Resurrection Tears
Children's sermon
Illustration
Preaching
Sermon
Worship
For April 9, 2023:
Resurrection Tears
By Chris Keating
John 20:1-18
For John, Easter morning begins with more perspiration than brassy proclamations or joyful fanfares. Mary’s startling discovery propels her across the starting line of the first-ever Easter 10K race. She turns and runs from the empty tomb, dashing to find Peter and John. But these guys are no help. After sprinting into action, they limp back home unsure of what to think or believe. Easter begins in the shadows of trauma, where weeping, confusion, and sadness keep us from finding hope.
Sweat and tear-stained cheeks do not fare well when compared to brightly colored eggs and eye-popping treats. After all, we all know better than to run around in our new Easter outfits. We would much prefer the day to be filled with chocolate eggs, short sermons, platters of ham, and champagne cocktails. Instead, we find ourselves surrounded by dejected and uncertain disciples.
Like Peter and John, we may think we can outrun trauma, but the truth is that we are all enmeshed in its tangled web. Matthew Thompson, editor of the New York Times’ Headway initiative, muses that we live in a time marked by the “omnipresence of disaster.” Plagues, pandemics, mass violence, natural disasters, tainted water and air crash into each other, he tells us. It is as if we are all stuck in the spin cycle of trauma.
There are plenty of examples. The (latest) school shooting in Nashville, TN, March 29 was the 130th mass shooting in 2023, depending on how you keep score. Just about one per day so far. But wait, there’s more! We’ve also experienced 300 tornadoes since January 1. While not officially diagnosed, there is no doubt that racial trauma continues unabated. It is no wonder that Merriam-Webster chose “gaslighting” as its word of the year in 2022. We’re facing a new reckoning with how trauma is defined and how it impacts our daily lives.
That may seem like bad news. But to paraphrase the late Frederick Buechner, Easter is bad news before it becomes good news. While it’s hard to square that truth against jellybeans and sugar enhanced Peeps, it is a promise that will help move from grief toward resurrection hope. Long before we can shout, “He is risen!” we must first hear Jesus ask us, “Why are you weeping?”
In the News
Shelly Rambo is a theologian who explores the intersections between trauma theory and theology. She describes how many trauma survivors often feel as if they are “locked in an indefinable middle” space that is somewhere between death and life. (Rambo, 2005) “The middle space,” she writes “is the space of despair, of the impossibility of life coming after devastating violence,” Rambo wrote those words in an article published in 2005 (Studies of Christian Ethics).
That may seem like a lifetime ago. After all, it was just a few months before Katrina crashed against the gulf shore. Years would pass before the ghastly shootings at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, among others. In 2005, nine years would still elapse before the youngest of the Uvalde massacre victims would be born.
Yet we are still stuck in that familiar middle space, which Rambo now often calls our Holy Saturday moment, where we are living beyond death but can not quite figure out life.
In that space our tears, like Mary, fall like streams of rushing water. Most recently, we entered that space following the March 24th mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, TN, a private Christian school related to the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA). The shooter used two “assault-style” weapons and a handgun in the shooting, all of which were purchased legally. Additional weapons were found in the shooter’s home according to police.
Like all mass shootings, the trauma associated with the Nashville incident is raw and multilayered. The shooter had apparently been under the care of a physician for an “emotional disorder,” and kept her arsenal of weapons concealed from her parents. But Tennessee law does not prohibit persons with mental illness from owning weapons if the person has not been “judicially committed to a mental institution.” The pathways into trauma are many.
“Our police officers have cried and are crying with Nashville and the world. I have cried and continue to cry and I have prayed for Nashville as well,” said Nashville Metro Police Department Chief John Drake.
Of course, trauma is not limited to mass shootings. Tornadoes tear apart homes and lives, and floods prove overwhelming. So far in 2023, there have been more than 300 tornadoes, at least 100 more than normal for this time of year. The mid-Mississippi River Valley region took the brunt of the storms on Friday, and could be the scene for more bad weather this week.
The cost of rebuilding homes and lives following natural disasters is staggering. Experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can further disrupt the lives of natural disaster survivors. Following the recent tornados in Rolling Fork, MS, residents came together to clean up homes and businesses. But many had problems making ends meet before the late March storm. “I can’t put it to words,” one resident told CBS news. “It’s unbelievable.”
Jeremy Grayson said that following the storm, the only sounds he could hear were survivors calling for help. But Grayson wonders where residents will find long-term help. The town of Rolling Fork is located within Sharkey County, where 35% of residents live below the poverty line, and many simply lack the resources to move out of the middle space between life and death.
The trauma of these events seems unending. Indeed, in 2022, more than 104 million persons across the United States experienced record-breaking heat on a single day. Ninety-percent of US counties have experienced some sort of weather disaster in the past ten years. The growing number of events call us to become communities of resilience.
“We have to make sure that homes are more resilient to flooding and manage the flow of water. These hurricanes are becoming stronger and lasting longer,” said Rep. Maxwell A. Frost of Florida. “The cost of not doing anything is far greater than the cost of making bold moves right now.”
Yet those living in the immediate aftershock of trauma may not have the emotional capital available to invest in public policy. The repeated wounding of trauma demolishes relationships with others and fragments communities. “Disaster is so ubiquitous that the idea of an aftermath has started to lose its meaning,” writes the NY Times’ editor Matthew Robinson. “Covid’s brutal, blurry slide from pandemic to endemic is an example that underscores one defining truth of our reality: Our disasters don’t exactly end; they evolve. And if we are to outlast them, so must we.”
We are all witnesses to trauma. As Shelly Rambo wondered years ago, the question for people of faith becomes one of discovering how our tears and turning from death might help allow for hope to be born. “Can life come after such a radical shattering of the self?” Rambo wrote in 2005. “It is not about simple seeing or hearing,” she wrote. If recovery is to occur, if resurrection is to be experienced, there needs to be thoughtful consideration paid to the experience of trauma.
It's possible, says Rambo, that Mary Magdalene might be just the person who can teach us what it means to move from the grips of death into resurrection life.
In the Scriptures
John’s story of the resurrection begins, appropriately, “while it was still dark.” The metaphor of lightness and darkness has spanned the entirety of John’s gospel, and its appearance here is no surprise. As Karoline Lewis has pointed out, the darkness at the tomb indicates that “full recognition and belief are yet to come.” (Lewis, John, Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentary, 2014). Despite all the running around that first Easter, John’s pacing is deliberate. The story moves gradually from the darkness of disbelief into the full recognition of Jesus, the light of the world.
Mary sees that the stone covering the opening of the tomb has been moved. But either the darkness of early morning or the darkness of her spiritual vision keeps Mary from understanding what has happened. Has his body been stolen? Did the army take him away? As grief is rekindled in her, Mary rushes back to find Peter and John.
When she finds them she mistakenly reports that Jesus’ body has been moved. Her witness is incomplete, perhaps a result of her own still unprocessed feelings of grief and trauma. Nonetheless, her announcement sounds the alarm and gets Peter and John running. The scene is chaotic, almost comedic, with people running back and forth breathlessly trying to find a missing corpse.
The male disciples depart, but Mary remains. As she weeps, she peers into the tomb. Her grief is real and palpable, as if the empty tomb has rekindled the pain of watching her friend die. The text is clear that her looking and her weeping happen simultaneously. As Rambo (2005) notes “Seeing through the film of tears, Mary’s sight is obstructed, making it difficult for her to be a credible ‘eye-witness’ to the events of the resurrection. She faces an empty tomb weeping in the darkness of morning.”
Yet her weeping releases the fervor of her emotion, preparing her for the stunning surprise that waits. As she encounters the risen Lord, we watch as Mary moves from the nebulous “in between time” into the light of resurrection life.
In the Sermon
The questions prompted by trauma are framed by our sudden awareness that the world is no longer dependable or safe. The predictable world collapses. “When we are overwhelmed,” writes Serene Jones, “what fails us most profoundly is our capacity to use language.” (Jones, Trauma and Grace, 2009, p. 29). It is a landscape familiar to most pastors, and indeed this is one of the challenges posed by preaching about trauma. In a stunning new book, Fractured Ground, Kimberly R. Wagner names three less than helpful temptations pastor may encounter: 1) giving in to our own sense of despair, 2) avoidance, perhaps out of fear that it will make people uncomfortable, and 3) pushing past the pain with “sacred optimism,” filling a sermon with anemic bromides and cliché assurances that “God has got this.” (Wagner, Fractured Ground, 2023, p. 5).
Because trauma, especially mass events like shootings and disasters, happens without warning, Wagner suggests preachers prepare themselves in advance by becoming conversant with the way trauma works. Perhaps revisiting the familiar resurrection story through the lens of trauma-informed preaching may be of help to both the preacher and the congregation. Carefully naming the ways we have all been impacted by mass trauma can aid us in preparing for the wounds that are surely to come.
Begin by not condemning Mary’s tears, nor overlooking them. Instead of hearing Jesus’ question to Mary (“Why are you weeping?”) as criticism, imagine Jesus inviting her to move beyond that middle zone between death and life. Scholars suggest that one of John’s main themes is the call to abide. Here, as Mary weeps, she is invited once more to follow as a disciple. Perhaps even in the traumas of our own lives we may hear the words of the risen Christ, “Who are you looking for?”
There’s the million-dollar question for our Easter worshipers.
