As Preached by Sister Rebecca
Holy Wisdom Church
Christ is Risen! He is truly Risen! If we were to invite a reporter to go around our Church with a camcorder and ask each one of us: What does this mean for you: “Christ is Risen”? Do we really mean what we proclaim today? What is our connection to this event as expressed in the Gospel today: “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.” Jn.1:5
It is easy to simply say the words: “Christ is Risen!” just like we also say our ‘Amens’ at the appropriate liturgical times. In order to really understand what it means for us personally to say: “Christ is Risen” requires that we really relate it to our own experience. Christ did not rise from the dead in a vacuum, abstractly – rather Christ invites us into this divine reality through our own experiences of dyings and risings.
We can encounter the Risen Christ only if we are willing to follow him to where we are not yet, to seek him where he goes before us. We must leave behind the safety of our preconceived notions. We must roll away the stone of our limited consciousness, go inward, and open inner hearts to experience the gift of the Spirit of the Risen Christ dwelling in the core of our being, trusting his promise of new life in our own dyings and risings.
Last week, the day before Palm Sunday we celebrated the Jesus’ raising of Lazarus. During the matins service, we heard a reflection by Rev. Suzanne Guthrie: she recounts a friend’s conversion experience in this way: “She is Lazarus come out of the tomb.” In a way it was true, the first of a series of conversions and awakenings, like a hermit crab molting, leaving behind an exoskeleton time after time and, in successive increments living for something unseen and beyond herself. Life in Christ demands successive deaths and re-births. Maturing, growing in consciousness requires painful re-engagements with life-cycles of rebirth, self-sacrifice, transformation, dying and being born again. She adds, once the creative life emerges, then you cannot go back anymore. I know I am called to come out of my tomb, to become fully alive. Am I due for another molting?
Dove-tailing this call to come out of our tombs I would like to share thoughts from another reading on this theme from our Holy Week: “Leaving a String of Empty Tombs”:
“Spring and Easter: a conspiracy between nature and religion..to make newness, to thaw out, .. to rejuvenate, to make the sunshine, to warm frozen places and to produce new buds on trees and new enthusiasm in the heart! It is the season of resurrection…of the melting earth and melting hearts.”
‘Like nature needs springs each year, so too, we need regular resurrections. How so? Much of our lives lie frozen. It is possible to be dead and not to know it, to be asleep and still think we are awake, to be bitter and think we are loving. Physical death comes last, but before that, there is the long series of other deaths, crucifixions, diminishments, and losses. It is precisely in those areas most precious, most sensitive, where we bear God’s image in us that invariably get crucified. And on the contrary, what is calloused and tough survives and we can go through the motions of our life on automatic pilot – almost lifeless. And then before actually being buried in our graves, we are buried in our lives. We make do: a life without enthusiasm, without fire, joy frozen. Christ is us is lying in the tomb, and what is most precious within us is frozen under bitterness or numbness. Some years back the author, Ronald Rohlheiser, received an Easter card which said: “May you leave behind you a string of empty tombs!” That is the challenge of Easter: To resurrect daily, to leave behind us a string of empty tombs, to let our crucified hopes and dreams be resurrected. Like Christ, our lives will radiate the truth that, in the end, everything is good, life can be trusted. Love does triumph over apathy and hatred, togetherness over individualism so rampant in our society today. We need regular resurrections. We need to be open to new possibilities, to surprise. Given any chance, life wins out, brokenness heals, bitterness melts, numbness awakens, new seeds form and life bursts forth from what once appeared to be dead.’
‘Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, may we be awake and present and breathe in this new life. Let us pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.’ (Quote adapted from Martin Luther King)
“The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.” Jn.1:5
Quotes and paraphrasing above is from Ronald Rolheiser is from The Passion and the Cross
