200 –  that Lewis arrives at belief in God.  But it’s not until page 237 – the very next to last – that he comes to Christian faith; and he describes this final conversion in all of two sentences.  Some friends had proposed an outing to a famous old zoo, about an hour from Oxford, called Whipsnade; and here’s what Lewis says of that trip: “I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning.  When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”

            He gives no further explanation of his conversion: nothing about anything he suddenly came to understand, no specific connection that suddenly became clear to him.  Instead of anything like that, he says: “It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.” And he remained awake –ever increasingly – for the rest of his life.

            In truth, finally, there’s nothing that we can really say in logical explanation of why we believe in Jesus Christ.  Because, in faith, we proclaim that we are standing in the presence of the eternal God, the Creator of the universe, and finally all we can say is (with the psalmist): “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them…?” (Ps. 8:4)  And in Christian faith, we proclaim that is the loving presence of that same God among us; and we behold the risen Christ and, with the disciple Thomas, we can say, “My Lord, and my God!”  MyLord.  MyGod.  The one who stands right next to me in this life – whatever the circumstances – and helps me find the way.

             When I call myself a Christian, I’m usually aware of a slight discomfort. Because I know it would be more accurate to say that I try to be a Christian; or that I’m in the perpetual process of becoming a Christian.  Because being a Christian means following a way.  It’s not static, it’s active.  We Christians follow the way of Jesus Christ, the way that leads to what Jesus called the kingdom of God.  In this world God is always trying to draw us closer, to bring us home (that’s why we call it redemption.)  Love wants to happen, in this world.  It’s what we’re born out of, and, as Christians, that’s the way we’re on, to live into.

            We see it in today’s gospel story from Luke, the resurrection story which happens as the two disciples are on the road – on the way – to Emmaus.  They meet Jesus, but don’t recognize him.  He stays with them, walking along, explaining the scriptures, talking about how God is alive in the world.  And they still don’t recognize him, but the Spirit is growing in them as he speaks. They ask him to stay where they’re sheltering the night.  And only when he breaks the bread with them at supper do they see that it’s Jesus, and just as instantly he disappears.

What strikes me about this story – today – is that, at the critical moment – when they suddenly recognize Jesus, and then just as suddenly he vanishes right before their eyes – they don’t remark at all on this utterly mind-boggling one-and-only-time-in-the-world physical circumstances.  They just know that it happened; that it was the truth; and that they both saw it.  And right then they turn around and go back to Jerusalem, which they had fled. Because the risen Christ has just shown them that that’s where the kingdom of God is happening, right then. They’ve seen a new level of truth, and they need to share it.  That’s the way they’re on.

And that’s the way we’re on.  Our world today may be way up there on the unfamiliarity scale, high on the anxiety-meter.  But the message we carry – that the kingdom of God is within us and among us, now and forever – that message is the same, now and forever.  And we carry it in how we live, loving our neighbors as ourselves. That’s the way we’re on.  And that will never change.  Thanks be to God.

4/19/20

(Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Ps. 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31)

            One day some years ago I got a call from New Milford Hospital.  There was a man in the Intensive Care Unit there who was dying, and his son and daughter, who were there with him, had requested that an Episcopal priest come and offer prayers.  So I went to the hospital, up to the ICU, met the man’s children – they were both in their forties – and spoke briefly with them about their father; then we all gowned and gloved up and went into his room.  He was on a respirator, not conscious, and obviously in great distress. So I prayed over him – we were in there for about five minutes – and the three of us went back out in the hall. And as we were taking off the safety clothing and talking, a doctor, walking past, looked at the two of them and said, Boy, you guys are really covering your bets, aren’t you?  On my way out I learned from a nurse that I was the fourth clergyperson, all of different denominations, that they had called in that day to pray for their father (and I don’t know that I was the last.) Apparently the operating principle was the same as in hockey or soccer: the more shots you take on goal, the better your chance of scoring.

            And I remember feeling, at the time, not irritation that my time had been wasted (I didn’t, and don’t, think it was), but rather sorry for those two people: that their misunderstanding of prayer, and of what Christian faith has to say about death and dying, denied them true comfort about their father, and about God’s presence in their own lives.  

Death is the starkest reality we face in life, and there’s no sugarcoating it, and no doing away with the pain that surrounds it.  But as Christians, we face death – our own and everybody else’s – in the light of the resurrection.  In Christian faith we know that death is not the last word.  We know that true life is eternal.  And that knowledge means, among other things, that we can live this life differently.  We can live in hope: a state of being which has practical effect on our real lives.

            I’m thinking about all this for two reasons. One is obviously the coronavirus pandemic: the death it’s causing all around the world, and the huge changes it’s caused in all our lives.

            But the other is that this is the second Sunday of Easter, and that we are now in the season of Easter, a time when our church directs our attention to the resurrection, and to the awareness that as Christians we are to live as resurrected people.

            We see something of what that means – the difference it makes – in the life of St. Thomas, in the well-known story we heard today from the gospel of John.  Thomas has not himself seen the risen Jesus, as the other disciples tell him they have. But he refuses to believe them, which is not hard to understand.  Thomas remains determinedly, insistently bound to the reality of this world: Unless I see his wounds with my own eyes, until I can put my hands on them, I will not believe.

            And then Jesus presents himself before Thomas and invites him to do just what he said.  And in his response – he makes no move to touch Jesus, but says simply,“My Lord and my God!” – we see the change in him: the glorious realization of the real presence of God in his life, flooding in at that moment.  And we have some idea of how this changed his life and the lives of people around him: one Christian tradition has it that Thomas went on to evangelize, and be martyred, in India, which would have made him probably the farthest-traveled of all the apostles. 

            So what does all this have to do with us, now?

