FCC Dundee Devotional Book

FOR A TIME SUCH AS THIS devotionals to feed your spirit

Dear Members and Friends, We miss you! As hard as we are all working to stay connected, there is no substitute for being together. I look forward with great anticipation to the day we can gather and celebrate in person, safely and joyfully. In the meantime, I know many of you are making a conscious effort to be the church where you are, in so many ways. Some are out and about, doing our best to keep our common life going and provide for our families. Others are staying in place, enduring sameness and loneliness to keep us all as safe as possible. Many parents are helping with remote schooling – some while working from home at the same time. Kids are attempting to adjust to complicated new ways of doing things. We all have people or experiences we are missing – those blessings that make our lives rich. Many of us are quite tired and often scared. These devotions, then, are meant for a time such as this. These are scriptures and thoughts that have meant a lot to me over these past several months; I hope they mean something to you, too. I have found in these words inspiration, challenge, comfort, and a lot more – which is to say I have found the Spirit of God at work in them. May that same Spirit be in and with you. There are 20 short devotionals in this book. They cover a lot of different ground, but perhaps it is appropriate that they begin with Love and end in Hope, as does our faith itself. Thank you all for who you are and what you do. Until I see you again, be safe, be well, and be the church! Peace, Pastor Aaron

love Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law (Romans 13:8) T here are a lot of rules these days. There are countless drains on our attention and claims on the truth. There are myriad perspectives and opinions – and an awful lot of noise. It can all be paralyzing and exhausting. It can be hard to know what to do. In a time such as this, it is good to be reminded that love is the law. Love – lived out in service, respect, and compassion – is the beginning and the end and the heart of all the rules we make. Loving relationship is the nature of God, and all that we do in love takes part in the work of God. Let that love be your North Star: it may not be the only star in the sky, but for us, it is a constant. When we are disoriented, love can guide us; in the midst of all that is changing, we can always use it to find our way home.

stillness Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10) Lately, I’ve heard a lot about something called “decision fatigue.” It is just what it sounds like: the psychological and spiritual weariness – even exhaustion – that comes from making seemingly countless choices every day. And these days, it seems like there are more decisions to be made than ever. There’s more information coming at us every minute – meaning we may even have to re-make decisions we thought were settled. Even small decisions now carry great consequences, and we live with the anxiety of not knowing whether or not we made the right one. We grow frustrated with and are divided from those who are choosing differently. Which makes it a good time to remember to be still and know that God is God. Not that we don’t still have work to do or tough decisions to make – we do. But in all this busyness and noise, we need to make time for stillness. We need to remember to not try to control what we cannot control. We need to know how to let some things be. And we need to remember that God has us. The most important decision was made long before we had any say in the matter: God knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us more than we can imagine.

struggle I will not let you go, unless you bless me (Genesis 32:26) About a decade ago, Lord Jonathan Sacks, a British rabbi, was part of an interfaith panel exploring that wonderfully American phrase: “The pursuit of happiness.” He pointed to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. In particular, he pointed to this phrase: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” After a night of wrestling, Jacob doesn’t let go until his otherworldly opponent has blessed him and renamed him. After which, Jacob – now Israel – limps away from his struggle, both permanently wounded and somehow made new, both broken and blessed. Even now, as Rabbi Sacks said, the people who still bear that name – the people of Israel – have looked to that story, to that phrase, in times of struggle and suffering: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” There may be a message in here for a time like this. Sometimes, we are so quick to move past struggle that we miss the blessing in it. Our culture is often focused on “moving on,” on getting over it as fast as we can so we can get back to the “good” part. Yet there might be potential for blessing in the struggle. And not just despite it, but because of it – a blessing we otherwise wouldn’t have were it not for the struggle. Of course, God does not cause these things to happen. But God is with us in everything so that even in them we can learn, and grow, and be blessed by them. And I do believe that if we wrestle with all this faithfully, it can reshape us. Like Jacob, when the sun rises, we can limp away from this both wounded and somehow made new, both broken and blessed.

