The Easter Threshold of Holy Newness!

Image by Douglas Lawrence

3rd Sunday of Easter

In her recent book, “Open the Door, A Journey to the True Self,” author Joyce Rupp reflects on the power and gift of thresholds in the visible and invisible realities of our lives.  She writes: “Thresholds grant passage between two different external spaces.  Thresholds are doorsills or entrances to a house or building; it is any place or point of entering or beginning.  . . .

A threshold contains the power of transformation. In this place of uncertainty and decision-making we are forced to slow down and take stock of what’s happening. Threshold experiences contain tremendous energy.  They hold the power to unglue and shake us deeply and they can set an imprisoned spirit free, and bring peace to a desolate mind.”

As a metaphor, a threshold is that unique and significant component of our spiritual journey. It is that invisible space within us that marks the division between who we are now and who we will become.

In the past few weeks, we have walked with Jesus and the disciples from threshold to threshold as we have reflected on the Resurrection accounts of the Gospels in which the writers have endeavored to tell the story of this glorious mystery.  These accounts were not only what they remembered, but how these events affected them and how they reacted to what had happened.
 
We have heard the story of Mary of Magdala waiting and weeping at an empty tomb.  It is in her turning that she encounters Jesus and crosses over an inner threshold in which she views him through the lens of fear and believes him to be the gardener.

We have heard the story of the two disciples passing over the threshold from Jerusalem to Emmaus.  They were carrying within themselves desolate spirits and visionless eyes unable to recognize the stranger walking with them to be Jesus. As they conversed with him, he is chided as being the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know of the things that have taken place there in the recent days.

We have heard the story of the frightened disciples who crossed over the threshold of the upper room with closed hearts, locked minds and anxious spirits.  It is within this space that Jesus appears to them with greetings of peace, and yet they think him to be a ghost.

The power of the threshold resonates in the resurrection  event and through all the appearance stories that surround Jesus.  He passes from cross to tomb and from death to new life; he shatters all boundaries and moves through closed hearts, locked minds and anxious spirits back then and even now.   It is in the intimate and early moments of an Easter dawn that Mary hears Jesus whisper her name and then upon being known, she names him Teacher.

It is in the quieting of the early evening the two disciples invite Jesus to stay with them and in the breaking of the bread Jesus passes over from being stranger to friend leaving them with a blessing and hearts blazing!

Jesus waits for them on the seashore.  He calls to them to throw their nets to the other side of their boat - casting aside their shame, fear and old ways of being and doing.  It is here in this early morning mist that Jesus invites them to breakfast on love and friendship - and in so doing, they name him, Lord.
Jesus shows up in the upper room to those behind locked doors companioned by their post-traumatic stress and dread.   He greets them with peace, shows them his wounds and breathes on them to receive the Spirit.  He liberates them from everything that holds them hostage, and disturbs them into discipleship and sends them on a mission to believe in him no matter what.

Jesus challenged his disciples to receive this new Easter Alleluia Peace and to come to their own inner rising above and beyond fear and doubt – passing over a threshold to a new freedom and faith, courage and compassion, justice and joy, passion and peace. 

As Easter People, we, too, are challenged in our resurrection belief to declare that true resurrection faith does not arise from seeing and believing in an empty tomb, but from meeting God in the Scriptures, in the breaking open of the Word, and sharing the bread.  And in our everyday lives with eyes open to surprise, with hearts receptive to the unexpected, and with minds willing to surrender to mystery.

In the resurrection, we are assured that there are no doors that are eternally closed.  Every time we close a door or one is closed on us, God opens another for us to cross over to a new threshold – one that assures us that God never gives us up on us.

We are Easter People whom God continues to disturb into discipleship to take up the mission where Jesus left off.  It is the Mission of loving and serving one another, resisting evil and doing good, showing mercy and compassion, justice and forgiveness.

So what is the Good News for us today?

“The resurrection stories reveal the always-present tension between coming and leaving, intimacy and distance, holding and letting go, at-homeness and mission, presence and absence.  We face these tensions every day.” (Henry Nouwen)  Let us pray for God’s gift of transformation which awaits us at every threshold of our lives.