Jesus affirms her trauma and offers us the chance to move through the middle zones of life where we may feel dead but are unable to claim life. While Easter zombies will never be as cute as Easter bunnies, they will be present on Easter morning. Our folks will arrive with baskets of grief and unseen scars. By affirming Mary’s experience of trauma, we may encourage those stuck in the similar middle places to encounter the new life of resurrection.
By reminding the congregation that resurrection is neither a quick triumphalist shout that ignores pain, nor a confusing, incoherent symbol distanced from the realities of human life, we can stand beside the empty tombs. Resurrection happens in the moments when tears are shed, and the empty places of life are named. It happens as we hear our names called, and like Mary are invited to move into new life.
* * * * *
SECOND THOUGHTS
Calling Profane What God has Already Made Clean
by Elena Delhagen
Acts 10:34-43
Several months ago, I visited Caesarea Maritima in modern-day Israel. As we know from our New Testament text today, it is here where Peter shared the faith with the gentile family of Cornelius after being summoned from Joppa. I urge us to remember, however, that this story doesn’t begin here, in these nine short verses. Acts 10:1-2 introduces Cornelius as one who already believed in and followed the Lord. The only distinction between him and Peter was the fact he was a gentile while Peter was a Jew.
At Caesarea, our tour group began to read aloud the story of Peter and Cornelius from Acts 10. We were a group of nearly forty people, young and old, from countries all around the world. The amphitheater in which we sat was enormous, and after we read the scripture, I began to take notice of other tour groups around us. There was a group of Asian men with earpieces, all listening to a tour guide speak to them in what I believe was Cantonese. There was another gathering of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians in white robes. In that theater were people of every skin color I could imagine, all representing different homelands, different faith traditions, and different languages.
We were, I thought to myself, such a beautiful depiction of Cornelius’ family.
In Acts 10:34, Peter begins to preach the good news to the gentiles. Speaking from personal experience after his vision at Joppa, he proclaims the truth that God shows no partiality. What a revelation! God shows no partiality — none! God’s immense, wide-reaching welcome of saving grace to anyone and everyone willing to hear it.
Later, after hearing Peter preach, the gentiles who were gathered there were baptized by the Holy Spirit. Acts 10:45 says that the “circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the gentiles.” Even them, God? Your mercy is even for them?
How many groups of people do Christians today categorize the same way, othering them and believing that the ways in which they might be different can somehow prohibit them from the power of the Gospel? Too often, we are just like Peter, calling profane what God has already made clean.
More and more, conservative Christian groups are funneling millions of dollars into limiting LGBTQ+ rights in the United States, as evidenced by the recent wave of anti-trans legislation being introduced in courts across the country. On the Wednesday before Holy Week, the Kentucky Senate voted to override Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear's veto of Senate Bill 150, one of the nation’s toughest anti-trans laws. Little more than 30 minutes later, the House did the same — making it law.
The law:
Transgender individuals are mocked, stigmatized, discriminated against, and denied access to quality healthcare and other basic human rights all across thiw country. Conservative Christians lump trans people into groups and call them unclean and abnormal, and they demand trans people conform in order to be accepted. Yet God shows no partiality! Just as Cornelius was claimed and made clean by God, so are our trans brothers and sisters. The Gospel is for all people — and all means all! It stretches far wider than any box we may construct to try and contain it. The beloved community of God is made up of those from all races and ethnicities, all ages and genders, all socioeconomic classes, all sexualities, “all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9). The Gospel is so much bigger than we give it credit for!
We are far too often prone to holding tight to our circles, the ones we’ve drawn that proclaim who’s in and who’s out, and all the while, God’s Spirit comes and blows everything wide open. And we, like those gathered in Acts, are astonished. Even them? Who we thought was out was in. What we named dirty is called clean. We all have a seat at the table; we all are accepted and chosen by God.
And that, my friends, is the good, good news of Easter.
ILLUSTRATIONS
From team member Mary Austin:
Matthew 28:1-10
A Permanent State of Resurrection
“Don’t be afraid” are practically the first words that the risen Christ speaks, as Matthew tells it. We are afraid of death (although we fear public speaking even more than we fear dying) and resurrection is scary, too.
Novelist John Updike reminds us that both are more common than we realize. “Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? It is even possible to dislike our old selves, those disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot.”
Resurrection comes daily, by the grace of God.
* * *
Matthew 28:1-10
Fearlessness
Fear is the subtext of Matthew’s good news. Both the angels and Jesus himself say, “do not be afraid,” suggesting that everyone’s first response to the resurrection is fear. To take in the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, first they have to set aside their fear.
Thinker Margaret Wheatley says that we need names in the world that “demand fearlessness.” She adds, “You're a coach. You're an executive. You're a consultant. You're a teacher. You're a minister. You're a hospital administrator. You're a civil servant. Are those names demanding fearlessness of us?” Even our descriptions of ourselves are too small. “So, we call ourselves, 'cancer survivors;' that seems to be a very bold name, but is it big enough to hold a life? Or 'children of abuse.' Or we call ourselves 'orphans,' or 'widows,' or 'martyrs'.... are these names big enough to hold your life?”
Jesus tells his friends how to get out of their fear: “go” and “tell” are his instructions. Similarly, Wheatley says, “Our fear is based on wanting to protect and defend ourselves. And a lot of fear arises when we're so focused on ourselves that we lose our engagement with the world. If the way out of fearfulness is to stop identifying so terribly with ourselves and with the self that we're trying to protect and defend and nourish, then this leads us into the possibility that the way out of fearfulness is to connect with the greater world.”
The followers of Jesus eventually end up with a new name, finding that their old identities are too small to hold the transforming experience of the resurrection.
* * *
Matthew 28:1-10
This I Believe
How are we to live with fear? Jesus is constantly saying “don’t be afraid,” and yet we are so often fearful. In 1951, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow noted that America was consumed with an epidemic of fear. “Around us all is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and the fury of the A-bombs, the hell bombs, or whatever may be coming…” In response, he invited Americans of all kinds, famous and not, younger and older, to speak about the beliefs that held them together.
The idea came from Murrow's friend Ward Wheelock, “a Philadelphia advertising executive. He was a decorated veteran of both world wars who made his fortune selling Campbell Soup and Whitman's chocolates to America…with Murrow's fame and Wheelock's fortune and the support of the CBS network, This I Believe hit the airwaves in 1951 and continued until 1955 with more than a thousand essayists. It became a cultural phenomenon, 39-million Americans listening to its daily broadcast or reading a weekly column that appeared in newspapers around the country.”
Ordinary people set down their fear and heard others talk about how they made a difference in the world, cultivated their beliefs, and worked hard to make the world less fearful. As followers of Jesus, we can do the same in living our faith.
* * *
John 20:1-18
Noise and Silence
One of the exquisite contrasts between Good Friday and Easter morning is in the quiet of that early morning. Very little is said when Mary and the other disciples find the tomb empty, and for some reason, I picture Mary crying quietly. Not huge sobs, but the quiet tears of another disappointment for an already weary heart. On Good Friday, we can hear the crowds jeering, the thieves mocking Jesus, and the soldiers loudly going about their work. Easter is quiet.
As we move toward Easter, Gal Beckerman notes that, “Ours is a noisy country. We’ve been rebellious, insolent shouters since the beginning. We invent freak shows and circuses and casinos. Talk too loud. Our public spaces honk and whistle at us. We believe ourselves stars just awaiting a stage. We’re a people, Walt Whitman crooned, “singing, with open mouths,” our “strong melodious songs.” We chew with open mouths, too — we’re without pretense or much regard for personal space. Our latest, greatest gift to the world is a computer for your pocket that chatters at you all day long. And then there’s the past two years: political and technological churn, offense and outrage. Noise incarnate.”
We need the silence of Easter for renewal and rebirth.
And then we can’t stay there. Easter morning is soon filled with the angels speaking and then shouts of disbelief, surprise and joy. Beckerman says, “Visions of total unplugging also seem a bit grotesque. Even if we can still shut our eyes and cover our ears, become details of the landscape, should we? Is it morally acceptable at this moment?”
Something within us can be renewed in silence, and then we turn back to the world that Jesus loved enough to love in, to put our resurrected spirits back to work.
* * *
John 20:1-18 or Matthew 28:1-10
Fake Resurrection
Work will be our salvation, or so we have been told. Derek Thompson says, “As the managerial revolution created a sense of professional progress, the decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many highly educated workers in the white-collar economy feel that their job cannot be “just a job” and that their career cannot be “just a career:” Their job must be their calling.”
This is our new religion, Thompson says. “I call this new religion “workism.” Workism is not a simple evil or virtue; rather, it’s a complex phenomenon. It is rooted in the belief that work can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion: community, meaning, self-actualization.”
The beauty of Easter calls us out of our narrow focus on work — and all the other false gods. The quiet of the garden in John or the showy commotion of the angels in Matthew lift us out of our human routines, and back into the transcendent presence of God. The God who shows up in storms and with angels, or in the quiet of a garden, is too big of a God to let us think that work, or any other human invention, can save us.
* * * * * *
From team member Tom Willadsen:
Matthew 28:1-10
Who’s afraid?
It’s interesting to note that the guards “became like dead men” because they were afraid, whereas the women do not. Of course, the angel began by saying to the women, “Do not be afraid,” which is how angels usually begin their speeches because angels are scary!