endurance And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Romans 5:3-5) Verses like this let you know Paul has lived it. Many of us have lived it, too: to get through suffering (or grief, or pain, or struggle), we have no choice but to develop endurance. Later, we discover that this endurance has created in us a capacity, a grit – what he calls character. And that character means we can face the rest of our lives with greater hope, knowing our own strength and God’s ability to see us through. And that hope is a wellspring of faith. This isn’t to minimize or romanticize suffering. Some suffering is brutal and oppressive. None of it is caused by God. And, at times, we can be a bit generous with our terms; “suffering” may be over-stating what some of us are experiencing right now. It is always important to keep things in perspective. And yet many of us are, in our own ways, working hard to endure. But this struggle does not have to be meaningless. For how many of us have the toughest seasons in our lives given us something we would someday need? For how many of us have our hardest times made us who we are? “Nothing beautiful comes without some suffering,” says the Dalai Lama. Like muscles that need to be used, our spirits are exercised by resistance: only in being broken down can they be built back up, stronger. If we try to keep from our lives any challenge, resistance, or pain, we are also keeping at arm’s length a lot of beauty and joy. This time might not be what we would have asked for. But maybe, if we have the endurance to see it through, it is also making us who we will someday need to be.

forgiveness Jesus took a deep breath and breathed into them. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he said. “If you forgive someone’s sins, they’re gone for good. If you don’t forgive sins, what are you going to do with them?” (John 20:21-23 The Message Translation ) When I first heard this verse translated this way, I thought it was a rhetorical question: “What are you going to do with them?” As in, “What are you doing still holding on to them? There’s nothing to do with them – let them go!” But that’s not the whole story. There can be power – even goodness – in not letting go. There is power in not forgiving, or not forgiving too easily, or not forgiving until it is the right time. There is power in holding on to the sins of another: “I will hold on to these until there is justice. I will hold them up and will not let them go until you’ve seen them. I will use them to teach and to lead and make the world better – that’s what we will do!” And then, one day, when the time is right, you will let them go. Not necessarily for the other person – you may not owe them anything. Someday, you will need to let them go for yourself. There will be a time when holding on to them any longer doesn’t do you any good – a time when, instead of holding on to them, you find them holding on to you. As long as you keep holding on to someone else’s sins, a part of you has to be busy holding on to them, which means you are not as free as you could be. And someday the time will come when forgiving will not mean giving up, but rather setting yourself free. Let that be a good question to ask yourself, if you find yourself holding on to someone else’s sins: what are you going to do with them? Are you using them for good? Are they doing you any good? Do you still need them? Or might it be time to let them go? Is holding on to them giving you life and purpose, or taking life from you and weighing you down? What would happen if you let them go? What would it take to let them go? When the time is right, how could you live, and who could you be, if you let them go?

simplicity He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8) Oliver Wendell Holmes is quoted as having said, “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” As I hear it, the prophet Micah was living in the simplicity on the far side of complexity. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought about it or didn’t understand it. He knew life was a mess, and that even well-meaning people struggled to live faithfully. Life has competing demands, countless perspectives, and constant distractions. But on the far side of that complexity was the heart of our faith: doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. You can make things as complicated as you want; if your life doesn’t align with these, it isn’t what God is looking for. I wonder if we sometimes make things more complicated than they are, if only because if we can claim to not understand them, we can’t be held responsible for not doing them. If it’s too complicated, we can throw up our hands and say, “Well, it’s all just such a mess” – and then do what we want. But Micah reminds us we have no business pretending we don’t know what our faith is about. Let’s make our lives about these things, too. It may not be easy, but it has always been simple.

unity For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another (Romans 12:4-5) It is one of the Apostle Paul’s most famous and compelling metaphors: the church as a body. It is both intuitive and challenging, an ancient image conjures some questions for this time, too: Are you hurting? If so, you’re in good company, but it doesn’t make your pain any less real. Have you grown in appreciation for other members of our body – perhaps those you hadn’t noticed before, but have recently become essential? Are you yourself feeling unnoticed, unappreciated? Are you feeling left out, like you cannot contribute to the good of the whole the way you want to? Or are you bearing the weight of responsibility, like too much has been placed on you? And how can our body come together and heal? If we are a body, made up of different members, then we need one another and are in this together. When one part of our body suffers, the whole body suffers – and we will not be made whole until we are all made well.

