Sunday, March 31 - EASTER DAY: The Rev. Lex Breckinridge

John 20:1-18. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew,* ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).

I think it’s not a coincidence that each of the four gospels reports that Mary Magdalene was the first disciple to whom Jesus appeared following his Resurrection. It was Mary Magdalene, after all, who presented herself to Jesus with such holy humility for healing. We have no reports of any of the other disciples being so forthcoming with Jesus. (As an aside, the idea that Mary Magdalene might have had an unsavory past has no basis at all in the biblical text. That gets dreamed up 400 or so years later by Pope Gregory the Great.) She then keeps watch at the foot of the cross with Jesus after Peter and so many of the others have taken off. She is drawn to Jesus’ tomb, searching for something she probably couldn’t identify. Her faithfulness, her persistence, her longing for relationship with Jesus, seem to put her in the right place at the right time, the time and the place where she can recognize the voice of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, as he calls her by name.

Why do we gather here at St Thomas in Jesus’ name? There’s an image that we here in the Northwest know well that maybe gets at the question. I think maybe we share something with the salmon, that beautiful fish that after an eventful and treacherous journey out to sea, experiences an ineffable pull to return home. And so the salmon makes her way back upstream to the place of her birth—she is called back home. It is as powerful as it is unexplainable.

We gather in Jesus’ name at St Thomas because we too are each being called home. Even if you have never entered these doors before, you have been called back home. Because home for each of us is that place where we hear the Good Shepherd call us by name. This morning, in this place, Jesus, the Good Shepherd is calling you by name. And we are here as this community of St. Thomas to call each other by name in the name of the Good Shepherd.           

— The Rev. Lex Breckinridge

Saturday, March 30 - HOLY SATURDAY: Gini Davis

Job 14:1-14. For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant.

Many of you know that 3 years ago this May, our family was blessed with a wonderful baby, a first child and granddaughter, Siena Margaret. She is lovely, funny, sassy and very bright... a bundle of hope. Last summer she and I spent much of it together in my gardens, watching the small flowers and herbs we had planted together grow and mature. We dried some of those summer herbs, chives and basil, and gave them to our family and friends as Christmas presents.

But after Christmas time had come and gone, there were no plants for us to water, to dry or bundle. Siena began to express fear that the flowers may not come back. Spring time coming is not exactly believable for a two and a half year old, even though promises of spring and more flowers kept coming from her grandmother. Siena Margaret lives in the here and now, and she needed concrete proof, results to back my promises, my hope.

So last Saturday after breakfast, we put on our rain jackets and rubber boots, and went out looking for the flowers. And sure enough, under last year’s leaves, the flowers were coming, in spite of the rain and the dark wet ground. Siena Margaret was delighted! She insisted on fetching her little watering can and watered everything that looked remotely like a bud or a shoot. She seemed to instinctively know that watering the new life would help secure its delivery into our lives yet again.

I found something else in my garden this year. I found hope, waiting patiently to show itself to a wee child. To transform itself into buds of faith right in front of her eyes. I saw a magical invitation to Siena, inviting her to think hopefully and to believe in the promise of life. Siena Margaret helped me understand Job 14:7-9 in a way I never have before. Thank God.     

— Gini Davis, Grandmother

Friday, March 29 - GOOD FRIDAY: The Rev. Jim Friedrich

Isaiah 52:13–53:12. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.

The “Suffering Servant” passage (Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12) hammers the reader with a grueling series of passive verb forms describing the affliction of God’s representative: marred … despised … rejected … stricken … wounded … oppressed … crushed. Like Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, this text may strike us as excessively fascinated with the details of brutality and violence, perhaps engendering an unhealthy attraction to victimization. Is such imagery no more than a “sickening bloodbath,” as The New Yorker labeled the Gibson film?

St. Anselm offered a more balanced response in the 12th century: “Turn your eyes away from his divinity for a little while and consider him purely as a man. You will see a fine youth cruelly beaten and covered with blood and wounds. Look at him diligently now, and be moved to pity and compassion.” And when we hear the Isaiah passage every Good Friday we are indeed moved to consider how much God’s Anointed suffered for the love of us.