* * *
Matthew 28:1-10
An envelope/inclusion
The angel’s admonition to the women, “Do not be afraid,” functions as a literary envelope. Envelopes are devices that repeat words or ideas that appear earlier in a written work. Compare Matthew 28:5 with Luke 2:10, “Do not be afraid; for see — I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people.” (NRSV) If these words sound familiar to worshipers it’s because they heard them last December when Linus recited them at the end of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
* * *
Matthew 28:1-10
Jesus vs. the angel
It’s interesting to compare the angel’s speech to the women to Jesus’; the angel’s is much longer. They both begin with “Do not be afraid.” Fear is part of the stunning news of the resurrection. Do not overlook it. While many worshipers will be ready to jump right into shouts of “Christ is risen!” a goodly number will still be back at the desolation of the cross and the horror of Christ dying so publicly and vulnerably. The women have to be told by both of the messengers of the resurrection to not be afraid. This stunning news comes to them in a time and place where following Jesus is perilous. It’s not all joy, balloons, and jelly beans for them.
* * *
Acts 10:34-43
Lord of all
Peter uses the title “Lord of all” in v. 36. This title is also used for pagan gods, Roman emperors, and the Lord. Earlier in his speech Peter makes it clear that God’s love and grace include people of all nations and ethnicities. Peter’s use of the title “Lord of all” is another subtle clue of God’s inclusive, expansive love.
* * *
Acts 10:34-43
Hanging on a tree
Peter uses the term “tree” for cross in his speech before the Council in Acts 5. Paul does the same in his sermon in Antioch in Pisidia, recorded in Acts 13:29. This is no accident, nor is it merely a clever, colloquial way to refer to the cross.
Deuteronomy 21:22-23, NVRSUA reads,
When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed and you hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you must bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you for possession.
This is an echo to Jesus’ being taken off the cross and buried hastily on Good Friday. Clearly, Joseph of Arimathea was aware of this passage when he approached Pilate in Matthew 27:28.
* * *
Colossians 3:1-4
Hidden/revealed
Colossians 3:3 is the only place in the New Testament where the concept of being hidden in Christ appears. The phrase may indicate that those who are dead remain dead until Christ returns. The New Testament offers several different scenarios for what happens to the bodies of Christians who die before Christ returns. This image offers a nice counterpoint to Christ’s burial on Friday and resurrection on Sunday morning.
* * * * * *
From team member Dean Feldmeyer:
If the only thing Easter is about is the reanimation of a corpse 2,000 years ago, then we have missed the central message of this glorious day. That Easter marks the victory over the death of our physical body is worth celebrating, to be sure. But there are other kinds of deaths that are just as life-ending and from which the Easter story can deliver us. Despair, hopelessness, addiction, hate, prejudice, failure, injury, abandonment, and a host of other human experiences can, like metaphorical deaths, mean the end of our lives or, through the promise of Easter, they can mean new beginnings. One of the greatest promises of Easter is the promise of a second chance.
These six stories from the Guardian’s Sunday, Nov. 3, 2019 edition help illustrate the reality of second chances and how the promise of Easter is an ever present reality in every life.
* * *
Qusay Hussein: injured by a bomb in Iraq, rescued by Médecins Sans Frontières
Qusay Hussein lived in the small village of on the edge of Mosul, Iraq, but when the war started in 2003 and a famine destroyed his family farm, his family had to move to Hatra when he was 15.
On August 3, 2006, he and his friends were playing volleyball and a crowd had gathered to watch. As they were enjoying the evening a suicide bomber drove a truck into the midst of the crowd and set off a bomb. He remembers bodies and cars flying through the air as everything went dark.
Qusay was severely injured, along with various lacerations and broken bones, his nose and cheek had been torn off, but his father found him and drove him to a clinic where they told him there was no hope for his son; he would be dead inside of an hour. So, his father loaded him into a car and headed for Mosul. They were stopped by American soldiers who gave him a tranquilizer and air-lifted him to a hospital
After 14 days in a coma, it was determined that his injuries were so extensive that neither the American Army Hospital nor the Iraqi doctors had the resources to help him, so they turned to Médecins Sans Frontières who took him to Amman, Jordan, where he spent three years rehabilitating.
Today, Qusay lives in Austin, Texas, a war refugee, where he has completed his degree at the University of Texas. “I’m hopeful about the future,” he says. “If what I’ve been through has taught me anything, it is that you should take every opportunity that comes.”
* * *
Kathy Pannozzi: former nun who found the love of her life at her local church
A lot of people were surprised when Kathy Pannozzi entered the convent at the age of 18. She was popular in high school, had boyfriends, and loved to talk. Life at the Sisters of Mercy convent in Providence, RI, would be a lot different. There would be lots of silence involved in being a nun and, of course, there are the vows: poverty, obedience, and celibacy.
Nevertheless, she says, she embraced every aspect of being a nun, following in the footsteps of her sixth-grade teacher and role model, Sister Maura, with whom she’d stayed in touch. This was the 60s and she liked to think of the life of a nun as its own kind of counter-culture statement.
After three years of training at the convent and two years at an all women college, she took a teaching position and, eventually, took her vows, committing herself fully to the life of a nun.
Then, five years later, Father Frank came to the local parish where she and the other sisters who shared an apartment went to mass. She liked Frank. He was good looking, preached good sermons, and valued her opinions when the chatted over coffee. They became good friends.
And friends they remained for two-and-a-half years until 1980 when her mentor, Sister Maura, became seriously ill and was hospitalized. Kathy realized that she had never told Maura how much she meant to her and how much she loved her. She went to see her that night.
The next day, she had a rare moment alone with Frank. They were picking apples and she told him about her feelings about Sister Maura. Frank looked at her and said, “Kathy, that’s how I feel about you.” Less than a year later, they were married.
Says Kathy: “Before then, I questioned my vows and my relationship to God. It took time, but I came to the conclusion I stick by today: being a Sister of Mercy was a gift from God, and so, too, was Frank appearing. I could take or leave either, to God it didn’t matter, because God is in the people all around us. I opted for Frank and I have not one regret. It’s 38 years since our wedding, and he’s a gift that just keeps on giving.”
* * *
Dwayne Fields: victim of gang crime who became an explorer and naturalist
Dwayne Fields recounts his life in Stoke Newington, London: “I’ve never carried a knife or a gun. But as I know too well, that doesn’t guarantee freedom from the violence. I’ve got two stab wounds on my body; I’ve been held at gunpoint on at least three occasions…One time I was walking with a friend through an estate in Tottenham and woke up waiting for an ambulance to collect me with one stab wound in my stomach and another in my chest. After that, people around me were saying we should catch up with my attackers and get them. There was pressure to get revenge.”
But Dwayne took a different route after nearly being shot in another altercation over a stolen moped.
Life on the street clearly wasn’t working so he decided to create another life for himself. He recalled his life as a 7-year-old in Jamaica and how he loved being out in nature. He wanted to recapture that feeling so he signed up for a 10k run. After successfully completing that he completed the Three Peaks Challenge, a hiking event that tests the hiker’s stamina, endurance, and resilience. He applied to join James Cracknell and Ben Fogle on a trip to the South Pole but he was too late; he was offered the North Pole instead and he accepted. Since then, he has circumnavigated Jamaica by kayak, run ultra-marathons, and trekked across the Sinai desert.
“The adventures and expeditions are great,” he says. “I can see the world and tell stories — but doing them also helps me show others how to live their best lives, too. I’ve been given a second, third, fourth chance. You need to seize them. As I tell everyone, you never know if you’ll get one again.”
* * *
Jan Jacobs: realized she was gay at the age of 50 and started a new life
Jan Jacobs had been seeing a counselor for years but nothing was helping the discomfort she was feeling deep inside herself. She couldn’t put her finger on it but she just wasn’t happy with the life that she was supposed to be happy with.
She loved her husband, Chris. They were about to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Their daughter was away at college and loving her life there. But something just wasn’t right. She loved Chris but she wasn’t “in love” with him. Her daughter was comfortable with her bi-sexuality, even celebrating it at the Pride parade.
But Jan was just, basically unhappy.
After a weekend away with her girlfriends, she came home, still feeling that uneasiness and went to her counselor. “And then I heard these words coming from my mouth,” she says. “As if another person inside me was speaking: ‘I think I’m gay.’”
Suddenly, she says, it was as though a weight was lifted from her shoulders. She felt lighter, freer. She began telling her friends and with each disclosure, she felt more affirmed. She was emerging.
Eventually, she was confronted by her husband, who could tell that something had changed between them. He had a hard time hearing her disclosure but, gradually, came to accept it.
Now, feeling all alone and not knowing any other gay people, she ventured out to a lesbian club someone told her about but, being an introvert, she was not comfortable with that scene.
A friend told her about a woman named Sarah who she’d known for a long time. Sarah came out when she was 12, so they were introduced and became fast friends, then, after many meetings over coffee and long talks into the night and a few stay-over’s, they realized they were in love.
Today, they are a married couple. Says Jan: “The feeling of being loved and being in love is still so special to me. I feel like the luckiest woman in the world.”
* * *
Michelle Dorrell: was in the audience at Question Time and then decided to enter politics
Michelle Dorrell knew, just knew that people like her and her soon-to-be husband don’t ever get heard or cared about by politicians. So, when the TV program Question Time announced that they were coming to Dover, just down the road from them, they thought it would be a laugh to apply for tickets to be in the studio audience.
