A Reflection for Easter Sunday 2024 Church of the Holy Trinity, Hertford, NC
March 31, 2024 Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Celebrant
Easter Sunday 2024
In one of her books, Accidental Saints, Lutheran Pastor, and all around rule stretcher, Nadia Boltz Webber writes “In the Jesus business, community is always part of healing. Even though community is never perfect.”
What Jesus does in his ministry is to call people into community for healing. Also in the Resurrection, Jesus does this when he comes back to life: he calls people who were scattered by the crucifixion into a community of resurrection. This is what we do on Easter Sunday, we call the scattered people, scattered for all sorts of reasons, to come and gather together; the living and the dead, the friends and the strangers. It is Sunday morning, the 3rd day after the Crucifixion. Let us see who is here in this place and community and who was there in Jerusalem in that place and community a couple of thousand years ago and whom Jesus calls by name.
Let me start with right now. One of the people who is here to join this community for today, is my friend Paula Myatt. She was once a senior Warden in the church where I was Rector before I retired. She and I graduated on the same day from UNC many years ago, although we never met until 37 years later. She is here doing an act of mercy, since a group of people at my old church did not feel comfortable with my driving since I had heart trouble. She is here out of an act of love. Thank you, Paula.
One of the people who is not here physically, is my wife, Pat. I don't think any of you have ever met her, but she is with me wherever I go. She died last year, but she is here in the way I treat people. She taught me how to love; to give and to accept. BP, Before Pat, most people had to earn my approval. Thank you Pat for freeing me from that trap.
Usually I write a poem to collect my thought into a coherent whole, but Nancy, a member of a dream group which I agreed to take over after my wife died, sent me this Poem: What to Remember When Waking , by David Whyte an Irish American poet. She sent it to me for me to use when I address the Unitarian - Universalist fellowship next month to talk about how dreams are ways the Powers Greater Than Ourselves speak to us. I saw the poem as a way we have of sharing differences between and within ourselves. I steal from the best. Thank you David for the Poem and Nancy for the thought. These are a couple stanzas about the invitations to join community we send out.
To become human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance
You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.
One of the people who is not here physically is my Father, Bill Wilson. Raised a Roman Catholic, he grew to observe organized religion with suspicion. He married a lovely Presbyterian classmate at Carolina as he went into the war. They split the difference and baptized the kids as Episcopalians. He taught me not to insult people's intelligence, but to treat them with respect. He died when I was in college, but he is with me every day. He was a Civil Engineer and he loved building roads, and especially, bridges. On vacations, as we were growing up, every time we drove over a bridge, he would explain what the Engineer was trying to do with that bridge over that gorge, or that body of water. The events this week brought him even closer to my mind, He loved the concept of different beams arranged together, respecting their different angles, creating a means of overcoming barriers. It is a metaphor for the church: so many different views shared in dynamic tension creates a common ground. When we lose the dynamic tension; every thing collapses. Thank you, Dad.
Then there is Mary, who is in some of the resurrection stories. She is weeping because she does not see that man she loved. She cannot see his body, she does not even recognize him through her tears. Her heart is breaking, she wanted to do one more act of love to his dead body but his body is gone. She is like so many others who come here filled with their own losses that they cannot even see what is really just in front of them. Except, she is different, she keeps on searching, until that moment when he calls her by name, and then she realizes that her Rabbi, her lover, is here with her. Thank you Mary for being here with us, who choose to love, even when we cannot always see.
Then there is Thomas, the Doubter, who doubts, because there is a limit to his imagination. Yet, he comes anyway. His plan is just to sit there and be with these fools, his friends. He comes, not because he believes, but because he loves. It is an act of love, love which he learned from Jesus, who he thinks is now deader than a doornail. I think he comes to mourn with his friends, as an act of ministry. His plan is to keep quiet and to be there to wrap his arms around his poor deluded friends, to help them through their loss. His heart, but not his imagination, is in the right place. Thank you Thomas, for being here with us. Doubters are always welcome.
Then there is their friend Judas. He loved Jesus; and he betrayed him. His sorrow at the betrayal, caused him to end his life, his shame ended his own life. The old saying is true “We are not punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins!” Judas punished himself. But that one who was loved by Jesus is here in his spirit. He had learned a lesson that death does not separate. We learn a lesson from Judas; there is nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing (am I saying it enough times?) , nothing that we can do that can ever separate us from God's love. We can try to lock all the doors; but there is no lock to keep God out. Thank you Judas.
