Living word by word

Easter lectionary 3A -- Acts 2

 It’s unfortunate that the Acts pericopes for this week (Acts 2:36-41)  and next (Acts 2:42-47) disconnect the repentance and baptism of 3000 on Pentecost and what follows – the entry of this new community into a pattern of breaking bread (v. 41) and sharing all things in common (v. 44). These two things – repentance, turning around and the breaking of bread with a forgiving Savior – are core elements of Luke-Acts, and with this Sunday’s Gospel.

We tend to bracket the incredible number of converts at the end of Peter’s sermon into the category of "Biblical statements that can't possibly translate into today's context". But which is more incredible in today’s context– that 3000 were added in one day, or that they shared all things in common? Or that more were added to their number daily (47), even though people knew that this was a community in which people sold their possessions in order to share them with the poor?

Sara Miles (who I’m very happy to announce will be preaching and speaking at ECLC next February) has written powerfully in her memoir Eat This Bread: A Radical Conversion about this connection between conversion and communion, and between Jesus’ feeding us with himself and our call to feed others. At her church, St. Gregory of Nyssa, the communion table is cleared at the end of the Eucharist and quite literally becomes the table of fellowship with coffee and treats. And the gifts of the community to others are gathered there as well.

The experience of being fed at Jesus’ table converted Miles to Christianity, and in that feeding she also found her own call within St. Gregory’s – starting a food pantry where, weekly, anyone who came to the church doors was offered a bag of groceries, no questions asked.

 Miles has said in a PBS interview that after years of thinking that Christianity was about rules and strict creeds and unlikely beliefs in creationism, she discovered that “faith is about hunger -- a hunger I had always had --  and a willingness to be fed by something you don’t understand.”

 

In this week’s Gospel, and in the Emmaus text, Jesus comes as an unfamiliar figure to the disciples. They still don’t know what his presence means, but as they eat with him their eyes are opened. As they are willing to be fed by this stranger among them, they find their Lord.

wild awake

   Sunday night I went to see Mary Oliver at  the State Theatre. It was a magical evening -- an almost-full house gathered simply to hear an aging, unassuming woman read her spare poetry for an hour. For once, the standing ovation felt completely natural and deserved.

I was also struck, having never heard her speaking voice, how much the voice I've heard in my head as I've read her work matched the one I heard from the stage. She is clearly a writer who has, as they say, "found her voice" and translated it to the page perfectly. She's also one of those writers whose work is so spare, so simple and so direct that you walk away thinking, "I could do that." But, of course, I can't. Making it sound that easy takes fifty years or so.

She confessed that her work is shifting a bit in recent years more toward the human landscape, and that she is more willing to speak directly about situations of injustice and violence in her poetry. She got the most raucous applause for a poem in which she imagines taking her dog to the White House, where Donald Rumsfeld would get down on the floor and play like a boy, "for once, a rational man." But clearly, the natural world is still Oliver's first love, and her attention to it the gift she offers to us all.

Until Thirst was published, few people would have called her a religious poet. Now that she occasionally invokes God or prayer or a biblical scene in a poem, she brings to humankind the same attention and compassion.  "Gethsemane"  reflects on how the natural world is always "wild awake." But then she shows true compassion for the disciples, and all us humans, so often not attentive to holiness:

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not

keep that vigil, how they must have wept,

so utterly human, knowing this too

must be part of the story.

I am so grateful Oliver is still waking early, wild awake to God's grandeur around us.

no foolin'

Nothing like April snow to shake things up a bit. A stiff north wind last night plastered the north side of every fence, street sign and stoplight with heavy wet snow. It's quite a sight.

This morning in our staff devotions a writer referred to the winter landscape as a "pall," which at first struck me as a rather pejorative term for the beauty out our window. But then again, a pall is a reminder of baptism, the whiteness which covers the signs of death and calls us to remember that death does not have the final say.

Given the dry years we've often had lately, this whiteness is its own baptismal reminder that we need some rain -- or snow -- to fall in order for new life to appear. The waters above are now waters all around us. It's beautiful (and, this time, it won't last long).

Easter silliness sunk to appropriate depths

For pure humor value, you must see our friend Mary Kay's entry in the "what else can you do with Peeps?" contest.

Someone has argued that you can't really be bad-humored about the Easter bunny, as pagan and silly as it is. I agree. Same goes for Peeps, which are not only silly but gross as well.

