Outside my office window, the crimson and magenta azaleas bloom, and the red bud trees blossom. (I wonder why they are not called purple buds?) They look like they are just poised to open up on Easter Sunday.
The church staff is scurrying around making final preparations for Holy Week and Easter worship. Yet we are still reveling in the joy of last Sunday when 17 of our youth were presented to the whole church for membership. As Rev. Katie Smith Mussat immersed them in the warm waters of the baptistry, she proclaimed, “Buried with Christ, Risen to walk in newness of life.” I loved hearing those dramatic words and wondered how they washed over our bright young people.
Austin Farrer, a philosopher who was friends with C.S. Lewis at Oxford, wrote: “We do not come to God for a little help, a little support to our own good intentions. We come to God for resurrection.”
I trust that your Pastors’ class members realized that we, as their church family, are not just “supporting them”, we are inviting them into a life-transforming relationship with the living God. They will no doubt encounter challenges in the years to come as they navigate middle school, high school, and college years. Just as they were lifted out of that water by Rev Mussat’s strong arms, so they will be lifted up by God. In this tumultuous time to be a teen, I’m awed that you, as a church, invest heart and soul into these young people. You reveal God’s goodness to them. You promise them a resurrection kind of life.
We do so in part by revealing our own adult need for God’s resurrection. We humbly admit that faith is a journey that we never fully master. For example, when C.S. Lewis and Austin Farrer (see above quote) exchanged philosophical and theological insights in England, they could not have foreseen how the Anglican church would change over time. Women, in their lifetime, could not be ordained priests. Could they, as wise church fathers, have imagined that in the next generation, the church would install a woman as the Archbishop of Canterbury? Even the church needs to be raised to new life!
As we read the news each morning, our hearts ache with all that needs resurrection. As we ponder the challenges within our own interpersonal relationships and swim around within the circumference of our personal lives, we know that resurrection would be so welcomed! The theologian Jurgen Moltmann survived WW2 as a teenage soldier in Germany. He was devastated by the sadness but he was awakened to new life in the POW camps. There he found Christ. He wrote, “Believing in the Resurrection does not just mean assent to a dogma and noting a historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God’s.” He spent his life practicing resurrection.
I look forward to seeing you on Easter morning, where we will sing and celebrate that this amazing one we call God, still rises, even among us.
Grace and Peace,
Carla
