Myrrhbearing women Sunday-4th after Pascha 1Jn2:3-10, Ac 2:37-47, Mk 15:42- 16:8 X is risen. Christos Anesti

As preached by Sister Cecelia
Holy Wisdom Church
April 22, 2018





Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Jewish Supreme court and yet we have no hint that he spoke even one word in Jesus’ favor or intervened in any way on His behalf. While Joseph is the man who gave Jesus a tomb when he was dead, it seems he was silent when he was alive. (For us too, do we provide flowers for our loved one’s graves and keep our praises for them until they have passed into the next life?) How soon Jesus’ words came true that when he was lifted up from the earth he would draw all to himself. The centurion and then Joseph who, no doubt, had been present when he died would risk their reputations (by) of doing and saying what is right.

The religious leaders understood that Jesus had indicated he would rise from the dead, so they stationed guards at the tomb and sealed the stone so that his disciples would not steal the body away and claim he had risen. His own disciples did not understand that he would rise from the dead. They were dubious and slow to believe even when Mary Magdalen told them she had seen the risen Christ. The women too, who went to the tomb to carry out the mourning rites, were afraid to carry that news to the men because of their own incredulity.

Are we any better? How often we hear that God loves us and loved us first but we are so slow to believe it. Doubts can assail us too, even now. Reflect on how the news when it finally was believed by the disciples changed them from frightened for their lives and hiding behind locked doors, to people with radiant joy and now flaming with courage.

Jesus is not just an historical figure but a living presence. We can know a great deal about Jesus which is good but our true aim is to know God, which enables us to love God and then all who God loves. Jesus made clear to Peter that he was forgiven for denying him by the angel saying to the women, tell His disciples and Peter - especially.

Coming to know Jesus enabled all the disciples, men and women, to create a united group, the early church. The early Christians knew they could not meet life with only their own strength. They always appealed to God before they went out to others. There was an intense feeling of responsibility for each other. Wonderful things can happen when people come together. God’s Spirit moves upon his worshipping people enabling them to reverently see that the whole earth is the temple of the living God. The riches of Christ are inexhaustible and every day was counted wasted if they did not go more deeply into the wisdom and grace of God. The joy and happiness derived from the acceptance of Christ’s good news made their beliefs attractive to many. Scripture says thousands came to believe.

Only when we see ourselves, humans, as part of creation, rather than as the crown of creation, will we ever be able to come anywhere close to really grasping the greatness of God and God’s gifts to us. Only then will we begin to understand that we are all meant to come to fullness of life together—plants, animals, planet, and humans in one great reciprocal circle of a common creation. Until we do, all of us will go on living life with spiritual blinders on. Like John speaks of in the first reading today, we will think and claim that we know God but our actions will not so clearly manifest that we do.

John speaks of the commandment to love in a way that is both new and old: Old, in the sense of having known the first two commandments to love God above all and the neighbor as the self. New, in the sense of a completely new standard – to love as Jesus showed us how to love: Love that reaches out to the sinner, to the Gentile, to the whole world. Glory be to Jesus Christ!

 

Homily Easter April 8, 2018

As preached by Sister Rebecca

Holy Wisdom Church

       We heard this morning from John’s Gospel that the Light shines in the darkness.  What light?   John is pointing to this Light of Christ, the same that emanates and radiates from the very beginning of God's creation:  In the book of Genesis chapter one, we hear of the Spirit hovering over the deep dark abyss and God said: “Let there be Light”. This is not the light of the sun but rather the mysterious Divine Light imbuing all of creation.   John is referring to this Light in introducing his Gospel:  Jesus is the very Word of God incarnate.  He is the Light of Life.  In him and through him God dwells (or more literally the text says that in Him God has pitched his tent in our midst.)  Jesus from the beginning of his ministry lived as a nomad: “the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”   He was on the go, taking part of ordinary, everyday life’s comings and goings and in the process, teaching the good news: God is here and now and manifesting this power of life in healing, giving sight to the blind, new life to the sick, even raising some from death to life... 

            But the very goodness itself of God manifested in Jesus teaching aroused the hatred from those refusing the light and was put to death. We know the story and how this unexpected event threw his disciples into a deep dark abyss of despair, sadness, and dashed hope for a Savior of the world.  The disciples spiraled down the dark inner confusion to the point of being terrorized of being associated with Jesus.  So they enclosed themselves behind locked doors, insulating themselves, huddling together in their misery.  Closed doors did not prevent the Risen Jesus from passing through into their midst and revealing himself to them.  Nothing they did brought about this sudden visitation...it is sheer grace, the goodness of God that brought them to new life.  

            And this visitation of the Risen One occurred over and over again starting with the faithful women disciples and continues throughout almost 2000 years to this day. 

            Teillard de Chardin said this extraordinary energy of the Risen Lord changed the very atoms of creation-that it not only transformed lives, but also the entire creation.   God did not just create in the beginning and then somehow bow out of sight but has been creating, renewing life right up to our day.

            This brings to mind an event that may well illustrate this same Spirit recreating in our midst:

Just before Holy Week I received a voice message on my phone extension:  it came from a woman I will call Joan.  The message said:

“I am calling to get some advice as to what I should do.  My family hates me.  I am an alcoholic. Last night I heard this voice: it said from inside me: ‘You can have another chance.  Everything is OK.  The past is forgotten.’  The feeling was wonderful.  I am calling because I do not know how to make the best of it.”

Those in AA can vouch for similar experiences that changed their life forever.

