"Such Faith"

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” (1Pet. 1:3-5)

You have been born again to a living hope. Why? Because Jesus is risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity. Death no longer has dominion over Him, and being in Him, it no longer has dominion over you. You live in hope of an imperishable inheritance which is now already yours, and is waiting to be revealed in the last time. And while you wait, you are being guarded through faith, by the power of God. But how do you obtain such faith as guards your soul and body unto life everlasting?

Earthquakes

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“I feel the earth move under my feet / I feel the sky tumbling down, tumbling down / I feel my heart start to trembling / Whenever you're around.” This opening stanza from Carole King's 1971 rock anthem might well be the words of the soldiers posted at the tomb of our Lord that first day of the week, the day of our Lord's resurrection.

They felt the earth move under their feet as the Lord of Life broke the bonds of death once for all and the tomb that could not hold the Living God was burst open and the Prince of Life who died strode forth in immortal splendor. He is not dead; He has risen!

Of course, this is not the first earthquake in these few days of history.

Clinging

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Awake, my heart with gladness, / See what today is done; / Now, after gloom and sadness, / Comes forth the glorious sun.” Awake, o ye faithful! Awake and arise from the sleep of death, for the glorious sun of righteousness has dawned upon the never-ending day of the new creation in our resurrected Lord Jesus. See what today is done – how our Lord conquered the powers of sin, death, and the devil, and rose victorious over cross and grave!

Awake, be attentive to the Wisdom that comes down from on high! Be attentive to the Lord who appears to His people to fulfill the blessed visions of the Prophets and the testimony of the Evangelists. Be attentive to the Wisdom of God revealed unto salvation for mankind. Be attentive to the voice of God calling you from weeping to rejoicing at the blessed vision of your Lord and your God.

Ending and Beginning

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Dear Christians, one and all, rejoice! Tonight the holy penitential season of Lent is ended. Fasting and weeping are put away. Tears and sorrow are removed. Your salvation is completed.

And yet, this is but the end of the beginning. For on this holy night, we keep solemn vigil. We keep watch for the One who comes in the Name of the Lord, the coming King. St. Augustine wrote:

In that life for the attainment of the peace of which we labor, and which Truth promises to us in the resurrection after the death of this body or at the end of this world, we shall never sleep, just as we shall never die. For what else is sleep but a daily death which does not completely remove man hence nor detain him too long? And what else is death but a very long and very deep sleep from which God arouses man? Therefore, when there is no death, there is likewise no sleep, the image of death. Finally, there is no sleep except that of mortals.

The Family of God

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Facebook phenomenon of picking sides in political and philosophical battles hurts families. Facebook has made it easy to tell tales out of school, and many have found themselves filled with sorrow at such actions. At one time, we disagreed with our parents’ politics in dorm rooms. We complained about our in-laws over coffee to close friends. Those we loved, but disagreed with or even disrespected, in part, remained mostly unaware of it. They were not hurt very much by it. We could strut and boast and conduct thought experiments in relative safety, without much long-term damage. Now we broadcast our disagreement, and often our disrespect, all over the world in an indelible, digital format that might well follow us the rest of our lives. Was the old way more dishonest than the new? Perhaps. But it was also less damaging and less painful, easier to correct and amend.

Our families are more broken and dysfunctional than we care to admit. We look back at the medieval idea of courtly love and Victorian romance with derision for its artificiality. But any judgment on our part reveals our hypocrisy. We are a people raised on sitcoms and pop music. Our culture’s view of love is that it is mainly a matter of affection and that the good feeling it gives is the highest good. We think love is god, but by love we mean our own amusement and pleasure. Thus, we have little room for sacrifice or duty. If it feels good in the moment, it must be love, and if doesn’t feel good, or if it grows stale, we drop it.

“If I Do Not Wash You”

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Peter said to Him, 'You shall never wash my feet.' Jesus answered him, 'If I do not wash you, you have no share with Me.'” If you will not let Jesus serve you, then you will not receive the benefit of His service. It is that simple.

