Tag Archives: Sermon

Today, I am a Mustard Seed.

Mark, Year B, , ,

Year B Proper 6
Mark 4:26-34
Preached on June 17, 2018 at Christ Church Christiana Hundred

 

Sunday Sermon – June 17, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

I’ve been at Christ Church for just over fifteen months now, but as many of you know, this isn’t my first time living in Delaware. I went to college just down the road at UD, so my first move to Delaware was when I was nineteen.What you probably don’t know is that it was a move I didn’t want to make. I enjoyed high school; I had it down. I was never super popular but I was involved in a variety of student groups and had a great circle of friends, many of whom I still consider my soul sisters. Also, I’ve always been close to my family and many of them lived nearby. I had a good thing going. Going off to college would mean a new chapter, a new beginning. Sometimes, now, when I’m driving south on turnpike I can still remember the day I moved into the dorm, riding in the backseat of my Dad’s silver suburban, with my one-third of a dorm room in back. I wanted that car ride to last forever.

(I imagine right now some of you are thinking “Why did this girl come back to Delaware?”)

How I felt about UD transformed in my time there because I transformed too. In college, I made new friends, lived into my passions, found a voice I didn’t know I had and discerned my vocation. I was like the sower in the first parable in today’s gospel lesson, sleeping and waking and going about my daily business…. But all around me seeds were sprouting and growing in ways I didn’t know or expect.

We get a lot of seed imagery today as Jesus tells us about the kingdom of God, because seeds are beginnings – awaiting growth and transformation. Today, Jesus teaches us that the kingdom of God gives us life when we’re surrounded by darkness, breaks us open to new possibility, and invites us into a new way of being full of endless opportunities for growth.

The mustard seed is so small when it starts out but like all other seeds, it has to be buried to grow. When a seed is planted to awaken its new beginning, it is surrounded by darkness under the earth. Riding in that backseat of my Dad’s suburban that day, all I could see awaiting me in this new beginning I’d chosen was the darkness of the unknown. Every time we move, start a new job or school, embark on a new relationship, we’re sowing ourselves into unknown territory. We’re planting ourselves like seeds and praying for new life. Sometimes, that darkness is not expected. Sometimes, it’s overwhelming. Often, it’s completely unpredictable and we have no idea how long it will last. But next time you have one of those days where you just want to stay in bed, pull the blankets over your head, and hide: remember how Jesus likens the Kingdom of God to a seed and the precursor to all of that transformation is total darkness. God is nurturing us in that darkness, even when we can’t see God there.

In order to get out of that dark place, a seed has to not only break open to the unknown but it has to sprout. It has to reach out overcoming any fear and temptation to stay in its safe and secure shell and pull its little mustard seed down comforter over its head. At the end of my first day of classes, I joined my first student group. I looked up where it met, walked across campus by myself, and entered a room filled with strangers, who would become some of my first and closest friends. It was one more strange new thing in a season of strange new things, but it was the beginning of what would become a weekly ritual that would shape my college career and help me discover my voice. Whether the darkness around us is heavy or light, isn’t it always those little moments of reaching out that lead us to something great – like the first time you shook your spouse’s hand or the first time you did the thing that became your greatest passion? All of those moments began with a seed, something impossibly small but that God was surrounding the whole time. All of these moments began with one brave decision to reach out into the unknown and have faith that God is there. The Holy Spirit is always waiting to surprise us.

Any seed brave enough to break open and sprout is always always going to find its way out of the darkness and reach the warmth of God’s life-giving light, where it will continue to transform, blooming into blossoms like the ones on our altar or growing tall like the magnolia tree on Buck Road or becoming the greatest of all shrubs like the mustard seed. In Christ, the possibilities for growth are endless. That place I went to on that very first night of classes – where I found some of my dearest friends and began my journey to finding my voice? It’s the same place where I met the people who connected me to Christ Church. By likening the Kingdom of God to a seed that springs life, Christ is reminding that the Kingdom of God is alive – alive and the source of all life and transformations, just like how Christ tells us that mustard seed that grows so big that it comforts the birds. We’re called to invite each other into God’s transformation.