She had been through a long rough patch in the few years up to that time. A divorced single mother of four children, she had lost her job where she had worked for more than 15 years. She couldn’t pay her rent and she had been sorely disappointed by the politicians who she had voted for who made promises to help but didn’t keep them.
Still, she had no intention of speaking when she took her seat in the studio audience. She didn’t want to embarrass herself. But something just happened when Amber Rudd, M.P. started speaking about bringing the country economic security. A ball of anxiety and frustration and anger exploded from Michelle’s mouth. She stood and said she had voted for Rudd and that she believed their promises and they betrayed her.
Her outburst went out live on the BBC.
For the next few days, every newspaper, TV station, and radio show was calling her. Reporters showed up at her door. She was a phenomenon. When things died down, she started reading more. She met with politicians from different parties and got involved in her local Labor party but stayed on the fringes at first while she “learned to believe in herself.”
A year later she was elected councilor to her local city government, the equivalent of our city council.
She sums up her experience this way: “It feels so wonderful to finally feel that things I say are worth hearing. For a long time, I felt worthless. Now I’m making sure I, and my local community, have a voice. I wouldn’t have believed a word of it if you’d told me all this when we applied to be in the Question Time audience. It’s bizarre how something so little ended up changing so much.”
* * *
Colin Thackery: Chelsea Pensioner who won Britain’s Got Talent at the age of 89
Colin Thackery joined the army when he was 15 years old and made it his life. He met his wife, Joan, there and when he retired at 40, he was apprehensive about his future but he knew that, with Joan by his side, they’d be just fine.
And they were. They lived and loved and raised two children and grew old together and then, after 66 years of marriage, Joan died and Colin felt that same apprehension about the future, only Joan wasn’t at his side anymore.
Feeling lost and out of sorts without Joan, Colin turned to music, which had been he and Joan’s passion. They had been in Army bands and choirs and he and Joan had belonged to an operatic society near their home. Now, after moving into a senior living center at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, he and a friend began entertaining the other residents with songs on Friday nights and he found that performing the music lifted his spirits.
Stepping off the stage one evening, a man from the audience told him that Britain’s Got Talent had opened auditions, and suggested he apply. He demurred. Why would they want an old man like him. But the man dared him to apply and, never one to turn down a dare, he did.
There was an audition and he was called back, then another, and another, and, the next thing he knew, he was singing in front of a packed house at the London Palladium with his family members screaming their enthusiastic support from the audience.
When the final round came and he won, the applause and cheering was so loud he had to ask the host what was happening. When Declan Donnelly told him “You’ve won!” he could hardly believe it. He was in a daze.
He says that was the beginning of a whole new life for him at the age of 89. There was a spot on the Royal Variety Show and he is now the oldest person in the world ever to sign a record deal. His goal is to sing before the king.
“If I was a teenager,” he muses, “I’m sure I’d be hungry for a huge career, but I’m just enjoying it. It’s never too late, I’ve learned, to do what you love. Just a few years ago I thought everything was over, and now I’m a pop sensation!”
* * * * * *
WORSHIP
by George Reed
Call to Worship
One: O give thanks to God who is good.
All: God’s steadfast love endures forever!
One: God is our strength and our might.
All: God has become our salvation.
One: This is the day that God has made.
All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
OR
One: Alleluia! Christ is risen!
All: Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia!
One: Out of the trauma of execution he rises triumphant.
All: Out of death he comes to life that is eternal.
One: In Christ’s victory of death we are all made alive.
All: Glory to the one who brings us all to life.
One: Alleluia! Christ is risen!
All: Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia!
Hymns and Songs
Christ the Lord Is Rise Today
UMH: 302
H82: 188/189
PH: 113
GTG: 245
AAHH: 282
NNBH: 121
NCH: 233
LBW: 130
ELW: 369/373
W&P: 288
AMEC: 156
STLT: 268
The Day of Resurrection
UMH: 303
H82: 210
PH: 118
GTG: 233
NNBH: 124
NCH: 245
CH: 228
LBW: 141
ELW: 361
W&P: 298
AMEC: 259/160
Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise
UMH: 312
H82: 214
NCH: 260
W&P: 323
There Is a Balm in Gilead
UMH: 375
H82: 676
PH: 394
GTG: 792
AAHH: 524
NNBH: 489
NCH: 553
CH: 501
ELW: 614
W&P: 631
AMEC: 425
Spirit Song
UMH: 347
AAHH: 321
CH: 352
W&P: 352
CCB: 51
Renew: 248
Where Charity and Love Prevail
UMH: 549
H82: 581
GTG: 316
NCH: 396
LBW: 126
ELW: 359
Help Us Accept Each Other
UMH: 560
PH: 358
GTG: 754
NCH: 388
CH: 487
W&P: 596
AMEC: 558
Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation
UMH: 559
H82: 518
PH: 416/417
GTG: 394
NCH: 400
CH: 275
LBW: 367
ELW: 645
AMEC: 518
I Come with Joy
UMH: 617
H82: 304
PH: 507
NCH: 349
CH: 420
ELW: 482
W&P: 706
Renew: 195
One Bread, One Body
UMH: 620
GTG: 530
CH: 393
ELW: 496
W&P: 689
They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love
CCB: 78
Lord, I Lift Your Name on High
CCB: 36
Renew: 4
Music Resources Key
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
H82: The Hymnal 1982
PH: Presbyterian Hymnal
GTG: Glory to God, The Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African American Heritage Hymnal
NNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
NCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
LBW: Lutheran Book of Worship
ELW: Evangelical Lutheran Worship
W&P: Worship & Praise
AMEC: African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal
STLT: Singing the Living Tradition
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
Renew: Renew! Songs & Hymns for Blended Worship
Prayer for the Day/Collect
O God who brings life out of death and healing out of trauma:
Grant us the faith to trust that you are with us in our darkest times
and that new life and healing are your gifts to us always;
through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We praise you, O God, because out of death and trauma you bring new life and healing. When things look the darkest you bring light. Strengthen our faith that we might trust you always be bring gifts of new life and healing when we need them most. Amen.
Prayer of Confession
One: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially our failure to trust in the new things God is bringing to life.
All: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We have forgotten that you are the God of life and that you are in the business of bringing new life to all creation. We look around us at your creation and see that everything participates in your cycle of birth, death, and rebirth and yet we fail to believe it about ourselves. We fear the little deaths of failure and disruption and we are petrified of our own mortality. Forgive us and renew our faith that we may trust you to bring new life out of the tombs of our lives. Amen.
One: God is the God of life and desires to share life with all creation. Nothing is beyond the reach of God’s love and power which renews all that God has created.
Prayers of the People
Blessed are you, O God of life who breathes into all creation your own life. You are the one who has defeated death forever.
(The following paragraph may be used if a separate prayer of confession has not been used.)
We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We have forgotten that you are the God of life and that you are in the business of bringing new life to all creation. We look around us at your creation and see that everything participates in your cycle of birth, death, and rebirth and yet we fail to believe it about ourselves. We fear the little deaths of failure and disruption and we are petrified of our own mortality. Forgive us and renew our faith that we may trust you to bring new life out of the tombs of our lives.
We give you thanks for the wonders of your creation which constantly gives birth to new things which live, die, and are reborn. We thank you for the constant reminder that you are the God of the living and all are alive to you. We thank you for the witness of your people to your constant love and care. We thank you for your Spirit that dwells within us and among us and for Jesus who came to witness to your love for us. We thank you for our victory in his triumph over death.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for one another in our need. We pray for those feel they are caught in patterns of death that they cannot escape. We pray for that your message of life out of death may be heard throughout all creation.
(Other intercessions may be offered.)
All these things we ask in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ who taught us to pray saying:
Our Father....Amen.
(Or if the Our Father is not used at this point in the service.)
All this we ask in the name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Amen.
* * * * * *
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Jesus the Gardener
by Katy Stenta
John 20:1-18
Bring a flower in a pot
In this story of Jesus being resurrected, Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener, why do you think that is?
Could it be Jesus was bent over, tending the garden like this when he was talking to Mary at first? This makes sense because God was our first gardener. The very first thing God created for humans was the Garden of Eden, wasn’t it?
He asks what is going on? (Mimic Jesus by tending the plant while you say this.)
And Mary says, “I am very sad because my friend and teacher is dead?”
Mary is distracted, so she doesn’t really recognize Jesus’s voice or appearance.
And then Jesus looks up and says, “Mary?”
And Mary says, “Jesus! Teacher!”
And then Jesus tells her that he won’t be staying forever, but she is to go and tell all his other friends and disciples what she has seen.
It feels so good to know that Jesus tends to us and the garden on Easter.
Let’s pray:
Jesus,
Thank you
for tending to us
and your gardens
on Easter.
Help us
to recognize you
and your resurrection.
In Jesus’s name we pray.
Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, April 9, 2023 issue.
Copyright 2023 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
- Resurrection Tears by Chris Keating. Easter begins by peering into the tombs where trauma has lingered for too long.
- Second Thoughts: Calling Profane What God has Already Made Clean by Elena Delhagen based on Acts 10:34-43.
- Sermon illustrations by Mary Austin, Tom Willadsen, and Dean Feldmeyer.
- Worship resources by George Reed.
