Easter Sunday

By The Rev. Bernard W. Poppe, Rector

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia! The ancient greeting rings out with a truth first described as an idle tale! How about that? The women come back from the tomb of their beloved Jesus telling the disciples about the empty tomb and the angels and the message of Jesus being raised for the dead and the disciples dismissed it as an idle tale. As though the women thought the disciples were being a bit too gloomy and thought they’d perk them up a bit with a resurrection story. Peter goes to verify and him they believe. Somehow the women who stood by Jesus the whole time were making things up, but Peter who denied him was credible. Now that’s an idle tale.

The details of the resurrection the women spoke of are vague and lost in the mist of time and layered story. But something happened. Something so profound as to propel the disciples, not to return to their former lives, but to turn to a lives of missionaries to proclaim the resurrected Jesus. Lives that often led to deprivation, ridicule, persecution and martyrdom. People don’t do that for an “idle tale.” They do that because of some truth that has deeply transformed them. They do that because their lives have so profoundly changed that there was no going back.

In the first lesson we read this morning from Isaiah, we hear the author in the voice of God saying, “..I am about to create a new heaven and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating...” People of faith have always believed in God’s ability to create something new from something old. Order out of chaos. And even life out of death. Over and over again, the stories differ in the details and times, but the essential similarity is the triumph of life over death. The victory of truth and justice over that which is evil and self seeking. There has always been a belief in resurrection.

The story of Jesus’ resurrection is so compelling because it is a victory over death itself. Prior to that, most resurrections had to do with health or life’s circumstances, not life itself. What made Jesus so miraculous is that God’s action created something new. A new heaven and a new earth.

I believe in resurrection. I believe in Jesus’ resurrection and I believe in my resurrection and I believe in your resurrection. I believe in the resurrection of Haiti and Iraq. I believe in the resurrection of people and places where life is in danger or lost. Because I believe that resurrection is life itself and that life doesn’t end, it transforms.

The disciples become interesting case studies for me. They had pretty decent lives before Jesus showed up. Steady jobs, families, they pretty much knew their way around and probably felt relatively secure and comfortable in their lives. Jesus shows up and turns everything upside down. They hit the road, have a little hint of glamour and fame, but that ends badly with an arrest and Jesus’ execution.

But in the midst of all this, they got a taste of a deeper life they didn’t see or know about before and they couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist. They saw and felt the love of God in a powerful way they could no longer live without. They chose a more difficult life, physically, in most of their cases, but we have to assume that the serenity they had in their spirits was worth the price. What an amazing depth of knowing God that would lead them to live the lives they led. For as vague as the details of the Gospels can be about the resurrection, the lives of the disciples who continued to follow Jesus after his resurrection are testimonies not only to Jesus’ resurrection, but their own.

I have experienced resurrection myself through new life that has risen from the ashes of divorce, addiction and the deaths of loved ones. I have seen the resurrection of so many others whose faith in God and the promise of resurrection has changed their lives, especially when they thought it was over. There is a living death that occurs in so many ways, that each of us can testify to. And I’ll bet that without much prompting, many of those stories of living deaths can also be understood to contain the seed of resurrection. And these are not idle tales. They are real.

I’ve seen people in the throes of addiction, what I often call the living dead, who have found new life through recovery. I’ve seen sections of towns and cities come back through the efforts of hard working activists, organizers and regular people on the street. I’ve seen people who faced the deaths of spouses or partners with faith that their lives would continue and did.

I’d like to tell you a particular story of resurrection that I saw last year. While I was on sabbatical last year, the first leg of the trip was to the Holy Cross Monastery in Grahamstown, South Africa. During the month I was there I got to know the small community of brothers pretty well. One of the brothers, Josias, told some of his personal story in a Lenten sermon he preached while I was there. He took for his text Psalm 22 that begins, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me..” It’s a very important psalm since Jesus quotes it from the cross. It’s verses describe the desolation of the speaker and how beaten down he is. The verse Josias focused on was the 6th verse that says, “but as for me I am a worm and no man...”

He stopped there and told a little of his story as a black man born in Johannesburg during the last days of Apartheid. The struggles and tensions in those final days of that evil system, the danger and the temptation to be beaten down by it. His lips trembled with emotion as he told of the assaults on his humanity and how often he was treated like a worm and no man.

He told of his early conviction in his faith and how the love of God in Jesus pulled him out of despair and gave him new life. This shy, soft spoken, sweet young man riveted the congregation when he looked up from his sermon text and declared in full voice, “I am a man, and no worm.”