Just like how every seed grows up differently, the Kingdom of God always has room for new possibility – and new transformation that continues throughout our lives. Over and over again, just as we pray that “Thy Kingdom come” over and over again in the Lord’s Prayer.

After I graduated from UD, I loaded the last of my dorm room into my beautiful Ford Taurus and as I drove across the Delaware Memorial Bridge towards the entrance to the New Jersey turnpike, I cried that that beautiful chapter of my life had come to an end, even though I knew I was just a summer away from my move to South Africa….and you know, when that time came, I remember wishing that plane ride would last forever.

We’ve always been told that we should have faith like a mustard seed – faith that grows bigger and bigger. But more than that, this gospel is calling us to be the mustard seed:
To have faith in God’s transformation spirit all around us when we are buried by dark unknown soil!
To break open and welcome God’s life-giving call, every time God presents Godself!
To grow in the life-giving light of God, fearless and ever-changing as we become what we cannot predict!
God’s transforming power is already in progress. Are you ready to be planted? b

Something Better Than Gold

Lent, Sermons, The Psalms, Year A, , , , ,

Year A, Lent 3
Psalm 19
Christ Church Christiana Hundred, Wilmington, DE

This Lent, my colleagues and I committed to preaching on the psalms, an exciting challenge for all of us. More than usual, this sermon evolved over the course of the morning’s services, so the video does not include the Jordan River bit that I prayerfully extroverted, then added to the script below.

Sunday Sermon – March 4, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

One of my practices at the end of the day is to recount the things that I am grateful for. Sometimes, my gratitude for the riches of the day blinds me from my gratitude for my journey to the day. I’m grateful for my education. In high school, I always knew I would go on to college. I was quiet, but I did well in school. Generally, I was quite a rule-follower, too; I wanted to do the right thing, you know? Even if my vision for my life didn’t always line up with my parents’, I didn’t want to let them down. And though I went to high school in a post-Columbine world, I felt safe. I can’t imagine what it feels like for high schoolers now. I am overwhelmed by the violence and the pain it causes. It sounds like the youth of our nation are fed up, too, as they vocally cry out and peacefully march. Some schools are threatening suspension or loss of prom or graduation for students who walk out. In an age where competition for college is greater and greater, no one wants a stain on their application. How can they choose between securing their future and securing their present safety – our future? It’s challenging enough to do the right thing when the answer to the problem is clear; what happens when we can’t figure it out?

In the heart of today’s psalm, Psalm 19, the psalmist tells us about the glory of doing things “God’s way.” He spends three verses – verses 7-9 –  on the Lord’s law, testimony, statutes, commandments, fear, and judgements; many of which are fairly synonymous. Together, these things make up the God’s will, for our world as a whole and for God’s call in each of our lives. When we say the Lord’s Prayer – the prayer Jesus taught the disciples –  God’s will on earth is what we’re praying when we say “Thy Kingdom come.” Praying for God’s kingdom is praying for a world that follows God’s call as a community and as individuals. The Psalmist describes following each piece of the way of the Lord as reviving the soul, giving wisdom, rejoicing the heart, and always enduring.

