For many decades, few mainstream horror films failed to follow the old-testament formula. They enumerated reasons why victims deserved to die—promiscuity, drunkenness, whatever—showed us their deaths, and provided us with a hero free of sin who conquered the evil and lived on. (Not coincidentally, the villains typically have the ability to bend reality and are more or less immortal.)
Vocation is ultimately less about “what shall I do with my life” than it is about “how shall I respond to the relationship with God that I’m already in, perhaps without knowing it? The stirrings and restlessness that come with that experience of call are really already responses to God’s grace, active in us and in our world and relationships.
Only when the hustle and bustle of Advent, Easter, and Lent has calmed down can we really focus on what it means to live and grow as Christians in this ordinary time in this ordinary world. It is a time to nurture our faith with opportunities for fellowship and reflection. And we have a lot of growing to do, so God has given us most of the church year in which to do it.
What is god but Creator? What is creating but reaching out? What is reaching out but connecting beyond self? What is connecting beyond self but loving others?
Perhaps the forty days the risen Jesus spent with his disciples points to an indefinite but considerable period of time following Jesus’ crucifixion in which the disciples experienced Jesus’ presence with them. They experienced Jesus in a new, radically different manner, a manner that the disciples did not know how to describe, a manner that transformed their despair over his death into the hope that built the Church.
Jesus is Lord. In the same sense that early Christians proclaimed that Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord, remember that no one else – not any hierarch, not any ecclesiastical official, not any one of you – is Lord. We belong to God, whom we know in Jesus, and there is no other place where we find the ground of our identity.
Yes, life is important – supremely so – whether one believes in Jesus Christ or not. For those of us who do, it is even more important that we make sure not to see life as the same as God or in the place of God. For those of us who believe, life is not God, but rather the gift of God. Life is not in the place of God, but is rather the place where God pours out his love most fully and completely.
By 2008 Franklin Roosevelt starts to sound like a theologian or a prophet, ‘We have nothing to fear except fear itself.’ In fact Roosevelt’s words make a decent summary of the Resurrection Gospel. The resurrected Jesus returns to deliver us from our double addiction to fear and to safety.
The best symbols and stories, “classics,” have what David Tracy calls a “permanent excess of meaning.” And they give rise to a never-ending process of interpretation. I say this, not because I doubt the truth of the Easter story. Rather, I say it because of the kind of story it is. I believe the tomb was empty. I believe that Jesus appeared to his friends. I also happen to believe that this story creates as many problems as it solves.
Today the word is Silence. All the chaos and noise of Holy Week is stilled. Palm Sunday with its hosanna-ing where even the rocks cry out in praise is past. Maundy Thursday’s slopping of water on bare feet of resistant Peter, ended with the betraying Judas leaving in a flurry of shame. Good Friday has come and gone with its whipping and wailing and pounding of nails. And now – silence.