Dear People of Christ Church,

It’s the first Thursday of the month, so I was blessed to spend the early morning with the Sisters of Saint Anne and their daily Eucharist, soft boiled egg and toast breakfast following. The sisters regularly include a “Requiem” mass in their rotation, with the readings and prayers centering on offering thanks for those who have died.
The readings for this morning were the lovely passage from the prophet Isaiah about the “feast prepared on the mountain of the Lord,” that God will “swallow up death forever.” In the Gospel of John Jesus says he has not lost anything God has given him, that all will be raised on the last day.
Death and resurrection are the pattern of life, period. All life. Life day in and day out, is death and resurrection. Death: things come to an end, feelings are hurt, conflict ensues, the loved one dies. Resurrection: all is held in the palm of a God who creates, redeems, and restores, simply because it is in the nature of God to do so. We don’t earn it, we don’t keep it, we don’t work for it. Life comes out of death: it always does. Not always the way we’d hoped and not always on the schedule we planned on, but it happens.
What does resurrection look like, day to day? It’s God’s world, but we live in it. And “practicing resurrection,” as the poet Wendell Berry puts it, involves making some choices in how we relate to the world. I’ll leave you with my paraphrase of the French thinker Jean Luc Marion, which I shared in my sermon on Sunday (the original is found in his Prolegomena to Charity, p. 84),
We need to put more confidence in God’s love than in our own broken and faulty wishes.
We need to have more faith in God than mistrust in ourselves.
We need to decide for the infinite, which we’ll never own or master, instead of the success of the world, as Jeremiah would call it, a cracked cistern that can hold no water.
We need to risk losing ourselves to the astonishing generosity of God, instead of being frozen in the idiotic myth of scarcity.
How are you losing yourself to God’s astonishing, generous resurrection life?

Blessings,
Sara+