Now what?
Christ has risen, Alleluia! Now comes the hard part. The disciples are left in confusion. When Jesus returns the disciples struggle to recognize him. Christ has been raised from the dead, but we do not receive a quick fix to our daily struggles. How do we take Christ’s message and see the world through different eyes? How do we navigate life now?
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
Glimpses of Grace on Spotify
Transcript
In the name of the Father,
and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
So, as we said, we find ourselves stepping more fully into this Easter season. And I was thinking about just all that we have been through. We’ve been through a lot and we continue to go through a lot. I had a moment watching the live stream, if you all had a chance to do so, of the astronauts coming back. It was fascinating to watch. I didn’t know you could go that long without breathing, but that’s what I did. Just frozen in place. But there was a point whenever one of the commentators said, there was like a ten or a fifteen minute stretch, and they said “once we start this point, a whole series of things are going to take place that will culminate in ten to fifteen minutes, you will splash down, and you may not even be able to catch them, because they’re all going to happen at such a fast interval”. And I thought, I think that’s what some of us felt like during Holy Week. Once this series, once it starts, there’s a whole series of things that are going to take place and you may not even know what you’re doing half the time, but you keep coming and you come to the next thing.
We all felt like that last week. We always do. So much goes into that week. And rightly so in some ways. But so much goes into that week. But if we’re honest with ourselves and the team would find these moments to catch ourselves and give each other a kind of a side-eye. So much goes into it because of our own perfection, and our own tendency to want to control things and wanting everything to work out just the way that we want them to work out, so that on some level, if we’re honest, that maybe someone’s impressed just a little bit.
Maybe they’ll come to the last service and almost 400 people were here, and they’ll be impressed just a little bit. I mean, we are human. So I was thinking about all of that. And then once you’re finished with that last service, the tenth in seven days that some of us did, you go home and you sit there and you wonder, well, what comes now? Easter’s over. But then you actually remember it’s not over. All of the work that went into Holy Week and Easter Day is done, but Easter has just begun. So we find ourselves on this day, on this second Sunday of Easter, in this series of Sundays in Eastertide leading up to Pentecost Sunday, that 50th day, maybe having a chance to catch our breath, splashdown, just for a moment, regroup and ask ourselves “now that we’ve accomplished all of these things that we felt really strongly and wanted to do, what comes next? What does Easter truly mean on a deeper level?” And we ask ourselves, “what are we left with?”
Well, it’s curious that we ask that because if you look at the stories themselves that we read, we find out what we’re actually left with are a lot more questions than maybe we thought we would have. There’s part of us in this culture that thinks once we have accomplished this, once we have been successful at this and we sit back, then everything’s going to be clear. Everything will be clear. In the case of Easter, once Jesus is raised from the tomb, all of our problems are going to be taken care of. We’re not going to have to worry about such-and-such, and all of our answers are going to be given to us. All of the questions that we have are going to be clarified.
That’s not what we find ourselves. It’s curious because during that first week of Easter, there’s actually a Gospel text, and all that are chosen for each day. And the one on Tuesday and the one on Wednesday were all around the story of Mary Magdalene going back to the tomb. So you would think if that had just happened, then everything was clear. Not at all. You’ll know that story. She goes back to the tomb and she finds out that the body’s gone, and she sees someone who she thinks is a gardener, and she tells him, “sir, if you’ve taken the body, just tell me where they’ve taken the body. No harm, no foul. We just want to get the body back.” And he says, “Mary,” and she turns, and she didn’t even recognize that it was Jesus.
Then we have this morning’s text. They’re gathered there the evening of that first day it says, so not a lot of time has passed. And Jesus appears to them and says, “peace be with you”. And the text, of course, being the focus of this Sunday, says Thomas, was not there. It sets up the plot.
I think Thomas always gets a bad rap. I don’t like the phrase Doubting Thomas. I think he’s just human. Human Thomas. Because which one of us, if we’re honest, if we were in that same spot and we came back from most likely running an errand, if we came back and in the time that we had run an errand and we came back in and everyone else said, “you’re not going to believe what happened, but Jesus has just come back.” Would we say, “oh, that’s wonderful. It doesn’t matter that I missed it. I’ll just take your word for it.” No. No one would say that. We would say just like he did. “Unless I see, unless I can see it for myself and know that this has changed and shifted, how can I believe it?”
Next week we’re going to pick up the story with those two men walking down the road to Emmaus. Another fascinating step on this road of Easter confusion. And they end up talking with Jesus, and I love that part, they tell him the story of actually what just happened to him. And then Jesus reinterprets it back to them. But not until they sat down and broke bread, you know, did they actually know who he was. And then the text said he “disappeared from their sight.”
And so if we went into this Easter season thinking that everything was going to be clarified for us and everything was going to fit into place and be wrapped up with a shiny bow, now that we had accomplished all that we felt so strongly about, we were mistaken. We have entered into a much more complex time, and we’re challenged to ask ourselves what now do we do? What did this mean that this happened? How have our lives been changed? How have the patterns of our lives, all of the things that we thought were so important, all of the things that we planned, what does it matter going forward now? How does the way we see the world actually shift? How have we been transformed? That’s the work of Easter.
Easter is not a season that says somehow the Spirit’s going to come down and solve all of our problems. Easter is a season that says our posture has shifted so that with the Spirit’s power of the resurrected Christ, we can step forward in a new way. We can live life in a new way, knowing that there is a deeper level of hope than we ever thought possible.
That’s the Easter path leading all the way up to Pentecost Sunday. Whenever, honestly, all of the craziness just broke loose. And they’re there in the room, gathered once more and tongues and flames of fire come down and the spirit fills their hearts in a way that they never imagined, and they’re sent forth into the world to tell the story. Only after they had gone through the time of confusion and questions and wondering does the spirit come and say, now you’re ready to go forth.
So as we soak up the Sunday, soak all of it up, soak all of it up, soak up those parts of yourself that are still wrestling and wondering, those parts of yourself that are confused. Welcome to the club. All of these parts, as we wonder and listen even more fully to what the spirit has in store for each and every one of us.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.