Easter Sunday
On Easter Sunday, I might ordinarily remind you that the Hosanna Parade; where we each have parts, ended with screams. But you heard sirens and gunshots on real time in Brooklyn on the subway as people were trying to get to work in the morning. Which also means that you likely heard the danger of bigotry; antisemitism and racial separatism in the name of God, even before you read essays I printed on bulletins and sent in the mail warning of this corrosive ugliness.
We do not need more, bigger, stronger, fiercer beliefs.
We need humility. Grace. Love. Reconciliation.
We need Jesus.
We need these so that we can better experience Grace and Peace dwelling here.
That’s what we get in Jesus’ mandatum, his commandment to love one another. “On the night in which he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus did not seek out of his biggest boys; he did not get a cache of secret weapons, or weaponize his language and shore up his political base…instead Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and said, ‘this is my body. It is given for you.’”
So moving is Jesus’ commandment to love one another as I have loved you; so compelling is his example of non-violence and spiritual fortitude that it not just seems other worldly; it is literally no longer of this earth.
Did you know that in July of 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on their Apollo 11 moonwalk—that’s, “one small step for man and giant leap for mankind,” brought with them consecrated bread and wine. They literally had communion on the moon.
Aldrin said from space to Nasa on the ground, “I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever you are to contemplate the events of the last few hours and to give thanks in their own individual way.”
Then, Buzz Aldrin, an Elder at Webster Presbyterian Church, Webster, Texas; consumed what was for him the body and blood of Christ.
Many years later Buzz wondered if this sacrament was too narrow…in his 2010 memoir he wrote, “we had come to space in the name of humankind: Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and atheists alike…” perhaps he could have chosen a more universal ritual.
That’s perceptive.
That’s sensitive.
Today is Easter at the Church of St. Paul and Incarnation. A poet reminds us,
“Make no mistake: if he rose at all It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse,
the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit
in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh;
ours.”
The poet is John Updike, an intellectual, who some of us may nod along with and say, “Yes. Yes. My those Seven Stanzas at Easter. They are close to scripture themselves.”
Or, you may be like my wife, who is both smarter and better educated than I am; “never heard of him.”
Vanessa doesn’t know John Updike or his poem. She wasn’t familiar with Communion on the Moon. She had heard of Julia Child.
We are watching together a TV series on HBO Max of how Julia got to be a household name. One of the minor characters on the show is John Updike. While the publishing world was fawning over his staggering genius and Public Television was trying to educate the minds of Americans to become more sophisticated, Julia Child was trying to help people eat better with whatever food they had near them. Food that’s accessible. Turning dinner from subsistence to something to savor…
That is an Easter story too.
I know what Updike says,
“Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable…”
I also know what Julia says, “first you take the chicken…”
On a day in which we read that women were the first to discover the empty tomb I confess I’m especially attuned to Julia today.
We’re watching a drama of how difficult it was for Julia as a woman; a large woman; with a strange voice to succeed on a medium that favored; and still favors people who don’t look like most people. In church we’re listening to an account of a man who says that the women were the first to tell their experience of angels and an empty tomb… and it seemed to the other men like an idle tale.
Maybe umm listen to them.
To them I mean not just Mary Magdelene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the other women… But listen as well to Julia and to hidden figures; do you know who I mean…(I mean Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson—the women, the black women, the brains behind what would become the Apollo 11 spacewalk.)
If there is to be communion on the moon there must be communion on the earth.
Which of course begins on the night in which he was betrayed…
It continues in kitchens where bread is baked and in classrooms where people are taught and workplaces where people are valued…
On the way to work there is hate and gunshots; sirens and smoke. That’s why we must listen to them—to the women who tell us that the rock has been rolled away, that they’ve seen angels and that everything Jesus said is true!
When we listen to their witness we can become confident that prayers are not in vain…I’ll pray for you friends.
Please pray for me. Let us pray for the world. Then let us work for peace as we place our faith in Jesus. Amen.