In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
First we extinguish the Christ Candle, and we watch the smoke go up.
Jesus went up as well to his Father. This past Thursday we celebrated the Ascension of Jesus.
We’ll leave it out for the remainder of the service, to remind us that he has gone. But it will be re-lit at 10, for the baptism then. We do it because it’s a symbol that he never really does leave us, that by our baptisms we are given the Spirit, who makes all things infused with God.
And like the disciples in today’s story from Acts, we wait. We wait for the Spirit once again to come to us, to energize us and make Jesus real for us, to comfort us and to be our guide.
We have an advantage over those first disciples. They didn’t know Jesus as Lord and God right at first. We do, and we have. The Spirit has been at work in us for a long time.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Let’s make a whole sermon out of one little phrase. Take a look at the reading from the first letter of Peter. It’s in the second column—“He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison . . .
He went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison. Very obscure. What might it mean? Anyone have any ideas?
The idea for the “harrowing of hell” the line in the Apostles Creed that says he descended to the dead (or he descended into Hell).
The idea is that Jesus, in the days between his death and his rising again, actually went to the place where those who had died were being kept, waiting for the Savior to open up the gates of heaven. They were in a holding tank of sorts.
I was struck by the readings for Eucharist on the 20th of April. They mentioned stones and rocks all over the place. The psalmist prays, “Be my strong rock, a castle to keep me safe, for you are my crag and my stronghold.” The first letter of Peter exhorts us to “Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” And we have the negative side of rocks, too: Stephen was stoned to death for hanging onto his faith, his Rock, despite the threats of the locals.
One reason I was so taken by these references to rocks and stones was that on our recent vacation we encountered the most interesting dwellings built entirely of stone.
Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.
This sermon was delivered from the center aisle of the church. This is the outline of the sermon.
• So the followers of Jesus heard Mary Magdalene bring her story back to them—how she saw Jesus—the dead one—back to life in the garden.
• But they’re still scared—they are hiding with the doors locked in fear.
• Then they see Jesus—how did he get in? The doors were locked! And only then they rejoiced, after having seen him with their own eyes.
• And Jesus tells them “Peace be with you”—it’s a comforting thing for them. First of all they’re scared to death after this dead man appeared to them through the walls. Second of all it’s a statement that they are forgiven for abandoning him so fiercely as he was being judged and as he was dying.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I just love this gospel. It’s through a woman that the news of Jesus’ resurrection gets out to the world. And it’s through a woman that this episode follows the same pattern that the rest of the gospel follows:
• Come and see
• You are loved; and you will live
• Go and tell.
Now, that instrumental woman is Mary Magdalene, the one that scripture tells us had 7 demons cast out of her. The Bible never says a thing about Mary Magdalene being a prostitute, or being romantically involved with Jesus. The prostitute thing came from Gregory the Great in the 7th Century; the paramour of Jesus idea came even later than that.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I have really been struggling with the Eliot Spitzer story. Any time we see a public figure so far outside the bounds of decency and integrity, it’s disturbing. Especially this man: as we know, Spitzer made a career as Attorney General of New York by pushing and pushing for tighter laws and stricter penalties for so many crimes. Ironically, he pushed for instating strict legal sanctions for those who do what he was just caught doing.
The media have had a field day with this story, of course. Stephen Colbert started off his program the night the news broke with the headline: “New York Post: I call dibs on Eliot Mess.” And I won’t even remind us what the New York Post headline was the next day. I don’t want to say it from the pulpit.
And the general population had some interesting reactions. I heard rumors that on Wall Street there was some applause as financial workers gathered to watch events unfold on TV. The New York Times tells us that following this story has “gripped the nation, as more than 70 reporters and photographers clustered outside the governor’s Upper East Side high-rise, separated from the building by a metal barricade erected by police. Three helicopters whirred overhead as tourists atop passing double-decker buses snapped pictures of the scene.” [NY Times, March 12, 2008, page A24]
I’m struck by the glee with which so many Americans are watching this story unfold.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Let me tell you about the funniest late-night phone call I ever received from my daughter Chloe. It came right after we’d dropped her off in New York for her freshman year at NYU.
The phone rang and woke us up. It must have been 11:30 or midnight, awfully late for a couple of empty-nesters. I heard Chloe’s voice and she was screaming. So naturally I’m thinking she’s gotten mugged or something terrible like that.
But no, as soon as she calmed down enough to talk she told me that she’d just run into the kid who was the star of “The Sixth Sense,” that’s Haley Joel Osment. Believe it or not that kid must be about 20 now. He’s a student at her school, in her same year, and she’d seen him at a party.
Well even though she woke us up I just had to laugh. I’d be pretty excited about seeing a “movie star” at a party, too. And when I think of him I think of that movie, that creepy movie.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I had a bit of a crisis on Thursday afternoon. It was time to send in Glad Tidings file to Connie Borofsky so she could get to work on the next issue. I had written my piece at home on the Windows Vista system with the Word 2007 edition.
I sent it to work where I have Word 2003. And—you guessed it—I couldn’t open the file to work on it and send it off. And I had a little panic attack for a few minutes there.
Then Microsoft came to my rescue and pointed me to the “Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System” that I could get online for free. Thank God, that saved the day.
This is a program that makes it possible to SEE what you’ve done on the other computer. That opens your eyes, so to speak, so that you’re not blind to the file. It’s a kind of translator.
Well, Jesus was an eye-opener, a file-opener, for the blind man in the gospel story today.
