Easter 2014

Easter 2014


Christo Anesti. Christo Anesti. He is risen, he is risen.

This is Easter.

The experiences that we are loved, have love, and can love – this is Easter.

We experience (from time to time) redemption… this is Easter.

You and I have resurrection experiences and stories of rebirth and new life. We experience the feelings of discovery and the jubilation of understanding.

We have glimpses of what it feels like to be free.

We dream of a day of peace when swords are beaten into ploughs. That is Easter.

We know what grace is and what it means to be forgiven even though we don’t believe we deserve it.

This is Easter.



In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College David Foster Wallace, one of the great literary geniuses of our time, began with what he called the “deployment of a didactic parablish like story” which I will now insert here.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What … is water?”

The immediate point of the fish story is (he said) that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about…[i]

This is Easter.



Our resurrection story, our Good News, our Gospel, Easter begins with Mary. It begins with a woman discovering that Jesus’s body is not in the tomb where he was laid and then she reports it. She is the first evangelist, the first messenger of good news, the first one ever oh ever to know, and she tells the disciples this is Easter.

There then is the famous disciple race – who will know next? The beloved disciple loves Jesus the mostest and he arrives at the tomb first before Peter. When he arrives he sees the burial clothes and the lack of the body and he experiences resurrection and he believes that Jesus lives and that he is Lord. He sees, he experiences and he believes. He is the second to know. And he is the next to share with others his Easter experience.

Mary Magdalene then returns to the tomb. There she experiences the risen Christ – the living Jesus - when he appears before her in the garden. She has been searching for him; she sees him but does not immediately know him. In fact she does not know him until he calls her name. “Mary.”

This is the very real experience of Jesus’ own teaching from chapter 10 verse 3: "The sheep hear his voice as he calls by name those that belong to him." "I know my sheep and my sheep know me." He says. Her response is to announce to the disciples that she has "seen the Lord."[ii]

These are different experiences of the risen Christ from two loving followers.

Some years later Paul too will have visions of the risen Christ and believe that Jesus is alive and that he is Lord. Paul becomes a loving follower himself. The bible tells us this is only a few of the many stories of resurrection.

The experience over the generations of the risen Christ is Easter.

Each story gives a sense that the risen Lord is known in many ways and experienced in many ways and is known to many people. While true belief will come with the Holy Spirit, we are given here in John's resurrection story the beginning of the new creation where the Gospel is available to all people.

Victory is won on the cross. The chasm that separated the earth and heaven is now breached. A new order and a new creation is even now rooting itself in the cosmos and in our lives.

Here is the beginning of faith which comes from experiencing the risen Lord – here in these stories we have the beginning of our Easter.

John's Gospel tells us clearly that resurrection is not simply a bodily - this world - experience but it is a resurrection into unity with God. We are reconciled with God and new life is ours – freedom, redemption, resurrection, love, grace, and forgiveness is all ours. It springs forth this most obvious, most ubiquitous, most important of realities.

This is Easter.



David Foster Wallace believed that we are deluded by the lens by which we experience the world – this is part of our problem and it hides the most obvious realities. He wrote, "A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded… [because] everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence... Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real”[iii] that it is difficult to hear the other voices. Wallace says, "As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head.”[iv] “In fact some of you are carrying on that conversation right now.”[v]

Easter, the resurrection is a vision altering, relationship altering, and monologue interrupting event for those who experience it.

The living God in Christ Jesus (who bursts forth from the tomb, is not recognized till he calls your name, appears by your side at the road’s edge, sits with his feet below your table and breaks bread with you and shares wine, and he comes to you in the locked room of your darkest night) – this appearing and showing up shorts out the “natural, hard-wired, default-settings [of our] self-centered lens.”[vi]

The resurrection invites us to move beyond abstract arguments. It invites us to wake up in a very real world where Easter happens… look around ourselves and see what is outside of ourselves. The resurrection invites us to choose what we pay attention to and how we interpret our experience and how to interpret meaning from our experience.

Because of the resurrection we may see a sliver of what is offered - an invitation to reject wholesale the notion that the best it will ever be is a comfortable, prosperous, respectable, unconscious, adult life where we are slaves to our egos and end up in a day-in-and-day-out routine of death.[vii]

Because of a Jesus who will appear at any point in our life we are invited to look for him in the world around us and in the people around us. Because of a Jesus who appears alive we are to see the world for the living that is in it. Because Jesus comes to us in a companion along the road side or in the locked upper room we are to look for him in places we least expect to find him.

Because of a God who is obedient to his love for humanity and in so doing breaks death’s strangle hold on us we are able to experience love, grace, freedom, forgiveness, and mercy when we open our psychic tombs to the risen Lord.

We experience these things not from a self-centered way but because we open ourselves up to having our name called out by the other. We risk giving all that we have and all that we are. We are generous. We love. We love regardless of the cost. We love even to death and we love through death and to the other side.