            This is another of many visitations from on high.  This voice from within Joan, heard so clearly, is inviting her to new life – to rise from a dead-end prison of bondage but also misery not only to herself but also to her family and friends.  In calling for help she is doing her part...stepping out to ask for advice so she can act according to the Life offered her.  The seed has been planted.  She needs the good soil for it to germinate.  

            You would not be here this morning, I think if this emergence of Light in the darkness isn't part of your own experiences.  The Spirit of the Risen Christ continues to break through our sense of powerlessness.  

“There is a crack in everything and that is when the light gets in.”  (Leonard Cohen)

            The psalmist says:  “Deep calls unto deep. “  The deep dark abyss continues in our day:  we hear about it every day in the news...killings and wounding of innocent people, ...many horrors flood the news, which we need not mention in detail.  We hear about it enough in the daily news reports.  The Risen Lord assures us:  that when there is the experience of this deep dark abyss it calls forth in some way -unique each time-the Creative Spirit of God who has been hovering over this chaos from the very beginning of not only our earth but the entire universe and bringing forth New Life.

            Later today we will return to our 24/7 daily lives with our concerns, our work, and our relationships.  Would that we keep in mind and heart Jesus telling us before he died to ‘abide in me’.  When we heed to this presence, this kairos time, then we allow the Light to pierce through everything we are and do...in every NOW moment.  Some part of us, though, is yet to be redeemed.. to see the Light.  We need the shocks of our difficulties, challenges, sometimes mini or maxi crisis, to wake up to this innermost reality of God's creative life in our midst...calling us to cooperate in God’s re-creating.  At times we find ourselves wrestling with our problems, with our thoughts, feelings and we feel our sense of powerlessness.  Our tendency like the disciples is to go into the insular, self-enclosing in on one’s own little self.  When we do this it is like trying to solve the problem within the problem. God's grace is bigger than one's limited sense of self.  Grace is woven into the fabric of our lives.   A German proverb says:  Begin to weave and God will give you the thread".

We need only to trust in and cooperate this divine presence, this Light of Life permeating all of life and then our voices resounding in “Christ is Risen” will follow us into our everyday lives and unbeknown to ourselves reverberate for the Life of the World we live in.

   

Barriers

As preached by Brother Luke

Holy Wisdom Church

Sermon 155: Col 1:13b-20; Ac 2:22-36; Jn 20:19-31 [15Ap18] 

Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus was forever acting to break down barriers: societal, religious, cultural, and personal. He confronted taboos about women’s natural menstruation cycles being unclean, opposed the belief that touching an ill person made one ritually unclean, challenged the prejudice against foreigners, questioned over burdensome laws about Sabbath work and rest, invited people to recognize who one’s neighbor really is, and denied the accepted wisdom that retaliation was the necessary response when abused or attacked. Those are only examples of the barriers formed by the religious and cultural mores of his time that Jesus broke. Although these religious customs and traditions were understood to be things that pleased God and were intended to bring people closer to God, they often had the opposite effect. So, we see barriers may not always be physical, but of course, sometimes they are.

In today’s gospel reading the barrier between Jesus and his disciples is initially formed by Jesus’s death on the cross which left the disciples dejected, believing that with his death, the great vision of the Good News had died with him. So, the disciples are hunkered down in a room behind locked doors for fear of the authorities who might very well seek to arrest these followers of Jesus in order to bring this fledgling movement to an abrupt end. This lock-down image of the disciples in that room certainly has its scriptural pedigree. As the prophet Isaiah says: “Go to your room and close the door. Stay there for a while until the time of wrath is gone” [Is 26:20]. But the barrier intended to keep the authorities out does not keep Jesus out. Jesus was not finished with his disciples. They had a mission to embark on and Jesus was going to make sure that they moved forward with that mission.

In John’s telling of this story, he twice refers to the locked doors. Jesus’s two appearances with the disciples in this scene intentionally includes the image of the locked door. The locked door is something Jesus passes through, his mission unimpeded. But the barrier to Jesus mission includes something more personal than a locked door. It is more than the dejection felt by the disciples. It is more than the fear of the dangers lurking all around them. It is Thomas’s locked heart.

Sometimes the toughest and most impregnable barriers are those we erect around ourselves. In today’s gospel, it is Thomas who has placed a barrier between himself and Jesus by declaring that he will not believe unless he sees and touches the marks of the crucifixion on Jesus’s body. So, Jesus, without rancor or criticism, simply responds by showing himself to Thomas and telling him to put his hands in the holes in his hands and side. Once done, he then tells Thomas to no longer be unbelieving. And Thomas is transformed from cold doubter to a fiery evangelist carrying Christ’s message as far as India. Jesus took Thomas’s stubborn refusal to believe and turned it into a powerful missionary force.

What is the message for us? Might we also have erected barriers born of the same defensiveness that kept Thomas estranged from God? In addition to that physical safe place where we might seek shelter from what is raging around us, we can also build up a bulwark of other defenses which in a psychological sense are also intended as a barrier between us and others, including that most important other: God.  The English language makes it easy to see this. Simply add the word self as a prefix to a list of words and the image becomes unmistakable: self-importance, self-indulgence, self-sufficiency, self-satisfaction, self-absorption, self-assurance, self-protection, and so forth. Jesus is ready to break down barriers we erect and guide us from selfish to selfless.

And that closed-door image may not always be a barrier between us and God. Behind closed doors, we too may experience contact with the divine presence, as did the disciples. As scripture says: When you pray, go to your inner room, close the door and pray to your father in secret. And your father, who sees in secret will repay you. [Mt 6:6]

Christ is Risen!