rest Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy . . . For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore, the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it (Exodus 20:8,11) It is a remarkable thing that rest is named as part of God’s Law. You’d think the laws would be confined to doing, but this commandment is to stop doing. God rested, and you must, too – the logic is pretty straightforward. Rest is a holy pattern, a good embedded in Creation, and one of the ways in which we are to be like God. But it has been hard to do, for some of us. There is too much to do, and it is too difficult to leave good things undone. For some of us, ambition and achievement have been baked into our very core, and to rest is to feel left behind. It may not be everyone’s challenge, but for some, rest feels like failure. But rest is no less than a matter of freedom and justice. The people of Israel, newly emancipated from Egypt, receive this as part of the Law from God. Why? Because slaves can’t take a day off, but free people can. To rest is to declare your freedom; to put it another way, whenever we cannot rest, we are enslaved by something. Rest admits we have limits and acknowledges that the world will turn without us for a while. Rest claims that there is more to us that what our lives produce. Rest is a form of surrender: “I can’t control this, so I can rest.” Or maybe it is an act of defiance: “This won’t control me; I can rest.” This may be a uniquely difficult time for rest. Which means it might be a uniquely important time for rest. Remember that your worth is not tied to what you do. Remember that even God rested. Remember that rest is not failure, but a way of being as God would be, and an investment in who God called you to be.

creativity God has filled them with skill to do every kind of work done by an artisan or by a designer or by an embroiderer in blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and in fine linen, or by a weaver—by any sort of artisan or skilled designer (Exodus 35:35) I have come to believe that our creativity is one of the ways we are created in the image of God. In a real way, we were made to be makers. There are times work gets a bad rap, and understandably so: We are sold the illusion that we have to produce things to be valuable. We are told the lie that our worth is tied to our net worth. Some of us are overworked; others are underworked – all of it can be a source of stress. Many of us never had a chance at our “dream jobs,” whatever they might be. And yet, I believe there is a light in us that dims whenever we cannot be creative. And though the God-given gifts above sound pretty specific, this means everything: Crafting, building, repairing. Writing, singing, dancing. Painting, composing, sculpting. Gardening, knitting, cooking. All these and infinitely more: whether we find ourselves talented in these areas or not, they are God-given opportunities to find creative joy. A pastor once commented that, instead of “practicing our faith,” we might think of “faithing our practices.” We should think of our “common” work as bound up in the creative life of God, not separate. It may not be a church thing – who cares? If it is done in the name of goodness and love, it is all of a piece. So what are you going to do today that brings you joy and satisfaction, that sparks your curiosity? What are you going to make today that puts that energy of the Creator living in you to good use?

change We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:22-23) Change may be the heart of life, but it has never been easy. To live is to grow; to grow is to change; to change is to let go of what was – and in this is often grief. Even when change is good, growth often comes from the hurt of hard-won lessons or the grind of a long struggle. To make it even more difficult, many of us experience the same change very differently. For some, this pain feels like death throes: the end of something they loved. For others, these are birth pangs: the blessed beginning of bringing forth something new. Often, if we are honest, many of our changes are both of these at once. As people of faith, can we care for those who are grieving, and also celebrate with those whose moment is arriving? Both are real and, in their own way, faithful. What is this time like for you and those you love? What about those whom you find hard to love? God is with you, whatever this change is for you.

peace And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7) Often enough, I think of peace as absence: no noise, no fear, no pressure, no pain. But the peace spoken of most often in the bible is something far more present and active. Shalom, as it is in Hebrew, is something much more like a joyful flourishing: all as it should be, in harmony. Which means peace, fully realized, is probably louder and more exuberant than I can usually imagine. When everyone is safe to be themselves, and everyone has enough, and we are free from fear – this peace will be more like a party than some carved out quiet time, alone. Sometimes, though, this vision also reminds me how far away we are from the real thing, which can be discouraging. For some of us, carved out quiet time, alone, is hard enough to find – forget achieving world harmony. Most of the time, I’ll happily settle for an absence of noise, violence, pressure, and fear. Yet the challenge might be this: Can we find glimpses of peace, not before or after, but during? Can we offer havens of peace, even for a moment, to those who need it? While we are waiting and working for the fullness of peace, can we ourselves be peaceful?