In verse 10, the Psalmist summarizes of God’s law and testimony as more desirable than gold and the sweetest of honey. An important thing to know to fully understand this verse is: During the Old Testament times, honey was a rare enough commodity that it was considered a luxury, more on par with gold than it is by today’s standards. So, for all the soul-reviving, wisdom-granting, heart-rejoicing, and always-enduring aspects of the Lord’s commandments – the way of life we pray for – these things are not only associated with items of the highest value but with items that are rare.  See, even for knowing that God’s will for our lives is best, most enlightening way of life that offers for the greatest reward: we get to verse 12 and the psalmist says “Who can tell how often he offends? Cleanse me from my secret faults”

The Psalmist, just like us, struggles. The Pslamist knows that God’s law is the best way to live – something better than gold – but he also knows that it’s hard to figure out how to do the right things.  Do any of us know how often we offend? How many secret faults do I have that I am blind to? When we join together in saying the confession there’s that line about “things that we have left undone.” When I say the confession, I’m more comfortable in naming ways that I may have fallen short than I am in having to acknowledge that I might have some blind spots. The first two thirds of today’s psalm are all a set up for the last third: the psalmist is asking God for help to do the right thing. “God, please keep me from making the same mistake again, and while you’re at it, please help me make fewer new mistakes.” Sometimes, part of the challenge of doing the right thing means knowing what the right thing is.  Our lives are filled with some pretty murky waters.

Last month, during my pilgrimage to Israel, I had the great joy of renewing my baptismal vows while standing in the Jordan River. While the way of life that these promises calls us to remains clear, the waters of the Jordan River are actually quite murky. Standing knee-deep in that river, I couldn’t see my feet, but I could still recommit myself to my baptism, no matter how much lack of clarity surrounded me.

Lucky for us, our Lord and Savior is Jesus, who spent a good portion his earthly life wandering around healing people because of their faith or the faith of those around them. I’ve heard the story of Jesus restoring the sight of the blind beggar; it helps me keep the faith the Christ can restore my sight to the blind spots in my heart that keep me from seeing which is the right decision.

Thomas Merton, a twentieth century theologian and writer, penned one of my favorite prayers, which is known at the “Thomas Merton Prayer.” I couldn’t help but think of it, when I read today’s psalm. It begins; “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going” and continues “the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does, in fact, please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.” Don’t we all want that desire? When I struggle to discern God’s will, I take comfort in believing that that desire to please God does please God.

For all the psalmist’s pleas to God to help him discern God’s will and follow God’s law,  he is clearly aware of God’s presence. This whole journey of declaring the glory of God’s will and begging for strength to follow it begins with the psalmist reveling in the glory of God’s creation; “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows God’s’ handiwork.” Every day. Every corner of the earth. Every glorious sunrise and sunset. God is visible in God’s creation. God reveals Godself in Creation. While the psalmist makes it clear the glory of following God is even greater, these first verses provide us a roadmap that Creation is the first place we are to look for God: the trees and the flowers and howling wind and the warm rain… and us. Humanity. We are a part of Creation. There is a piece of Christ in every human heart. We get to know God better by getting to know each other. We are agents in helping to manifest God’s transformation at work in all of our lives; thy kingdom come, indeed!

One of the reasons our life together as a Christian community is that when we share our faith with each other – whether it’s in a church, in a Growth Group, on a night ride home, or sitting on a rooftop in some strange city – it makes us vulnerable. When we are vulnerable with each other, we reveal Christ to each other and get to know God better.  One of the promises we make in our Baptismal Covenant is to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.”  All of these things are connected: apostles’ teaching and fellowship. Because learning about God and being in community together are inextricably linked.  When I am struggling to do the right thing, I can ask for help. When I can’t see what the right thing is from where I am, my friend can tell me how things look from her perspective. We’re all in this together, and I am so grateful. I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine figuring it all out on my own.

We all know the right thing is usually not the easy thing. It’s made harder still when we can’t even identify the right thing. But we have us. Our community. When I say the “Our Father,” I take comfort in the our, in the prayer’s line  to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive.” There are no I’s in the Lord’s Prayer, or the Confession of Sins. We need the support of everyone in the church to welcome someone in Baptism. Our Sunday mornings are filled with this communal language because we are all in this together. One step at a time. It’s the only way we’re going to navigate God’s law and live a life richer than gold. Thy kingdom come, indeed.

