One of the things that has brought me the most comfort
through the years is that I’ve learned to appreciate the value that can come,
even from the struggles I’ve sometimes faced.
Even when things aren’t going well – or at least aren’t going as I’d
have them go, if I had my way, I remember that other times like that in my past
have helped me to become the person I am today.
As an old Gospel song says, “I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey
now.” Even though that journey sometimes
hurt a bit in the making, it got me where I am, and I wouldn’t change a thing.
But that’s the grace of hindsight. We say that hindsight is 20/20 – of course
that’s not always true. Sometimes
hindsight gives us rose-colored glasses; making the past seem better than it
actually was. But the grace is in that there
is sometimes wisdom that comes from seeing a fuller picture of our experiences
– the kind of fuller picture that can’t be seen when we’re in the midst of a
moment.
Like those earliest days of pandemic back in March of
2020. Do you remember how naïve we
were? Do you remember people saying,
“this lockdown should only last about two weeks, then we’ll have this thing
nipped in the bud.”? In the moment, I
don’t know if any of us actually believed it, but we all wanted to cling to
that prediction. Now we know it
was pure folly. Now we know it would
take a lot more. But in the moment, our
hope clouded our vision.
The gospel that we’ve read today is, for us, a kind of
“hindsight”. The story is taken from a
section of the teachings of Jesus known among biblical scholars as the
“farewell discourse” – it’s the bits of parting wisdom and advice that we get
from Jesus as he prepares for the end of his earthly ministry.
But given to us here, on the Fifth Sunday of Easter, through
the lens of the Resurrection, these parting words ring differently than they
did in Lent. They certainly carry a
different kind of meaning for us living in the context of Resurrection than
they must have carried when the disciples first heard them.
“Abide in me as I abide in you.” That must have sounded vastly different to
those earliest followers once they heard it in the context of the
Resurrection. When Jesus first said it
to them, it must not have made much sense.
Maybe they thought it meant to trust in him. Maybe they thought it meant to feel
comfortable and at home with him. But it
takes on new dimensions in Easter.
Through the context of Easter, “Abide in me” seems
like a sort of glorious invitation. Live
in my life – live in my renewed life – live in this unending life I
offer. But then he says, “as I abide in
you.”
That gives the message a twist…Before
his death, it must have sounded like, let’s make our home with each other.Let’s abide together.You will be my home and I will be yours.But now it sounds like something more.After Easter, it’s not just Jesus inviting us
into the Resurrection life, but calling on us to embody that
Resurrection life, too.
We are invited into Resurrection, and we are called to be a
part of Resurrection.
With great power comes great responsibility. With great gifts come great callings. And our great calling in an Easter world is
to be the place where eternal life makes its home. We’re all familiar with the calling to be the
hands and feet of Christ in the world, but it doesn’t stop there. We’re also called to be the life of Christ in
the world.
The world may have pronounced Jesus dead, but the Church,
through the grace of God and with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, continues to be
called by God to breathe life into Christ.
The world closed the door, but the church is called to fling it open
wide.
I love this story of the Ethiopian eunuch. It’s the story of a person with political
power, but who, even so, lived as a cultural outsider. He lived outside the gender norms that were
expected of most people. But even
through his status as a sort of a simultaneous insider and outsider, he longed
to live as a person of faith – a person with a real relationship with God – but
the religious traditions at the time said that he couldn’t. He was outside the bounds; a
relationship with God wasn’t thought to be suitable for him.
But God called Philip to live the Resurrection for the
man. God called on that abiding presence
of Christ to work through Philip to open the doors of the faith to the
Ethiopian eunuch. Not because of his
political influence. Neither in spite
of, or because of his status as an outsider in much of the culture of his day. God called Philip to be the hands and feet of
Christ in the world for this man, simply because of his longing. The man’s longing was met by God’s equally
passionate longing. They found each
other, like the poles of powerful magnets dragging across a table, longing for
reunion.
And that’s a big part of what it means to embody the
life-giving power of the Resurrected Christ in this world. It means to show that life to those
who believe (or those who have been told) that they’re outside of its reach. It means to embody that final image of Christ
with his arms outstretched on the cross by opening ourselves wider to the
world. By opening ourselves and our
churches – our abiding places – to invite in and to incorporate into this
unending life – everyone.
Through the grace of hindsight, the cross, that image of
death and punishment is seen more clearly as a sign of invitation,
incorporation, and embodied love.
There’s another great old gospel song called “I don’t feel
no ways tired”. It says, “Nobody
promised the road would be easy, but I don’t believe God brought me this far to
leave me.”
The cross wasn’t an easy road to take, and sometimes our
lives aren’t either. I imagine those
first followers of Christ felt lost up until they started remembering where
they’d come from – remembering the lessons and the love that formed them into
the community that they were. They
probably feared that God had left them, until they started looking back, and
seeing Jesus’ teachings with broader wisdom.
When we look back with a wide-enough lens, we see that we
haven’t been brought this far for nothing.
We will see that God is still in the story. Hindsight may not be 20/20, but it sure is
filled with grace. Amen.
Comments