risen, day 5

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Power of Love, shining through the risen Jesus, radiantly shine in the dark places of my pain.  Let their power to infect me be broken and drawn into your heart. (Feed My Shepherds by Flora Slosson Wuellner)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 80

Scripture for the Day: Matthew 28:1-20

Reading for Reflection:

One of the consequences of having been sick enough to die once myself is that I am now much more interested in any celebrations regarding being raised from the dead than  I once was.

     For some years, I prepared for Easter by attending a Good Friday service and watching the cross go out the back door, its ominous and unsettling black veil flowing in the breeze, trying to summon up the courage to imagine and to face some semblance of the sense of loss the disciples must have felt on that day, trying to come to grips with what it means if there is another word after good-bye and what it means if there is not.  Being close to being draped in black and carried out the same door myself has, shall we say, made the whole thing a bit easier for me to imagine.

     I was in the hospital around Easter, and the doctors gave me a pass to go to church on Easter morning.  My sister came to pick me up and help me get there.  Sitting in the pew that morning, barely two blocks from the hospital where I was told I might well have been dead instead of alive on this Easter morning, it came to me that the resurrection is a theological concept that may well be ignored unless one’s death cannot be.

     It follows that forgiveness is not much of a concept without something for which to forgive and be forgiven.  Healing has no meaning in the absence of illness.  Peace is no treasure at all to those who have known no war and no strife.  Saying hello has no joy in it without the saying of good-bye. 

     I am coming to believe that the thing God said just before “Let there be light” was “Good-bye, dark.”  And that Noah could not say hello to the rainbow without first having said good-bye to the world as it disappeared beneath the waters of the flood.  And that something deep and mysterious about saying good-bye from the bottom of the pit made the hello that Joseph spoke to his father all those years later all the more wondrous.  “Good-bye, Egypt” turned out to be another way for the Israelites to say “Hello, Canaan.”

     “Good-bye, Jesus of Nazareth,” whispers Mary through her tears at the foot of the cross on Friday afternoon.  “Hello, Lord of the Universe,” she murmurs to the one she mistakes for a gardener, on Sunday morning. (Between the Dreaming and the Coming True by Robert Benson)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Arise, My Soul, Arise

Arise, my soul, arise,
Shake off thy guilty fears:
The bleeding Sacrifice
In my behalf appears:
Before the Throne my Surety stands,
My name is written on his hands.

He ever lives above,
For me to intercede,
His all-redeeming love,
His precious blood to plead;
His blood atoned for ev'ry race,
And sprinkles now the throne of grace.

Five bleeding wounds he bears,
Received on Calvary;
They pour effectual prayers,
They strongly plead for me;
Forgive him, O forgive, they cry,
Nor let that ransomed sinner die!

My God is reconciled;
His pard'ning voice I hear;
He owns me for his child,
I can no longer fear;
With confidence I now draw nigh,
And "Father, Abba, Father!" cry.


Closing Prayer:

O God, who by your One and only Son has overcome death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life; grant, we pray, that those who have been redeemed by his passion may rejoice in his resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord.  Amen.

                                                                ~Gelasian Sacramentary