covenant But Ruth said, “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16) Recently, I’ve seen some variations on a common idea (I’m not sure if there is an original author). But it goes something like this: “Do you think it’s about the journey or the destination?” one person asks. To which the other replies, “It’s about the company.” Destinations can be wonderful. They can give our lives direction and purpose. The journey may be even more important, lest we ignore all those meaningful steps between milestones. But company might well be the most important of all: regardless of where you’re going or how you get there, your traveling companions make all the difference. Ruth and Naomi had faith in God, I’m sure, but God is never mentioned in their story. Their story is about their faith in one another, and the covenant that saw them through the worst, that brought them from death into life. Their relationship saved them. Who have been your best companions? Even in this strange time, whom have you been most grateful to have by your side? Or are you missing someone even more, lately? For many of us, there are holes in our hearts where some of our best partners used to be. For now, though, let’s grow in gratitude for those who are still by our side, and will see us through.

inspiration Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit (Corinthians 12:4) Everyone I know speaks the language of inspiration. Regardless of their religious affiliation – or lack thereof – they speak the language of comfort, enlightenment, challenge, peace, guidance, and energy. They even speak the language of conviction and call, of empowerment and giftedness – what we have come to know as the movement of the Spirit of God. Which gives that language great, common power. We still think of gifts of the Spirit – things like teaching, healing, encouraging, truth-telling – as gifts. We still think of the fruits of the spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control – as the way to be. Our hearts still clench at pain; our guts still wrench at suffering; we are still warmed by simple acts of kindness; we can still be broken open by a gentle touch, or a look that knows us. We are still, at our best, buoyed by hope, outraged by injustice, compelled by the truth, creative beyond measure. These are all the work of the Spirit; for most of us, they are a common vision, a great good. Perhaps there is a chance, then, to put this language of inspiration back at the center of church. Maybe we could see ourselves not only as worshipping a man who was but embodying a Spirit that is. This language – in part because so many of us still speak it – is the language that speaks at the deepest level to what it means to be human: one who wonders and creates and grieves and hopes to mean something. This is to speak of ourselves, the image-of-God one-offs we are, and when we speak to what is most personal, we touch what is universal. We must remember that the language of inspiration is not just the language of life – it is the language of God. By whatever name we call her, the Holy Spirit is still at work – which makes this our work.

grace Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. (Matthew 13:1-9, excerpts) This is a story about God the sower, who tosses the seeds around seemingly without a plan, without thought to waste or expectation. God who flings the seed everywhere, because you never know. This is a story of extravagance, of willy-nilly, heedless grace. I wonder if we think we could do better. It seems almost cynical, this fickle flinging of goodness into places where most of it will be wasted. If we could only tell ahead of time what the good soil was, we could save a lot of time and energy. But how can we tell what moment someone will be ready, what kind word will reach them, when love will move them, when they need us the most? Most of the time we can’t tell when they – or we, for that matter – are good soil. I’m not sure God knows, honestly, which is why God is the sower who is infinitely and indiscriminately scattering grace all over the place. We need more people who are willing to scatter seed more places than we think are reasonable. To offer kindness to more people than we think deserve it. The world needs more who can love as God loves: absurdly and abundantly. We are called to be that one who scatters goodness everywhere we go, risking wasted effort because we never know who needs it, and because we know the real waste is rationing love. Here’s the challenge: Who has the faith to sow seeds where you are almost sure they won’t grow? We are to scatter with extravagance because this is, in the end, a story about what God can do with all our far-flung efforts if we have the faith to love like that.