You see Easter is awareness of life lived freed from death. What David Foster Wallace says of awareness in general is what we say of Easter - “It is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water.”[viii]

This is water… this is love… this is life… this is Easter.

This is Easter.

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[i] David Foster Wallace, Water is Communion, Kenyon Commencement Address, 2005

[ii] Raymond Brown,John, vol 2, 1008ff

[iii] Foster.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid. This is in the recorded version but not the written version.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] A paraphrase of Foster’s argument.

[viii] Ibid.

Ash Wednesday Meditation

Mika Waltari’s book entitled The Dark Angel describes the night of May 28, 1453.  This was the night before the fall of the city of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks.  It was the last Christian service that was held in the giant church of Hagia Sophia.  Everyone who was present for the service was sold into slavery or killed the following day.  It was a miraculous moment, for in that moment Roman Catholics and their theological enemies the Greek Orthodox were present. These were the two groups who had previously had violent even deadly confrontations because of the words of the Nicene Creed.  But on this night they laid down their differences and received Eucharist together for the first time in a long time, and for the last time.[i]

Waltari wrote:

We rode together to the church as day was fading behind the Turkish camp and shedding a last gleam of blood on the green domes of the churches.  … In my heart I knew that for the last time a doomed Byzantium was gathering to dedicate itself to death.

…In the presence of death, all quarreling, suspicion and hatred disappeared.  Each and everyone bowed his head before the inscrutable mystery, according to his own conscience.

In the presence of us all the Emperor confessed his sins in the phrases that centuries have hallowed.  The Latins [meaning the Romans] joined with him in murmuring chorus.  … Tonight no one was disturbed by these divergences.  All proceeded as by tacit agreement, and the Greeks in their relief wept more loudly than before, because their faith was no longer condemned.

There were so many in church that the bread would not go around.  But each one willingly shared with his nearest neighbors the morsel he had received, so that all who came might have at least a crumb of the sacred Body of Christ.  Whether the bread were leavened or unleavened [as they had argued before] made no difference now.

During the service, which lasted several hours, we were moved by a strong and radiant ecstasy, more wonderful than any I have known in any church.”

The Rev. Dr. Paul Zahl, who introduced me to this passage said of it:

“In the presence of death”:  that is the key phrase.  In the presence of death, the animating purpose of church that night became, and still becomes, clear: mystery, tolerance, compassion, even ecstasy and out-of-body feeling.  No vertical status, no hollow “cant”, no empty ritual (but real ritual, which means something to people), no judgments and no opinions.  Rather, practical aid in time of need, mutual support, forgiveness, and encouragement.[ii]

In the presence of death only a few things matter: the love of God and the love of family, friends, and neighbor.

In the presence of death every nonessential prerequisite washes away and only the essentials are left.

In this moment of powerful recognition of the finite nature of life we are able to see clearly our unity.

We are able to see ourselves more clearly…perhaps as God sees us – transparently presented naked before him with all of our messy feelings of inadequacy and failings laid out before us.

The brutality of honest reflection reminds us of our complete and utter dependence upon God alone.

The shield of projected blame upon our neighbor falls to the ground as we are mindful that nothing, that nothing in the presence of death, can avert its eye from our predictable human condition.

Jungian analyst James Hollis reflecting on Thomas Nashe’s A Litany in Time of Plague recalls:

Brightness falls from the air.

Queens have died, young and fair.

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

…and then writes, “It is not so much that death shocks or surprises us…but that there are, finally, no exceptions, no exemptions. As Job found to his dismay, we have no signed contract with the Party of the First Part, and all things fall.  Brightness itself falls.  Even queens, young and comely, are no exception.”[iii]

You are dust and to dust you shall return.

In this moment of clarity, in the presence of death, we are united seeking comfort from one another, forgiveness from one another, encouragement from one another; and from God.

We see plainly that all of this – churchy business - is really only meant for one profound thing…to link us to God and to one another in an open and honest relationship.

And what happens?

What happens in that moment…in the presence of death? In the presence of dust and ashes and dry bones?

What happens is that God reaches out to us, his frail and little people, huddled in mass, mumbling trifles of repentance, some going through the motions out of obligation, others fearful of letting anyone know the truth within us…and God reaches out towards us and whispers amongst the prayers spoken from parched and trembling lips …”I love you.”

I love you.

I forgive you.

Forgive yourself.

Forgive one another.

I love you.

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[i] Mika Waltari, The Dark Angel, Translated by Naomi Walford (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953), 322ff.

[ii] Paul Zahl, PZ’s Panopticon,  (Charlottesville, VA: Mockingbird Ministries, Inc., 2013)65ff.

[iii] James Hollis, The Archetypal Imagination, (College Station, Tx: Texas A&M University Press, 2000) 3ff.