“Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love,
that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness,
and minister your justice with compassion.”
 
A few people have asked me how it feels to have our Centennial Celebration over with. I thought it was a terrific year, with all kinds of great ways of giving thanks and treasuring memories. It’s important for parishes to make time now and again to step back and celebrate ourselves. At the same time though, any church community only has a finite amount of attention and energy, and the vast majority of ours this past year has gone into the Centennial and its events. So I’m also really looking forward to this next year, when we can simply be a church, simply put energy and attention into the central things our life is about, like discipleship and worship and servanthood. Those are the things that, in the long run, move the ball down the field.
 
And as part of easing back into moving the ball down the field, I want to look at the collect this morning, and in particular the interesting request it makes of God, and how it sheds light on our style of being church here at Emmanuel.  “Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion.” What’s this about?

Imagine with me if you will Millennium Park in Chicago – or really, let’s picture the huge expanse of open space that runs all the way down Lake Shore Drive. Grant Park is the name of that whole area, and it extends south as far as the Museum campus and Soldier Field. If you’ve ever seen that entire zone full of people, it holds maybe 500,000. So let’s imagine that crowd in Grant Park.
 
While you’re imagining, let’s put a big hi-def screen in there, like there would be at Lollapalooza, say. So we’ve got a huge public space, with several hundred thousand people in it, watching a big screen. Hard to get more public than that. Now I ask you each to imagine one more thing: Let’s imagine that the screen is broadcasting, for all to see, a completely uncensored feed of everything you have ever done.
 
Some joyous events in there, of course. Celebrations, accomplishments. But also that epic screaming fit, the time you tortured a frog when you were 7, the night you skipped out on the bill, those episodes of binge-eating, the comments you dropped knowing that they would ruin someone’s chances of getting hired. Put everything any human being has ever done on a screen in Grant Park, and there is not a single one of us that could show our face again. Nobody, other than Jesus, has lived every minute of their life in a way that an experience like that would not be humiliating.

​Enjoy your summer! Welcome to summer! The school signs all over town proclaim the season we are just beginning. And in church we recognize it too. It is green time, ordinary time as it is known in some denominations, and officially the season after Pentecost. Generally this time of the year for many, brings less responsibility, and more relaxation. Life, like the seasons, is rhythmic, often described with the metaphor of the ocean. The water comes in and goes out, ebbs and flows, over and over. With each ending there is a new beginning, and with each beginning is an ending. It continues on and on. Summer is a time to experience God’s creation in different ways and to explore parts of the world, God’s world, we don’t ordinarily see.  Over the past few weeks I have listened to various people’s plans for these months with the accompanying expectations of delight. Each person or family has different ideas for what they will do, but the anticipation of a happy, less stressful time is the same.

I’ve always found it a little frustrating that Trinity Sunday falls right as we’re heading into summer. I understand why Trinity Sunday has to come after Pentecost: only once Jesus has risen into a new kind of life and then sent the Spirit to initiate you and me into that life can we have any hope of engaging the Trinity at all. Without the experience of Easter and Pentecost first, the Trinity will inevitably come off as an abstract, irrelevant theory. So yes, I concede, as a matter of principle, Trinity Sunday probably does need to come where it does in the calendar.
 
But principle aside, I wish that it didn’t always fall just as everyone is getting ready to go spend a week at the lake, or to use a bunch of Cubs or Cardinals tickets, or, like this year, on Memorial Day weekend when I’ll bet half of us already have half our brains on whatever cookout or party or ceremony we’re headed to later. One of the profoundest and most effective things God has revealed to us, and we get it just when our attention spans are at their lowest. Yes, the truth of the Trinity runs throughout our worship every week, but I still kind of wish the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church would schedule another Trinity observance in, say, October.

The 7th Sunday of Easter has to be one of the oddest occasions in the whole liturgical year.  We’re still in Easter season, but Ascension Day has already happened, and Pentecost is yet to come. And if you’ve somehow missed this, Pentecost next week is going to be an over the top celebration to close out the Centennial, with a procession and a pig roast and our Bishop doing confirmations and baptisms and all of us causing a big holy commotion starting at 9:30 am at the corner of Hill and Randolph.  
 
But we’re not there yet! One commentator has noted that today sort of feels like a semicolon between two exclamation points. The Lord has ascended!  … The Spirit has descended! …. But in the meantime, it’s the 7th Sunday of Easter.

Today is the sixth Sunday of Easter, which means there is only one more remaining in the season. Each week of Easter this year we have heard a reading from the first letter of John and we will finish the letter next week. While we don’t know for sure, 1st John is thought to be authored by the same person as wrote the Gospel of John. Most probably it was written later in John’s life, perhaps when he was in exile in Patmos. There are many similarities in word choice and themes between this letter and John’s gospel. Jesus Christ is the Word; Jesus Christ is the only son of God; Jesus Christ has come in flesh to the world to be its Savior.