Resurrection is claiming life from that which appears dead. Josias spoke for all of us in the life circumstances that make us feel “less than”. In God’s love we are people and not worms. We are worthy enough for God to have been incarnated in the life of Jesus, to have given us miracles and healing. To have taught us and shown us the love of God. To have died for us and risen, as proof that life does not end. It changes and deepens, but it does not end.

In truth some people still call stories of resurrection “idle tales”. They are not. Once you’ve seen them or lived them, you can’t deny them. They are wonderful stories of hope and love, and they are worth telling, despite what anyone else thinks.

From the psalm today, verse 24 speaks for us - On this day the Lord has acted, we will rejoice and be glad in it!” Amen.

©2010 St. George's Episcopal Church, Maplewood, NJ

Good Friday

By The Rev. Bernard W. Poppe, Rector

A man hangs on a cross. The pain is unimaginable - even by those who inflicted it. Perhaps it’s because they couldn’t imagine it, that they were able to accomplish it. I wonder if anyone who has endured agony can willingly inflict it on someone else without reliving it, without experiencing it again.

When Jesus hung on the cross he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” They didn’t. On the different levels that people exist, they didn’t know. Physically, none of the Centurions had experienced the pain of crucifixion and drove the nails in without knowing what they were doing. The people gathered around had no idea what it was like to be ridiculed unjustly and tortured. They didn’t know what they were doing. The disciples hadn’t been betrayed and set up for a mock trial, and they didn’t know what they had done.

Perhaps it’s because none of them knew that they were able to do the horrible things they did. And still Jesus forgave them, because they didn’t know. Or rather, they didn’t fully know.

Two thieves hung on either side of him. One ridiculed him in the same way the crowds did. The other asked to be remembered, finding in his pain a relationship with Jesus that he didn’t have before. It’s a curious scene between three men, presumably strangers, now bound by history and the common experience of hanging on a cross.

That grim tableau is a microcosm of our world as well. People causing pain to others in crimes and battle without really knowing the fullness of their actions. I wonder if Presidents who have experienced war are more reluctant to declare it than those who have not. I wonder if those who have experienced crime committed against them, or the pain of attack could ever easily commit such things themselves. But in our world, people do things all the time that create pain and havoc while not really knowing what they do from an experiential level.

And in relationship to Jesus, there are people who hang in pain that reflect the reactions of the two thieves. In the moments of their most excruciating pain, some turn toward God while others turn away.

The focal point for all of this is Jesus. The one who hangs in the middle with arms outstretched to gather into one embrace those who ridicule and those who come for comfort. Earlier in his interview with Pontius Pilate, Jesus said that he came into the world to testify to the truth. Pilate asks “What is truth?” For Pilate, truth was no doubt malleable, subject to the spin given it. What people believe to be true is not always truth. People in positions to create the impression of truth understand this and use it to their advantage.

How threatening it is to have someone who embodies truth. That same person will become a light that shows where lies have been told. The truth of Jesus is the unconditional love of God. It’s not earned, or stolen, sold or won. It’s freely given. Because he told this truth, because he lived this truth, because he was this truth, he was arrested and killed. It was too much to bear. I think there is a secret fear common among people - that we are not lovable. Many people have a hard time accepting compliments because they don’t believe the one giving the compliments. Others have a hard time accepting love, because they do not believe themselves worthy of love, or they are hiding some secret truth that if the one offering love knew, would withdraw that love. The simple truth of being loved gets very complicated. As Jesus embodied a truth almost unbearable to accept, he was taken and hurt.

But he forgave them, because they didn’t know what they were doing. He forgave them, because they didn’t know what HE was doing. But in the end it was not in their power to kill him, but it was in his power to help them live.

When I was a teenager my uncle was working on a house from a ladder and fell. He was hospitalized and hurt his back very badly. I drove my grandmother, who at the time was in her late eighties, to the hospital to see her son, who was in his early sixties. I remember being so struck by her quiet tears as she held his hand, saying in a voice meant only for herself, or perhaps it was a prayer - that she could be the one in that bed who was hurt so that her son could be alright.

A mother’s love is a powerful thing. And the desire to relieve the suffering of her child even at her own physical expense is extraordinary. No matter how old the mother, or how old the child the love remains the same.

She was not able to take the place of her son, but that story has become a way for me to understand the depth of love that would have God take the pain of the world to himself as a way to relieve the suffering of humanity. I think the worst form of suffering isn’t even the physical as bad as that is. I think the worst suffering is to be without hope or love.