light The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1:5) It was a clear night, and the moon was only a sliver, which meant it was deeply, thickly dark as we more or less groped our way through the woods down to the lake. We were up in the Boundary Waters area of Northern Minnesota, which means there was no ambient light and no one for miles – just you and the woods and the wolf tracks crossing the frozen lake. It was like stepping out of time: if you didn’t catch a glimpse of your own clothing, there was nothing there that hadn’t been there for thousands of years, and it gave you the sense that you were standing in no particular time at all, or all time. And there they were: stars that snapped your neck up, startlingly clear and dimensional. The thick layers of stars, the sheer expanse of sky out on a lake – it brought me to a truth so obvious I had to see it for myself to get it: No wonder they looked at the stars. No wonder we all watched this celestial theater and told ourselves stories about how we got here in the first place, and where we go when it is all done, and what it all means in between. The Anishinaabe have a story (“Anishinaabe” is the native word for those who were the first inhabitants of that vast northern woodland and the ancestors of today’s Native American woodland tribes). They looked at that same sky, passing their eyes along what we would call the long edge of our galaxy: “When we die, that’s the path we take from this world to the spirit world.” And I looked up at the same sky and I thought, “Well, of course it is.” A path through the heavens, lit by the stars, that the spirits of our ancestors travel between this world and the world beyond us. The author of John’s gospel sat down, at least as I picture it, under these same stars, and thought, “That’s who Jesus is.” That power, that emanation, that word from God that set the night skies ablaze for the first time – that’s who Jesus was to me: whatever made the universe, made human. This is what we read on Christmas Eve, when we light our candles in darkness. This is what we read during Holy Week to remind ourselves that the hate will never overcome love. The rest of the gospel goes out from this, tracing Jesus’ life: the one who lived and died and rose again and gave us the Spirit we would need to keep going once he had returned to the eternal stars. And the rest of our story goes out from here, we lucky enough to live for a time, looking up.

hospitality Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward (Matthew 10:42) What Jesus means by “little ones” is those who are young in the faith. He means those still vulnerable, to whom the world needs to be gentle. Here, his disciples are the little ones who were, in terms of their faith, just starting to walk on their own two feet. And this was a message to everyone who was supposed to welcome them. At its heart, this passage is about hospitality. And for those of us who, from time to time, get stuck focusing on ourselves, hospitality is the right challenge at the right time. Because hospitality is not just a thing to do; it is an orientation, a way of life. It is a way of looking at the world that knows we are in this together, a way of living in the world that knows that my wellbeing is connected with yours. In fact, in this time when most of us are not really doing the literal hospitality of having people in our homes, it is a good time to remember hospitality is a spiritual capacity, a way of being. Hospitality is the soil of healthy community. And if there is ever a time we needed to remember that we are in this together, that our futures are bound up together, I think we’re living it. More of us than we think, I believe, are still little ones in the faith, and can use all the hospitality we can get. To find someone whose faith is vulnerable and break it – that’s the easy part. To instead meet them where they are, and listen to them, and help them, and receive them like the gift of God they are – that’s never been as easy as it sounds. And it might be that it has never been more needed.

wonder When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4) Dolphins are bilingual – or are at least able to passably mimic and communicate with different species of marine mammals. One teaspoon of Amazonian soil contains as many as 1,800 microscopic life forms, of which 400 are largely-uncatalogued fungi. The very foundation of existence is mostly empty space occupied by vibrating strings of energy. At base, we are not solid, or formed, or even “things,” per se – just strings of pure energy, bound together. These kinds of things stun me with awe. They force me to acknowledge my uncertainty; they spark my curiosity. Which is to say that these are the things that make me wonder. Wonder is such a beautiful, ambiguous thing – often many things at once. All of them – awe, uncertainty, curiosity – are pathways to God; all can be the seeds of joy. And yet, when we are stressed, preoccupied, exhausted, saturated, and worried, wonder seems to be one of the first things to go. Our psalmist-songwriter was in awe. Here someone who had discovered an unquenchable curiosity to match his unslakable faith. Here was someone both lifted up and put in his place by Creation, abundant and marvelous. If we can rekindle that same kind of wonder, even now, we can cultivate joy. Can we do this? Can we live without it if we don’t? I wonder . . .

