Tuesday in the Octave of Easter, April 14, 2020  (today’s lectionary)
Taxes again today. All the world is taxed. Viruses and absence, sheltering in place, social distancing, flattening curves, and in the midst of this the headlines. The footlines, the aw-shucks lines, the beasts and ants and turtles and hare-lines, rushing together for a little attention. Painbodies abound, and we suffer much for it.
Just reading headlines of the news, occasionally dipping my little finger through the tepid sordid surface, I get sick to my stomach.
Come on, David. Stop it.
I could be more accepting. I’m floating above it, after all. The judgments I make, and they are many, descend from a distance, and I feel guilty even thinking that way at all. I have skin-in-the-game, but not really. I feel so protected.
God and my faith in You rise up to protect me.
Yes. That includes your security, the foundation.
It includes our home, our back yard, our computers, our keyboards, our internet, our TV with all it allows. It includes our telephone and our refrigerator and our freezers, oh yes especially our freezers, and our oven and stove and microwave, and the electricity and gas that power up our lives, running without fanfare through the ground and through the air into our home, through the tubes and wires, catching fire and heating us … tis a gift to be simple, but hmmm … nothing is simple.
Just for a safe-distance-taste, a sweet scent, a word or two from the wise, just for those bits and pieces of another point of view, we need to beat a retreat to Amish Arthur, say hello to our dairyman Willis, be ministered to in the vicinity of his life. Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be true …
Reading today, one of my favorite lectionary days. In his new confidence, with words that come to him as Jesus said they would, when they are right and when they are needed, Peter brings the people to their knees. They are smitten with the blood-guilt of Jesus on the cross. But he doesn’t settle for accusation; he offers them healing and a new life. The church where we were married in Mt. Pulaski, Illinois, held this truth to be self-evident. Acts 2:38:
“Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is made to you!”
And I was, baptized, on Easter Sunday, again after the fount at birth, baptized this time after repentance without the protection or intervention of godparents, in 1979, when I was nearly 30 years old. And it was very good.
You just love those long sentences, don’t you David? Who do you think you are, William Faulkner? Henry James?
They are fine writers, Lord. Thanks for noticing.
Ha! You just keep on with what you do, David. Let the torch pass from my thought to your thought. Rest in me, and for now, write in me.
The earth is full of your goodness, Lord. You are kind and sweet, even to the end of the earth.
I will lay my kindness on you, on all of you, with a gentle hand. I will spread out like jam on the bread of my people. You can count on it. Taste and see, it is all Good. (Psalm 33)
She thought he was the gardener, and then Jesus said, “Mary,” and she held on to his feet, arms wrapped around his knees, and she was weeping. But Jesus stopped her and said, “I have not yet ascended to my Father.”
What will happen now, Jesus, in your life. Not yet?
I think your experience of time, limited as it had been by your humanity, was changing even there in the garden, outside the tomb. The spring winds freshened, and just as Mary Poppins rode here and there on her umbrella, you must have been carried in the joy of the Spirit straight into the bright spaces of our Father’s House. Eternity. Forever. The moment that never ends or begins. Ascension.
We have our own apostolic words for this: He descended into hell and on the third day he rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven. He is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and from there he will come, to judge, the quick and the dead.
I believe.(John 20)
#