- Children's sermon: Jesus the Gardner by Katy Stenta.
Resurrection TearsBy Chris Keating
John 20:1-18
For John, Easter morning begins with more perspiration than brassy proclamations or joyful fanfares. Mary’s startling discovery propels her across the starting line of the first-ever Easter 10K race. She turns and runs from the empty tomb, dashing to find Peter and John. But these guys are no help. After sprinting into action, they limp back home unsure of what to think or believe. Easter begins in the shadows of trauma, where weeping, confusion, and sadness keep us from finding hope.
Sweat and tear-stained cheeks do not fare well when compared to brightly colored eggs and eye-popping treats. After all, we all know better than to run around in our new Easter outfits. We would much prefer the day to be filled with chocolate eggs, short sermons, platters of ham, and champagne cocktails. Instead, we find ourselves surrounded by dejected and uncertain disciples.
Like Peter and John, we may think we can outrun trauma, but the truth is that we are all enmeshed in its tangled web. Matthew Thompson, editor of the New York Times’ Headway initiative, muses that we live in a time marked by the “omnipresence of disaster.” Plagues, pandemics, mass violence, natural disasters, tainted water and air crash into each other, he tells us. It is as if we are all stuck in the spin cycle of trauma.
There are plenty of examples. The (latest) school shooting in Nashville, TN, March 29 was the 130th mass shooting in 2023, depending on how you keep score. Just about one per day so far. But wait, there’s more! We’ve also experienced 300 tornadoes since January 1. While not officially diagnosed, there is no doubt that racial trauma continues unabated. It is no wonder that Merriam-Webster chose “gaslighting” as its word of the year in 2022. We’re facing a new reckoning with how trauma is defined and how it impacts our daily lives.
That may seem like bad news. But to paraphrase the late Frederick Buechner, Easter is bad news before it becomes good news. While it’s hard to square that truth against jellybeans and sugar enhanced Peeps, it is a promise that will help move from grief toward resurrection hope. Long before we can shout, “He is risen!” we must first hear Jesus ask us, “Why are you weeping?”
In the News
Shelly Rambo is a theologian who explores the intersections between trauma theory and theology. She describes how many trauma survivors often feel as if they are “locked in an indefinable middle” space that is somewhere between death and life. (Rambo, 2005) “The middle space,” she writes “is the space of despair, of the impossibility of life coming after devastating violence,” Rambo wrote those words in an article published in 2005 (Studies of Christian Ethics).
That may seem like a lifetime ago. After all, it was just a few months before Katrina crashed against the gulf shore. Years would pass before the ghastly shootings at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, among others. In 2005, nine years would still elapse before the youngest of the Uvalde massacre victims would be born.
Yet we are still stuck in that familiar middle space, which Rambo now often calls our Holy Saturday moment, where we are living beyond death but can not quite figure out life.
In that space our tears, like Mary, fall like streams of rushing water. Most recently, we entered that space following the March 24th mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, TN, a private Christian school related to the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA). The shooter used two “assault-style” weapons and a handgun in the shooting, all of which were purchased legally. Additional weapons were found in the shooter’s home according to police.
Like all mass shootings, the trauma associated with the Nashville incident is raw and multilayered. The shooter had apparently been under the care of a physician for an “emotional disorder,” and kept her arsenal of weapons concealed from her parents. But Tennessee law does not prohibit persons with mental illness from owning weapons if the person has not been “judicially committed to a mental institution.” The pathways into trauma are many.
“Our police officers have cried and are crying with Nashville and the world. I have cried and continue to cry and I have prayed for Nashville as well,” said Nashville Metro Police Department Chief John Drake.
Of course, trauma is not limited to mass shootings. Tornadoes tear apart homes and lives, and floods prove overwhelming. So far in 2023, there have been more than 300 tornadoes, at least 100 more than normal for this time of year. The mid-Mississippi River Valley region took the brunt of the storms on Friday, and could be the scene for more bad weather this week.
The cost of rebuilding homes and lives following natural disasters is staggering. Experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can further disrupt the lives of natural disaster survivors. Following the recent tornados in Rolling Fork, MS, residents came together to clean up homes and businesses. But many had problems making ends meet before the late March storm. “I can’t put it to words,” one resident told CBS news. “It’s unbelievable.”
Jeremy Grayson said that following the storm, the only sounds he could hear were survivors calling for help. But Grayson wonders where residents will find long-term help. The town of Rolling Fork is located within Sharkey County, where 35% of residents live below the poverty line, and many simply lack the resources to move out of the middle space between life and death.
The trauma of these events seems unending. Indeed, in 2022, more than 104 million persons across the United States experienced record-breaking heat on a single day. Ninety-percent of US counties have experienced some sort of weather disaster in the past ten years. The growing number of events call us to become communities of resilience.
“We have to make sure that homes are more resilient to flooding and manage the flow of water. These hurricanes are becoming stronger and lasting longer,” said Rep. Maxwell A. Frost of Florida. “The cost of not doing anything is far greater than the cost of making bold moves right now.”
Yet those living in the immediate aftershock of trauma may not have the emotional capital available to invest in public policy. The repeated wounding of trauma demolishes relationships with others and fragments communities. “Disaster is so ubiquitous that the idea of an aftermath has started to lose its meaning,” writes the NY Times’ editor Matthew Robinson. “Covid’s brutal, blurry slide from pandemic to endemic is an example that underscores one defining truth of our reality: Our disasters don’t exactly end; they evolve. And if we are to outlast them, so must we.”
We are all witnesses to trauma. As Shelly Rambo wondered years ago, the question for people of faith becomes one of discovering how our tears and turning from death might help allow for hope to be born. “Can life come after such a radical shattering of the self?” Rambo wrote in 2005. “It is not about simple seeing or hearing,” she wrote. If recovery is to occur, if resurrection is to be experienced, there needs to be thoughtful consideration paid to the experience of trauma.
It's possible, says Rambo, that Mary Magdalene might be just the person who can teach us what it means to move from the grips of death into resurrection life.
In the Scriptures
John’s story of the resurrection begins, appropriately, “while it was still dark.” The metaphor of lightness and darkness has spanned the entirety of John’s gospel, and its appearance here is no surprise. As Karoline Lewis has pointed out, the darkness at the tomb indicates that “full recognition and belief are yet to come.” (Lewis, John, Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentary, 2014). Despite all the running around that first Easter, John’s pacing is deliberate. The story moves gradually from the darkness of disbelief into the full recognition of Jesus, the light of the world.
Mary sees that the stone covering the opening of the tomb has been moved. But either the darkness of early morning or the darkness of her spiritual vision keeps Mary from understanding what has happened. Has his body been stolen? Did the army take him away? As grief is rekindled in her, Mary rushes back to find Peter and John.
When she finds them she mistakenly reports that Jesus’ body has been moved. Her witness is incomplete, perhaps a result of her own still unprocessed feelings of grief and trauma. Nonetheless, her announcement sounds the alarm and gets Peter and John running. The scene is chaotic, almost comedic, with people running back and forth breathlessly trying to find a missing corpse.
The male disciples depart, but Mary remains. As she weeps, she peers into the tomb. Her grief is real and palpable, as if the empty tomb has rekindled the pain of watching her friend die. The text is clear that her looking and her weeping happen simultaneously. As Rambo (2005) notes “Seeing through the film of tears, Mary’s sight is obstructed, making it difficult for her to be a credible ‘eye-witness’ to the events of the resurrection. She faces an empty tomb weeping in the darkness of morning.”
Yet her weeping releases the fervor of her emotion, preparing her for the stunning surprise that waits. As she encounters the risen Lord, we watch as Mary moves from the nebulous “in between time” into the light of resurrection life.
In the Sermon
The questions prompted by trauma are framed by our sudden awareness that the world is no longer dependable or safe. The predictable world collapses. “When we are overwhelmed,” writes Serene Jones, “what fails us most profoundly is our capacity to use language.” (Jones, Trauma and Grace, 2009, p. 29). It is a landscape familiar to most pastors, and indeed this is one of the challenges posed by preaching about trauma. In a stunning new book, Fractured Ground, Kimberly R. Wagner names three less than helpful temptations pastor may encounter: 1) giving in to our own sense of despair, 2) avoidance, perhaps out of fear that it will make people uncomfortable, and 3) pushing past the pain with “sacred optimism,” filling a sermon with anemic bromides and cliché assurances that “God has got this.” (Wagner, Fractured Ground, 2023, p. 5).
Because trauma, especially mass events like shootings and disasters, happens without warning, Wagner suggests preachers prepare themselves in advance by becoming conversant with the way trauma works. Perhaps revisiting the familiar resurrection story through the lens of trauma-informed preaching may be of help to both the preacher and the congregation. Carefully naming the ways we have all been impacted by mass trauma can aid us in preparing for the wounds that are surely to come.
Begin by not condemning Mary’s tears, nor overlooking them. Instead of hearing Jesus’ question to Mary (“Why are you weeping?”) as criticism, imagine Jesus inviting her to move beyond that middle zone between death and life. Scholars suggest that one of John’s main themes is the call to abide. Here, as Mary weeps, she is invited once more to follow as a disciple. Perhaps even in the traumas of our own lives we may hear the words of the risen Christ, “Who are you looking for?”
There’s the million-dollar question for our Easter worshipers.
