After Pentecost, 2004

This morning my colleague, Pastor Gail Sowell, is having a breast surgically removed to save her life from the cancer it contains. Providentially, last night was the scheduled quarterly service of prayer for healing. Twice the usual number came: came with their faith and their prayers and their love. They laid hands on Pastor Gail, who has been so open with them. Can you believe me when I say it felt less like a wake and more like a wedding reception or a confirmation party? For there was great confidence in God--not necessarily that the surgery would be a slam-dunk or even her life saved, but more simply that Easter was God's invention so why not be confident? How strangely these Christians behave: meeting a life-threatening malady and a deforming surgery with something like celebration.

That is what the Gospel does for us, to us. Pastor Jerome Burce, who appeared previously in this quarterly letter as the author of "The Gospel according to Enron," serves up an eight-course feast of Easter. And just in time! For while we are now after Pentecost, it is not after Pentecost has ended but after it has begun. So Jerry offers, in his own words,

a series fo short spins on the resurrection of Jesus, seven of them, one each for Easter's seven weeks with an eighth tacked on for that Easter P.S. called Pentecost. My aim is to lay the text of Scripture over the script of daily life as we presently know it, and, where these intersect -- where they cross, if you prefer--to dig for some signals as to what Easter means and portends and why it's worth trusting and talking about.

That is the goal of post-Pentecost: bringing the celebration of Easter's "on the first day" into the rest of the life-long week.

Jerry works from two Easter texts, Luke 24:1-12 and John 20:1-18. And he offers this prescription for our inevitable spiritual weariness: "one spin per day for a week and a day, preferably taken at morn-ing or evening devotions in the company of at least one baptized other who struggles with you to keep the faith that Christ crucified is risen indeed." May his prescription be for the healing of your soul!

tbcm

• C is for Creation
  as in brand spanking new and all over again, the bursting into something of nothing the world has seen before, not even in that time before time when Eve and Adam walked tall and naked in their garden. That something this wondrous, so (strictly speaking) fantastic is suddenly afoot in the world gets signaled by the words that both Luke and John use to open their Easter reports. "On the first day of the week..." they write. Who, attuned to Scripture, will not think quickly of Genesis 1, especially when John takes pains to add "...while it was still dark."

• R is for the Rags
  dead-last least of all the many witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus and therefore--of course--the first in line for the privilege of making their testimony. John tells us about them, that little heap of linen wrappings that Peter and the beloved disciple found in the tomb (Jn. 20:6-9). They lay there mute, inert; and in their use-lessness they preached the Easter Gospel so well that the beloved disciple heard it, and believed (8).

• O is for the "Oh, no!"
  that old Chuza must have bellowed when wife Joanna came home on Easter Sunday morning. Joanna, says Luke, was a member of the burying team (Lk. 24:10), a devout follower who had taken up with Jesus early on, surely to the teeth-gnashing chagrin of her high-placed husband, Herod's steward (Lk. 8:3). It cannot be that Chuza was a mild and pleasant mate. One doesn't work for a boss like his without aping the man's spirit.

• SS is for the Shadow of one's-Self
  a concept that Easter throws into hard reverse to the wonderment of anyone who dares to grasp it afresh. She, looking in the mirror, finds gray hair and crows' feet dimming beauty that was, and she grieves. A sportswriter in my town notes how the local major league shortstop, a master of the art, has made an early bunch of errors this season. He hopes sadly that the man will quit before the shadows stretch into a risible parody of the magician he used to be.

• I is for Imperat,
  final word of an old Easter chant. "Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat"--Christ conquers, rules, commands. Im-perat is what an imperator did, or, in the plural, the imperatores, the Eisenhowers and MacArthurs of the old Roman legions; though at day's end the ultimate imperator was Caesar himself as, in our own moment, is George W. Bush.

• N is for New
  tricks done by old dogs, one of the persistent signals in present time that new creation is indeed afoot with the shadows reversing and Christ the Commander calling the shots. Bear in mind that the old proverb is on the money. You and I can't teach the old dog anything, not least because the old dog has long since sniffed out the folly of puppydom's eagerness to please the master. Old dogs have Ecclesiastes down pat. In this fading world all is vanity, and a chasing after wind.

• G is for Go
  as in Let Go, I Go, You Go. That (more or less) is what Jesus told Mary on Easter morning when--Yes!--there was light and she saw who he was (Jn. 20:17).

• S is for the Spirit
  that God-in-Christ sent into the world one long ago Pentecost with the express purpose of bringing his Easter project to present flower and final being.