By knowing, by truly knowing what human suffering is, God enters our world and lives in a way that we cannot know. And in God’s willingness to bear that pain, to take the insults, ridicule and torture God not only embodies the truth of God’s love beyond our knowing, but also the hope that it’s still freely given in the forgiveness of that which we do not know. It simply is. God’s love simply is.

What we do here in story and song is to celebrate that love that would hang on a cross and still not be defeated. It is a wonderful truth. Amen.

©2010 St. George's Episcopal Church, Maplewood, NJ

Maundy Thursday

By The Rev. Bernard W. Poppe, Rector

Holy Week captures the themes and drama of the love of God in a way that is beautiful, tragically poignant and mystically triumphant. The Tenebrae service last night previewed the themes of the shadows of desolation creeping over the light. With readings of lamentations and psalms that voice the cries of those who are suffering and lost, the spirit touches the depth of pain in any person. Regardless of the circumstances that may have caused the pain in our lives, we are connected to the writers of lamentations and psalms, not in their physical reality, but in their spiritual reality. When the psalmist writes, “Save me O God for the waters have risen up to my neck. I am sinking in deep mire, and there is no firm ground for my feet....” we don’t know what that writer was experiencing that caused him to write this, but we deeply and viscerally understand the emotion behind it.

Quite literally water is rising in this state causing great suffering to those displaced from their homes. I watch the news of my home state Rhode Island also suffering from floods. The cries of “Save me O God..” call out from those facing a literal flood.

The cries from Haiti, the Middle East and so many other places torn by natural disaster and war also need saving from the waters of suffering as they rise. The shadows of Tenebrae give voice to this as they try to overcome the light. But at the end of the service, it is the light of Christ triumphant that will not be put out. The presence of God giving strength and hope to those in need, to those who rescue and those who rebuild.

The service of Tenebrae is abstract in it’s witness. Maundy Thursday, by comparison is much clearer. The Latin word, Mandatum, from which we get the word “Maundy” means command. Jesus gave his disciples the command to love one another as he had loved them. It sounds simple enough, but is so difficult. How can we ever plumb the depths of Jesus’ love for us in order to show that love to each other? As if in response to this unspoken question, Jesus shows them a simple way. He washes their feet. And he expects them to wash each others feet.

The action is bother literal and mystical. Jesus does in fact wash their feet, in much the same way we read the story of Mary washing his feet with her tears in an earlier story this past Lent. It is a sign of humility and love. But it is also a sign of trust and humility on the part of those whose feet are being washed. Jesus’ humility allows them to be vulnerable.

There is an intimacy in washing feet. Many people keep their feet hidden, especially if they are scarred or disfigured, or discolored. Often our feet bear the marks of physical difficulties, a metaphor for the pain traveled along this life’s road. To show another person our feet is to risk them seeing something that is painful for us to let others see.

Again, while that is literally true about our feet, it is also spiritually true. We try to hide and mask the pains and emotional scars that have accumulated in our lives. We do not want others to see them and feel vulnerable if they do.

When Jesus took the disciples feet in his hands to wash, he cleansed the dirt from their feet in a physical way, but also invited them to share their spiritual pain as well. To make themselves vulnerable to his love and healing touch. Love one another as I have loved you, he commands them. Interesting that he does not ask, but commands.

Tomorrow during Good Friday we’ll see just how vulnerable he made himself. The command is to be completely vulnerable and completely trustworthy of another’s vulnerability. It’s both simple and threatening, and difficult. And yet, here we are.

In our ceremony there are four chairs set up. I’ll invite anyone to come forward to sit in any of them and I’ll begin washing the feet as the shoes and socks are removed. I also will invite anyone who wishes to do the washing as well. Some may choose to do both - have your foot washed and then wash another person’s.

Reading bible stories is a rich experience. Beneath the story itself is a layer of human and spiritual truth. That’s what we delve to find. Holy Week is the richest mine of these stories since the themes go the deepest beyond the stories which are powerful in themselves, but even richer in the spirit which moves through them. It is that spirit of God which finds us and invites us in. It is that spirit of Jesus which commands us to learn from Him and love one another as he has loved us.

We’ll have a few moments of silence to meditate on this love and then as I move to the stations I’ll invite those who wish to participate in this part of the ceremony to do so. Amen.

©2010 St. George’s Episcopal Church, Maplewood, NJ