Acts 9:36-43
Ps 23
Rev 7:9-17
John 10:22-30
Nothing can take us out of the Father’s hand. How do we know that these comforting words apply to us? Sometimes it seems as if we think of Jesus back then, out there in some recess of history, not in the present time. If Jesus were here, x would not have happened. The truth is Jesus is here. No more remote from us than from the first century individuals who encountered him then in their time and place and failed to recognize his message or revelation. We too have opportunity to experience the real presence of God in Christ in our time, if we will allow the voice of Jesus to speak, if we will quiet ourselves long enough to hear the voice of our shepherd.
This past week we waited as an infant had heart surgery, recovered well, and can expect to live a long life. The healings made possible by modern medicine are nothing short of miraculous. It is tempting to think that Jesus healed everyone and if he were here now, there would be no need of hospitals or surgeons or medical research. Not every person who lived in Galilee or Israel at the time of Jesus was healed and it is as simple as who believed and who did not.
On the evening of the same day as our child’s surgery, I did a memorial service at the chapel at Hood for our staff and students, remembering the loss of life at Virginia Tech last week. One of our students read Psalm 139 vv 7-14 and her twin brother is a student at VT. There were 33-lighted candles on the altar and each of us lit a candle from one of those, symbolic of how life continues in different forms – from generation to generation – in the survivors – and in our hope of eternal life in the presence of God.
The tragic events last week at Virginia Tech challenge us to consider what is the meaning of life when it can be terminated so quickly. Life is fragile and finite. This fact is too easily forgotten in our busy rush from task to task as if the only important thing about us is what we do and how much we do. We are tempted in daily living to focus more on what we do than on who we are. Being gets lost in doing. When something so unexpected and so sobering happens we are stunned and fearful, quiet and questioning.
We ask how could this have happened? What can we do to prevent such things from happening? Why did this happen? The hard and realistic answer is that we live without concrete assurance of absolute guaranteed safety, longevity, and without convincing answers. We live in hope that our future is enough to be who we are, to develop loving and committed relationships, time enough to try our talents and potential. We live day-by-day, hour-by-hour, and minute-by-minute. Death is a part of life and we are wise when we live knowing that we cannot avoid the ultimate experience.
I find it helpful to remember that we are not destined to live as mice in a maze that runs down one blind alley after another, or from one dead end road to another cul-de-sac, to another but we are invited to walk in a labyrinth. The labyrinth is circular, and while the path often reverses itself, turning back to an earlier place where we had hope and starting off again in a path that feels familiar, we find that there is a turn ahead of us that leads closer and closer to the center. The point of the labyrinth is that we walk one step at a time, thoughtfully, intentionally, purposefully, but we continue on the path that ultimately leads not to dead ends but the center. The center represents the core of being, the ground of being, what ancients and moderns call the divine or God.
In the spring of 1999 three friends walked the labrynith together. One of us walked very slowly and deliberately to the center, sat down and stayed a long time. She left in a must quicker pace. At lunch we shared our experience and she said, “I don’t know why but I just wanted to step out. There did not seem to be any purpose of my return – the entire experience was about being in the center.
Days later I took her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with extensive metastatic cancer. She died four months later, translucent in her faith, able to see so clearly the distant shore. She knew whose she was and had that sense of being held in the palm of God’s hand. Throughout her last months she chose to spend time with family and friends – assuring us that she was fine. Standing with and being fully present for another is the essence of relationship.
Community is the collective form of human relationships. We live in community. When tragedy takes lives too soon, whether in the US or in Iraq, we who live in Christ are invited to stand in solidarity with those who grieve with compassion.
John Donne captured the same sense of compassionate solidarity in Meditations XVII:
“No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.” -- John Donne
During Easter we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus not only because it demonstrates the power of God over death, but because in Christ we hold the promise of the Father to be true. All that the Father has given me have come to me. I have lost none that the Father gave me. The Father and I are one. Nothing and no person can take them from the Father’s hand. If we are in Christ then we have hope, that however transient, long or short this temporal life may be, it is only a journey into a new future in God.
That hope allows us to take scripture seriously, to labor on for the work Christ has given into our hands, so that we may share not only in the work of the kingdom but also know that our future is in God. In word and sacrament we remember the works of God in salvation history and we take into our physical bodies spiritual food.
One of my favorite prayers is from the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer offered as a prayer after communion. “Father of all, we give you thanks and praise that when we were still far off you met us in your son and brought us home. Dying and living, he declared your love, gave us grace and opened the gate of glory. May we who share Christ’s body live his risen life; we who drink his cup bring life to others; we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world.”
Amen
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