Jesus affirms her trauma and offers us the chance to move through the middle zones of life where we may feel dead but are unable to claim life. While Easter zombies will never be as cute as Easter bunnies, they will be present on Easter morning. Our folks will arrive with baskets of grief and unseen scars. By affirming Mary’s experience of trauma, we may encourage those stuck in the similar middle places to encounter the new life of resurrection.
By reminding the congregation that resurrection is neither a quick triumphalist shout that ignores pain, nor a confusing, incoherent symbol distanced from the realities of human life, we can stand beside the empty tombs. Resurrection happens in the moments when tears are shed, and the empty places of life are named. It happens as we hear our names called, and like Mary are invited to move into new life.
* * * * *
SECOND THOUGHTSCalling Profane What God has Already Made Clean
by Elena Delhagen
Acts 10:34-43
Several months ago, I visited Caesarea Maritima in modern-day Israel. As we know from our New Testament text today, it is here where Peter shared the faith with the gentile family of Cornelius after being summoned from Joppa. I urge us to remember, however, that this story doesn’t begin here, in these nine short verses. Acts 10:1-2 introduces Cornelius as one who already believed in and followed the Lord. The only distinction between him and Peter was the fact he was a gentile while Peter was a Jew.
At Caesarea, our tour group began to read aloud the story of Peter and Cornelius from Acts 10. We were a group of nearly forty people, young and old, from countries all around the world. The amphitheater in which we sat was enormous, and after we read the scripture, I began to take notice of other tour groups around us. There was a group of Asian men with earpieces, all listening to a tour guide speak to them in what I believe was Cantonese. There was another gathering of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians in white robes. In that theater were people of every skin color I could imagine, all representing different homelands, different faith traditions, and different languages.
We were, I thought to myself, such a beautiful depiction of Cornelius’ family.
In Acts 10:34, Peter begins to preach the good news to the gentiles. Speaking from personal experience after his vision at Joppa, he proclaims the truth that God shows no partiality. What a revelation! God shows no partiality — none! God’s immense, wide-reaching welcome of saving grace to anyone and everyone willing to hear it.
Later, after hearing Peter preach, the gentiles who were gathered there were baptized by the Holy Spirit. Acts 10:45 says that the “circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the gentiles.” Even them, God? Your mercy is even for them?
How many groups of people do Christians today categorize the same way, othering them and believing that the ways in which they might be different can somehow prohibit them from the power of the Gospel? Too often, we are just like Peter, calling profane what God has already made clean.
More and more, conservative Christian groups are funneling millions of dollars into limiting LGBTQ+ rights in the United States, as evidenced by the recent wave of anti-trans legislation being introduced in courts across the country. On the Wednesday before Holy Week, the Kentucky Senate voted to override Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear's veto of Senate Bill 150, one of the nation’s toughest anti-trans laws. Little more than 30 minutes later, the House did the same — making it law.
The law:
- Prohibits conversations around sexual orientation or gender identity in schools, regardless of what grade students are in
- Requires school districts to forbid trans students from using the bathroom tied to their gender identities
- Gives teachers the freedom to refrain from using a student’s preferred pronouns
- Bans all gender-affirming medical care for trans youth
- Requires doctors to de-transition minors in their care if they’re using any of the restricted treatment options
Transgender individuals are mocked, stigmatized, discriminated against, and denied access to quality healthcare and other basic human rights all across thiw country. Conservative Christians lump trans people into groups and call them unclean and abnormal, and they demand trans people conform in order to be accepted. Yet God shows no partiality! Just as Cornelius was claimed and made clean by God, so are our trans brothers and sisters. The Gospel is for all people — and all means all! It stretches far wider than any box we may construct to try and contain it. The beloved community of God is made up of those from all races and ethnicities, all ages and genders, all socioeconomic classes, all sexualities, “all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9). The Gospel is so much bigger than we give it credit for!
We are far too often prone to holding tight to our circles, the ones we’ve drawn that proclaim who’s in and who’s out, and all the while, God’s Spirit comes and blows everything wide open. And we, like those gathered in Acts, are astonished. Even them? Who we thought was out was in. What we named dirty is called clean. We all have a seat at the table; we all are accepted and chosen by God.
And that, my friends, is the good, good news of Easter.
ILLUSTRATIONS
From team member Mary Austin:Matthew 28:1-10
A Permanent State of Resurrection
“Don’t be afraid” are practically the first words that the risen Christ speaks, as Matthew tells it. We are afraid of death (although we fear public speaking even more than we fear dying) and resurrection is scary, too.
Novelist John Updike reminds us that both are more common than we realize. “Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? It is even possible to dislike our old selves, those disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot.”
Resurrection comes daily, by the grace of God.
* * *
Matthew 28:1-10
Fearlessness
Fear is the subtext of Matthew’s good news. Both the angels and Jesus himself say, “do not be afraid,” suggesting that everyone’s first response to the resurrection is fear. To take in the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, first they have to set aside their fear.
Thinker Margaret Wheatley says that we need names in the world that “demand fearlessness.” She adds, “You're a coach. You're an executive. You're a consultant. You're a teacher. You're a minister. You're a hospital administrator. You're a civil servant. Are those names demanding fearlessness of us?” Even our descriptions of ourselves are too small. “So, we call ourselves, 'cancer survivors;' that seems to be a very bold name, but is it big enough to hold a life? Or 'children of abuse.' Or we call ourselves 'orphans,' or 'widows,' or 'martyrs'.... are these names big enough to hold your life?”
Jesus tells his friends how to get out of their fear: “go” and “tell” are his instructions. Similarly, Wheatley says, “Our fear is based on wanting to protect and defend ourselves. And a lot of fear arises when we're so focused on ourselves that we lose our engagement with the world. If the way out of fearfulness is to stop identifying so terribly with ourselves and with the self that we're trying to protect and defend and nourish, then this leads us into the possibility that the way out of fearfulness is to connect with the greater world.”
The followers of Jesus eventually end up with a new name, finding that their old identities are too small to hold the transforming experience of the resurrection.
* * *
Matthew 28:1-10
This I Believe
How are we to live with fear? Jesus is constantly saying “don’t be afraid,” and yet we are so often fearful. In 1951, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow noted that America was consumed with an epidemic of fear. “Around us all is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and the fury of the A-bombs, the hell bombs, or whatever may be coming…” In response, he invited Americans of all kinds, famous and not, younger and older, to speak about the beliefs that held them together.
The idea came from Murrow's friend Ward Wheelock, “a Philadelphia advertising executive. He was a decorated veteran of both world wars who made his fortune selling Campbell Soup and Whitman's chocolates to America…with Murrow's fame and Wheelock's fortune and the support of the CBS network, This I Believe hit the airwaves in 1951 and continued until 1955 with more than a thousand essayists. It became a cultural phenomenon, 39-million Americans listening to its daily broadcast or reading a weekly column that appeared in newspapers around the country.”
Ordinary people set down their fear and heard others talk about how they made a difference in the world, cultivated their beliefs, and worked hard to make the world less fearful. As followers of Jesus, we can do the same in living our faith.
* * *
John 20:1-18
Noise and Silence
One of the exquisite contrasts between Good Friday and Easter morning is in the quiet of that early morning. Very little is said when Mary and the other disciples find the tomb empty, and for some reason, I picture Mary crying quietly. Not huge sobs, but the quiet tears of another disappointment for an already weary heart. On Good Friday, we can hear the crowds jeering, the thieves mocking Jesus, and the soldiers loudly going about their work. Easter is quiet.
As we move toward Easter, Gal Beckerman notes that, “Ours is a noisy country. We’ve been rebellious, insolent shouters since the beginning. We invent freak shows and circuses and casinos. Talk too loud. Our public spaces honk and whistle at us. We believe ourselves stars just awaiting a stage. We’re a people, Walt Whitman crooned, “singing, with open mouths,” our “strong melodious songs.” We chew with open mouths, too — we’re without pretense or much regard for personal space. Our latest, greatest gift to the world is a computer for your pocket that chatters at you all day long. And then there’s the past two years: political and technological churn, offense and outrage. Noise incarnate.”
We need the silence of Easter for renewal and rebirth.
And then we can’t stay there. Easter morning is soon filled with the angels speaking and then shouts of disbelief, surprise and joy. Beckerman says, “Visions of total unplugging also seem a bit grotesque. Even if we can still shut our eyes and cover our ears, become details of the landscape, should we? Is it morally acceptable at this moment?”
Something within us can be renewed in silence, and then we turn back to the world that Jesus loved enough to love in, to put our resurrected spirits back to work.
* * *
John 20:1-18 or Matthew 28:1-10
Fake Resurrection
Work will be our salvation, or so we have been told. Derek Thompson says, “As the managerial revolution created a sense of professional progress, the decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many highly educated workers in the white-collar economy feel that their job cannot be “just a job” and that their career cannot be “just a career:” Their job must be their calling.”
This is our new religion, Thompson says. “I call this new religion “workism.” Workism is not a simple evil or virtue; rather, it’s a complex phenomenon. It is rooted in the belief that work can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion: community, meaning, self-actualization.”
The beauty of Easter calls us out of our narrow focus on work — and all the other false gods. The quiet of the garden in John or the showy commotion of the angels in Matthew lift us out of our human routines, and back into the transcendent presence of God. The God who shows up in storms and with angels, or in the quiet of a garden, is too big of a God to let us think that work, or any other human invention, can save us.