Easter's date

Still confused about why Easter's so dang early this year? Unable to believe that spring technically has already arrived?

I thought I understood the whole dating of Easter, until I picked up Mapping Time, in an effort to understand why Passover is sometimes on a different timeline. Well! I guess I didn't know as much as I thought I did.

There are nearly 30 fine print pages on the dating of Easter and its fraught history, containing sentences like:

  The 19-year Metonic cycle contains 12 common years each consisting of 12 months or lunations and seven embolismic years each containing 13 lunations.

In any case, I know understand -- sort of -- why Passover and Easter are sometimes nearly a month apart. The best story of the book:

Before the days of Google, an Englishman was wondering when Easter would occur the following year. Knowing that Easter depended on both the equinox and the lunar cycle, he contacted the obvious experts --astronomers at the Royal Observatory. The astronomers took his call and said they'd get back to him. They did -- after consulting the Book of Common Prayer.

 

favorite clips on John 20

    John 20 must be one of the most-preached Gospel texts in the lectionary. Why Thomas gets to appear each and every lectionary year, I don't know. Fortunately, it is a rich text.

    My favorite clips from the surfing so far:

• See Dan Deffenbaugh's (another Vandy-ite) lovely reflection on the Spirit at Seeds of Shalom
• Mary Hinkle Shore's old but powerful piece about Thomas at Pilgrim Preaching
• And, for everyone burnt out on theological treatises about the meaning of the passion and resurrection, don't miss the Ironic Catholic

More of my own thoughts to come.

the advantages of knowing your liturgical year

Three good reasons to know that Easter is a season lasting 50 days:

1. When Easter morning looks like this outside, you can still know that spring will appear before the season is over.

2. When the "Youth Easter breakfast" gets moved into May, you can still argue that it is still an Easter breakfast

3.  When the Easter bunny doesn't get around to your house until Easter Tuesday, your children can still fully enjoy their chocolate as an Easter treat (and the Easter bunny can take full advantage of those 50% off specials).

deep church, occasional church

    Make no mistake, I'm a church geek. Long before I was ordained I went to every Holy Week service available. Easter Vigil was not part of my childhood church life, but once I discovered it as an adult, it became indispensable.
    Vigil is wonderful for a lot of reasons. It engages all the senses and both the sacraments. It moves one physically from a womb-like darkness to the bright loudness of resurrection joy. It rehearses some of the most dramatic stories of the Old Testament, including  my all-time favorite, the farcical tale of Shadrach Meschach and Abednego. (Try reading it some time with the rhythms of Dr. Seuss.)
    I've wished for years that we could get more people engaged in this service, but, of course, it's usually just church geeks like myself who show up. This year, however, Easter's early arrival gave us an opportunity to draw in our Sunday School families in a new way. Hardly anyone was on spring break yet, so every class was given a story to tell, and no one was exempt since it was just part of the Sunday School time during Lent. And, in deference to small children, we started at 6 and kept the service short. We had 133 people there on Saturday night -- easily three times our average.
    A good Easter Vigil is really all the Easter I need. (I made a point of telling families that Saturday night "counted" as Easter church). I have long admired the Holy Week practice of  St. Gregory of Nyssa in  San Francisco. Easter Vigil is unquestionably the year's highlight, and the next morning there is no liturgy -- only a community picnic. (They also make the eminently practical move of having "Maundy Tuesday," partly to spread out the liturgical commitments of the week.)
    After gathering with the most involved members of the community around the most central part of our faith for a few hours at Vigil, Easter morning often feels almost a letdown to me. Sure, there are 500 people through the doors, but many of them are people I don't see very often the rest of the year. It's hard not to be cynical about the ratio of energy put out to community return. I'd much rather have a picnic with the folks who just helped make Holy Week happen.
    But, of course, the hospitality of Easter morning is undeniably a resurrection practice -- maybe an indispensable one. All those people who only show up two or three times a year are not going to come to Easter Vigil. They come Easter morning, and the Gospel is for them, even if they do see it as an obligation to be done before brunch. In fact, one could argue that Jesus' resurrection appearances focus on those whose faith is most at risk -- Thomas and his doubts, Peter after his denials, and the two leaving  the disciples in Jerusalem and heading to Emmaus. Jesus spends his limited post-resurrection time on them.  It makes sense for the church to do the same.