 

General Seminary Commencement 2016: A love that binds friend and stranger

Seminary, Sermons, St Patrick's Breastplate, , , , , , ,

Matthew 28:16-20


Jesus said to them… “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age”

To the end. From the beginning.  The alpha and the omega. Christ within us all, stirring and working within us to answer a call to be part of the community life within this place, and for those of us about to graduate, to go forth into the world having fulfilled this seminarian-shaped piece of that call.

My story is full of Christ beside me in so many wild and crazy and beautiful new ways in my time here. The comfort of the daily rhythm of chapel life, and the occasional whimsy of pranks. Fellowship with friends over wine around all sorts of tables. In the ringing of the bell in the tower. The people I started loving the moment I first heard them speak, and the people I have loved who I didn’t even think I’d like.

But I don’t think anyone here needs to hear a sermon about the radiance of our King of Glory in the beauty of springtime flowers blooming, rainbows cutting across the sky, children laughing and loving someone so deeply that your heart swells so big that it reaches your toes. Christ in the hearts of all who love us.

That’s Glory of God 101.

I’ve seen enough Grace made manifest in enough people here to say with confidence we’ve got it covered that Christ is with us in rainbows and butterflies.

Christ is with us always.

Always means not just when we feel Him in the sunshine or when we see Him in our favorite people or when we’re doing something that makes us feel really proud of ourselves and that we’re sure Jesus is going to want to hang up on His heavenly refrigerator when we present it to Him next time we go to pray.

Always means that Christ is within us through all of our least favorite parts of our stories: the parts when we screw it all up. When we say nasty things about what someone wore or how colossally they stuck their foot in their mouth or how they failed at something daring they set out to achieve. Christ is with us when we fail to disagree in a way that honors our baptismal covenant.  Christ is with us when we avoid the light of a truth because we’re too afraid of what it means. We can close our eyes and cover our ears and turn our backs and stomp our feet, but resistance to this truth is futile.

Wouldn’t it be so much easier to take comfort in the fact that Christ loves us so unconditionally that He is always there to help us avoid making that particular mistake again, if we let Him in? If we let each other in?

Christ is with us always.

Each September, as part of the ritual that ties all our stories together, each new class prepares to sign the book chronicling nearly 200 years of matriculates, Each September at matriculation we join together in singing St Patrick’s Breastplate:

Christ be with me. Christ within me
Christ behind me, Christ before me
Christ beside me, Christ to win me
Christ to comfort and restore me.

Restore. Restoration from any breaking down. For all the love I’ve learned so far, my story includes walls tumbling down, too. All of our stories have these ups and downs.

But Christ has the power to restore us from any deaths in our spirit that might interfere with our ability to experience the Gospel of Life, if we’re willing to take the time and do the work and name whatever the problem is – rather than pretend it simply isn’t there.

What does acknowledging Christ in times of danger even look like?

This past January, I had the privilege of going to South Africa on the General Seminary pilgrimage – something I highly recommend to every single person in this room – and as part of this wild ride, my fellow adventurers and I had the honor of dining with Fr. Michael Lapsley, who graced our campus with his presence two weeks.  Lapsley was one of many people whose stories and perspective helped enrich our class’s understanding of South Africa’s long journey of ending apartheid and continuing journey of restoration. One of the great many things Lapsley has done with his life is to found something called the Institute for the Healing of Memories. He believes that the entire human race has been traumatized by what we’ve done, what was done to, and what we failed to do. He believes the key to moving past this trauma is to have our stories acknowledged, reverenced, recognized, and given a moral context. Through his institute, Lapsley seeks to create a space that is secure for people to bare their wounds and move from victim to survivor to victor through being courageous and vulnerable enough to speak their truth.

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Christ is with us always.

