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.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 
Today is Maundy Thursday and, liturgically, it can be approached in one of two ways. It can be observed by washing each other’s feet, as Christ did to his disciples, which is the way that we follow the “new commandment” that He gives us to love one another. “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me,” Jesus says. In this sense, Maundy Thursday takes on the shape of preparation. Jesus is demonstrating, one last time, the form of life which his disciples should assume from here on out because he is with them only a little while longer. Maundy Thursday thus becomes forward-looking, and though the disciples do not yet know what exactly awaits them and their Lord (though they’ve received dozens of hints by now), they have received the example of what they should do, of how they should live, beyond the cross, beyond the resurrection.

​The other theme of observance for Maundy Thursday is that of the institution of the Eucharist. And in this sense, The Triduum, the three-day succession of liturgies which solemnize the Passion of our Lord, begins with an ending. We don’t get to look ahead. We have not even reached the cross and the tomb yet, nor do we concern ourselves with what is beyond them. This theme of Maundy Thursday demands that we pause, hold ourselves in the moment, and contemplate the fact that the Eucharist -- the very center of our lives together and the means by which we partake of God -- was instituted on the night in which Jesus was betrayed. How can this be? How can the means of our participation in Christ be inseparable from Judas’ betrayal? From our betrayal?

Assist us mercifully with thy help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby thou hast given us life and immortality, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
 
"That we may enter with joy." Today is our entrance into the center of Christianity, and I want to suggest that this entrance has three aspects.  There’s a threefold entry happening here, which means that there is a threefold entry available to you right now, if you make room for it.

• First, there is the entry of Jesus into the city of Jerusalem to meet his death and be raised to an entirely new kind of life for our sakes.
• Second, there is the group entry of all of us, the church, into this holy week to re-incarnate and re-present everything that happens to and in Jesus over the next five days.
• And finally, there is your own personal entry into your pain, your darkness, your mortality, so that you can surrender it to Jesus’ light and life via the great three nights of the Triduum.

Jesus’ entry, the church’s entry, and your entry, into death in order to be brought to new life. Three entries, beginning right now.

There’s a definite moment in many stories when the sense of inevitability sets in.
That moment when the plot commits itself to a certain trajectory and you just know
it when you see it, even if you don’t know where the story is ultimately headed.
The window of possibility narrows down and the story orients itself in a particular
direction.

​It’s like in The Lord of the Rings when Frodo finally reaches Rivendell bearing the
One Ring, believing that his part to play has been fulfilled. His mind drifts back to
his home in the Shire. And from what you know at that point, you’d be forgiven
for believing that too. But then you do a quick flip check and realize that you still
have about 700 or so pages to go. There must be more to this story. Among the
elves at Rivendell, in perceived safety, Frodo and his companions discover another
dark layer of meaning about this unassuming ring which will alter their courses
dramatically. Frodo begins to see the ring working its discord already amongst the
fellowship before it has even been officially formed -- the ring corrupts even the
question of what to do with it -- and he puts himself forward as the one to resume
the journey, carrying the Ring all the way to Mordor to cast it back into the flames
from which it came.

Come Holy Spirit and fill the hearts of your people, kindle in us the fire of your love, send forth your breath and we shall be made whole, and you shall renew the face the of the earth. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 
Good morning. I am so glad to have the opportunity to be here with you today. When we told our kids that we were coming, our youngest asked “why?” My wife, Katie, told him that you had invited me to preach as part of your anniversary celebration. He said, “Really? We’re going to Illinois just so dad can talk? He does that every week!?!” Then he changed gears and asked me if there was a priest of the year award?

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Bradley Pace. I am the rector of St. John’s in Lafayette, Indiana. Katie and I attended Emmanuel when we were grad students here in the early 2000s. It is always a great joy to return. I cannot express to you how much this church community means to Katie and me. We think of you often and reminisce about our time here. I am glad to see that you are in such good hands with Mother Beth and the rest of the talented and caring leadership at Emmanuel.

​There are so many ways that we can talk about the meaning of Jesus’s death, so many ways to talk about the meaning of the cross.  The early Church never settled on one way of thinking or talking about Jesus’ death. Even the catholic Churches—the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican Churches—have never settled on a single understanding. Of course the danger of trying to determine a single way of understanding the cross and Jesus’ death—the danger of coming up with a single theory of what the cross means—is that we will almost certainly miss something incredibly important. Perhaps here the Creed says more or less all that needs to be said—he died “for us and our salvation.” But of course we go on to say more. We say that Jesus’ death on the cross forgives sin, that it defeats the evil powers that rebel against God, that it destroys death. We say, as Rowan Williams describes it, that it is “a ransom, paid to our kidnappers; it is a punishment that we deserve, voluntarily borne by another, who is innocent; it is…a triumphant nailing up of a cancelled invoice” as Rowan Williams describes it. We use words like redemption and atonement, liberation and deliverance, all of which could be taken literally or figuratively. In the Bible, we get a series of rich metaphors. The connections to the Passover and to the Exodus story run throughout. Jesus is called the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He alludes to his death on the cross saying that he stands like the green tree that is set ablaze before the great conflagration when the dry branches are consumed. He describes himself as the mother hen who covers her chicks with her wings, giving her own life to protect them. In today’s Gospel, Jesus references an odd story from the book of Numbers. He says, “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” In that story, part of the larger Exodus narrative, God is angry at the Israelites and sends poisonous snakes to punish them. When the people cry out, God tells Moses to place a bronze serpent on a pole, so that the people who are bitten might look at it and live.