Let us pray for the courage to cross over this Easter threshold of Holy Newness for it contains tremendous energy and has the power to unglue and shake us deeply.

Finally, let us pray for openness to lovingly welcome the daily invitations to come to our own inner rising and to live as Easter People because Jesus has risen.  Alleluia, Alleluia!!

Thomas ~ one of good guys!

Painting by Caravaggio

This Sunday, in some places, is called, “Thomas Sunday.” Our Gospel for our liturgies includes John 20:19-31. It is the story of a week after the Resurrection event, when the disciples are crowded together again in the upper room - this time with Thomas present. He was absent from their first experience of Jesus’ appearance to them in the upper room.  So here they are again for another time of gathering to process what they have experienced and how to move forward beyond Jerusalem!

So often Thomas is associated with doubting, especially in relation to faith.  Although we hear in the other resurrection Gospels that other disciples doubted as well.  Let us not forget Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas who skipped town after the crucifixion and were “found out” on the road to Emmaus when the Stranger caught up with them.  However, the finger is often pointed at Thomas and we might hear the expression, “Doubting Thomas” in some gatherings.

As I reflected on this Gospel, I thought that Thomas is like many of us who sometimes just need to take leave of all the tensions, trauma, and “too muching” of highly intense events. We then struggle to get back to balance and our inner center. He just witnessed the betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, death, and burial of Jesus, whom he loyally followed for three years. Don’t we all have our own individual and unique ways of holding our pain and the ache of our grief?

Perhaps the disciples searched for Thomas, and upon finding him invited Thomas to gather with them once again as they shared their experience of the Risen Jesus. He may have felt hurt, or jealous, or  still be in pain upon hearing that Jesus appeared in the flesh to them and he was absent.  He knew what he saw and experienced as the Roman soldiers pierced the side of Jesus and nailed him to the cross. It was too much for his person to hold!  He needed space far away to let the pain of it all weave through his weary spirit.

But this time, he was in need of some facts – pie charts, bar graphs, graphics, and possibly a spread sheet with more data!  So often in our own journey of faith, have we not murmured  . . . “OK, God, show me a sign and then I’ll believe it . . .” Thomas is all of us who in our faithing have to be invited by our God again and again to trust and to risk being loved unconditionally. 

Jesus came in the way that Thomas most needed.  He instructed Thomas to put his hand in his side and fingers in the place of the nails if that is what Thomas needed.  We don’t know if he did.  But he did as with laser speed move to a deeper place of belief and exclaimed, “MY LORD and MY GOD!!"  This was Thomas’ own moment of inner rising!

So let us pray this day that the hand of God touch into the wounds of our world.  Are we not weary with the violence, wars, injustices, and deaths that humanity has inflicted upon itself and creation? 

Let us also pray that we let God’s fingers probe our minds, hearts, and spirits to release us from anything that keeps us in doubt or resistant to receiving God’s grace, mercy, and unconditional love. Peace be to all of us!!

Painting by Jusepe Martinez

It's in the breaking of the bread . . .

EMMAUS JOURNEY (Luke 24: 13-35)

All was chaos when he died.
We fled our separate ways at first,
then gathered again in the upper room
to chatter blue-lipped prayers
around the table where he’d talked
of love and oneness.

On the third day Cleopas and I
left for the home we’d abandoned
in order to follow him.

We wanted no part of the babble
the women had brought from the tomb.
We vowed to get on with our grieving.

On the road we met a Stranger
whose voice grew vaguely familiar
as he spoke of signs and suffering.

By the time we reached our village,
every tree and bush was blazing,
and we pressed him to stay the night.

Yet not till we sat at the table
and watched the bread being broken
did we see the light.

Irene Zimmerman, osf
From: Woman Un-Bent

The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Valasquez) - Denise Levertov

She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice
is his - the one
who had looked at her, once, across the crowd,
as no one ever had looked?
Had seer her? Had spoken as if to her?

Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now?
Hands he'd laid on the dying and made them well?

Surely that face-?

The man they'd crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive?

Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don't recognize yet with whom they sit.
But she in the kitchen, absently touching the winejug she's to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening.

swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.

Alleluia!

Easter Exultet

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

~ James Broughton ~

(Sermons of the Big Joy) 

An Inner Rising . . .

