Easter Hangover
The Very Reverend Harry H. Pritchett, Jr.
The Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta, GA
April 30, 2006
It’s been two weeks since Easter Sunday. The trumpets and the drums are quieted. All the flowers wilted, died and are thrown out. What’s left if the chocolate bunnies got stale. And all the plastic eggs are put up until next year. So what was all the fuss about? Following any high energy celebration we tend to ask that kind of question. One might call it an Easter hangover, and in many ways it feels like that.
And yet all over Christendom we celebrated God’s affirmation of Jesus’ life and the glorious “setting right” of all that death made wrong. Easter says that God’s purposes could not be defeated, that in spite of the very worst we could do to God, to ourselves and to each other, God can transform even that horror into something new and good and beautiful! Alleluia! Alleluia, indeed!
So I ask myself, why do I feel a little “hung over” after all the commotion and Easter egg hunts and dazzling music? Why am I back here today still doubting a little, still afraid and wondering and fretting about all sorts of things from the war in Iraq to the price of gas, to what to do about our Latino neighbors, to a grandchild who didn’t get into the school she wanted. My hunch is that you, as well, are not all that different from me. And together we are not all that different from the disciples in the Gospel story for today…..afraid, doubting and wondering, still only telling each other how we have seen Jesus risen from the dead…. at least, for us, in the luminous Easter liturgy itself.
And then Jesus himself comes right into the middle of the gathering. The disciples don’t recognize him… just like the two others on the road to Emmaus who thought he was a stranger… and those in the upper room with Thomas…and even Mary Magdalene, who mistakes him, at first, for the gardener. Clearly something was very different about him. So here we are not talking about a resurrected corpse, but neither are we talking about a “ghost” or spirit. (The word in Greek is the same.)
Then Jesus speaks to them as he had spoken so often before by saying, “Shalom” – peace. But they still don’t know him. And so the story says, he showed them his hands and his side, and says “touch me; feel my scars and flesh.” And while they are still wondering and disbelieving, he says the most unusual thing, “You got anything to eat around here?” That line sounds like my teenage son use to sound, coming in from school, and hungrily opening the refrigerator and peering in.
Jesus’ friends do have some leftover barbequed fish and Jesus takes it and they eat it together. And with his mouth still chewing, he opens their minds to understand the Old Testament and how the suffering Messiah is the fulfillment of his life and theirs as well. And then he gives them the charge. They are to witness to all folks every where this good news. And then he is gone. It’s almost seems like the weekly question at the end of the old lone ranger programs on television, “Who was that masked man?” But a silver bullet was always left behind to say who he was. In this resurrection story, the memory of a Bible lesson, a scarred body and a piece of fish are left behind like a silver bullet, to say who Jesus is.
So what do these gifts say about Jesus’ identity – about who God is – and about our commission to witness? First the Bible class. It is comprehensive and not narrow…the Law of Moses, the Psalms, and the prophets. Jesus opens the disciples’ minds, interestingly in this passage, not necessarily their hearts. They are to think, to study, and to see the traces of the nature of life itself within the traditions of scripture. Our mission is to do the same thing, helping others particularly in our times of fundamentalism and literalism, to be open mined to the truth from where ever it may come and toward wherever it may lead. Our witness is to the buoyant spirit of the scriptures themselves, their liveliness, their realness, their confrontations of us as well as their affirmations.
And then there is the gift of peace…of shalom…. of true friendliness and neighborliness that grows out of the knowledge that all human beings are connected to each other. And our commission is to declare it and act on the basis of it in our personal, and in our ecclesiastical and in our national life. This means a radical hospitality because every last one of us has been accepted by God in shalom.
And then there is the gift of Jesus’ scars on his flesh and his own hunger. This is an amazing part of the story. Because it says that the heart of all that is, the center of the universe, is scarred and is hungry just like we all are.
To be human is to have scar tissue, inside and out. There’s the wound to my head which healed over after being stitched together when I fell off the porch at age five, and the scar on my soul, from not being chosen by the head cheerleader to be her date for the junior prom, and the gash in my psyche from a Dad who never loved me transformed into a useful scar. To be human is also to be hungry, not only for food, but for many things and particularly for companions and friends along the journey.
And of course there are also the wounds and hungers of our common life…. in systemic injustice and racism throughout our land …. in the festering sores of poverty and abuse…. in the violent forces that converge to create homophobic lynch mobs…. in the pain and suffering of us all over war in Iraq and the Middle East, and in the pure horror of refugee camps. If we only think of individual scars, we may close our eyes and fail to see our joint wounds on the Earth, our island home-- the Earth which is scarred and disfigured by our human arrogance. Our commission to witness to environmental justice is obvious here since we acknowledge that our wounds are on the heart of God through the risen body of Christ.
It seems to me that the two most important truths of our faith are “the Word became flesh” and “Christ is risen.” In a very mysterious and amazing way these truths are joined together in this little resurrection story from Luke. The real flesh of Jesus and the Spirit of the resurrected Christ are joined together in the heart of God!
When our daughter was three or four years old, she awoke one night in the middle of a loud thunderstorm. She cried out, and I lost the coin toss with my wife to get up and go back to check on her. I quieted her down and assured her that all was well and there was really nothing to fear in the safety of her bed. And furthermore, I added, God will be with you. She looked up and said one of the profoundest things I had heard in a long time, “But Daddy, I want somebody with skin on.”
We all want somebody with “skin on,” and in the radical proclamation that Christ is risen in the resurrection of the body, we are declaring that the God of Gods, the Light of Lights, the Very God of Very Gods, the Heart of the Whole Creation itself is in fact scarred and hungry just like we are! How daring, how utterly daring of us so to proclaim! God comes to us with “skin on”…. in the person who opens our minds to the breadth and depth of scripture, in the one who greets us with real peace, in the persons who invite us to their table of hospitability, and in the folks who touch our wounds, and feel our scars and share in our suffering and in our healing. With these “silver bullets,” left by the Holy One, we can leave our Easter high as well as our Easter hangover, and live with integrity as God’s children in a profound Easter hope!
Amen
Comments? Contact Dean Pritchett at: HPritchett@stphilipscathedral.org