He is Risen! We are Risen!

(An excerpt from a sermon Bill Lewellis preached on Easter Sunday, April 15, 2001, Grace Church Allentown]

Christ is risen, Alleluia! I’m tempted to tell you how that happened.   But that would simply be my imagination working overtime.

We don’t know how the resurrection happened. Whatever we can imagine is surely not what happened. For we are in a dimension of mystery, of hidden presence, a dimension far beyond our wildest imaginations.

We aren’t supposed to explain the resurrection. God’s resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, our Lord, explains us. The message of Easter is always in the present tense: He is risen! We are risen!

The gospels ground our faith not on the argument of the empty tomb, but on the presence of the risen Lord in human experience. It is not the persuasive power of the empty tomb that leads to faith. Personal encounters with the risen Lord lead us to faith and hope and love and action.

A reminder of those personal encounters with the risen Lord is front and center before us today in this sanctuary – and, hopefully, in our hearts. It is the paschal candle, the light of Christ. We will see this lighted candle before us at every service over the next Great Fifty Days of Easter. It will lead our way at baptisms, at eucharists and at funerals. It is a symbol of the risen and living Christ leading/modeling us, in death and resurrection, to our transformation as a new creation in Christ.

NEW BEGINNINGS
(I heard this story first from Father Charles ????. I believe he served in San Francisco before retiring at Nativity Cathedral. I suspect someone here will remember his last name.)

A long-time legend from the artist's colony of Rome says that more than 500 years ago monks from Milan discovered a young artist painting the ceiling of a chapel in Florence. Deeply moved by his work, they asked him to paint a fresco on their dining room wall.

When he completed his work in Florence he went to Milan. He talked with the monks. He felt the wall. He asked about everything in the bible even remotely connected with meals. He listened. He thought. He imagined. Then he sketched out a rough drawing.

Because he always worked with live models, he began looking for 13 models from whose faces he would paint Jesus and his apostles at table. Easily enough he found 11 faces that matched his conception of Peter and Andrew, Matthew and Bartholomew… Thomas, James, John…

Imagine Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, however, with two blank faces. He had not found models for Jesus and for Judas.

He searched for more than a year. One day he watched a procession entering the Milan cathedral. Leading the procession was a young man with a determined yet peaceful face. Da Vinci saw the young man's face through the light of the candle he carried in front of him. Da Vinci found the face of Jesus.

Then there was only Judas who had no face. Leonardo DaVinci searched for Judas. Twelve years later, Da Vinci was still looking for Judas.

In the meantime he had begun to do some work in Rome. One day, while walking through Rome's Trastevere section, Da Vinci heard loud shouting and cursing. A muscular man with a mean look that takes years to develop pounded his fists into the face of another. He beat him, robbed him, and probably killed him.

Weeks later, Da Vinci saw the hoodlum again. He asked him to go with him to Milan — to model. This was the face he had been looking for for years. Da Vinci told him he would provide a place for him to sleep, provide all he could eat, and some gold besides — and all he would have to do would be to sit still for a few hours a day. The man agreed.

They went to Milan, to the monastery where a drape hung over the unfinished masterpiece. The mean, muscular mugger sat still for Da Vinci for weeks — but did not see the fresco.

When his work was finally completed, Da Vinci unveiled it and pointed to each face. Peter, Matthew, Thomas, James John… Jesus. Finally he pointed to the model's face in the fresco — Judas.

The hoodlum stared at the fresco. He looked at Judas. He looked at Jesus. Again at Judas. Again at Jesus. He backed away. He began to cry. Finally, gaining some composure he said to Da Vinci: “You don’t remember me, do you?” “No," Leonardo said, “I don’t."

“Years ago," the hoodlum said, “years ago, as a young man, I was your model for Jesus.” He whispered, “I want to be Jesus again.”

'I Want It All'

by Archdeacon Howard Stringfellow
8 May 2011

It must have been Holy Tuesday.  Just when I thought I had seen most everything, walking to the Post Office on West Fourth Street in Bethlehem, I saw one of those personalized license plates.  Not the official ones that are made to order and are legal plates found on the rear bumper.  This was an unofficial one found on the front bumper.  Palm trees, after a manner of speaking, were to the right and to the left, framing an orange sunset across a bay.  And in the middle, in script, was this confident advertisement: “I want it all.”

