Easter Day (A): Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43: John 20:1-18
Easter feels wrong this year. Not just because right now we are forced to celebrate the Feast of the Resurrection in an empty church with a few lonesome lilies, but because, with daily death tolls reaching ever higher across the country, and the prospect of a surge in fatalities heading our way, our joyful Alleluias sound somewhat out of tune with the minor key the world the world is living in right now. It feels like we are stuck in Good Friday, the darkness and death increasing by the hour, as the world is brought to its knees by this insidious virus.
Yet, on the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever needed the
message of resurrection more than I do today. The Easter promises of hope
coming from despair, joy coming from sorrow, life coming from death. I need
that message to stave off the fears and frustrations of this pandemic; to trust
that we will come forth from this tomb and that when we do something
beautiful will emerge.
Given the extenuating circumstances the world is experiencing, I thought I would share around something I wrote a few years ago. These are a collection of meditations on The Passion–the story of Jesus’ arrest, crucifixion, and death. I wrote these originally while serving at St. John the Evangelist in Hingham, but have expanded on them since then. There are now enough for a morning and evening meditation for all 40 days of Lent. They are conceived of as a devotional tool for the entirety of the Lenten season, not just Holy Week, but my hope is, given that you may have a little more time on your hands these days, they might enrich your walk through this central story of our faith in a time when most (all?) of us won’t be able to walk that journey in the ways we are used to.
Lent V: Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45
You’ve heard, this past week, a lot of talk comparing our current national situation to a war. It’s been used as people talk about our “common enemy,” and as a rationale for why extreme government intervention is needed. It’s been used as a rallying cry to pump up production of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, and to inspire us to make individual sacrifices for the greater good. It’s also been used to describe the eerily empty cityscapes and avenues across the globe, normally teeming with people and vehicles, now deserted. But there is another aspect of this metaphor of war that, for me has proven most apt in these difficult days: death. There’s the literal death count, going up by the day; the bodies piling up outside overrun hospitals and the stories of friends and relatives falling ill and dying, which are circling ever closer to home as the numbers increase. But just as troubling is the inescapable, oppressive prospect of death hovering around each of our lives in a way it never has, at least in my lifetime. An invisible adversary is on the prowl and everyone, everything is a threat. Every time I step outside my house I find myself hyper alert to where am I going? What am I touching? Who is near me? It’s an awful, exhausting feeling. And makes me behave in ways I never have: doing the odd dance of keeping wide distances should I cross another’s path; the donning of armor in the form of masks and gloves to go about daily routines. All of this done because anyone, or anything we touch could lead to our death. I’ve never been in one, so I’m speculating here, but that’s what I imagine it feels like to be in an active war zone: the prospect of death hiding around every corner. Of course the reality is for most of us death is not around the corner. Even those who may contract this disease are likely to suffer only mildly, if at all. Yet the specter of death hovers over those lives just as much, because the prospect remains that this unseen contagion will turn us into killers by making us a “vector,” one responsible for spreading the virus and unintentionally causing the death of another. All of this is undeniably terrifying—both the getting and the giving—and so we live now, in this constant state of fear.