There is another side of the Judas story. In the 1970's, Archeologists uncovered a Coptic document which Carbon dated to 300 AD which purports to be a Coptic Translation from a Greek Gospel in the 2nd Century of the Gospel of Judas. It was a Gnostic document and was repudiated by the early Christian churches. The document tells the story that Judas was only doing what Jesus asked him to do. The money he was paid was given to the disciples money bag, to jelp the community get through the rough times to come.
There is another story that Madeleine L'Engle tells about Judas in a deep dark slimy pit and after about a thousand years of ministry, he notices a small light. The light gives him hope and he begins to climb, He keeps climbing toward the light, but keeps falling back. He almost reaches the top of the pit but falls again to the bottom, Finally after a couple thousand years, he reaches the top and enters into a door into an upper Room. As he opens the door, he finds Jesus and His disciples in dazzling light. They cry out in Joy, and Jesus says “Judas, my brother, we are so glad you are here. Now we can begin the banquet. We could not start without you.”
We have as our guests here the leaders of the religious establishment who refused to accept the blood money, Judas threw at their feet before he hung himself. The Religious types knew that the money needed to be made holy and so they used it to buy land for a potters field for foreigners to be buried. They took the hate and turned it into a gift of love. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus tells us all things are redeemed, even betrayal, even hatred. Thank you religious leaders for showing mercy on strangers.
Then there is the Roman soldier at the foot of the cross, who realizes that what he did in carrying out the Crucifixion was, as they say, “following orders”. But he understood his own complicity in the legal murder, when he said “This man is innocent” ,or in another Gospel story. “This man is a son of God.”. He, is like the rest of us, who go on living our lives in the middle of slaughter of murders by guns on our American streets, or the actions of soldiers on all sides of conflicts in the middle East, or in wars in Europe, in Africa, in South America and in our hearts. Bring them with you today. Thank you Centurion.
Then there are two others who are here, in spirit, members of the ruling council, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. They did a lot, and could have done more, but there were limits that they placed on themselves. Yes, they could have done more, and they are not there in person at the meeting, but they were there in Jesus's heart. They are like most of us; they do what they can do, but our fear keeps us short of the goal. We are not called to be perfect; there is only one person here who is perfect, and I know I am not one of the perfect ones; I'm just doing what I can, based on what I choose to do. Thank you Joseph and Nicodemus.
One of the people who was there, that night , and is here in our imagination this morning, was Peter. He talked a good game, but he did not win any gold, silver of bronze medals in the faith Olympics. With his denials and his shame, he is like all the rest of us; loved and forgiven before we ask. Thank you Peter.
Then. there are people who just tick me off. I cannot quite put it out of mind and I have to face it. At first I thought it was about the fact that I saw in them the things that I did not like to see. But what it was, that what I was seeing, was the shadow of myself that I did not want to face. Karl Jung called it a shadow, he wrote:
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it… But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”
Healing begins when we have to learn to claim our shadows and not hide from them, nor project them on others. So, in the meeting where all the other people, thee is also our shadows. I ask God to help me claim my shadow instead of throwing it on to other people. We have to learn to sing and dance to “Me And My Shadow”. Thank you Karl.
There are others who I bring with me in my imagination and this is my daughter and her husband. I am pretty sure they will not be at an Episcopal Easter service. My grandchildren are home on Spring break from college and I bring them as well in my heart. They are kind and they care for people and love me. I love them, and I bring them in my prayers every time I stop to pray. I am not their judge, I am only some one who loves. Thank you Shanon, Steve, Nick and Luke.
Maybe, some of you have children, or neighbors, who you love and who have not shown up here in person. That is not your problem; your job is to love them and bring them in your heart to the throne of Grace. There may be empty pews here, but there should not be empty hearts. Bring them here in the warmth of your hearts. Our hearts are what we bring! Thank you all for opening your hearts.
May the resurrected Lord open our hearts today, so we may live in the light of the resurrection love in each one of us. We end as we began: “In the Jesus business, community is always part of healing. Even though community is never perfect.” Thank you for not waiting until you were perfect.
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