What does it mean to have it “all”?  Does it mean that as long as someone else has a penny in a bank account or in a mattress somewhere that you don’t quite have it all?  Maybe you have a tremendously expensive house, as someone once described his house to me, on that very beach, framed by those same palm trees.  Then, do you have it all?  Or you may have a penthouse in Manhattan and a studio in Nob Hill.  Maybe you have a BMW and a Porsche.  Season tickets to the Yankees and the Giants.  Then, do you have it all?  Or maybe an apartment in West Allentown or a house in historic district with all your bills paid.  Or, perhaps, the roof over your head leaks during hard rains, and you have to pick and choose among your necessary medications.  Then, do you have it all?  The answer is: “Quite possibly.”

This is the Season about having it all, about having everything of any importance whatsoever.  For the time is now when we can be assured that the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ conquers the enemy of us all and opens to us the gate of everlasting life.

But Easter is about having it all in another way, too.  Have you ever seen a child at around Noon on Christmas Day, when all the family and friends have gathered, and the thought is moving across her or his consciousness that all the presents have been given, and the day holds no more mountains to climb, no more wrapping paper to wrestle?  We are in a similar circumstance—all of God’s truly significant gifts have been given to us: the enemy of us all has been conquered.  God has given us the most precious gift in his bounty to give whether we have too much or too little, whether we dine on hamburger or crab, whether our stocks are rising or falling, or whether we are “in” or “out” at the club or the office.

From time to time I am asked why the Bible stopped being written—if the Bible is God’s revelation to us, and it is, did that revelation stop at the end of the first century when additional writings stopped being added to the body of writings thought to be the Word of God?  The answer I usually give is an Easter answer.  The gift of eternal life given in the resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost are the very big gifts God has to bestow.  It isn’t that God doesn’t have the money or the goods to be more generous; it is that God has given us what we need.  And God has given it in full measure.

I suppose a kind of ambition is in our nature: to want more, to think we deserve more, and to go out and try to get it.  And so much of our culture and our national ideals propel us to do just that.  But wrangling more and more out of God may just not be in the cards we’ve been dealt.  And we may forget what a tremendous barrier the just and innocent man, indeed, the Son of God, broke when he was killed and when God raised him from the dead.  Do any of us need to go faster than the speed of light?  Can we really make heaven a better place?  Will our lives be significantly improved if our ISP provides the 100 Mbps that it promises?  How much do we have to be given before it dawns on us that we really do have it all?

Christ's Own For Ever, by Archdeacon Stringfellow

From the Lectionaries
Christ’s Own For Ever
The Easter Vigil
Romans 6:3-11
By Archdeacon Howard Stringfellow
3 April 2010

At each Easter Vigil, we hear St. Paul’s famous Epistle exploring our union with Christ in his death and in his resurrection through our Baptism: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4).

Over the years, I have so accepted St. Paul’s identification of each of us with Christ’s death and resurrection that I have often thought that at our births and certainly at our Baptisms something of Christ’s dead body lies buried in each of us. And when it is raised in us, when we experience something like the Easter moment, we are raised with it to newness and abundance of life. It is the moment, in the words of the Celebrant’s opening address to the people at the Easter Vigil, that “we share in” the Lord’s “victory over death” (Prayer Book, page 285).

Entering into the reality of Easter

By Bishop Paul Marshall

In a few days it will be Easter. As we get ready for the feast, it is always worth asking how we enter into its reality. This is not just a contemporary question, but also one that faced the very first believers.

In John’s gospel Mary Magdalene sees that the stone has been rolled away from Jesus’ tomb. Despite all of Jesus’ teaching, she assumes what any of us would, that there’s been a grave robbery. How much trouble have we had when we have made assumptions and didn’t check things out?

In any event, Mary runs to the leadership and tells them not that the stone is gone, but that the grave has been robbed. Peter and the “beloved disciple” (who is John or the reader or both in John’s plan) go off to the tomb, and it is interesting to note what they see and don’t see. Peter climbs down into the tomb and sees the burial wrappings emptied. The beloved climbs down into the tomb, sees about that “and believes,” but we don’t know exactly what he believes, as John is careful to note that he doesn’t know the scriptures yet.