God comes to mankind to serve us. It has always been that way. Speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus instructs her to ask Him for the living water that will well up in her unto salvation. She believes, albeit after some trepidation and some questioning. Therefore she receives the living water of salvation. The crowds come Jesus to be healed and cured and cleansed and taught. They believe, and their afflictions are taken away. The weary crowds come to Jesus for food, and He feeds them. “Whoever feeds on My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life.” Our Lord serves His people not only with the bread and wine of the earth, the perishable stuff that preserves our perishable bodies for a time, but also His own true physical Body and Blood to preserve us now and unto life everlasting.

Envy and Blame

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pilate “knew that it was out of envy that [the Jews] had delivered [Jesus] up.” It was evident to anyone with half a brain that the chief priests and the teachers of the Law were out to get Jesus because they feared for their position and reputation. Caiaphas himself said prophetically that “it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” (John 11:50) They feared that if Jesus were elevated in the estimation of the people, the whole nation would follow after Him, and the priests and scribes would be dishonored.

Envy leads people to do some awful things. It leads to wars and genocides. It leads to murders and beatings. It leads to discrimination and division. It leads to people whom you might consider otherwise neighborly and peaceable doing and saying things that are downright despicable and destructive.

Of course, envy is nothing new.

"Like A Weaned Child"

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Long ago, the legend holds, Daedalus and his son Icarus were imprisoned by the wicked king Minos in a high tower atop a cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea. Daedalus determined that their only means of escape would be to build wings and soar off like birds. Being an engineer and a clever man, Daedalus constructed a set of wings covered with bird feathers held on with wax. He made a set for himself, and one for his feckless son Icarus. Before they set out on their escape, Daedalus warned his son not too fly too low to the sea, lest his wings become waterlogged, nor too high in the sky, lest the sun warm the wax and cause the wings to melt. They launched into the bright Grecian sun, and were free!

However, hapless young Icarus soon became overwhelmed with the power of flight and wheeled too high into the heavens. So close to the sun he went that his father's warning proved true. His wings melted and came apart, and the poor boy fell and drowned in the sea. He did not heed sound counsel, but lifted up his eyes and his heart to things beyond his powers, and was destroyed for want of wisdom. So goes the efforts of the people of this world in attaining knowledge and understanding of things not given to them.

Ubi Jesu, Ibi Vita

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In the middle of winter, even a well-managed cemetery is a bleak place to visit. It is not designed to be this way: trees and shrubs and flowers are carefully planted to give color and beauty to the resting place of loved ones, to a site of mourning and grief. But winter comes with cold winds and freezing temperatures, with snow and ice. Life retreats: green disappears, the lawns turn brown, leaves fall, and branches look like dead sticks while the gravestones stand sentry and time goes on. For those weeks of winter, it is a place where all seems dead. This year, it seemed like the cemetery itself was buried under a cloak of white death.

But it is not so. Though sometimes it seems like it will never happen, the sun will rise higher with warmth and light, and the cemetery will be more a like a garden again. Those trees and shrubs and lawns are not dead forever; they are merely dormant, waiting for the sun to bring them back to life.

With that, the Lord teaches us an important lesson: what is true for the trees is also true for the people of God who rest from their labors. The Son of God comes to bring them back to life. Where Jesus, there life.

Rescue Me!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

As we have gathered together these weeks to mark the Lenten season, we have meditated on the Psalms of Trust, as they are often called. Tonight we turn our attention to Psalm 71, and we learn from the Psalmist how we ought to trust in the Lord in the face of opposition for the sake of the Word.

“In you, O LORD, do I take refuge; let me never be put to shame!”, cries the Psalmist. Whither shall you go for refuge in this world? For you are like Peter, faced with the choice of belief or disbelief: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Shall you go to the scholars of this age? They will tell you that refuge is to be found in health and wealth. They will give you prescriptions for every ailment under the sun, and then more prescriptions to counteract the prescriptions they prescribed in the first place. They will tell you to put your money in this or that or the other thing. Invest in gold; invest in farmland; invest in emerging markets; invest in “glocal” businesses.