* * * * * *
From team member Tom Willadsen:Matthew 28:1-10
Who’s afraid?
It’s interesting to note that the guards “became like dead men” because they were afraid, whereas the women do not. Of course, the angel began by saying to the women, “Do not be afraid,” which is how angels usually begin their speeches because angels are scary!
* * *
Matthew 28:1-10
An envelope/inclusion
The angel’s admonition to the women, “Do not be afraid,” functions as a literary envelope. Envelopes are devices that repeat words or ideas that appear earlier in a written work. Compare Matthew 28:5 with Luke 2:10, “Do not be afraid; for see — I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people.” (NRSV) If these words sound familiar to worshipers it’s because they heard them last December when Linus recited them at the end of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
* * *
Matthew 28:1-10
Jesus vs. the angel
It’s interesting to compare the angel’s speech to the women to Jesus’; the angel’s is much longer. They both begin with “Do not be afraid.” Fear is part of the stunning news of the resurrection. Do not overlook it. While many worshipers will be ready to jump right into shouts of “Christ is risen!” a goodly number will still be back at the desolation of the cross and the horror of Christ dying so publicly and vulnerably. The women have to be told by both of the messengers of the resurrection to not be afraid. This stunning news comes to them in a time and place where following Jesus is perilous. It’s not all joy, balloons, and jelly beans for them.
* * *
Acts 10:34-43
Lord of all
Peter uses the title “Lord of all” in v. 36. This title is also used for pagan gods, Roman emperors, and the Lord. Earlier in his speech Peter makes it clear that God’s love and grace include people of all nations and ethnicities. Peter’s use of the title “Lord of all” is another subtle clue of God’s inclusive, expansive love.
* * *
Acts 10:34-43
Hanging on a tree
Peter uses the term “tree” for cross in his speech before the Council in Acts 5. Paul does the same in his sermon in Antioch in Pisidia, recorded in Acts 13:29. This is no accident, nor is it merely a clever, colloquial way to refer to the cross.
Deuteronomy 21:22-23, NVRSUA reads,
When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed and you hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you must bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you for possession.
This is an echo to Jesus’ being taken off the cross and buried hastily on Good Friday. Clearly, Joseph of Arimathea was aware of this passage when he approached Pilate in Matthew 27:28.
* * *
Colossians 3:1-4
Hidden/revealed
Colossians 3:3 is the only place in the New Testament where the concept of being hidden in Christ appears. The phrase may indicate that those who are dead remain dead until Christ returns. The New Testament offers several different scenarios for what happens to the bodies of Christians who die before Christ returns. This image offers a nice counterpoint to Christ’s burial on Friday and resurrection on Sunday morning.
* * * * * *
From team member Dean Feldmeyer:If the only thing Easter is about is the reanimation of a corpse 2,000 years ago, then we have missed the central message of this glorious day. That Easter marks the victory over the death of our physical body is worth celebrating, to be sure. But there are other kinds of deaths that are just as life-ending and from which the Easter story can deliver us. Despair, hopelessness, addiction, hate, prejudice, failure, injury, abandonment, and a host of other human experiences can, like metaphorical deaths, mean the end of our lives or, through the promise of Easter, they can mean new beginnings. One of the greatest promises of Easter is the promise of a second chance.
These six stories from the Guardian’s Sunday, Nov. 3, 2019 edition help illustrate the reality of second chances and how the promise of Easter is an ever present reality in every life.
* * *
Qusay Hussein: injured by a bomb in Iraq, rescued by Médecins Sans Frontières
Qusay Hussein lived in the small village of on the edge of Mosul, Iraq, but when the war started in 2003 and a famine destroyed his family farm, his family had to move to Hatra when he was 15.
On August 3, 2006, he and his friends were playing volleyball and a crowd had gathered to watch. As they were enjoying the evening a suicide bomber drove a truck into the midst of the crowd and set off a bomb. He remembers bodies and cars flying through the air as everything went dark.
Qusay was severely injured, along with various lacerations and broken bones, his nose and cheek had been torn off, but his father found him and drove him to a clinic where they told him there was no hope for his son; he would be dead inside of an hour. So, his father loaded him into a car and headed for Mosul. They were stopped by American soldiers who gave him a tranquilizer and air-lifted him to a hospital
After 14 days in a coma, it was determined that his injuries were so extensive that neither the American Army Hospital nor the Iraqi doctors had the resources to help him, so they turned to Médecins Sans Frontières who took him to Amman, Jordan, where he spent three years rehabilitating.
Today, Qusay lives in Austin, Texas, a war refugee, where he has completed his degree at the University of Texas. “I’m hopeful about the future,” he says. “If what I’ve been through has taught me anything, it is that you should take every opportunity that comes.”
* * *
Kathy Pannozzi: former nun who found the love of her life at her local church
A lot of people were surprised when Kathy Pannozzi entered the convent at the age of 18. She was popular in high school, had boyfriends, and loved to talk. Life at the Sisters of Mercy convent in Providence, RI, would be a lot different. There would be lots of silence involved in being a nun and, of course, there are the vows: poverty, obedience, and celibacy.
Nevertheless, she says, she embraced every aspect of being a nun, following in the footsteps of her sixth-grade teacher and role model, Sister Maura, with whom she’d stayed in touch. This was the 60s and she liked to think of the life of a nun as its own kind of counter-culture statement.
After three years of training at the convent and two years at an all women college, she took a teaching position and, eventually, took her vows, committing herself fully to the life of a nun.
Then, five years later, Father Frank came to the local parish where she and the other sisters who shared an apartment went to mass. She liked Frank. He was good looking, preached good sermons, and valued her opinions when the chatted over coffee. They became good friends.
And friends they remained for two-and-a-half years until 1980 when her mentor, Sister Maura, became seriously ill and was hospitalized. Kathy realized that she had never told Maura how much she meant to her and how much she loved her. She went to see her that night.
The next day, she had a rare moment alone with Frank. They were picking apples and she told him about her feelings about Sister Maura. Frank looked at her and said, “Kathy, that’s how I feel about you.” Less than a year later, they were married.
Says Kathy: “Before then, I questioned my vows and my relationship to God. It took time, but I came to the conclusion I stick by today: being a Sister of Mercy was a gift from God, and so, too, was Frank appearing. I could take or leave either, to God it didn’t matter, because God is in the people all around us. I opted for Frank and I have not one regret. It’s 38 years since our wedding, and he’s a gift that just keeps on giving.”
* * *
Dwayne Fields: victim of gang crime who became an explorer and naturalist
Dwayne Fields recounts his life in Stoke Newington, London: “I’ve never carried a knife or a gun. But as I know too well, that doesn’t guarantee freedom from the violence. I’ve got two stab wounds on my body; I’ve been held at gunpoint on at least three occasions…One time I was walking with a friend through an estate in Tottenham and woke up waiting for an ambulance to collect me with one stab wound in my stomach and another in my chest. After that, people around me were saying we should catch up with my attackers and get them. There was pressure to get revenge.”
But Dwayne took a different route after nearly being shot in another altercation over a stolen moped.
Life on the street clearly wasn’t working so he decided to create another life for himself. He recalled his life as a 7-year-old in Jamaica and how he loved being out in nature. He wanted to recapture that feeling so he signed up for a 10k run. After successfully completing that he completed the Three Peaks Challenge, a hiking event that tests the hiker’s stamina, endurance, and resilience. He applied to join James Cracknell and Ben Fogle on a trip to the South Pole but he was too late; he was offered the North Pole instead and he accepted. Since then, he has circumnavigated Jamaica by kayak, run ultra-marathons, and trekked across the Sinai desert.
“The adventures and expeditions are great,” he says. “I can see the world and tell stories — but doing them also helps me show others how to live their best lives, too. I’ve been given a second, third, fourth chance. You need to seize them. As I tell everyone, you never know if you’ll get one again.”
* * *
Jan Jacobs: realized she was gay at the age of 50 and started a new life
Jan Jacobs had been seeing a counselor for years but nothing was helping the discomfort she was feeling deep inside herself. She couldn’t put her finger on it but she just wasn’t happy with the life that she was supposed to be happy with.
She loved her husband, Chris. They were about to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Their daughter was away at college and loving her life there. But something just wasn’t right. She loved Chris but she wasn’t “in love” with him. Her daughter was comfortable with her bi-sexuality, even celebrating it at the Pride parade.
But Jan was just, basically unhappy.
After a weekend away with her girlfriends, she came home, still feeling that uneasiness and went to her counselor. “And then I heard these words coming from my mouth,” she says. “As if another person inside me was speaking: ‘I think I’m gay.’”
Suddenly, she says, it was as though a weight was lifted from her shoulders. She felt lighter, freer. She began telling her friends and with each disclosure, she felt more affirmed. She was emerging.
Eventually, she was confronted by her husband, who could tell that something had changed between them. He had a hard time hearing her disclosure but, gradually, came to accept it.
Now, feeling all alone and not knowing any other gay people, she ventured out to a lesbian club someone told her about but, being an introvert, she was not comfortable with that scene.
A friend told her about a woman named Sarah who she’d known for a long time. Sarah came out when she was 12, so they were introduced and became fast friends, then, after many meetings over coffee and long talks into the night and a few stay-over’s, they realized they were in love.