To fully acknowledge the Christ within us, we all must be courageous, too, when we go out through those gates and into the city. But having courage like Christ means we need to be brave enough to be truly vulnerable.  If we want to go out there and inspire the world with a love like Christ, then we need to follow the model of our God – who so yearned to be in deeper relationship with us that our God led by the example of stepping out of a heavenly, glorious, comfort zone and taking on an infinitely more vulnerable way of being – frail, fragile, human flesh. Christ before us. The word made flesh, tabernacling among us.

The love doesn’t stop there. Obviously.

In case taking on frail human flesh for us wasn’t enough of a vulnerability, Christ died naked, nailed to a cross in the crucifixion and that violent, vulnerable, Good Friday nightmare – was the death that preceded the resurrection. Think about that. There’s no big, beautiful resurrection without the crucifixion. That is mind-blowingly miraculous vulnerability! That’s God’s love for us. That’s Christ.

And Christ is with us always.  

We are never going to get it all right, out there or in here. But if we spend our whole lives hiding from the truth of the errors we make or too afraid to speak a truth that goes against popular opinion because we’re afraid, then we’re living in the kind of fear that perfect love like God’s casts out.

And even if we’re cowering, there’s no sure way of avoiding having the crowds of the passion play yell “crucify him!”  or “crucify her!” at any of us.

And for all the pain involved in standing in front of the angry mob…
It’s that COURAGE!
It’s that VULNERABILITY!
It’s that TRUTH!
That gets us to resurrection and new life!

We wouldn’t have a resurrection without a crucifixion.

Christ loves us with a love unafraid to be truly, deeply vulnerable because He knows that’s the path to new life.

How do we experience rising again if we don’t fall down?

In the words, of St Patrick’s Breastplate, here is my prayer for us all:
Christ be with us, when we go out of these gates into the city.
Christ within us, help us love more deeply
Christ behind us, call us out of our comfort zone.
Christ before us, continue to inspire us with your example of deep, vulnerable, love
Christ beside us, help us help each other rise back up when we dare greatly enough to fall.
Christ to win us over to a better way of life.
Christ to comfort and restore us. Always.
Christ is with us, always.

We have already bound this love unto ourselves. Let us dare to live it.

Love like Big, Boundless Skies

Sermons, , ,

I preached the following sermon at St Thomas Episcopal Church in Newark, DE, where I worshiped and was involved in campus ministry when I was at the University of Delaware. The propers are for the Fifth Sunday after Easter C, focusing on the gospel, John 13:31-35.You can watch it here.

“Everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”

Christ calls us to love and honor all people.  It’s one of the foundational promises of our baptismal covenant and the subject of many a passage of scripture. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that love is patient and kind and bears and believes all things. It’s a lovely passage. But you don’t have to worry about my preaching on it today.

For me, I know all this talk about love makes it tempting to write today’s gospel off. I know to strive to hold the door for people behind me, to hold my tongue when I’m tired and grumpy, and to hold off on tailgating the car going the incorrect speed for its lane choice.  I mean, I’m trying to be good and to be kind.

Jesus said “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”

How does Jesus love his disciples that isn’t covered in 1 Corinthians?

When Jesus first called his disciples, they weren’t wandering around like baby ducks looking for a mother to imprint on and to follow. They were people like you and me, waking up and going out into the world with one or more jobs to do.

Picture it:  you’re waiting tables at a café or checking out customers in a grocery store line. In your frantic, mad rush, you turn to your next customer and there’s JESUS and he says “Hey, I know this is how you put food on the table and a roof over your head and that you’re shifts not ever for another few hours, but you should stop everything you’re doing and follow me.

“Now.”

That’s scary. That’s wild. That’s outside my comfort zone.

That’s Jesus loving his disciples by inviting them into a new way of being, – should they dare to accept such a radical love – and spread wings they might not even know they had.

And that was just the beginning!

