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- "Death and transformation of a single grain" - Homily for Lent V, 2012 (by Sister Amy, SSJD)
- "The Resurrection Icon" (by Fr. Randy Murray)
Sr. Amy Hamilton, SSJD
Homily for Lent V(b)
St. Andrew’s Anglican Church
New Carlisle, Québec
St. Andrew’s Anglican Church
New Carlisle, Québec
Sunday 25 March 2012
10:30 AM Sung Eucharist
Jeremiah 31:31-34,
Psalm 51:1-13,
Hebrews 5:5-10,
John 12:20-33
Psalm 51:1-13,
Hebrews 5:5-10,
John 12:20-33
Death and transformation of a single grain
Let us pray:
Loving God, creator of all that is,
here we are-today, in this place,
with all the senses you have given us.
Help us to use them to come to experience you more deeply.
You are present everywhere around us;
open us to know more of the many ways that your
goodness surrounds us. Thank you for this time to be
with you and to listen to you.
Amen.
When I was in high school I belonged to Spirit Borne, a group of youth who came together and put on Christian musicals. We also would sing in different churches as a choir. One of the choruses that we sang was based on Ps 51. “Create in me a clean heart, O God and renew a right spirit in me.”
As a teenager full of angst it was the perfect song for me. It reflected my desire and my longing. My call to God to create me and lead me where I was to go and be. In my teenage brain I thought that once I knew what God wanted me to do, the path would be easy and simple. How soon I found out that the opposite is true. That one of the toughest things to do sometimes is to follow where God is calling us and to persevere thought the ups and downs in the journey. What I think we are hearing in the readings today is this message. With the imagery of new hearts and covenants in Jeremiah, we also hear Jesus' message of surrender. Which in our world today is not a word that we use very often. It is a word that most of us cringe at when it is said, it is a strong and powerful word.
“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Whenever I hear this verse, there is a little voice that always go “well of course! that is what seeds do. They are planted and then they grow, what is so amazing about that? That is the job of seed right?
It was not until I had my own little garden that I realized how wonderful and what a miracle it is. (Especially if I am in charge of their up keep). When you plant a seed, you plant a hard little round ball and when it grows it turns into a wonderful flower or vegetable. So it starts as something and breaks forth as something new. It surrenders itself to change.
So what do seeds and us have in common? What can we learn from a seed? And what is Jesus calling us to do today, right now?
I think that Jesus has called us to be seeds. To surrender ourselves to change and growth, to move and be transformed. To cease to exit as we have done. To embrace the change. Like seeds we need to let go of our control and determination to stay the same. To always ways remain as seeds, willing to be buried and grown anew, to time and again let go of our husks, that feel safe and secure, what we know and what is familiar. To shed our outer shells, so that we can be fully more the people God has called us to be. Surrender is the call to become part of something greater than our selves.
The Message translation of the Bible says it this way. “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more then a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
So we hear that if we hold on to life just as it is we destroy our life. We are being destructive and suffocating. So how do we let go? How do we live our lives reckless in our love? And again I feel that this calling of reckless love is the call to surrender, that final act of openness. To remove those walls and barriers that protect us from feeling, from seeing, from hearing. To let go of the things that hold us back, that make us look inward instead of outward and muffles God's words to us.
For me I know that I cloth myself with perfection, strength and strive to not care too much, not to get involved, to stand on the sidelines and not to trust. I am sure that you too may cloth yourself in these or in something else. We have learned to do this as small children. To fake it until we make it, to make sure that people do not see what is really going on inside of us, to never see past the lovely walls that we have place around our selves. This is not the message of the gospel today, but we are so called to be more. To live a full life!, we hear today Jesus asking us to be reckless in our love. To shed ourselves of those things that impede our true light to shine out.
With new hopes, dreams and expectations of a situation, to the actual experience, each new moment in our lives means a leaving behind, a shedding of the old self before the new one can be born. So the move to the new house, new friendships or a change in lifestyle calls for laying down the old patterns in our lives so that we can rise to the new possibilities. Which sounds fine and even reasonable until we're faced with the actual fact. Then it all boils down to trust, trusting God and maybe the hardest lesson to trust ourselves. To believe in that still, small voice that is in all of us. Calling us to spring, to grow and know and trust who we are. To leave behind the old shell and become people who bear much fruit.
With new hopes, dreams and expectations of a situation, to the actual experience, each new moment in our lives means a leaving behind, a shedding of the old self before the new one can be born. So the move to the new house, new friendships or a change in lifestyle calls for laying down the old patterns in our lives so that we can rise to the new possibilities. Which sounds fine and even reasonable until we're faced with the actual fact. Then it all boils down to trust, trusting God and maybe the hardest lesson to trust ourselves. To believe in that still, small voice that is in all of us. Calling us to spring, to grow and know and trust who we are. To leave behind the old shell and become people who bear much fruit.
