Jesus will attend Easter mass
EDITOR?S NOTE: Popular religion columnist George R. Plagenz died March 26. This is his last column.
The man’s excuse for not going to church was that all he ever heard were stories about the resurrection. Of course, if you go to church only on Easter, you may hear a sermon about the resurrection.
But these days, even if you went to church on Easter last Sunday in one of the mainline churches (Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, etc.) there is no assurance you heard anything abut the resurrection, except in an allegorical sense.
“It is hard to find a robust belief in the resurrection nowadays in the mainline churches,” observes the Rev. Fleming Rutledge, an Episcopal rector in Port Chester, N.Y. “We hear from the pulpit about ‘a new season, new growth, new life.’ We hear words like renewal, revival and rebirth, but not resurrection.”
“Seriously now,” she asks, “would today’s Easter sermons inspire you to come back to church the next Sunday? Put yourself in the place of the women who went to the tomb on Easter morning. Maybe the flowers were blooming and the birds were singing as the women walked along. Do you think they took comfort from that?”
If this word ever gets out, we may no longer have empty seats in church on the Sunday after Easter. We may even have to put up extra chairs! Easter is many things to many people. But to all Christians, it is their assurance that the “Highest” and “Best” is a present reality in their lives.
If that does not seem to be our experience of the moment, two of the Easter stories can help us. Like the women who went to the sepulcher to find Jesus on Easter morning, we may be looking in the wrong place. The women were looking in the graveyard — among the dead. That is where we often look for fulfillment of our heart’s desires — among things that lead to a dead-end in terms of happiness. Like the women in the Easter story, we are looking in the wrong place.
“He is not here,” said the angel to the women at the tomb. “He is risen. He goeth before you into Galilee. There ye shall see him. Go quickly.” And as they ran, “Jesus came to meet them.”
Easter is a living encounter with the highest and best life can offer us. It is in running and reaching toward the highest and best that we realize our heart’s desire.
That is the first clue the Easter stories give us. The second is in the walk of the disciples to Emmaus after the resurrection. The risen Christ had joined them on the way but they didn’t recognize him.
That often is our trouble. The highest and best is in our midst but we don’t recognize it.
The Rev. Leslie Weatherhead, a noted British Methodist Pastor, told the story of the young wife whose husband had just died. She was sitting on the hearth rug in front of the flickering fire in the small cottage. The arm of an old white-haired woman was around her shoulder.
The younger woman was very resentful as she said to the minister who was there: “You talk about the love of Christ. I don’t believe it. You talk about the everlasting arms of God. I don’t believe it. My husband and I were so much in love with one another and now he has been taken away.”
And the minister said to her, “My dear, the love of Christ is within a foot of you — in your mother. And the everlasting arms you don’t believe in — why they are round you at this moment. Whose do you think is the arm across your shoulder now?”
Easter is our assurance that the highest and best life has to offer is right now where we are, “waiting only to be recognized and embraced.”