Following Jesus around in this new way of being did not guarantee any sort of glamour or social desirability.  I think I can say with confidence that there was no “Disciple of the Month” award that came with a modest Applebee’s gift card. Jesus’ love that called the disciples into a radical new way of being also called them to love everybody. The real everybody. Not just everybody in their neighborhood or where they used to work or who they went to school with. Jesus’ love called the disciples – and still calls us – to love the people we like to pretend we don’t see or only exist in the form of being causes we give our money to.  People who are forced to sell their bodies. People who talk to themselves when they ride the train. People who we can smell when we walk by them, making it harder to pretend they’re not there.

Jesus’ big transformative love doesn’t allow for the big invisible walls our society can put up to keep us separate from people less desirable than we are.

Jesus’ love called the disciples to invite them to dinner. This love believes we should all come to the table together.

This past January, I had the incredible honor of returning to South Africa for 10 days with my ethics professor, Fr. Michael Battle. Towards the end of our trip, we had breakfast with Desmond Tutu and one of my classmates asked him what his greatest passion is. His answer: Freedom. It was at the heart of Tutu’s passionate work to end apartheid in South Africa and still visible in his support of his daughter Mpho’s plans to marry another woman, the center of much discussion in Cape Town around the time of our trip.

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”

Talk about a love that transforms! Tutu’s leadership and passion for freedom helped to transform a nation and break down the barriers established under apartheid and inviting an entire nation into a new way of being.

You never know when the Holy Spirit might come lovingly knocking at your door and inviting you into a new way of being. And while these outrageous acts of Grace are about as easy to predict as finding a door to Narnia (never the same way twice), we do have some control as to how ready we are to welcome such big love. Where might there be invisible walls that keep up from making space within our very own hearts?

A few days ago, I was going for a walk with one of my classmates. We were talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly in the great world of Job Searching in the Episcopal Church.  It’s a pretty big church out there, but in all the pressure to find a job, it can be tempting to force ourselves to fit into a good-enough one. To think the fit is close enough to right. To convince ourselves that we won’t be clipping our wings enough to even notice.

But if we’re contorting ourselves to fit into this new space, it doesn’t sound like we’ll be leaving much room for the Holy Spirit to make a Graceful entrance. I don’t mean to underestimate Her so much as to acknowledge just how distracting that kind of contortionism can be.

This conversation about the church prompted my friend to share a bit of her personal experience from earlier in her life. She told me how she had been tempted many times to make that same mistake in relationships. To force herself to fit. To clip her wings a bit to see if that might turn “good enough” into “good.”

It didn’t.

If you’re clipping the magnificent and unique set of wings God gave you to fly with in the one-of-kind way God is calling you to fly, you’re doing it wrong.

If your love for someone is shaped like a birdcage, contains any sort of latch, or requires wing-clipping; you’re definitely doing it wrong.

And that’s wehn my friend said something else to me that sounded a lot like Bishop Tutu’s passion for freedom from birdcages of inequality and injustice and abuse.

She said: “You know how I knew my husband was the one for me? I didn’t have to even think about clipping my wings. He was already shouting, ‘FLAP HARDER!’”

That’s the kind of image that lines up with Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.

A love that invites you to spread your full wingspan and SOAR requires a lot of space. Those boundless skies have a lot of big, scary, stunningly beautiful room for transformation.

Jesus said “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”

 “Just as I have led you with love that transforms you, you should love one another in a way that breaks down barriers”

Flap harder. Tell your friends.        

 

Good Friday, Easter, & Living in the Tension

Sermons, , , , , , , , ,

The following is a sermon I gave at the Easter Vigil, a joint service for St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge, St John on the Mountain Episcopal Church in Bernardsville, & St Bernards Episcopal Church in Bernards, NJ. It was held in the barn at The Ross Farm in Basking Ridge. This sermon was almost exactly one liturgical year in the making.

Allelulia! He Is Risen! And we are here to celebrate.