God is not calling us into a place of fear but to a place where fear is no longer. We are being called out of the tombs that we have built to protect ourselves. But we cannot truly fulfill our purpose if we are surrounded by stone. We must call each of ourselves out and offer a safe place to surrender to be our true selves. To let our own light shine which can be the most scary thing of all. To embrace our fullest and all the possibilities that are open to us. Nelson Mandela said it this way in his inaugural speech in 1994:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small don't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
May we be able to surrender and break forth into the full and beautiful people God is calling us to be. To be willing to be planted and surrender to the growth process, to shed our husks of comfort and fear. Placing in ourselves our clean hearts and joining in the new covenant.
Let us pray:
Loving God of all life, bless all those who work with seeds, producing them or sowing and harvesting. Bless, too, those having a hard time with the shedding of old ways in order that new growth may happen. Help us to see you more clearly in the loss and dying in our lives as well as the new possibilities that arise, and in the midst of this dying and rising help us to know your comforting presence constantly inviting us to grow.
Amen
The Resurrection Icon
By Fr. Randy Murray
“Thou hast come down to earth to save Adam,
and having not found him on earth,
thou hast descended into hell, seeking him there.”
From Orthodox Paschal Matins
and having not found him on earth,
thou hast descended into hell, seeking him there.”
From Orthodox Paschal Matins
The sacred Triduum, or Three Days (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter) reveal in high relief the central mystery of the Christian faith: the redemption of the world by Christ’s dying and rising. In the liturgies of these days we are allowed the deepest insight into the mystery of Christ’s redeeming work, the renewal of creation and its permanent union with God.
Written as if to fill in an unnoticed hole in our perception of Christ’s redeeming work, is the icon of Christ’s Descent Into Hades. Commonly called the Resurrection Icon, this gift of the Orthodox tradition is not simply a decorative item. Rather it is, as all icons are, a visual Gospel that incarnates or puts form to a spiritual truth: a depiction of Christ’s work of uniting the material with the spiritual, the latter divinizing the former.
The Resurrection Icon draws attention to an often overlooked aspect of this redeeming work, that hole in our perception of Christ’s victory, which is Christ’s descent among the dead between his own death on Good Friday and his resurrection two days later. Although the Apostles’ Creed includes this work as an article of faith (he descended to the dead) and medieval painting records the centrality of the teaching historically, little mention is made today about Christ’s “proclamation to the spirits in prison.” Despite scriptural support (1 Peter 3.19, 4.6 and elsewhere), the focus of the Western church today is on the empty tomb. By contrast the Eastern church meditates deeply on this extension of Christ’s redemptive work among those who lived and died prior to Jesus’ incarnate life, the work that the icon depicts.
While details may vary, the basic elements of a resurrection icon remain the same. At the centre stands Christ on the fallen gates of Hades, now cross-shaped and spanning a black hole. Below lies Satan bound in chains, sometimes with two heads indicating his lack of integrated personhood. Scattered about is the hardware that held the gates.
As the light of the world Christ is dressed in white, his resurrected glory indicated by a blue mandala behind him. On one side is Adam, on the other Eve. Christ grasps their wrists, raising them from their coffins. In some depictions Christ holds a small scroll indicating his proclamation of the Good News to the captive dead; in others he holds a cross, the means by which he has trampled Hades’ gates. Sometimes angels are shown holding the tools of crucifixion: the cross, spear and sponge.
Other figures in the icon represent those, both prior to Christ and contemporary with him, who recognize Jesus as God’s Anointed. The crowned figures on the left are Christ’s ancestors in the flesh, David and Solomon. Moses, along with Abel, the first to suffer injustice as a result of sin, is here as well. St. John the Baptist is present as the last of the Old Testament prophets. Here again he acts as forerunner, proclaiming repentance in the abode of the dead even as he did to the living on earth. On the right are contemporaries of Christ, among whom we may include ourselves. All together these figures show Christ’s redeeming work as transcending time and space.
As we observe no proper liturgy for Holy Saturday, the Resurrection Icon is a witness to our need as Anglicans to pay greater attention to the Great Vigil of Easter. In a way that is similar to the Icon, the Vigil liturgy manifests or puts form to the full extent of Christ’s redeeming work. The darkness in which the Vigil begins reminds us not only of Christ’s lying dead in the tomb, but of our own lying and the lying of those who have preceded us. First the wait inside the dark bowels of the earth, then the lighting of a new fire that pierces the darkness, and finally the spread of the light throughout the created world (symbolized by our hand-held candles) speak of the fulfillment of God’s desire for humanity.
The spread of light over the course of the Vigil, culminating in the singing of Gloria in excelsis (best accompanied by the ringing of bells), speaks of Christ’s restoration of Adam--humankind--both here on earth’s well-lit surface as well as in earth’s darkest depths. As it is shown in the Resurrection Icon, so it is shown in the Vigil liturgy: our movement from the darkness of death into the light of life--Christ seeking us and grasping us by the wrists, pulling us from our tombs.
In both the Icon and the Vigil then, Easter joy isn’t a sudden replacement for Good Friday gloom. Instead it is a process of redemptive work that we have witnessed Christ accomplish. We have been there. We have seen Christ enter all the dark places, including hell itself. We have seen him illuminate them with his resurrected body and raise us with him to resurrection life.