Mary Magdala's Easter Prayer
by Ron Rolheiser, omi

I never suspected
            Resurrection
                        and to be so painful
                        to leave me weeping
With Joy
            to have met you, alive and smiling, outside an empty tomb
With Regret
            not because I’ve lost you
            but because I’ve lost you in how I had you -
                        in understandable, touchable, kissable, clingable flesh
                        not as fully Lord, but as graspably human.

I want to cling, despite your protest
            cling to your body
            cling to your, and my, clingable humanity
            cling to what we had, our past.

But I know that…if I cling
            you cannot ascend and
            I will be left clinging to your former self
            …unable to receive your present spirit.
 

A Good Friday story . . .

Once upon a time there was a poor peasant family that had worked for years scrimping and saving to buy a piece of land of its own.  Finally the day came, and they took possession of it.  The mother and half a dozen children gathered in the two-room shack that would serve as their house, while the father walked the length and breadth of their land.  He paced it out, marking the four corners as boundaries, praying in joy and thanksgiving as he walked.  As he rounded the last corner and laid the stone in place he noticed something sticking out from under a bush.

He bent and scratched at the dirt, digging with his hands, and soon unearthed the corpus from a crucifix.  It had obviously been in the ground a long time.  Its hands and arms were gone, and its feet and legs missing. It was mangled, scratched, cracked, and paint nearly all gone. He picked it up and carried it back in his arms to the house.  It was a good size corpus. The crucifix it hung on must have been ten or twelve feet tall.  He came in and laid it on the kitchen table.

The family stood around it, looking at it, in an awkward silence.  The father explained that he had found it on their land.  It was the first thing he had dug out of the ground.  What should they do with it?  Should they take it to the church and give it to the priest?  Should they burn it?  Should they bury it again?  They all stood and looked at it.

Finally, the youngest spoke: “Father, I have an  idea.”
“What, my child?”
"Why don’t we hang it on the kitchen wall and put a sign underneath it.”
“What would you put on the sign?”

And the youngest told them. There was a long silence.Then the corpus was hung with care on the whitewashed wall of the kitchen and a small sheet of paper was tacked underneath.  It read: “Jesus has no arms or legs.  Will you lend him yours?”    

      

And it was night . . .

Crucifix at Jesuit Retreat Center ~ Oshkosh, WI

Astride a borrowed donkey whose hooves trampled the royal palms and cheered by the poor who have no voice and rocks that have recently learned to shout, Jesus arrived at the feast of a liberation long gone with the hope of a liberation yet to come.

The Son whose hands never left the plow and who pushed past fields of the dead burying their own, moved with the anger of a long lost heir into the traffic of the temple.

The priest of the whip and the dream shouted over the clatter of coins at the fleeing priests of smoke and magic.
“Not for the people, but for you! Not for the law, but for you! Not for the faith, but for you! Not for the children, but for you! I must die!”

So Anna whispered in the ear of Caiaphas
And Caiaphas whispered in the ear of Herod
And Herod whispered in the ear of Pilate and the thin man hunted in the midnight streets till he found him awake in the garden of sleep and whispered in the ear of Jesus who screamed at the night. “Send twelve legions of angels and I will crush them.”

But the voice was not his own. It had no ring to it, like someone had ripped the tongue from a great bell.  Jesus prayed again, “Your will is my blood. Your wish is my breath.” And the music of the water returned and with it the name the Jordan gave him.

Then a tree without leaves and nails against the carpenter and cracked lips of gall and the thin man turned legion, his voice splintered into a 1000 thorns, each one piercing the darkness of noon.
“If you are the Son of God climb down from that cross; and dance in the temple air or bake rocks into bread or step on the neck of the world, or escape into the desert and starve yourself into heaven.”

But Jesus held fast to the life he was losing.
It was the centurion of many crucifixions who saw in the man on the edge of the world the Son of God of everlasting embrace. “Truly, this was the Son of Love.”

Then he ran a lance into the side of the man who would not come down. The blood of Jesus and the water of the Jordan flowed as one stream down the cross, soaking through the earth
with the determination of a journey, carrying the Son to the unmoving center of the universe.
(Stories of Faith by John Shea)