Easter is my favorite day of year. Resurrection. Life. Light. Flowers blooming. Miracles. Hope that wasn’t in vain. The knowledge that no matter how badly you’ve screwed up or deeply you’ve grieved, Jesus is RISEN, and promises us that in our baptism we’ll be risen too.  We are a resurrection people. After all of the grief of Good Friday. The weeping. The tears of mourning have been shed and the font is about to be filled with the same waters from which God called forth swarms of living creatures. We are a resurrection people.

And as Episcopalians, we are also a liturgical people. We divide the many lessons our Bible teaches us into a calendar we repeat year after year. To get to Easter – the beautiful 50 days of love and light and hope come to fruition in the miracle of the resurrection – to get here – takes 40 days of Lent, culminating in this journey through Holy Week that our communities have shared together.

Still in seminary, my liturgical formation – a vast amount of which I attribute to my liturgics professor blessed Fr. Pat Malloy, who has become the voice of my inner, liturgical, Jiminy Cricket – My liturgical formation has made me more deeply aware of the richness of our liturgical calendar than I had been before I started this journey. One particularly poignant learning moment occurred just one liturgical year ago.

Last Easter, I experienced the miracle of the resurrection with the church I was interning at in Brooklyn, and since I was not able to make it home across the Hudson to my family afterwards, that evening, I broke bread at Easter supper with friends who had become family near my home at my seminary in Manhattan. Love. Life, Joy, Resurrection. Easter blooming new life.

But my joy at this moment in our liturgical year was harder to carry forward into those 50 days than it had been in the past. Easter Monday should have been a mixture of riding the wave of the momentum of Easter joy and a respite from a whirlwind of liturgical adventures. When I woke up Easter morning, slow to rise on my much-earned day off, I picked up my phone before I could even pick up my head and the first thing I saw was a message about my friend Ty, a young woman I shared a house with during my year in South Africa, a country where two oceans meet, our shared home nurtured a friendship that deeply intertwined a handful of those of us living there into a family.  At 23, on Easter Monday, Ty had died. She had joined in the resurrection I had just experienced the day before, but I was not in Easter with Ty, I suddenly found myself back in the midst of the grief of Good Friday. Couldn’t I carry the miracle of the resurrection out into the world for one whole day? We just retold the story of the Lord dividing the Red Sea to guide the Israelites to safety, but suddenly my grief made me feel as if I was drowning with the Egyptians who dared pursue them. Walls of water tumbling down around me, too.

Today’s gospel passage brings us to dawn on the first day of the week after the nightmare of Good Friday. The women who watched the crucifixion of their lord and Savior have learned enough about breathing again to go to the tomb of the savior with the spices they had prepared for the ritual that follows death to prepare to say goodbye to the body of their savior. Their companion of the journey who had taught them so much. Someone who they loved. On this lonely morning after the climax of their grief they found themselves at the tomb, only the stone was rolled away and now instead of facing the cold body they’d been preparing themselves to see all that was there was an empty tomb. Suddenly darker than they’d imagine. And The weight of the unknown had multiplied.  They were in the space between Good Friday and the miracle of the resurrection we celebrate this night.

Lent. Good Friday. Easter Sunday.  On our liturgical calendar we quantify and measure when these days will come each year. We can control them in our measure of time, in a way we can’t in our day-to-day lives: the soul-filling joys and ecstasies of grief we cannot predict or that fall outside of our liturgical schedule. The Easter of the birth of a new life – or miracle that one was able to preserved against all odds – and the Good Fridays that catch us off guard – the valleys of nothing but dry bones that we somehow stumble through, struggling to find our way. Fighting to see through bleary tear-filled eyes.

11219706_10153280389241707_4346427145384145597_n

Lent is NOT a season where we endure giving up chocolate chip cookies for 40 days out of our calendar year. Lent is the wilderness we get lost in when we least expect it.  The storm that unexpectedly rolls our way in the midst of relatively smooth sailing. The darkness that encroaches on what we thought was a well lite path. The telephone call at an unexpected hour to let us know that the rules we’ve been playing by this whole time no longer apply and that leaves us wondering if we’ll ever be back in the game again. During moments like these, the Good Fridays of our own lives can take much longer than one calendar day – much like we often speculate the creation narrative to in the face of modern science.

