Each Thursday, I am home with my daughter. It is definitely one of her and my favorite days of the week. This Wednesday she said to me, “I wish we could stay home today.” I told her that tomorrow we would and we’d have lots of fun together.
On Thursday morning, the first thing she asked me was, “Is it tomorrow?”
Hmmmm…I wondered how to respond. Um, kind of. I mean if you are talking about yesterday than yes today is tomorrow but now it is today. Never mind, it is Thursday. Thursday is when we stay home together.
My daughter, and I assume most three year olds don’t have a great concept of the passage of time, they don’t really move from yesterday to today to tomorrow. They don’t have the capacity yet to understand life in the more linear way that we as adults typically do. While she does have memories, she doesn’t really have the capacity to tell the story of life in the way that we do.
As we grow and mature, we are told a story about our world and we begin to co-create our own place in that story. We see the narrative arc of history and begin to tell the story of our own life in that same way. It is filled with ups and downs, events from the past bring us to our present moment and we have plans, hopes and fears about how our life today will lead to the future.
This week, we have been following the story of Jesus and the larger story of our faith.
It is also a story of ups and downs, of trauma and joy, and the way it is presented in this week it follows the tidy narrative arc of we crave from our stories, saving the best moment for last.
Palm Sunday Holy Thursday Good Friday And finally, today - Easter Sunday
Like most people, I love Easter Sunday. Even during particularly cold springs like this one, you can still feel the brighter earlier sun, you can tell life is trying to bloom. And gathered here with flowers and bells, these white decorations. Everything feels new and bright and we get to shout and celebrate the hope and truth of our faith, Jesus has risen!
We get to live within a really good story.
And yet, the disciples in our Gospel this morning, they haven’t yet realized this…the resolution hasn’t quite come. This Easter Sunday we are presented with only an empty tomb, the Gospel ends saying the disciples don’t yet understand what has happened. While we celebrate today because we know the end, we are actually meeting the disciples in the moment of their deep grief and shock. They don’t yet know that they are in a good story with a good ending.
And you know, this Easter Sunday of all Easters it kind of feels right that this is the Gospel story we have because even with all the joy, how good it feels to be together, I still feel a pretty big sense of emptiness right now.
I told Marty when we were here for Holy Thursday that I was surprised how sad I felt coming back to our physical church. Not because I don’t love this space and all the good stories that have happened here but because so, so much has changed.
Personally, I carry deep grief of witness so much death as a hospital chaplain.
As a community, I am grieving those who are not here with us…those we have lost and those who have moved on.
Globally, it doesn’t feel quite right to speak of Easter joy when we know that our sisters and brothers in Ukraine are dying and that is only one of the many spaces of violence in our world at this moment.
Our story doesn’t always feel like a good story. We stand at an empty tomb too, confused and heartbroken.
In Paul’s letter to the Colossians that we heard today, Paul says, “Let your thoughts be on heavenly things, not on the things of earth. After all, you died, and now your life is hidden with Christ in God. But when Christ — who is your life — is revealed, you too will be revealed with Christ in glory.” These words of Paul are familiar to us, similar states are said throughout his letters…having died in Christ we know live in Him. Common words for us but if we really examine them, they don’t make a lot of sense in our understanding of how the story of our lives works. We have already died? What does that mean? Death is the end of the story and none of us are there yet. This is where our concept of time, our typical narrative arc doesn’t work. The movement from yesterday to today to tomorrow falls a part and it can be very disorienting. Young children, like my daughter, who don’t yet have the sense of the passage of time, cling to a cyclical sense of time. They rely heavily on patterns, routines and repetition of each 24 hours. Every night without fail, my daughter tells me that the moon has woken up and when I kiss her goodnight she says, “I’ll see you when the sun rises!” Each morning she runs to help me open the curtains and say good morning to the sun. She does live within a story, hers is simply a tight cyclical story as opposed to our long linear stories. This Easter morning, I believe we are called to enter into different type of story, not the one that feels neat and tidy but one that is cyclical. Maybe we need to cling to that sense of time. A story where we can both die and live at the same time. A story where we can stand grieved at an empty tomb and a changed world and still joyfully sing Easter’s alleluias! I think that is what Paul means when he says that having died in Christ we now focus on heavenly things. It doesn’t mean we are focused on the ending and “getting to heaven” it means we are focused on a deeper truth that is all around us, the Risen Christ and our very Risen lives are here right now, we are living in eternity already even with our feet firmly planted in the physical here and now. Our faith, the practice of our faith is cyclical and repetitive just like my daughter’s life. We follow a liturgical cycle celebrating the entirety of our faith story, from the creation of universe to the resurrection of Jesus over and over again. We gather and perform the exact same rituals every single week and this basic format has been practiced by Christians all over the globe for over 2,000 years. As we lift our voices today, we join with all our beloved, all the saints who have gone before us…we are not separate from them any longer, living and dying is right here. We break bread this morning with one another but also with this whole world, our sisters in brothers in Ukraine, in Mexico, in Libya, in Iraq and beyond…broken we become united. Our story is not the neatly packaged one we get presented each Holy Week, our story is a continual journey of creation, life, suffering, death, and life again. And it is a really good story. And when we enter that story, then all of who we are can be present. We can stand at the empty tomb and we can cry, we can run away, we can come back. We can stand here together, and we come back as a community, we can laugh and hug and sing Easter alleluias and acknowledge that who we are has forever changed and there is both sadness and hope in that reality. However, you show up today. Filled with joy and ready to celebrate. Struggling and sad. Unsure and not quite ready. It is all welcome. The fullness of our story, of life of death and life again, it all belongs here. Our story is a difficult one but together with the love of God and the love of one another, this is a really good story and I’m glad we are here together in it. Happy Easter.