easter in winter

 A sermon preached on Zoom for Easter 5A, 2020. Texts for this Sunday are here.  The article referenced, "Leading Beyond the Blizzard," is here. 


Today’s Gospel is a passage,
At least the first paragraph, is one that we often read at funerals, 
Words that give us comfort in times of incredible loss -
The moments when we realize that the loss of a loved one 
Means that things will not go back to normal.

And actually, this is a bit of a funeral sermon - 
It’s from that long, long, loooooooong farewell speech of Jesus’s 
Given as the empty dinner dishes from the last supper are still spread out on the table,.
Jesus is essentially preaching his own funeral in advance - 
Telling his disciples that indeed there is no normal for them to go back to.

I don’t want to downplay the grief a lot of us are feeling during the pandemic,
Maybe even more acutely today when you realize it’s Mother’s Day.
And in fact, I think one of the gifts of the church in this time is helping people grieve. 

But we all know the story doesn’t stop at the end of this Gospel passage,
And we have the whole second paragraph to go as well. 
Jesus knew that his time was short,
But he meant to inspire the disciples to further ministry,
To doing deeds of power in his name, 
Continuing the story - our story - for much longer. 

So on the eve of Good Friday, Jesus says - 
- to a group of scared disciples 
Who only dimly grasp what is to come - 
I am going before you to prepare a place for you - enough places for all of you, 
To welcome you into God’s household, 
To gather you, together, under one roof. 

They’re words that in this Easter season 
recall for us what the angel says at the empty tomb 
(At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, but still).
Don’t look for Jesus here, in the past, among the dead - 
Indeed he has gone before you - into Galilee - 
The place you thought you started, 
But where the landscape will be very different indeed. 

There’s an article going around Facebook - clergybook, really -
That I know that Kara has offered at least in the St. John’s newsletter -
Where the author uses the metaphor of a blizzard, the winter, or the ice age -
As ways to understand what is happening with this pandemic. 

Remember when this all first started? 
We thought this was a blizzard - a short, discreet event - 
we could hunker down and it would blow over.
We would lose a few days, maybe two weeks, then it would blow over. 

Soon we realized we were living at least in a metaphorical winter,
Where we had to figure out how to resume some of the things of our normal lives,
Under drastic circumstances - 
Get new gear, develop some new strategies, wait this one out. 

What has become more and more clear as the weeks drag on
Is that we are at the beginning of a little ice age - 
Which will be longer than a winter.
And unlike a single winter, where the snow melts and things come back as they were before,
An ice age reshapes the entire landscape - 
Probably in permanent ways. 

There is no normal to go back to - 
Even if we do get to back to what we thought was familiar territory -
Whatever our Galilee was -
We are going to find the landscape completely changed - 
And ourselves, too - the landscape of our hearts marked 
With a deeper and perhaps more somber knowledge of what is possible. 

Yes, AND - even with all the grief and loss - 
All the sorrow and worry of these days - 
Our faith, 
Our baptism into the household of God with those very first saints of the church - 
Reminds us that we are a people of hope.

We remember that 
Our very own Great Lakes were formed in an ice age - 
They are the scars from the deep cuts glaciers once made - 
And now we cannot imagine the shape of our world, our city, our lives, without them. 
And we remember that 
Jesus, too, bore scars on his body 
Even after his resurrection - 
scars through which the world was born into new life, 
From which the new way living, which we call the church, was born.

I think that in this new ice age,
We will find a lot more in common with those first disciples. 
Our lives will be in many ways reshaped by what we have lost, 
Chief among it the belief that this will blow over
And things will go back to normal. 
For a long time yet, when we meet - 
it will be something like how those disciples met - 
In small, furtive groups, where the stakes are as high as life and death for some. 

And while I do not wish any suffering on any human being, 
Our faith also tells us that there are some things that need to die. 
I find myself praying that 
We can put to death the idea that the ways we have been living
Should be called normal. 
For a lot of people, the old normal was not working -
This virus has found every fault line in lives, in our city, 
Every inequality, all that exploitation - and made it all painfully clear. 
Some of that will have to - even should - die, 
For a new way of life to be born, and a new story to be told. 

Our Acts passage today reminds us that God does not, in Christ, 
Promise us a world without hurt, or without death - 
But promises that our hurting, our dying, 
Will be tied into a greater story, 
That story that Stephen has on his lips as he becomes the church’s first martyr,
And the story that one we are continuing to tell today,
All of us (at least in grid view) - 
Little living stones, our separate little zoom block built into a spiritual temple, a royal priesthood. 

For nothing - neither life nor death, 
not power nor principalities, 
Economic depression or face masks, or even a novel coronavirus,
Can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ,
And we cannot allow it to separate us from one another. 
fxOnce we were no people, but now we belong to each other - and to God. 

AMEN.