And even when our eyes clear of the tears that cloud our vision and our legs learn to stand, there’s still a space between standing and being able to move forward into Easter morning.

The women in today’s Gospel reading are in that space between.  Waiting in that tomb, fighting the fear and the grief they’ve been fighting since the crucifixion that they’ve had to fight every step –  every breath – of the way to  even  this far. Wanting so deeply to move forward in their grief but not knowing what to do yet. No light to guide their way.

The space between.

In the beginning, the earth was dark and formless too, but then a wind from God swept over the face of the water and from the dark, empty space and deep, surging seas, God said, “Let there be light” and so began the seven days of creation that filled the space with life that God called good.

While the lamentations of the prophets and the power of the passion we heard last night and last Sunday retell the story of my grief in the Biblical stories of our salvation, there is one more non-canonical text that has been a supplementary map to the many unscheduled Lents that I’ve encountered in the past seven-and-a-half years: it’s the Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat Pray Love. In the midst of many beautiful moments about navigating Lent in our lives outside of worship, there’s one moment that I carry around more than most of the others that resonates with today’s gospel passage. At this particular moment, Gilbert is grieving her divorce and her great lost love at an ashram in India. She is longing for God but her worship is impaired by the immensity of the grief that weighs upon her over the end of her marriage. At this particular moment she is conversing with a dear friend who she refers to as “Richard from Texas” and as Gilbert conveys her struggle to move forward after all of this time, Richard says to her:

“[You say you miss him?] So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him and then drop it. You’re just afraid to let go of the last bits of him because then you’ll really be alone, and you’re scared to death of what will happen if you’re really alone. But here’s what you gotta understand, if you clear out all this space in your mind that you’re using right now … you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot – a doorway. And what the universe will do with that doorway: It will rush in – God will rush in – and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop [blocking] that door.”

When the women arrived at the tomb on Easter morning, the stone was gone, rolled away, no longer blocking the entrance to the tomb, and when they walked in, the tomb was empty, and for all the grief and fear and confusion they could fill it with in the space between when they saw where the body was no longer laid and when the angels spoke, the angels did appear, dazzling, next to them to tell them “He is not here! He is RISEN!”

This is the miracle we celebrate now at Easter., Easter is the season in our liturgical year that we celebrate the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and eternal life and a great, beautiful moment of joy but it’s joy is greater than its annual place in our liturgical calendar. For me, the joy in this day is that it is bigger than this day. This moment represents the timeless the triumph of eternal life of Christ’s resurrection, the promises made for us in our baptism. And there’s more. Easter is a reaffirmation of surviving all the Lents and Good Fridays that happen in our lives outside the liturgical calendar –that are measured in late night phone calls and moments when the water rose too fast and too quickly. Easter isn’t just about the glory of the past 40 days of adorning our altar in purple and not saying Allelulia  – Easter is the resurrection we’ve shared with Christ every time we overcame the heaviness of our broken hearts and kept moving forward. Easter is being able to get up Sunday morning after very nearly wishing we’d died too on those Good Fridays that dragged on and on beyond the safe confines of the few hours allocated on our liturgical calendar. The joy of Easter is what happens what the waters of grief recede and the spirit of God rushes across the receding waters to fill the weeping shores with the love and light and the miracles of the resurrection. The rebirth we experience in the waters of baptism – enduring heartbreak we thought might drown us to be cleansed and called forth from the waters into new life as we read about in Genesis.  This is why we have water to be thankful for in Easter.

Allelulia. He is risen. And we are here to celebrate.

12439194_10153673866850668_8332603914593784087_n***The Easter Vigil at Ross Farm***