Today, they are a married couple. Says Jan: “The feeling of being loved and being in love is still so special to me. I feel like the luckiest woman in the world.”
* * *
Michelle Dorrell: was in the audience at Question Time and then decided to enter politics
Michelle Dorrell knew, just knew that people like her and her soon-to-be husband don’t ever get heard or cared about by politicians. So, when the TV program Question Time announced that they were coming to Dover, just down the road from them, they thought it would be a laugh to apply for tickets to be in the studio audience.
She had been through a long rough patch in the few years up to that time. A divorced single mother of four children, she had lost her job where she had worked for more than 15 years. She couldn’t pay her rent and she had been sorely disappointed by the politicians who she had voted for who made promises to help but didn’t keep them.
Still, she had no intention of speaking when she took her seat in the studio audience. She didn’t want to embarrass herself. But something just happened when Amber Rudd, M.P. started speaking about bringing the country economic security. A ball of anxiety and frustration and anger exploded from Michelle’s mouth. She stood and said she had voted for Rudd and that she believed their promises and they betrayed her.
Her outburst went out live on the BBC.
For the next few days, every newspaper, TV station, and radio show was calling her. Reporters showed up at her door. She was a phenomenon. When things died down, she started reading more. She met with politicians from different parties and got involved in her local Labor party but stayed on the fringes at first while she “learned to believe in herself.”
A year later she was elected councilor to her local city government, the equivalent of our city council.
She sums up her experience this way: “It feels so wonderful to finally feel that things I say are worth hearing. For a long time, I felt worthless. Now I’m making sure I, and my local community, have a voice. I wouldn’t have believed a word of it if you’d told me all this when we applied to be in the Question Time audience. It’s bizarre how something so little ended up changing so much.”
* * *
Colin Thackery: Chelsea Pensioner who won Britain’s Got Talent at the age of 89
Colin Thackery joined the army when he was 15 years old and made it his life. He met his wife, Joan, there and when he retired at 40, he was apprehensive about his future but he knew that, with Joan by his side, they’d be just fine.
And they were. They lived and loved and raised two children and grew old together and then, after 66 years of marriage, Joan died and Colin felt that same apprehension about the future, only Joan wasn’t at his side anymore.
Feeling lost and out of sorts without Joan, Colin turned to music, which had been he and Joan’s passion. They had been in Army bands and choirs and he and Joan had belonged to an operatic society near their home. Now, after moving into a senior living center at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, he and a friend began entertaining the other residents with songs on Friday nights and he found that performing the music lifted his spirits.
Stepping off the stage one evening, a man from the audience told him that Britain’s Got Talent had opened auditions, and suggested he apply. He demurred. Why would they want an old man like him. But the man dared him to apply and, never one to turn down a dare, he did.
There was an audition and he was called back, then another, and another, and, the next thing he knew, he was singing in front of a packed house at the London Palladium with his family members screaming their enthusiastic support from the audience.
When the final round came and he won, the applause and cheering was so loud he had to ask the host what was happening. When Declan Donnelly told him “You’ve won!” he could hardly believe it. He was in a daze.
He says that was the beginning of a whole new life for him at the age of 89. There was a spot on the Royal Variety Show and he is now the oldest person in the world ever to sign a record deal. His goal is to sing before the king.
“If I was a teenager,” he muses, “I’m sure I’d be hungry for a huge career, but I’m just enjoying it. It’s never too late, I’ve learned, to do what you love. Just a few years ago I thought everything was over, and now I’m a pop sensation!”
* * * * * *
WORSHIPby George Reed
Call to Worship
One: O give thanks to God who is good.
All: God’s steadfast love endures forever!
One: God is our strength and our might.
All: God has become our salvation.
One: This is the day that God has made.
All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
OR
One: Alleluia! Christ is risen!
All: Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia!
One: Out of the trauma of execution he rises triumphant.
All: Out of death he comes to life that is eternal.
One: In Christ’s victory of death we are all made alive.
All: Glory to the one who brings us all to life.
One: Alleluia! Christ is risen!
All: Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia!
Hymns and Songs
Christ the Lord Is Rise Today
UMH: 302
H82: 188/189
PH: 113
GTG: 245
AAHH: 282
NNBH: 121
NCH: 233
LBW: 130
ELW: 369/373
W&P: 288
AMEC: 156
STLT: 268
The Day of Resurrection
UMH: 303
H82: 210
PH: 118
GTG: 233
NNBH: 124
NCH: 245
CH: 228
LBW: 141
ELW: 361
W&P: 298
AMEC: 259/160
Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise
UMH: 312
H82: 214
NCH: 260
W&P: 323
There Is a Balm in Gilead
UMH: 375
H82: 676
PH: 394
GTG: 792
AAHH: 524
NNBH: 489
NCH: 553
CH: 501
ELW: 614
W&P: 631
AMEC: 425
Spirit Song
UMH: 347
AAHH: 321
CH: 352
W&P: 352
CCB: 51
Renew: 248
Where Charity and Love Prevail
UMH: 549
H82: 581
GTG: 316
NCH: 396
LBW: 126
ELW: 359
Help Us Accept Each Other
UMH: 560
PH: 358
GTG: 754
NCH: 388
CH: 487
W&P: 596
AMEC: 558
Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation
UMH: 559
H82: 518
PH: 416/417
GTG: 394
NCH: 400
CH: 275
LBW: 367
ELW: 645
AMEC: 518
I Come with Joy
UMH: 617
H82: 304
PH: 507
NCH: 349
CH: 420
ELW: 482
W&P: 706
Renew: 195
One Bread, One Body
UMH: 620
GTG: 530
CH: 393
ELW: 496
W&P: 689
They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love
CCB: 78
Lord, I Lift Your Name on High
CCB: 36
Renew: 4
Music Resources Key
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
H82: The Hymnal 1982
PH: Presbyterian Hymnal
GTG: Glory to God, The Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African American Heritage Hymnal
NNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
NCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
LBW: Lutheran Book of Worship
ELW: Evangelical Lutheran Worship
W&P: Worship & Praise
AMEC: African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal
STLT: Singing the Living Tradition
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
Renew: Renew! Songs & Hymns for Blended Worship
Prayer for the Day/Collect
O God who brings life out of death and healing out of trauma:
Grant us the faith to trust that you are with us in our darkest times
and that new life and healing are your gifts to us always;
through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We praise you, O God, because out of death and trauma you bring new life and healing. When things look the darkest you bring light. Strengthen our faith that we might trust you always be bring gifts of new life and healing when we need them most. Amen.
Prayer of Confession
One: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially our failure to trust in the new things God is bringing to life.
All: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We have forgotten that you are the God of life and that you are in the business of bringing new life to all creation. We look around us at your creation and see that everything participates in your cycle of birth, death, and rebirth and yet we fail to believe it about ourselves. We fear the little deaths of failure and disruption and we are petrified of our own mortality. Forgive us and renew our faith that we may trust you to bring new life out of the tombs of our lives. Amen.
One: God is the God of life and desires to share life with all creation. Nothing is beyond the reach of God’s love and power which renews all that God has created.
Prayers of the People
Blessed are you, O God of life who breathes into all creation your own life. You are the one who has defeated death forever.
(The following paragraph may be used if a separate prayer of confession has not been used.)
We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We have forgotten that you are the God of life and that you are in the business of bringing new life to all creation. We look around us at your creation and see that everything participates in your cycle of birth, death, and rebirth and yet we fail to believe it about ourselves. We fear the little deaths of failure and disruption and we are petrified of our own mortality. Forgive us and renew our faith that we may trust you to bring new life out of the tombs of our lives.
We give you thanks for the wonders of your creation which constantly gives birth to new things which live, die, and are reborn. We thank you for the constant reminder that you are the God of the living and all are alive to you. We thank you for the witness of your people to your constant love and care. We thank you for your Spirit that dwells within us and among us and for Jesus who came to witness to your love for us. We thank you for our victory in his triumph over death.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for one another in our need. We pray for those feel they are caught in patterns of death that they cannot escape. We pray for that your message of life out of death may be heard throughout all creation.
(Other intercessions may be offered.)
All these things we ask in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ who taught us to pray saying:
Our Father....Amen.
(Or if the Our Father is not used at this point in the service.)
All this we ask in the name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Amen.
* * * * * *
CHILDREN'S SERMONJesus the Gardener
by Katy Stenta
John 20:1-18
Bring a flower in a pot
In this story of Jesus being resurrected, Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener, why do you think that is?
Could it be Jesus was bent over, tending the garden like this when he was talking to Mary at first? This makes sense because God was our first gardener. The very first thing God created for humans was the Garden of Eden, wasn’t it?
He asks what is going on? (Mimic Jesus by tending the plant while you say this.)
And Mary says, “I am very sad because my friend and teacher is dead?”
Mary is distracted, so she doesn’t really recognize Jesus’s voice or appearance.
And then Jesus looks up and says, “Mary?”
And Mary says, “Jesus! Teacher!”
And then Jesus tells her that he won’t be staying forever, but she is to go and tell all his other friends and disciples what she has seen.
It feels so good to know that Jesus tends to us and the garden on Easter.
Let’s pray:
Jesus,
Thank you
for tending to us
and your gardens
on Easter.
Help us
to recognize you
and your resurrection.
In Jesus’s name we pray.
Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, April 9, 2023 issue.
Copyright 2023 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
