A Reflection for Easter III All
Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC
April 19, 2015 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
 |
| Bill and Sharon Capps 1969 |
First of all I want to say that I’m sorry for
missing last week’s service; I would have preferred to stay with you, but I
went to Roanoke, Virginia to the church home of a longtime friend of Pat’s and mine.
Pat knew her for forty years and I for almost 31 years. Sharon’s funeral
service had been held on Saturday afternoon. Sharon had visited us and come to
church here in the Outer Banks a couple times, but the last
time Pat and I were in that church was six years ago, also during Easter
week, when her husband, Bill, was buried after he died on Maundy Thursday.
Bill’s funeral had been on Easter Monday at 10:00 in the morning, and Sharon
died last week at 10:10 AM Easter Monday, and after being apart in life but
never in spirit for six years, they were finally reunited. Bill had been the
church’s organist and Sharon, who had been a music teacher, was the director of
the choir, and OH the outpouring of song as they followed Sharon’s written
instructions - she had revised the order of service four times in the past six
years. The tables were put up after the overflow crowd was cleared out of the
Parish Hall to go out to the columbarium to place Sharon’s ashes next to
Bill’s. The tables were groaning with the offerings of love from parishioners
for all of us who knew and loved Bill and Sharon. Pat and I wanted to hug their
grown children and to comfort another longtime friend of ours, Susan, the
Rector of that church. Holy Week is exhausting and burying a friend is hard,
and the combination is very hard. To
top that off, Susan’s husband, Michael, had heart bypass surgery during Holy
Week.
I am also
sorry that I missed the service here this last week because I hear Pastor Al
Douglass, the Lutheran replacement, was a very good preacher and a fine
presider of the services. I hate it when that happens - I prefer replacements
that leave the congregation longing for my return. I tend to have a competitive
streak within me, and I was confronted with that side of myself last Sunday.
Since I had already written a sermon for All Saints’, I suggested to Susan at
dinner on Saturday night with her and Michael that I could fill in for her on
Sunday morning. Actually the dinner had
been provided by those same loving parishioners who had more than enough love for
Susan and Michael. She thanked me and said that a retired Episcopal Priest who
helps out there had already volunteered. Well, I also knew this priest from the
time I was first ordained. Thirty years ago when I was very arrogant - I still
am, but even more so then - I had occasion to hear him preach, and while he was
much beloved in the Diocese, in his church, and by fellow clergy, I sniffed in
derision at the altar of my ego at how much better I was than he. I have come to realize that the Risen Lord is
in the space between my ego and another person, and I don’t need to keep
proving my worth to the One who loves us both.
On Sunday morning at 8:00, I arrived a few minutes
late and settled into one of the back pews. They were doing Rite One. I groaned
to myself because I am so used to the cadences of Rite Two and even to our
variations, but I was prepared to smile tolerantly at the coming sermon. My
smugness evaporated as the service was comforting and the Preacher was right on
target. The truth is that we can only fully feast at God's table when we send our own egos out to lunch.
As in the Gospel lesson for today from Luke, the
Risen Lord was there with us as we gathered together and ate and drank, along
with Bill and Sharon. So it had been all week long. The Risen Lord was here
when we at this church did Bob Strickland’s service as we acknowledged each
other’s wounds of loss and as we knew Bob’s presence on the other side of the
Altar. We gathered to pray together and sing lustily, and then the Hospitality
crew coordinated a wonderful time of fellowship in the Parish Hall where we
hugged, mourned, and celebrated
In the Acts of the Apostles lesson for today, Peter
says to the people who were either silent or complicit when Jesus was
crucified, "And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance”. He is
telling them that what they were doing to this man Jesus was because they were
ignorant of the reality that this stranger from Galilee was really God. All
acts of silence or complicity in the face of injustice, cruelty, and violence
are not just against fellow humans but, because of our self-centered ignorance,
they are also against God.
When I was three, four, and five years old, our maid
in Salvador would try to drum it in my head that all my acts of selfishness and
meanness had a much larger dimension. She would say, “Oh, Tomasito - Nino, you
are such a good child, but when you do something like this, you are driving a
nail into the hands of Jesus.”
As I grew up, I dismissed her admonition as
superstitious gibberish. Yet, as I have walked deeper in my faith, I realize
she was telling me the truth - that when I pursue my own selfish agendas,
ignoring the harm to others, or remain silent and complicit in the face of
injustice, cruelty, and violence, with my ego as the center of my world, then
there is not a dime’s worth of difference between me and the people that Peter
is addressing. One of the most sobering moments of the Palm Sunday and Good
Friday liturgies is the identification with the crowd calling for the death of
Jesus that the congregation is invited into when they read the lines of the crowd.
Also in the Good Friday liturgy, when we pound the nails into the cross, we
hear the sound of our hammers and nails, feel the of vibration of the hammer each
time it strikes the nail, and those sounds and sensations blend with the echoes
of the hammer and nails of two thousand years ago.
In the movie version of the John Steinbeck novel Grapes of Wrath, the hunted hero, the
Jesus archetype, Tom Joad, played by Henry Fonda gives a final speech:
"I'll be
all around in the dark. I'll be ever'-where - wherever you can look. Wherever
there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop
beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad
- I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready.
An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses
they build - I'll be there, too."
On the other side, our church thought we did the
service and reception out for love for Bob and Ellen, and the Roanoke church thought
they did the service and reception out of love for Bill and Sharon, and both
are partly true. But on a deeper level we did it for the glory of God from
which all of love flows. Jesus said, “If you do this to the least of these, you
do it to me.” The Risen Lord is always is the space between us and all acts of
love are acts of love for God. Every
service we attend, every reception we help put together, every meal in which we
partake, there is a guest who is also the real host.
This is the Easter Season which follows Lent. In the
forty days of Lent, we focused in on our individual and corporate sin, but now
in the fifty days of Easter, let us work on how we can best share that God-given
love with this broken world.
No comments:
Post a Comment