Rector's Study April 2009

From the Rector's Study ~

“Live!” says God to the world. “Live! You are free, so live!” That inward journey upon which we entered some forty plus days ago has a destination. While we may rightly understand that we never really arrive there, yet it’s also true that the end point of our journey is always with us. Christ is alive, and so we too arrive at life. We live. Jesus has been raised beyond the finality of death itself. This Jesus Christ has made a journey from the glories of divinity to the struggles and joys of his own life among us as one of us. Christ’s journey has been always toward you and me and all humanity.

As trying as our forty days’ journey through Lent may have been, and as rewarding, Christ’s own journey has been far longer, far more challenging, and surely far more richly gratifying in the end. Our journey has taught us again that the journey inward to ourselves is a journey upward to God, for the more closely we draw to our true selves and to one another, the more closely we draw to God. Any soul-searching solitude, whether at Lent or any other time in our lives, will reveal to us that God is with us more surely than we’d ever supposed. Christ is raised from death and from everything that whispers of it.

As a necessary component of God’s victory over its grip on human existence death must be present in order to be defeated. So, yes, sadness remains a part of human life. Despair still happens. But also true, Christ has been raised, a sign from God that the experience of blessing is more available to us than that of misfortune, caring indignation ever ready to respond to injustice. Christ raised again is God’s sign to us that joy, not just a part of life, is life itself; that more than happenstance, hope is God’s own heartbeat constant within us. Through us, Jesus Christ died and risen again is God’s sign to the world around us that the destination of our respective and collective journeys is life in such fullness as few if any can imagine; fullness of life to which God’s Love calls us all. God set Christ Jesus free from the finality of death, and freed all humanity with him.

Your life and mine, ours together in this community of ECR, are participant in the life of Christ. This means that our efforts to know joy and to share it, to have hope and to inspire it, to care and work and pray for God’s blessings for ourselves and to be God’s blessing for others, are begun and ended in the very life of God. We have never been on our own in this, and never will we be. Knowingly or not, we have always been on our journey toward God. And in Christ and his resurrection, we now know that God has always been on a journey toward, more to the point, a journey always with us.

We will always rise and rise again. I think we here at ECR, we know this and live this more richly than most. We are a risen people working and praying to raise up the world around us Christ’s Name. We have never sought the ease of abundance or the privilege of stature. We have no need for such lesser goals, for we have always understood that we have already arrived. We are Resurrection. Here at ECR, we are already home in Christ Jesus. We are already home in God’s Love for us and for all. So, ‘Live!’ says God to us in Christ and his resurrection; ‘Live!” cries God with God’s own joy. “You are free to share in my life, free to share in my love. I have set you free. Share me life with the world around you; share my Love. And Live!”

Happy Easter!
Jim +