In this letter, John develops the connection between Christian belief and moral conduct. God is love, we heard last week, and the Christian who is a child of God, loves his neighbor as well. Christian life requires both faith in Jesus and love of brothers and sisters.

Because of its repetition, sometimes the letter can be a bit confusing and seem to be written in circles. It can be difficult to sort out the meaning, taken sentence by sentence. I suggest we think of this letter in its entirety. Its structure is somewhat like a finely woven Asian carpet or a symphony played by a full orchestra. A theme is introduced in one section or one part and then the same theme reappears in another section or part. Layered together, part upon part, one hears or sees the entire, rich, idea. 

O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
 
This prayer comes up every year on the third Sunday of Easter – not the third Sunday after Easter, but of Easter, because Easter, as Fr. Gene reminded us last week, is 50 days long. Easter has 7 Sundays in it, and this is the third, and every year the church asks us to pray these words: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work.
 
We see over and over in the resurrection appearances in the Gospels how difficult it was for the disciples to grasp what was right in front of them,  Jesus Christ in his resurrected body. They needed their eyes opened. Remember, Mary Magdalene didn’t even recognize Jesus at first; she thought he was the cemetery gardener. Last week, Thomas simply told the other disciples he didn’t believe them when they said they had met the risen Christ. Just doesn’t happen. No way. And today, the writer Luke piles up adjectives to convey how tough it was for them to see what was right in front of them: “startled, terrified, frightened, disbelieving, wondering.”
 
Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work. Without the eyes of our faith opened by the direct action of God, what we will behold is Jesus in part of his redeeming work. We’ll see the part we’re inclined to want to see, or the part we already approve of. We can only go so far in understanding God without God’s help, or as a friend of mine says, it takes God to know God. The assumptions we carry and the blinders we wear as we come to the Bible affect how much of what’s there we are able to behold. This may be especially so when the topic is the Risen Christ and what his resurrection means and does.  

​          I have a wrist watch that is 68+ years old.  It is a winder—unless I wind it it stops.  There is no battery to be replaced.  The watch keeps excellent, dependable time if I wind it.  It was manufactured in Illinois but was a graduation gift to me from my parents when I was graduated from high school in Mansfield Louisiana.  It is an Elgin.  The Elgin clockworks has long since ceased operation and my wrist watch is now a sought-after collectors item.  Did I have any idea that it would be “collected,” when I first saw it in Stott's Jewelry Store in my home town in Louisiana​?  Not at all.  Its value to me is mostly sentimental.  It represents the love and pride my parents expressed for my achievement in graduating from Mansfield High School.
          As a timepiece, the value of my Elgin wrist watch depends upon my taking care of it and winding it daily.  Then it keeps time accurately if I wind it.  In the liturgical year the time is the second Sunday of Easter.  Easter lasts for fifty days until Pentecost.  After the celebration of Easter Sunday and the various disciplines we followed during Lent, we may feel that it's time to coast until the excitement of Pentecost.  (Dig out your red clothing to be ready!)  What do our Lessons tell us of the challenges of this Season?

If you were writing up an inspiring story of renewed hope, is that how you would do it? We just read the apostle John’s narrative of what happened Easter morning, and it was rather long and involved, and not until the very end did we hear anything inspiring and hopeful. For most of the reading, what we heard was confusion, running around, and slightly odd minor details.
 
Some of those details seem less odd if you know how Jewish burials of that time worked. Bodies were not interred in the ground; instead, there was a two-step process. First the family took the body of their loved one to a large grave chamber with special shelves carved into it, and left it there on one of the shelves, wrapped with aromatic spices in a cloth. About a year later, the next of kin came back to that shelf, after decomposition was complete, and reverently gathered up the bones to put in a small box called an ossuary. You may have seen ossuaries in art museums. When the disciples John tells us about today arrive at the tomb where Jesus’ corpse had been laid, the shelf where it had been is vacant. The body is gone. John tells us that, which would seem to be a main point, but he also adds so many perplexing details.

This is a somber night for Christian believers, the family of God, and quite honestly too much for some to bear. I acknowledge that you who are here tonight have found the strength to face the darkness, rather than avoid it. And I am glad that we are together in community as we observe this night. The liturgy and the scripture readings are heavy and dark, actually the heaviest and darkest of all year.

We remember the last day of Jesus’ life on earth, his pain and his suffering, the cruelty and betrayal he experienced, and we identify with the fear and shock of his closest friends and followers. How difficult it must have been for them to witness the agony of Jesus and how difficult it is still for those who love him to accept his pain.
           
​The liturgy, scripture and music are enough to contemplate tonight so I will be brief. I want to focus for a moment on the psalm spoken each year on both Good Friday and Maundy Thursday, psalm 22.  In our prayer book psalms are titled in Latin using words from the first verse and those brief words are enough to bring to mind the entire psalm. The 22nd psalm is titled “Deus, Deus, meus”. My God, my God.