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Rector's
Messages
Easter
2004
"For
anyone united in Christ, there is a new creation" II Corinthians 5:17
(R.E.B.)
Lent
may indeed mean spring; but in our part of the world, the Lenten
experience remains largely a winter one. This certainly seemed to be true
this year with Lent beginning the week following the blizzard or weather
bomb of 2004. Behind the neighborhood in which I grew up there was a
fairly large marsh. The marsh would freeze in years when there was
flooding from early winter rain. It was possible to skate and play hockey
on the marsh; but there was something seemingly unusual about that frozen
state of affairs. Later in life, I would learn a word that fit perfectly
the experience standing on the middle of the marsh in winter time--the
word "surreal". The quiet and almost motionless state of the
marsh in winter was beyond real. The air bubbles in the clear ice gave the
impression that most of the life of the wet land was on hold. What a
contrast this presented to the usual vitality of the marsh with its waving
green and brown bulrushes or cattails. The marsh was home to frogs, birds,
and a variety of insects. At night a chorus of peeping sounds arose from
the marsh, sometimes accompanied by a light fog drifting up out of the
ooze. There was no real accounting for spring until the life signs
returned to the marsh.
The
surreal moments of life seem to place everything seems on hold. The breath
of life itself appears captured by some unseen force. The fragility of
peace and the prevalence of violence in the world , the loss of focus and
the presence of discord in community, the death of a loved one and the
experience of grief, each of these can create in us a sense that time and
circumstance has slipped beyond what is real. Life, as a normal course of
affairs, seems unable to come to fruition.
St.
Paul proclaimed to the people of Corinth, "...in Christ, there is a
new creation". The Easter faith is one which offers the promise to
transform each and every aspect of our life --personal, communal, and
social. Christ's resurrection is the sign of an offer of new life in all
its fullness. The truth about Easter is a truth about being ground in the
reality and reliability of God's love for the whole created order.
The
Rev. Rod Gillis, Lent and Easter 2004 |