faith When Peter noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:30-31) Peter walks on water for a minute, which is a miracle. Or maybe we should change the emphasis: Peter walks on water . . . for a minute. And then he gets scared, starts to notice the wind and the waves. His fear makes him doubt and his doubt makes him sink. Immediately, Jesus is there to save him: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” I choose to hear something gentle, even parental, in these words. Like a parent would say to a child learning how to ride a bike, a child who fell upon realizing that the parent had let go: “Why did you get scared? You had it!” A parent who sees the failure but would never call it that because she knows that failure is what growth is made of, and growth is what life is made of. A parent who, yes, wants her child to succeed, but first loves her child more than she could say for having the courage to try. And I think Jesus loves Peter like that. He loves Peter’s faith, even as fear got the better of him – he loved that little faith. If he failed, it was because he was the only one who attempted anything. He might have only had a little faith, but what little he had he put to work, and did something miraculous for a moment. Maybe a little faith is enough. Maybe a little faith, put to work, is the only place to start. Peter knew it: if you are a disciple of Jesus you will have things you think are beyond you asked of you. So, what are you doing right now that is putting your faith to work? You may feel right now like you only have a little faith. Most days, it might be all you can muster. And who’s going to say we’re not in the middle of a storm right now? There is plenty to be scared of. So, you can huddle in the boat and wait for a miracle. Or, with a little faith, you can walk on this water.

community But wanting to justify himself, the lawyer asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29) It has been just over 50 years since the world first saw the photo named “Earthrise.” The astronauts of Apollo 8 had spent the day photographing the surface of the moon, but when they reoriented and looked back, there was our little blue and green planet, bathed in light, rising over the moon’s horizon. There it is: our home – all of it. In this picture, for the first time, we all got to be on the outside looking in. We got to see our world the way the universe sees it: not indomitable, but finite and fragile; not broken up into warring fragments, but whole; not the center of the universe, but a speck of dust suspended in infinite blackness. It was, and is, as bracing a dose of perspective as one can have. There it is: our community. And there it is, our challenge: to make a life together without destroying it or one another. If we have nothing else, we have this: together, we get to share a wink of existence on an animated little flying rock at the same time. Which has never been as easy or as simple as it sounds. I say this knowing that many of us may well arrive at this moment more or less tapped out. Many of us might be feeling like we have recently given more than we have received. That we have offered more compassion than we have received. Many of us wake up weary and more than a little wounded. You do need rest and healing and compassion – and may you find it. And when you find it – when you are restored – let it also be a reminder of how much everyone around you needs that, too. Which brings us back to our little verdant, fragrant marble, our sapphire and emerald speck swirling in space. That world still has plenty of people in it who believe that things will only be right when those who are different are either gone or have become like them. But we know – and the world has always known, even if it hasn’t always been able to live it – that that world will be saved by compassion and community.

hope Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher) (John 20:16) Our Easter faith is about hope. It is about new beginnings, and fresh starts, and next steps. It is about the courage to wait – even to sit with emptiness and loss – and watch for what is to come. The Easter moment is not only when Jesus was raised. It is when Mary, called by name by the man she thought was the gardener, rises off the ground and finds herself face to face with the living Christ. “Rabbouni!” she says, in wonder and excitement and joy, and races off to tell the others. Hope, like Easter, is understood in contrast: a candle lit in the pitch black, new life after death. Easter is not a day when the rich get richer and the happy order another round, but when the lowly are lifted and the sun rises after our longest nights. Hope is not wishing things will turn out fine. Hope is not denial, a cultivated naïveté that helps the medicine go down. Hope is listening in the low moments for messengers from God, for reminders that it’s not over, that life continues, that we are not alone. Hope is knowing that the God we’re seeking still seeks us. Hope is rising, with Mary, off the ground. Hope is turning to the inexplicable presence of the living Christ, hiding in plain sight, calling us by name and waiting, lovingly, for our “Rabbouni!”



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