            Listen again to what Jesus says to Thomas right after his Eureka-moment: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  Jesus is talking about us: all of us, who weren’t there, then, to see the risen Christ: all of us, down through the centuries; and he calls us, “blessed”.

            Now.  “Blessed” is the translation we use of the Greek word makarios, which mostly means “happy”, but with a strong overtone of “lucky”.  Calling someone blessed is to declare that that person has received a great gift of God, which that person did nothing to earn.  And as it’s used in the Bible, that declaration looks to the future; a future that takes place in the kingdom of God: that is, in this life and beyond, where what God intends, wants us to have, is what happens. Blessed are the meek – the gentle – for they will inherit the earth.   At the Annunciation, Mary says, All  generations will call me blessed: because she will bear a child of the Holy Spirit, and she will mother that child into a life that will change the world forever.

            And the one who has not seen the risen Christ, yet has come to believe is blessed – we are blessed – because in the raising of Jesus Christ God has shown us something about God’s true nature: that the almighty and eternal God, the Creator of the universe, loves each one of us as God’s own child, and will never let go of us, for all eternity.

            All this has to do with much more than how we think about death.  We know that, as we live as resurrected people – as we try day to day to live in the love of God in Christ – what we do ripples out in ways we don’t see – cannot see – far beyond our particular time and place.  In the power of the resurrection, we meet every day – whatever it might bring – in hope, which spreads God’s love over the whole world. Thanks be to God.

4/12/20

             For some years now, on Tuesday in Holy Week, our bishops have invited the clergy of the ECCT to join them at the cathedral in Hartford for the renewal of our ordination vows.  We do a form of the liturgy for ordination, and then there’s a program of some sort, and then we share a meal, and spend some time together.  Five or six years ago the program was to go out into the neighborhood around the cathedral for a couple of hours and look for where we could see Jesus.

            So: how do we see Jesus?  Where can we see Jesus?  What does that mean?

            There were a number of specific places where people congregated which we were directed to, like the public library, and Hartford Hospital.  The one I chose was the big common room in the basement of the cathedral parish building, which they open during the week to people on the street, giving them a place where they can come and be warm for a few hours in the middle of the day, have a cup of coffee, and hang out in a safe and friendly environment.  

That day there were around thirty people there; I joined a couple of guys sitting at a table playing dominoes, who taught me how to play. And at one point, there was a man who was making his way around the room, stopping at different tables for a few minutes.  When he got to us, it became apparent that he needed help; but he had some kind of cognitive difficulty, and a speech impediment, so it took him a few minutes to make himself understood: he needed to get home, which was somewhere in the city, and he didn’t have any money.  And when that finally became clear, before I could reach for my wallet, both of the guys I was sitting with, at the same time, reached into their pockets and said, No, man, I got a bus pass, you want a bus pass?

            That bus pass was something each of them needed, I was quite sure, but they were each offering theirs to a complete stranger who they could see needed help.  That’s the self-sacrificial love of God in Christ.  That’s where I saw Jesus that day.

            Today we proclaim that Christ is alive.  Today is the greatest, most joyful day of our Christian year: even in conditions like the ones we’re living in now.  Which are not unlike those of the church – the followers of Jesus – on the day of the resurrection, 2000 years ago.  That church was dispersed, as we are now: blown apart by a terrible calamity.  Its heart and soul – the source of its life – had been destroyed.  Their friend, their teacher, the person who’d said and done things no one had ever seen before, things that seemed undeniably to come straight from God: that person was now gone for good, executed like the scum of the earth.  So there was fear, and anxiety; as there is today.  They didn’t know who they were any more.  We thought God was right here with us.  What could God possibly be doing?  Was any of it real?

Today’s gospel story from Matthew shows they’re about to find out that it was real; in fact, more real than any of them had imagined.  The angel tells the two women at the tomb, “I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.  He is not here; for he has been raised….”  He’s telling them, Do not look for Jesus among the dead; because he is not dead.  He has been raised.

“Raised.”  Let’s think about that for a minute.  The risen Jesus is not alive again in the same way that he was before, ready to resume his earthly ministry, God having performed a magic act to confound Jesus’ enemies.   No. God has raised Jesus: raised him to a higher, an infinitely greater, realm of life: life which is in this world here with us.  When we talk about the risen Jesus that’s what we’re talking about.  And that life is not just as real as Jesus’ life before; it’s more so: because it’s the life that’s eternal.

The angel tells the two women to go to the disciples and say that Jesus has been raised, and gone ahead of them to Galilee; and they will see him there.  Those women then  immediately come face to face with the risen Jesus, and he tells them the same thing: Tell my brothers to go to Galilee, they’ll see me there.

Galilee: it’s is where they all came from, Jesus and the disciples.  Galilee is the sticks: flyover country; a place where you could scratch out a life, but nothing there this world puts much value on.  It’s in the far north, as far away in the nation of Israel as you can get from Jerusalem, from the center of worldly power, the temple,  the headquarters of the Roman Empire: it’s where the money is.

That’s why Jesus wants the disciples to go to Galilee.  He knows that their connection to the kingdom of God, which was through him (as it is for us), has been broken.   He knows they’re frightened, and anxious, and confused, and in despair.  He wants them to get away from the powers of this world – that right now have blinded them to his presence – and go to Galilee; where they will see him.   And they do. They go to Galilee, and they see him: the life that is eternal; is now; and will be forever.

So you see, today is the greatest day, the most joyous day, of the Christian year.  It always will be: whatever the circumstances of the present moment, whatever’s in the headlines.  Because this is the day on which we behold the resurrection: which opens our eyes to see God’s infinite love for us; opens our eyes to see the life that is eternal, which is here now; opens our eyes to see all that great glory, through the One who is our Savior, our teacher, and our friend: the Lord Jesus Christ.  Hallelujah.  Thanks be to God.