Redeemer Review
The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer
April, 2007
From the Vicar
Easter is the season of new life. When most of us imagine new life, or new creation, our thoughts turn to nature,
to spring: to the unfolding of bud and unfurling of leaf, the bright notes of birdsong, green grass and green hope.
But for those of us who walked the path of the One Earth during Lent, the idyll of spring looks a little different.
We saw how during the span of a single human lifetime – it was in about 1981 that earth passed its carrying
capacity – spring itself is threatened by development and overconsumption. During Lent, we walked through a
culture so stressed by its own affairs that one parishioner felt moved to ask, “What ever happened to the
community we once were?” Thus, as we arrive at Easter morning, it is fair to ask, as the disciples asked long
ago: Which is going to win, life or death? God or Rome?
On the first Easter Sunday, the answer was far from clear. The disciples had risked everything they were and
everything they had for the sake of a teacher, a healer and a friend who had promised to save them. And then he
was gone, captured as simply and easily as any man on the street. The disciples were terrified. They scattered
and fled. It is almost impossible to imagine that the God of Life, if that is what Jesus in fact was, could simply
die without putting up any resistance. The beloved community felt irrevocably broken.
And then Mary Magdalene went to the tomb. She did it because that is what women do. She did it because she
was numb with grief and anointing a body is a way of dealing with grief, of burying my heart in the fragrance of
memory and opening it in silence and in tears. On that first Easter morning, Mary Magdalene arrived at Jesus’
tomb, expecting a place of death. Instead she found it a place of life. She didn’t recognize what was going on at
first; someone must have come along and removed the body. This was a very reasonable conclusion in those
politically charged times. So she turned to the person next to her, who appeared to be the gardener, one of those
silent servants who notice things. And then this unassuming man said, “Mary, Mary.” And her world was never
the same again.
At the most recent Cursillo weekend – Cursillo is a short course in Christian leadership, witness and renewal –
our symbol was the butterfly. Like Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna, the three women who followed and
supported Jesus, Liesje Blank, Jay and Maureen Wayne, Cathy Kirk and I served the women who came on that
weekend. Rosemary Ames was one of those who came. We spent three days pondering the Christ, our nature
and the butterfly. Some churches hang butterfly banners from their rooftops during Easter, for the butterfly is a
curious creature. It spends its caterpillar life close to the ground, eating up everything in sight. Then, impelled
by those tidal forces that we humans only see in dreams, it spins itself a chrysalis within which is literally
dissolves and dies. When it emerges as a butterfly, it does so as a completely new order of life.
Mary did not recognize Jesus when she met him in the Garden, any more than one would recognize a caterpillar
turned butterfly. Such is the work and the result of resurrection. It is not just getting up from a sleep unto death,
or recovering from disease or depression, a new version of the old you. It is becoming entirely new, beautiful,
winged, living lightly on nothing but the fragrant nectar of spring flowers. And that is nothing more and nothing
less than what God is calling us at Redeemer to do.
Blessings,
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