But our contemplation of the Passion is not the valorization of the machinery of victimization, but its condemnation. For both the Suffering Servant of the Old Testament and the crucified Christ of the New Testament subvert the structures of social violence, by conveying to us “the intelligence of the victim.” By seeing the violence as Jesus sees it from the cross, we can no longer deceive ourselves: we are liberated from ignorant complicity with everything that wounds and oppresses the children of God, and offered the chance to live in penitent solidarity with those who suffer. For those of us blessed with comfortable lives in the heart of a powerful empire, the intelligence of the victim can be a troubling revelation. But it is the punishment that makes us whole.

For once we are freed, by Christ’s view from the cross, from the mesmerizing cycle of reciprocal violence that undergirds human culture, suffering is robbed of its inevitability, its finality, and it becomes the passage to the kind of transformation described by feminist theologian Marie Fortune: “the means by which, refusing to accept injustice and refusing to assist its victims to endure suffering any longer, people act.”       

— The Rev. Jim Friedrich

Thursday, March 28 - MAUNDY THURSDAY: Gretchen Breunig

John 13:1-17, 31b-35. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet…

My aunt lived alone. Strong willed and independent, she traveled extensively. A few nights before she planned to depart for Alaska, she had a severe stroke to the left side of her brain.

After the stroke, my aunt was unable to speak. The right side of her body was paralyzed. She had to relearn how to do everything: eat, sit, and stand. Yet she persisted. She labored to learn how to write left handed, relearned the alphabet, and worked tirelessly to write a brief card to each of us on our birthdays. She worked hard to regain control of her feet and her hands.

As I would enter the room, her smile of recognition and gratitude warmed my heart and gave me the hope for our next conversation. While Pat lived two and a half years after the stroke, we were never clear exactly what she knew and understood about our conversations and her daily existence.

After several invasive infections and repeated hospitalizations, we could see in her eyes: she had had enough.

My sister, my daughter, my mom, my nephew, and I spent our last visit with Pat singing camp songs. I knew that the hands that had helped me tie my shoes, and model how to trim a rosebush, now just liked to be cupped in my hands. She listened to the songs, but the smile was gone. “Please let me go,” her eyes seemed to say.

Similarly, one day I know that the little backs and feet and hands that I clothed and bathed will become my support. Modeling the ability to listen, to forgive, to be forgiven, and to love unconditionally are the critical skills I have attempted to share with our kids. They are also the skills I hope to model at the threshold of death. With Pat, we thought that her greatest life skills came in the living. But I admired her ability to know when death was near and be receptive to the ways we each chose to accompany her to the threshold. My sister and I chose to close with these old familiar songs we had shared on hiking trails, as if she were always carrying the tune with us in our heads and hearts. Maybe these same hiking songs will carry my sister and me to the threshold surrounded by our children and nieces. I know I will love them to the end. I pray that God gives the strength to know how and when to open my heart to Holy Spirit.     

— Gretchen Breunig

Wednesday, March 27 - WEDNESDAY IN HOLY WEEK: Mike Hayes

Hebrews 12:1-3. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight…and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.

It is always hard to forget that Lent is a season on the calendar, an annual re-occurrence. It is marked by the tilting of the earth which makes for lengthening days, gradual warming, and new life in our gardens.

Lent. A season. But, as Paul tells us, “a cloud of witnesses…,” worldwide, are deep into another kind of season. We turn inward, as a community and individually, in contemplation of an historical event. No, we turn inward in mourning for the loss, the pain and suffering (the humanity) of our Lord Jesus Christ. We turn inward asking that He will increase his presence with us. It is a time when we may review our ideas and ideals, seek more understanding of our spiritual life, and explore our errors with hope “to lay aside every weight….” It may be a sorrowful season.

But no. We are, after all, Easter People. We know the story. He will rise in glory. We will celebrate the gift with joy, as we have for past centuries and will for endless future generations.

— Mike Hayes