Church!
Have you noticed we’ve had quite a few visitors lately? This past Sunday nearly 20 people attended our church for the first time. As I stood in the narthex chatting with a group of them they asked me, “Are your worship services always this rowdy?” LOL
They mentioned specifically Joel Rockey jumping up and down in the last song. 🙂 (I missed that jump cause I’d already processed out but I hear it was an epic leap of faith.)
I said, “Well, we go big during Eastertide. We take all the seasons seriously here and we just came through a pretty intense, somber Lent. So we’re celebrating during Easter.”
But I want to say something about celebrating during Easter when our lives still feel stuck more in Lent. When parts of our life are not experiencing resurrection or joy or hope. How do we celebrate when we still have things to grieve? How do re rejoice when our heart is heavy?
A few thoughts on this:
The Apostle Paul exhorts us in Romans 12 to “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (v. 15) in a part of his letter where he’s describing how love works. Part of how we are saved by Christ and his resurrection is through God’s solidarity with humanity: Christ assumes human flesh and endures our sin on the cross as one of us! So, too, we are called into the same kind of participative love with and for each other. That means we share in each other’s joys and sorrows. We carry each others crosses and crowns.
Many of us can have a hard time with this because it can feel “fake”, as though rejoicing when I’m sad – or mourning when I’m happy – is being false or inauthentic. It’s possible to “fake” this, sure, to do what Paul is saying in a surface or dishonest way. But there’s another, deeper expression of this that I believe helps us tap into the reality of our life together as Christ’s Body. By the Spirit, Christ has made the many of us one; we now share an identity that has as corporate element to it (i.e. Body or Bride or Living Stones or Temple, etc). One way we live into this is to share – experientially – in each other’s joy and sorrows.
Finally, it is possible to hold space in our hearts for more than one experience at the same time. Even as I type I’m aware of the suffering and pain that STILL awaits healing and liberation from sin and death – and – the goodness and beauty of Christ’s life and love in our midst. Both are present; both can be reckoned with. It’s a terrible beautiful reality we live in.
So today, beloved: may you have room in your body for Easter. Where there is joy may you be glad. And where there is longing or brokenness or sorrow or pain, may the Spirit orchestrate in you a longing too deep for words that all of God’s good creation would be shot through with the power of Easter.
Whooping and weeping with you as your Priest, for Christ’s sake,
Fr. Matt